Our missions program seeks to develop student's sense of mission as a follower of Jesus. The program has a strong emphasis on "process", which means we place a high priority on creating an environment that will foster students' spiritual growth throughout. Students will have the opportunity to grow at their own pace as they work through the course material.

A second emphasis of the missions course is diversity. As North American Christians, we must realize that our culture represents roughly 5% of the world's total Christian population. Thus, we must be sensitive to the  ways in which North American culture; embodied in consumerism,  individualism, and industrialism, influences the way we read scripture and understand God. We need to thus give a fair voice to minorities from  cultural and denominational backdrops different from our own, so that we may be truly united in Christ as "one body" even if we don't always agree with, or understand one another. We model this from Paul's instructions to be warm, kind and patient with others (1 Thessalonians 5:14), to bear with one another in love and forgive one another when necessary (Ephesians 4:2 & Colossians 3:13).

The program also seeks to help students re-imagine what serving others can look like in their own day-to-day lives as well as on the mission field. Traditional short term missions usually involves heading to a developing country to build a church or a school for a community of people we perceive as impoverished, or to spread the gospel through evangelistic programs where the missionaries are the speakers of the message and our cultural hosts are the listeners. We will seek to shift this focus from building monuments to building movements within and among the people we serve.

The challenge is to move from simply telling people about Jesus to actively listening and looking for the ways in which God is already at work in the community, so that we might recognize the ways God has gone ahead of us to prepare the way. Our focus will thus be in modelling a holistic example of the Gospel of Jesus through the gentleness and integrity of our speech, actions, and interactions. We will aim to allow God to produce in us a gospel-centred sensitivity to our cultural hosts, and above all else, a desire to listen.

This doesn't mean we won't build anything or spread the gospel: If the community desires, or requires a structure, then we can respond appropriately in an effort to respond to both the spiritual and physical needs of the people we serve. But rather than trying to convince a foreign culture to join our ways of knowing and understanding God, we will aim to learn how to be culturally sensitive in order to speak Jesus into the culture we find ourselves in.