Ocean Springs a likely spot for new megachurch Oasis campus

An Oasis Church service will be held at the Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Center on Sunday.

The Mary C. theater is about to become the Ocean Springs campus of one of the Coast’s few megachurches. Oasis Church is based in Pascagoula, and Sunday’s service will be a dress rehearsal of sorts.

But Oasis’ pastor Eric Camp, will lead the congregation in person and will continue to do so at a 5 p.m. Sunday service there each week. This is not a video service. The Ocean Springs campus will have the same full treatment of praise and worship the evangelical church offers its main congregation of more than 2,000 in Pascagoula.

The real opening for the new campus will be the first Sunday in March. That’s when they’ll have bounce houses for the children. Flags and signs will alert the community along Government Street. They are already planning for overflow parking.

“It will be very obvious Oasis Church is here,” Camp said.

The church has 200 to 300 members in the area, so it was the likely location for a westward expansion.

“We have a lot of people already in Ocean Springs, in D’Iberville and Biloxi,” Camp told the Sun Herald. “This is going to help us give them a campus to belong to. It will also alleviate congestion, because we’re overcrowded in Pascagoula.”

Oasis is part of ARC, a church-planting network out of Birmingham, Alabama, that claims 600 churches nationwide. Oasis is staff-lead. In contrast, Ocean Springs’ other megachurch, Mosaic, is part of the Acts 29 network and is elder-lead. Oasis is more evangelical, Camp said, but theologically they are the very similar.

“We’re looking to expand along the Gulf Coast,” he said. “The goal is to be conscious in every community.”

Oasis launched in 2009 and has quietly been growing its congregation in a collection of buildings north of U.S. 90 along Pascagoula Street, where there had been a First Assembly of God years ago.

Camp and his wife, Toni, were in Pascagoula before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, pioneering, planning and building a team to start a church. They had bought the property of the old church, which was destroyed, and insurance from that helped them launch Oasis. Before Gautier’s Singing River Mall was torn down, Oasis had a campus there for awhile.

A vision for many

Attendance in Ocean Springs is a given. It’s where Camp and his family live. He’s on the Ocean Springs School Board.

“We’re well-rooted here,” he said.

They are outgrowing the Pascagoula campus, already leasing parking spaces on Sundays from a nearby grocery store. They have 300 children on any given Sunday.

“Instead of building a bigger church, we bought into the whole idea of multi-site,” Camp said. “Which is a kind of a new thing that growing churches are doing. Instead of building 2,000- to 3,000-seat auditoriums, they are actually multi-siting,” starting smaller campuses.

Marketing the new campus on social media, Oasis bought advertising on Facebook that has gotten 24,000 hits so far.

The term megachurch doesn’t fit philosophically with Oasis. Toni Camp said she sees the church as more personal and intimate in its services. She called it a microchurch with a mega-vision.

In the foyer in Pascagoula is printed the real vision: “We exist to reach people where they are and connect them to everything God has for their life.”

That makes the Mary C. a likely venue. The church is the people, not its walls, Camp said. The work of the church is teaching people how to apply God’s word and equip them to be a chruch, he said.

And the philosophy is practical too. It’s about relationship.

“There’s a difference between religion and relationships,” he said. “Jesus didn’t die to give us a religion, he died to give us a relationship with God.”

This story was originally published February 24, 2017 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Ocean Springs a likely spot for new megachurch Oasis campus."