Introducing the Rescue Mission Report: Bridging Innovation & Tradition
City Vision University's R&D Newsletter to Empower the Rescue Mission Movement
City Vision University is an accredited online university founded by rescue missions for rescue missions. While our partnerships with rescue missions have 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 report focuses on the History and Values of the Rescue Mission movement. The target audience is all rescue mission staff and supporters. Through our Rescue Mission History Project, we are compiling 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 those connecting the movement’s roots to the larger history of Christian parachurch charity over the past 2,000 years.
Season 2 of our podcast and later reports focus on diffusion of innovation and best practices from a wide range of research. 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, 100+ courses (including 240+ books used in those courses) and hundreds of documents compiled from partners in our toolkits. For each report, 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 ever since.
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 designer, 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.
After MIT, 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).
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. For example, while we’ve compiled a list of over 200 books on rescue missions, we know that there are many additional histories of individual missions and key leaders that we do not yet have. If you or your mission has any valuable books or other history documents that you might want to add to the Rescue Mission History Project, please let us know by sending an email to partnerships@cityvision.edu.
Relationship to CVU’s Future Doctoral Program Plans
We are in the process of designing our first doctoral program (in Organizational Leadership and Innovation). In designing this doctoral program, our goals are that it would help:
Students advance their careers and become thought leaders within their chosen domain to help the larger rescue mission movement be more effective in transforming 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.