ERBC’s Core Values: People Matter
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 second core value: People Matter.
We believe that People Matter because all people have inherent worth and dignity – far more worth and dignity than anything else in this world. In fact, the Bible teaches that human beings are the pinnacle of God’s created works, the only part of creation that He made in His own image (Genesis 1:27). As image bearers of God, all people reflect the majesty of God and share some of His attributes – knowledge, creativity, agency, capacity for relationships, eternality. Yes, eternality; a theologian once observed that the only things in this present world that last forever are God and human souls. When we consider these divine fingerprints stamped on each one of us, it should lead us to harmonize with David’s psalm of wonder to God: “What is man that you are mindful of him? ... [You have] crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the work of your hands, and have put all things under his feet.” (Psalm 8:4-6) Each and every person who we meet at Echo Ranch (and everywhere else in the world) shares in this glory and honor, was created uniquely by God, and was created for an intimate relationship with God.
All of this is why, in Echo Ranch’s list of core values, People Matter comes right after God Matters in importance. So, what does the principle of People Matter look like in practice?
Simply put, it looks like prioritizing people over things. At ERBC, there are always jobs to be done; messes to clean; projects to be worked on. But if any of these worthwhile tasks comes to supersede the preeminence of people – caring for them, serving them, building relationships with them – then we have let our priorities get misaligned. If there’s a person that needs someone to talk to, then the dishes or the mop can wait.
At camp, a big part of showing that People Matter is meeting people’s needs. Camp is by definition a place away from home where people come to stay, and so we want to show them sincere and superb hospitality. That means making sure that our facilities and activities are safe, that people feel comfortable and cared for, that they’re warm and well-fed, and that hopefully, they have a fantastic time at camp.
Among the countless little ways we see this core value play out each day at camp, a spot where it’s exemplified prominently is the camp kitchen. (The writer of this article doesn’t usually work in the kitchen, so bear with the following bit of bragging on our kitchen staff.) Our kitchen crew cooks three meals every day for anywhere from 50 to 300 people at a time. With numbers like that, it’s almost guaranteed that several (or many) of the diners have dietary restrictions. It certainly would be easy to stick with one main menu and say sorry to the people who can’t eat it... but that would say that those people don’t matter. Instead, there are many weeks when our kitchen staff make several different additional versions of every meal, every day – gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, onion-free, and beyond. All because we believe that every person in our Dining Hall deserves to have a meal made with care that they can eat and enjoy. It sure makes for higher grocery bills and longer hours in the kitchen, but it is all worth it to show each person staying with us that we care about them.
In all of this, we strive to live up to the one who perfectly modeled putting people over things: Jesus. In his ministry on earth, Jesus was always intensely focused on people, sometimes to the point of perplexing his disciples, who were often caught up in other preoccupations. Especially in the accounts of Jesus healing people with ailments, we see him interacting in very different ways with different people, because he was able to perfectly perceive the needs of each person he met and engage with them uniquely. From the blind beggar to the high-ranking centurion, Jesus showed each person who came to him that they mattered. We may not have Jesus’ perfect insight into every person’s soul, but we can do our best to follow in his steps, treating each person as a specially created individual who deserves love and respect. Because people matter to God, people matter to us.