Focus Areas

What does missional innovation look like? We focus on five interconnected themes that are critical for renewing the witness of the Church, along with key opportunities for innovation. This framework shapes the impact agenda for our community.

Gospel

Advancing the Christian Story. We work to advance meaningful encounters with the good news of Jesus as a comprehensive vision and invitation for all of life.

Innovation Areas:

  • We look for projects that are advancing the Gospel by equipping individuals and communities toward winsome witness, direct evangelism, and sharing their faith effectively.

  • Advancing thoughtful Christian engagement with ideas and ideologies in the public square. Includes apologetics, research, and dialogue across academia, science, industry, and other channels of public engagement with the quest for truth.

  • This includes both the development of new tools and media for evangelism, as well as missional engagement of people groups and online communities through digitally-native approaches to mission.

  • Supporting the wider missionary effort to reach unreached or under-reached peoples that have never had a chance to engage with the Gospel around the world.

  • We’re interested in the interaction between technology, AI, and advances in bible translation and distribution, a critical global mission priority.

Discipleship

Forming Followers of Jesus in All of Life. We work to shape "heart, mind, soul, and strength" in the Way of Jesus through experiences, practices, and community.

Innovation Areas:

  • Discipleship is the prime mover of mission - we support new communities, collectives, orders, societies, movements, and other forms of discipleship-centric fellowship.

  • The spiritual life is the foundation of discipleship, and we need to form people with a vibrant, living faith, expressed in communities of prayer, worship, and devotion.

  • Focusing on the transmission of faith to children and youth in ways that lead to resilient faith over a lifetime.

  • Equipping Christians for effective faith and work integration is critical to our witness in the world. We need more models of effective vocational training and equipping.

  • Discipleship requires whole-life applications, serving men, women, marriages, parents, financial health, mental health, recovery, and numerous other dimensions.

  • The tools for content creation, distribution, and engagement are changing rapidly. How might we leverage them wisely for discipleship?

Leadership

Equipping and Multiplying Leaders. We work toward equipping Christian ministers, leaders, and laity for mature leadership in the Church and in the public square.

Innovation Areas:

  • We need new models of access and delivery for theological education, for academics, pastors, and laity around the world.

  • We need to support pastors and explore new models of sustainable ministry, to avoid burnout and scandal, and ensure healthy shepherding of our congregations.

  • As new generations emerge, we need new networks and platforms to call and activate younger leaders to give their lives to the Gospel and develop an imagination for creative leadership in the world.

  • Reimagining how we might equip, mobilize, and send a new generation of missionary leaders. Particular focus on re-thinking short term trips, indigenous leadership training, and more.

  • We need new specialized leadership networks, specifically for underserved and under-represented leaders, including minority leaders, women, global leaders, and more.

Church

Planting and Renewing the Local Congregation. We work to renew and multiply diverse forms of congregational life, for the flourishing of local churches and communities in all contexts.

Innovation Areas:

  • Church planting is central to mission - but often we limit our imagination around what that means. We want to see new experiments in church planting and the emergence of innovative networks.

  • As the way we gather changes and puts pressure on our existing models, we need new expressions and approaches to church - micro, mega, and everything in between.

  • We hope to support a new generation of prayer, worship, and spiritual renewal movements, which serve as the catalyst and foundation for broader renewal in the Church and culture.

  • Technology is radically changing the way Churches interact with their people and communities. We need to think about Church tech.

  • We need to creatively reimagine the relationship between our physical buildings and our neighborhoods as part of how we engage and renew our communities.

Culture

Bearing a Compelling Witness to the World. We work toward compelling, prophetic, sacrificial models of social and cultural engagement and witness, in the name of Jesus.

Innovation Areas:

  • Christian engagement with government, the academy, the market, the media, and more requires deep thoughtfulness. We look for projects pressing into thoughtful Christian witness in the centers of culture.

  • Christians are called to the “quartet of the vulnerable,” and we support new programs and efforts to serve the least of these in the name of Jesus as an expression of the good news of the Kingdom.

  • We need creative business models for mission that break cycles of charity and dependency and fund new means of engagement, while also reckoning with the limits of a capital-driven system.

  • Climate change and the environment put disproportionate pressure on the global poor. Christian leaders, especially in the developing world, increasingly face challenges around stewarding land properly for the flourishing of the Church and their communities.