ERBC’s Core Values: Ministry Matters
Throughout our newsletters in 2025, we want to highlight some of Echo Ranch’s basic operating principles. In any organization, fully committed teams can get so caught up in what they’re doing that they forget – or never even work out in the first place – why exactly they’re doing it, and how their mission and beliefs should inform the way they do it. With the endless jobs and many moving pieces at Echo Ranch, we know that if we’re not careful, our team can be susceptible to this sort of value amnesia. That’s why we’re using this space to unpack each of our four core values. This month, we’re looking at our fourth and final core value: Ministry Matters.
Of our fore core values, this one might seem, at first, the most nebulous. Our first three core values (God Matters, People Matter, and Team Matters) are all pretty straightforward and immediately understandable, but what exactly does it mean that Ministry Matters? What exactly does “ministry” mean?
“Ministry” simply refers to our efforts to live out our mission statement: to echo God’s glory by building the body of Christ through Christian camping and in partnership with the church. Through our summer camps, retreats, and everything else we do at camp and beyond, we’re striving to fulfill this mission statement. Doing so effectively requires planning, training, adaptation, collaboration and communication between many different roles... in short, a lot of work. When we say that ministry matters, we mean that all this work matters; it matters that we do everything we need to do to live out our mission statement the best that we can. Because this ministry is what Echo Ranch exists for.
In a way, this fourth core value is just an amalgamation of the first three. When we are glorifying God (God Matters) and loving people (People Matter) – especially by making God known to them in the Gospel – and doing so as a team (Team Matters), that’s ministry. And that’s our mission, in a nutshell; ministry is what we exist for. But, someone might ask, what’s the point of having the fourth core value at all, then?
Ministry Matters is a core value because, simply put, it matters that we make sure we aren’t getting distracted from our mission. To phrase it positively, we want to strive to ensure that all the work we do at camp is ultimately serving our mission, and that we’re paying attention to the right goals. Believe it or not, even at Echo Ranch, it’s possible to get distracted by a lot of other objectives that, whether good or bad, aren’t linked to our mission. To avoid wasting time and effort on misguided or even self-serving pursuits, we have to regularly remind ourselves that Ministry Matters and assess whether our operations are in line with this value.
Here's one of the ways this plays out. During the half of the year we spend together onsite at camp, our full-time staff (who are all members of Avant Ministries) meet once a month to evaluate all aspects of Echo Ranch and measure how well we’re exemplifying each of our core values. Just a few of the questions we discuss are: How well are we communicating? Are our job descriptions clear? Are campers and guests hearing the Gospel? Are new ideas welcomed and tested? Do each of us have a twelve-months-a-year ministry plan? Some of these questions are meant to gauge how well we’re measuring up to “Ministry Matters," but more than that, the process of evaluation itself is how we make sure we’re doing ministry the way our mission statement calls us to. It helps us identify areas where we need to change or grow in order to better accomplish our mission.
After all, no organization succeeds by stubbornly refusing to change. The same is true of ministries. While it isn’t by our own efforts and wisdom that we can discern what we need to change, through humble reliance on God, we seek to follow His leading and to be flexible to adjust the way we do things – while keeping the most important thing, the centrality of Jesus, unchanged. And so, regularly self-evaluating, adapting, refocusing, and moving expectantly forward in new initiatives as a team are ways that we live up to the core value of Ministry Matters.
At the end of the day, all that we do at Echo Ranch Bible Camp, and the camp’s very existence, is all rooted in Jesus; and the reason Jesus came to earth was, in a single word, ministry. He came to reconcile people to God with his life, death, and resurrection, and his ministry is what gives each of us the hope of peace with God and eternal life. Now, the ministry of every Christian is inviting others into this hope. Ultimately, this is our goal at camp. If we were to lose sight of this ultimate ministry and fail to keep the good news of Jesus at the heart of Echo Ranch, there would be no point to all our work, all our time and energy and sacrifices. Our efforts in ministry matter only because of his ministry to us.
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:18-21)