Sustainable Resilience is a two-week Grow2Serve online course designed to raise awareness and develop perspectives and lifestyle choices that will increase resilience and keep cross-cultural workers true to their God-given calling. Too many missionaries leave their ministry too soon when confronted with stress, conflict, danger, and suffering. This can change as we learn some key truths that help one grow in resilience. The asynchronous course asks you to make an investment of 10-12 hours of learning time over the 15-day period.
Are you willing to assess your attitudes, values and perspectives that may be detrimental to obedience, resiliency, and fruitfulness and begin to construct and implement a plan for inviting God into changing those things?
As a result of participating actively in the course, by the end you should…
- Understand what resilience in life and ministry looks like and why it is important for ongoing faithfulness to your calling;
- Find a constructive relationship between faithful fulfillment of calling and faithful stewardship of self and understand that these two in no way stand in contrast to each other;
- Weigh your willingness fully to lay yourself at God’s loving feet, a vessel fully available to Him to be used by Him as He pleases; and make this real by identifying places in your life where you are holding back control from God and beginning the implementation of a plan to relinquish that control;
- Believe that doing the right work, in the right quantity and at the right time is much more important than doing much work;
- Be able to map a reasonable pathway to a purposefully designed way of living among a group of people for the sake of the Gospel, even when that implies lifestyle choices that would not be preferable to you.
- Value inviting others into your life to help you be more resilient to unexpected and expected stressors while not creating a non-sustainable dependence on helps from others.
Content, Community, Consultation, Connections
Sustainable Resilience will afford you not just the opportunity to explore some interesting information regarding your development of resilience while living and serving cross-culturally, but, more importantly, it will connect you with fellow learners who are in a similar life stage. You’ll be able to help each other and learn from one another. Your course facilitator 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?
Sustainable Resilience is designed for those who have already lived and ministered at least 3 months in a culture new and unfamiliar and who are committed to fully 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 living and serving well in your context, this would be a good course for you.
Learn with those who have been there!
Course creators and facilitators are Mark & Julie Morgenstern. Mark is the former training director for ReachGlobal and is currently the director for continuing learning through the CIT Next ministry of Center for Intercultural Training. Julie is the operations director for Grow2Serve. She formerly served as a church-planter and pre-field training leader with ReachGlobal as well as in several senior leadership roles at South Suburban Evangelical Free Church.
Please note that ideally, for maximum learning impact, a learner in this course will spend 45-90 minutes daily (Monday – Friday) working on the material. Some of the coursework will involve reading, writing, listening and viewing videos on the computer. Other pieces will involve interacting in written form with other learners and engaging in your local community while practicing the skills you are learning.
