Intentional Multicultural Teams is a 15 day online course designed to raise awareness, develop perspectives, increase intentionality and gather tools for healthy and God-honoring multicultural ministry teams.    The main ideas that this course addresses are:

• Why do we even try to do multicultural teams?
• What do we mean by “team,” “culture,”  “multicultural,” and “intercultural?”  And why it is important to have absolute clarity on this in your team?
• How culture is important not only in how ministry is done, but how a team relates to each other and functions in accomplishing their calling and vision.
• What is the goal of a multicultural team — to work together well as a group of individuals who are really different from each other?  Or something more than that?
• The role of humility in succeeding as a member of a multicultural team.
• How I, as a team leader or team member, can make concrete plans to help my team be a great multicultural team.
• Eight distinct spheres of cultural variations of social practices that are particularly important for multicultural teams to be aware of and intentionally plan to navigate – communication, trust-building, leadership, persuasion, decision-making, disagreeing, criticism and time-usage.
• The spiritual dynamics that a multicultural ministry team must leverage in order to bear fruit and bring glory to God!

Are you willing to venture into these concepts and questions and ask God to make you a better member of your multicultural team?  The course asks you to make an investment of 12-16 hours of learning time over the 15-day period.

Content, Community, Consultation, Connections

Intentional Multicultural Teams will afford the opportunity to explore some interesting information regarding the development of your knowledge, perspectives and skills while living and serving cross-culturally.  But, more importantly, it also will connect you with fellow learners who are in a similar ministry situation. You’ll be able to help each other and learn from one another. Your “been there, done that” course facilitator(s) will also be a great resource for clarifying what you are learning and for providing you with input on assignments that you will complete and discussions in which you will participate.

Is this Course for Me?

Intentional Multicultural Teams is designed for team members or team leaders who are currently on a multicultural team serving in a cross-cultural ministry context or for those who anticipate being on such a team within the next 12 months. We also ask that course participants be fully committed to placing themselves into God’s hands for the sake of effective cross-cultural Gospel ministry.  If you are currently engaged in cross-cultural ministry and are committed to serving well in your context, this would be a good course for you.  Team members are strongly encouraged to complete this course together.

Learn with those who have been there!

The course creators for this course are Kevin L (AIM), Mark & Julie Morgenstern (Grow2Serve),  and Rodrigo and Valeska Petrelli (AIM.) Kevin serves as the Director of “Leading From the Inside Out”… a training program for new team leaders.  Kevin spent has spent about a third of his life in South America, a third of his life in the US, and a third of his life in Africa.  He’s been helping teams be healthy for the past 25 years.  Mark serves as the director for Grow2Serve. Julie runs the daily operations at Grow2Serve. They both formerly served as training leaders with ReachGlobal and in leadership roles at South Suburban Evangelical Free Church. Mark and Julie formerly lived and served for 13 years in Russia and Ukraine.  Rodrigo and Valeska are from Brazil and have served in Africa for many years.  Their current role has them leading a intercultural training team.

When will I need to schedule my participation in the course?  What time of day?

Grow2Serve online courses are built with a worldwide audience in mind.  We anticipate that every time this course is offered that the learners will be spread all over the world in many time zones.  Therefore, the course is designed to very sparingly use time-anchored activities such as video conferencing (Zoom, webinars, etc.)  Instead, the course is built to allow you to participate every day with daily required items that are due, while allowing you the choice to complete your activities any time within the 24-hour window that you choose. This allows you the freedom to continue your regular ministry responsibilities while participating in this 15-day course.  The course will include one or two video conferences (probably one each week,) and the timing of those will be agreed upon by the course participants as a group so as to include as many as possible.

Please note that ideally, for maximum learning impact, a learner in this course will spend 60-90 minutes daily (Monday – Friday) working on the course material. Some of the coursework will involve reading, writing, listening and viewing videos on the computer. Other pieces will involve interacting with other learners and engaging with your team or people in your community while practicing the skills you are learning.