City Vision University is an accredited online university founded by rescue missions for rescue missions. While our partnerships with rescue missions has been focused primarily on education, the goal of this newsletter and podcast is to focus on the Research and Development (R&D) coming out of City Vision University.
Season 1 of our podcast and our first research brief focuses on the History and Values of the Rescue Mission movement. The target audience is all rescue mission staff and supporters. We have compiled what we believe to be the most extensive digital library of history resources on the rescue mission movement. We believe it is essential to be grounded in the Biblical history and tradition of the movement before delving into innovations. While many of you will have heard about the founders of the movement like David Nasmith and Jerry McAuley, we have added many additional sources including connecting the movement’s roots in the larger history of Christian parachurch charity over the past 2,000 years.
Season 2 of our podcast and later research briefs focus on diffusion of innovation and best practices from a wide range of research reports. The target audience for this is executive leaders at missions (and those who one day aspire to be executive leaders). To compile this, we are building on hundreds of years of combined experience within the rescue mission movement of our staff and faculty, and 240+ books, over 100+ courses and hundreds of documents compiled from partners in our toolkits. For each research brief, we compiled many research reports using publicly available information from our list of 300+ missions using AI Tools like Google’s Gemini Deep Research. We fact check the reports and then combine them with our sources described above to generate podcasts using NotebookLM.
A Personal Introduction by CVU President, Dr. Andrew Sears
As the President of CVU, this initiative combines two of my great loves:
1) learning about the history and Biblically rooted tradition of the rescue mission movement and 2) exploring innovation and best practices to transform lives.
I got my start in rescue ministry in 1992 as summer staff at City Union Mission in Kansas City. I’ve largely stayed connected supporting the movement and learning about its history every since. I founded a ministry that initially partnered with computer learning centers at missions and eventually took over the operation of City Vision University in 2008 after it received accreditation and became independent of the Citygate Network (then AGRM).
My love of innovation took me to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where I co-founded a research group focused on innovation with one of the fathers of the Internet. After starting a dot.com in the 90’s and working as an Internet new product, I realized my heart was for serving God and the poor, so I redirected my skills to focus on empowering others to transform the lives of the poor in Jesus name.
Our research vision for this initiative is that CVU would serve as a major R&D hub for the rescue mission movement in the same way that Stanford has largely served as the R&D hub for Silicon Valley. To do that well, we believe that it is essential to bridge both tradition and innovation. We believe that “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Prov. 29:18). Our goal is to partner with you and your ministries to help this R&D project.
Relationship to CVU’s Future Doctoral Program Plans
We are in the process of designing our first doctoral program (in Organizational Management, Innovation and Leadership). In designing this doctoral program, we have three goals. Our goals is that it would help:
Students become advance their careers and thought leaders within their chosen domain to larger rescue mission movement to be more effective and transform lives. Our goal is that we could feature much of the research coming out of our doctoral program through this newsletter and podcast.
Missions to develop a leadership pipeline to assist in executive leadership transition.
The Rescue Mission Movement to innovate and incorporate new best practices to more effectively transform lives in Jesus name.
If you would like to join us in this effort, please let us know by sending an email to partnerships@cityvision.edu or clicking the button below.
