Mission

God has entrusted us with a niche, where we are to serve:

We come alongside those who are training missionaries. We help them provide effective ongoing, online, contextualized training that maximizes missionary success in fulfilling their callings.

Vision

As a result of God ministering through us, we look forward to seeing…

Faithful, called servants of God,
     Learning effectively and growing,
Serving successfully,
     So that the Kingdom of God expands victoriously.

Values

Our values influence the way we function as we daily move forward with accomplishing the mission God has given us. They are boundaries we choose to pay special attention to stay within.  Some of our values include:

• Transformational learning (based in community, ongoing, self-propelled, meeting real needs, flexible, applicable, and experiential)
• Hearing AND practicing God’s word
• Effective proclamation and demonstration of the transformative Gospel of Jesus Christ
• Serving in a timely manner with expertise and excellence
• Showing appreciation and honor for one another in practical ways.
• TEAM=Together Embracing a Mission
• Practicing authenticity and honesty
• Maintaining healthy balance
• Receiving joy through helping learners rise, with accountability, to their own God-given desires and expectations for themselves

Strategy

What we do every day…

1. Through hosting and administration of online learning websites, accessible and timely learning is made possible for those who provide it and receive it.
2. Quality online courses, built and delivered by Grow2Serve, provide an pathway for organizations to direct their learners to us for learning and for individual missionaries to opt in for learning opportunities. These courses also serve as a place for us to learn and demonstrate current best practices for in-context, community-based learning.
3. Grow2Serve consulting services assist organizations with designing learning programs that deliver transformational training in the right place and at the right time.

Our Faith

Grow2serve, adheres to the statement of faith of World Evangelical Alliance. This statement reflects the character of the WEA as an evangelical movement that has a firm commitment to the central doctrines of the faith while allowing for differences on secondary matters. In addition, we work within the four boundaries of our Grow2Serve vision frame which expresses our vision, our mission, our values, our strategy and our measures.

Our History

Grow2Serve has had a long, rich history of development from its origins with ReachGlobal to its partnership with South Suburban Evangelical Free Church. Today we operate as an autonomous, free-standing ministry in our own right. We are privileged as a team to serve over 500 missionaries and dozens of organizations across the world per year!

The first foundations for what would later be known as Grow2Serve were first laid in July of 2006. EFCA EQUIP (the human resources department of ReachGlobal) offered its first online course, Introduction to Teaching Online. Later, in September of the same year, Mark Morgenstern (now Grow2Serve’s senior director) was appointed as Director of EQUIP and, with his supervision, one of EQUIP’s historically most popular courses, Intentional Living, was first launched.

Under the administration of ReachGlobal and Mark’s leadership, EFCA EQUIP continued to innovate, developing a groundbreaking blended-learning event known as Pre-field Training for new missionaries. Designed to prepare pre-deployed missionaries for cross-cultural life and service, Pre-field Training offered the opportunity for these new missionaries to grow together while learning life skills and coping strategies that they would need once landing on their new mission field. For 7 years, Julie Morgenstern led the team, and the event was a massive success, with participants traveling from all over the country to learn and grow together.

Meanwhile, Mark and his team continued to develop online training courses for those already overseas, and the name of the online course site was changed to eventually changed to Grow2Serve. Over time, other mission organizations and ministries joined the Grow2Serve online learning platform to offer their own resources and classes to the public. A collaborative learning community was born.

December of 2015 brought the momentous unveiling of Grow2Serve as an independent entity under the leadership of Senior Director Mark Morgenstern and Project Manager for Operations Christina Schott. At this time, Grow2Serve launched out from ReachGlobal to act as a free-standing ministry overseen and administered under the leadership of South Suburban Evangelical Free Church (SSEFC). Then, on July 1, 2017, Grow2Serve spun off from SSEFC as an autonomous nonprofit organization.