As disciples of Jesus we are called to continually grow, learn, serve, and be fruitful in ways that bring glory to God. Grow2Serve exists to help people fulfill this calling through learning, we’re passionate about helping that calling be a reality.

Vision

As a result of God ministering through us, we look forward to seeing missionaries and ministers easily connecting worldwide to quality and transformative learning resulting in healthy spiritual lives and fruitful ministry.

Mission

God has entrusted us with something that we are uniquely to do and that is to bring timely and accessible learning to grow missionaries, ministers, and churches in knowledge, beliefs, and skills to learn and teach better.

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:

  • Honoring the Bible’s authority
  • Servanthood
  • Trust, transparency and open communication
  • Partnering and Community
  • Teamwork which values each member’s unique and vital contribution
  • Connecting people to opportunities
  • Being change agents for positive, lasting and effective change
  • Empowering people to do ministry better rather than doing it for them
  • Active and intentional management for better results
  • Respect for intellectual property rights
  • Financial responsibility of the resources God has entrusted to us to invest
  • Stewardship of the environment
  • Continual improvement
  • Innovation and willingness to change
  • Living a balanced lifestyle in all of its aspects
  • Connecting meaningfully with others is possible, even over vast distances
  • Doing all we do, in word and deed, for the sake of God’s glory

Measures

Using milestones along the way of our service for God, we continually check to make sure we really are being faithful and making progress.  Some of our measures are:

  • The number of Great Commission communities we are partnering with.
  • How many discrete learning resources which we are helping distribute are being used.
  • The number of visitors to our websites.
  • The number of take-aways of learning resources that we are helping distribute.
  • The number of unique users of learning resources in a year.
  • The number of consultation referrals we receive in a year.
  • The number of partner referrals we receive in a year.
  • Is Grow2Serve continuing to operate in a way that is financially sustainable?
  • What percentage of Grow2Serve resources are being used substantially?
  • The number of incompleted to do items that are left at the end of an implementation cycle.

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. It has only recently begun operating as an autonomous, free-standing ministry in its own right, but already the team ministers to over 500 missionaries and ministers across the world per year!

The first foundations for what would later be known as Grow2Serve were first laid about 13 years ago. 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. 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. In the next few years, Grow2Serve would like to double the number of organizations that offer courses online for missionaries from the current number of 7 to 15 or more. We’d also like to grow in the number of individual missionaries that are served in a given year. We’re hoping in 2019 to serve 800-1000 missionaries and in future years we’d be excited to see that number grow to 2,000 or more.

Strategy

We accomplish our mission by providing missionaries and ministers with a wide variety of distance learning opportunities and by connecting them to other learners and teachers worldwide.   Towards this end, our daily and weekly work flow is defined by  6 core spheres of activity, three externally-focused and three internally-focused.

Production spheres (externally-focused):

  1. Through hosting and administration of an online learning portal (grow2serve.net), accessible and timely learning is made possible for those who provide it and receive it.
  2. A Great Commission learning network (grow2serve.com) connects learners to learning opportunities in areas of their interest and ministry needs.  It also connects providers with learners and users of their services and links providers with other providers to increase collaboration and decrease redundancy.
  3. Consulting services assist learning providers, churches, and ministry organization with maximizing the effectiveness of their learning services as they seek to transformationally impact believers in their spheres of influence.

Production-capability spheres (internally-focused):

  1. Working together as a healthy and fruitful team, constantly open to seeing how God is working in others and how they might be a good fit to contribute to the team.
  2. Maintaining ongoing organizational intentionality through purposefully ongoing processes of vision framing and operational implementation.
  3. Protecting and fanning to flame the spiritual dynamic of our ministering community — individually, with each other and with our “learners” and “partners.”

Learning Philosophy

Grow2Serve promotes lifelong learning and personal development through a better understanding of how adults learn. Our aim is to enhance, facilitate, and encourage better learning and teaching in Christian life and ministry. We also serve to bring together in effective ways those who know things and those who need to learn those things. While we do create some of the learning resources and opportunities we offer, we also seek to serve other creators and facilitators of learning resources and opportunities.

One of our core commitments is that training and education be learning-centered rather than teacher, content, or even learner-centered. This kind of fruit-bearing learning is measured by observable changes in behavior.

The following captures some measures of effective learning  which we employ as we develop and deliver learning resources, as well as when we provide help and consultation to other learning providers:

Learner directed

Experiential

Able to be evaluated

Residual (build on known info, facts, experiences)

Numerous instructional methods

If you’d like to explore some more learning values that we hold,  please take a look at some stubs of concepts we’re working through and contact us to find more or to let us know what you think…

  • Use of both cognitive and behavioral approaches
  • Establishing an environment conducive to active and self-directed learners
  • Role of the educator  = (facilitate and present vs. direct and monitor); (teacher, facilitator, and coach)
  • Role of professional development
  • Training content (problem or task oriented vs. subject oriented)
  • Training climate (relaxed with mutual trust vs. formal and authority oriented)
  • Training goals (collaboratively developed vs. developed by an instructor)
  • Training activities (interactive and group vs. directive and individual)
  • Part or whole learning
  • Spaced Learning
  • Reinforced learning
  • Meaningful material
  • Asynchronous learning, and at times, some synchronous content delivery

Our Staff

Mark
Morgenstern

Senior Director

Julie
Morgenstern

Operations Director

Alisha
Boerner

Technologies Coordinator

Amberle
Danielson-Copeland

Special Projects

Board of Directors

Bob Mackey

Mark Morgenstern

John Peters

Council of Advisors

JoAnn Byrd

Bob Mackey

Mark Morgenstern

Steve Elliott

Julie Morgenstern

John Peters

Ken Guenther

Kathy Morgenstern

Shirley Roehl