EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION AT MISSIONAL UNIVERSITY
Missional University:
A Radically Different Approach to Christian Higher Education
Most Christian higher education still operates within three familiar models—yet all of them, in different ways, marginalize the very thing Scripture puts at the center: the missio Dei—the mission of God that belongs to every believer, not just ordained clergy.
- Christian Liberal Arts Universities offer an excellent education shaped by a Christian worldview, but the mission of God is rarely the organizing principle of the curriculum. Mission is treated as an application, an elective, or an extracurricular—never the core.
- Traditional Bible Colleges remain focused on Bible knowledge and church-based ministry training. Even as many struggle with enrollment and try to broaden their appeal, their vision of “ministry” is still overwhelmingly tied to local church programs rather than God’s mission in the wider world.
- Theological Seminaries (almost without exception) exist to train ordained clergy for institutional church leadership. Their curricula, accreditation standards, and faculty expertise are built around pastoral ministry inside the walls of the church. The missio Dei in society, culture, marketplace, and global contexts—and the equipping of the 99% of God’s people who will never be pastors—is consistently treated as secondary or omitted entirely.
Missional University breaks this pattern completely.
We are the first institution of higher Christian education deliberately designed from the ground up around the conviction that every believer—lay or clergy—is called and sent into the missio Dei. Unlike every other option, we do not exist primarily to prepare pastors for pulpits. Instead, we exist to equip all of God’s people for faithful, theologically grounded participation in God’s mission wherever they live and work—whether in their Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, or the ends of the earth.
This is not a seminary with a missional department added on. This is not a Bible college that tacked on a few “missions” courses. This is not a liberal arts university hoping students will somehow “apply” their faith out there.
This is a new paradigm: an academically rigorous university in which the mission of God is the integrating center of every degree, every course, and every learning outcome.
At Missional University you will find:
- A 21st-century missional university built for non-clergy roles in faith-based organizations, NGOs, marketplace mission, community transformation, and global service at the points of deepest human need.
- A new kind of seminary that finally takes seriously the New Testament truth that all of God’s people—lay and ordained—are called, gifted, and sent into the world as ambassadors of the Kingdom.
In short: while almost every other Christian college, Bible institute, or seminary continues to prepare people for the church gathered, Missional University exists to prepare God’s people for the church scattered—living out the missio Dei in every sphere of society.
That is not just different.
It IS the difference.
