Our Mission is to use online education to transform lives through Jesus, Justice and Technology.
Our Vision
We are reinventing Christian higher education to make it radically affordable and relevant to the needs of those serving the poor and addicted. Our goal is to be twice as relevant at half the cost of comparable options. We spread best practices to help a movement of faith-based organizations be more effective in transforming the lives of millions of homeless, addicted and low-income individuals each year. We also dramatically expand educational access to those who were recently homeless, addicted or imprisoned, providing them with education that leads to life transformation and employment.
Our Core Values
Jesus
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ – Luke 10:27
- Bible-centered. The foundation for all we do is our faith in Jesus, grounded in the Bible. We were initially founded to provide online education to staff at Bible-centered organizations serving the poor as well as their program participants. While this still remains a core focus, we have since expanded to also provide Christian education to students pursuing nonprofit and counseling careers. Our goal is to “be in the world, but not of it” in order to maximize relevance while avoiding the tendency toward secularization.
- Relational Health. We prioritize emotional health and believe that Christian counseling and recovery are important aspects of spiritual formation. We follow a holistic understanding of health recognizing that relational health can be impacted by spiritual health, physical health, organization health and the health of larger Christian movements. We believe that we are all called to be wounded healers. We prioritize the larger family and community relationships of our staff. While remote work can help our family relationships, we recognize that it creates a tendency toward shallow work relationships, so we invest effort to offset this tendency. We believe in peacemaking and proactively address conflict. We are not only a university, but also a ministry. As such, our goal is that we would minister to all members of our community: students, faculty, staff, partners and others.
- Spiritual Integration. We avoid the dualistic separation between the secular and the sacred. We are not a church or a business, but our organizational culture is a unique blend of the spiritual culture of a church and the professional culture of a business. We ensure our academic programs provide deep faith integration reflecting Christian values and worldview.
Justice
Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. – Matthew 25:40
- Focus on Organizations Serving the Poor and Addicted. We primarily focus on training students and partner organizations that serve those who are poor and addicted. With this niche focus, we believe our programs and courses are twice as relevant to those we serve. We use education to diffuse innovations and best practices within larger Christian movements serving under-resourced communities. While much of Christian higher education is increasingly reflecting the values of the affluent, our goal is to be culturally fluent and relevant to diverse movements serving under-resourced communities. We have a core competency in educating students for cross-cultural contexts and invest heavily in contextualizing education to the diverse students and partners we serve.
- Radically Affordable Education. Christian higher education is becoming increasingly unaffordable for those serving the poor and addicted. Our programs are typically less than half the cost of comparable online Christian higher education institutions. Our goal is that each of our academic programs provide the highest return on investment among Christian higher education institutions. We prioritize frugality and efficiency to keep our education affordable.
- Practical Education. Our organizational design and academic programs reflect our values of practicality and practitioner experience over theory. We avoid the traditional academic disconnect from practice. Rather than taking students out of their environment to a remote campus, our online education allows students to continue working in the field while learning online. We design highly customized courses and programs so that students can learn exactly what they need to know for their work environment.
- Student-Centered. Traditional higher education is faculty-centered and designed similar to a caste system with tenured faculty at the top. By contrast, all our systems are designed to focus on students’ needs while also balancing the needs of staff and faculty. We work extremely hard to better understand the needs and goals of our students and their organizations so we can continuously improve.
Technology
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. – Isaiah 43:19
- Technology Leadership. We believe that technology is a gift from God. Given the importance of technology in shaping society today, technology fluency and leadership are critical skills. We have a core competency in using technology and online education in leveraged ways to transform lives. We are a global thought leader in new models of Christian higher education to increase affordability and access. Our staff work towards high fluency in technology and seek to be bilingual translators of tech concepts to non-technical audiences.
- Disruptive Innovation. We pursue disruptive innovation for the sake of transforming lives, by making higher education accessible to all who need it. We believe that the traditional system of higher education will inevitably become increasingly unaffordable unless a new system is designed. This will make it inaccessible to the poor, the addicted, and those who seek to serve them. Therefore, we are building a new system of Christian higher education from the ground up, particularly for those serving the poor and addicted. To do that, we use the lean startup and other methods that enable us to maximize our speed of innovation. This requires that staff be willing to adapt quickly to a changing environment. We work to translate tech startup best practices and innovations into our context to transform lives.
- Efficiency. We use the latest technologies, sustaining innovations and best practices to improve the quality and efficiency of our educational programs and organization. A significant part of how we achieve both radical affordability and quality is by scaling in size and maximizing the speed and efficiency of our operations.