History, Vision, and Goals

Our History and progress to date…

Oasis Ministry Ventures was founded November 20th, 2020 to keep The Oaks Camp and Conference Center in Lake Hughes, CA in the Kingdom and to continue its core ministry: serving our urban communities in Southern California, advancing the gospel, and growing leaders through high quality, culturally responsive, Christian camp programs for underserved youth and families. At the time, due to COVID impacts and for other strategic reasons the owner ministry determined selling the property was their best course of action.

We have achieved the first goal. By making many Christian ministries aware of the upcoming property sale early in the process and communicating clearly the value of this property to the body of Christ, we ensured Christian ministries were ready to make an offer when it came on the market. These efforts resulted in one of the ministries we reached out to being able to engage a donor to secure the camp for Christian purposes. The camp transferred ownership in the beginning of 2022. Union Rescue Mission is now stewarding the property. Unfortunately, due to delays in the closing and updating of the Conditional Use Permit for the property, we were unable to move forward with a proposed lease agreement to manage the property on a summer seasonal basis, so we are operating out of rented facilities at this time.

• In March of 2022, we held our first ministry event since The Oaks closed its doors due to covid in March of 2020. Over 450 people attended and 100+ made faith decisions. See the event here.

• In the fall of 2022, we re-established outback wilderness trips by continuing a 25 year partnership with Los Angeles Christian School in South LA. We took their 7th and 8th grade classes to Joshua Tree National Park for a week of spiritual growth and leadership development.

• In 2023, we repeated winter camp, are moving foward with a pilot week of summer camp at Mountain Point Camp in Frazier Park, CA, will have two Outback trips in the fall, one with LACS and one with Passion LA.

• In 2024, we have TWO winter camps planned in partnership with Passion LA and the LA Fuel Youth Ministry Network with plans to expand summer camp opportunities.

There are over 14 million people in Southern California. Twenty-six percent of Los Angeles County is below poverty level and around twenty percent of people in the high desert and inland empires (1) are imporverished. This means there are at least 3 million people who lack access to quality Christian camp experiences because of the cost.

Our aim is to bring back access that was lost with the closure of The Oaks, and to bring the hope of Jesus to all of God’s children in a culturally responsive way through the incredibly effective and impactful experience of Christian camps and retreats.