ERBC’s Core Values: Team 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 third core value: Team Matters.
You don’t need us to tell you that good things happen on teams. Isn’t that what we’ve all been learning since preschool – “teamwork makes the dream work”? But for us, the staff of Echo Ranch, functioning well as a team isn’t just important, it’s crucial. So much of what we do here depends on good teamwork, from running summer camps to building cabins to rounding up horses and so on. But even if we put aside those practical considerations, we’re a little unique from most organizations in that for half the year, we don’t just work together – we live together! (Along with a few dozen summer staff who step into our team for three months each year.) If we don’t uphold the value of Team Matters, not only will we not get as much done, we won’t make it through the camp season together. That’s why we think it’s important to take a step back and look to God to understand the why and how behind teams so we can try to make our team live up to His design.
Our God is a God who loves teams, creates teams, and works among teams. Scripture, you might say, teems with teams. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) From the beginnings of Jesus’ earthly ministry, he worked with a core team of twelve, and he sent them and dozens of other disciples on outreach missions not individually, but in pairs. When the apostle Paul went on journeys to spread the Gospel, he rarely went alone, choosing rather to take along Barnabus or Silas for more effective ministry. Both of these examples, of course, were precursors to God’s great design for the redemption of the world: the church.
It has always been God’s plan to save not just people, but a people, bringing men and women from every culture and corner of the earth together into a community in Christ. That community is the church – the worldwide body of believers, represented by local churches dotted across the earth. Both in the global church and in any particular congregation, people who may share practically nothing in common with each other are united in a bond that goes deeper than blood. Or rather, the blood that bonds them – the blood of Christ – is more powerful than the blood of kin. In his prayer in John 17, Jesus prayed that this community he would assemble would “all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). Jesus is asking for the church to be characterized by an incredible depth of unity (on par with his unity with God the Father); here and elsewhere in this chapter, he also commissions the church with a mission (making him known among the nations). Unity and a common mission... sounds a lot like the makings of a divine team, the biggest the world has ever seen.
Okay, let’s zoom back in from that 30,000-foot view of why team matters. Here at Echo Ranch, what does it look like for us to function as a team, a small subset of the greater worldwide body of Christ? We’ll sum it up here with: we are loyal to each other, we support each other, and we are for each other.
We are loyal to each other, not in the sense of “us against the world,” but in the sense that we remember that we’re working together, and we consider the good of the team in our decisions. No team of any kind can succeed if the team members aren’t willing to sacrifice at times their own preferences, plans, and prizes to benefit the team. According to Scripture, the church is meant to have this kind of team loyalty so deep that it resembles a body, with the different members suffering together and rejoicing together (1 Corinthians 12:12-26). Our different members use their unique gifts to work together toward our common goal: echoing God’s glory in southeast Alaska.
We also support each other. In Paul’s metaphor of the church as a body, he emphasizes that the point of different body parts with different functions is that they will depend on each other and complement each other. Just so do our many different members of camp aid each other in little ways and huge ways that see play out every single day. The examples really are myriad; whether it’s cleaning the Dining Hall, hauling hay into camp, prepping cabins for a retreat, or rolling out pizza dough, so many tasks at camp see staff from different departments stepping in to help make it happen. This kind of interdependent support is the only way we can get everything done in a busy camp day!
Finally, we are for each other. This goes back to Jesus’ command at the Last Supper: “that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). Perhaps in some contexts a team can get by without truly loving and caring for one another; a baseball team or a Hollywood film crew probably rarely exhibit this quality, and they still get things done. But for a team that’s living and serving together in Christian ministry, this characteristic is the most important of all. This means that when we have a conflict with someone, we talk to them rather than about them; we show grace and seek to build each other up; we recognize that the good of our teammates comes before the jobs we want to see get done.
Team matters because we need to work as a team to accomplish our mission – but team also matters because we each need team personally. As the psalmist says, “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1) When we experience God-glorifying teamwork, we share in this realization, that being part of a healthy team – especially the Body of Christ – refreshes our souls. Just as God intended.