Innovation is not simply a matter of finding a better idea. An organization can have a promising model and still struggle to grow because its funding, staffing, partnerships, professional language, or culture remain built for the old one.
At City Vision University, we are trying to reinvent Christian higher education for people serving the poor and those experiencing addiction, while helping faith-based organizations strengthen their own work. Those purposes are connected. Our educational model is itself an innovation, and the people who study and partner with us can carry new practices into their organizations and movements.
The question, then, is not just how to improve a university. It is how to align mission, organizational capacity, research, leadership development, and the wider ecosystem so change can take hold.
Key Takeaways
- Connect mission and values to the financial, human, and systems capacity needed for impact.
- Learn legacy systems and partner cultures well enough to explain and adapt a new model.
- Develop innovations with early adopters, then help partners translate them for broader movements.
- Turn research and practical experience into durable resources others can discover and use.
Start With Mission, Then Build the Strategy
Everything begins with our mission: using online education to transform lives through Jesus, justice, and technology. Those three values are more than a slogan. Together with our supporting values, they express our theological vision and shape which problems we choose to address.
Our vision for Christian higher education is straightforward: make it radically more affordable and more relevant to those serving the poor and people experiencing addiction. I often summarize that ambition as twice as relevant at half the cost.
That vision has two closely related outcomes. First, we want to expand access to education for people who have recently experienced homelessness, addiction, or imprisonment, connecting education with life transformation and employment. Second, we want to spread effective practices among faith-based organizations so they can better serve people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and low incomes.
Those outcomes require more than good intentions. They require a strategic plan that connects impact to the capacity needed to sustain it.
Keep the organizational flywheel turning
Our strategic plan works as a flywheel. Financial capacity supports systems and people. Stronger systems and human capacity support greater program impact. As impact and reach grow, we have to identify what is slowing the cycle and invest accordingly.
Growth exposes bottlenecks. We completed a five-year plan in which we grew about 20 percent annually and set a 25 percent annual growth goal for the next season, moving from a relatively small base toward a $2.8 million target. But increased revenue and enrollment do not instantly become increased capacity. When more students arrived, staff were busy serving them. We then needed time to hire additional people and build the systems to support the work.
That is a practical part of a CEO’s job: figure out which constraint is keeping the flywheel from moving and address it. A growth target without a plan for staffing, systems, and impact is only a number.
Why We Need New Models in Two Sectors
Our values place us at the intersection of higher education and Christian social services. Many partners are strongly aligned with two of our three values, but fewer organizations work across all three. That intersection gives us two related purposes.
Across Jesus and technology, we are building a new model for Christian higher education. The traditional model is poorly matched to many people who want to serve in urban ministry. If a degree costs an enormous amount but leads into work that generally does not pay a high salary, the economics become difficult to justify. Programs preparing people for that work have disappeared, and we are trying to design education that fits the context better.
Across Jesus and justice, we want to help partner organizations develop new models for Christian social services. Their needs and communities change, too. The goal is not to hand every organization an identical program. It is to help them innovate while remaining grounded in their own vision and values.
That distinction matters: retaining core values is not the same as retaining every inherited practice. An organization can hold firmly to its purpose and still change how it teaches, serves, researches, or collaborates.
Work at the Organizational, System, and Movement Levels
New models do not operate in isolation. We have to work within our own organization, within higher education’s rules and professional networks, and alongside Christian social service movements. Each level presents a different challenge.
Learn the language of legacy systems
Accreditation and regulation are unavoidable parts of higher education. An unfamiliar model can be difficult to explain through categories developed for a conventional institution. The answer is not to abandon the innovation. It is to gain enough fluency in the existing system to explain the work accurately in terms that reviewers understand.
We experienced this during a reaccreditation cycle. Reviewers raised questions about how we defined research. I could describe what we were doing, but I could not yet describe it well enough in their professional language. A board member, Jay Gary, helped identify action research as the framework that fit our approach. I then spent the following month learning that framework so I could explain our work clearly in our response.
That is what I mean by code switching. We do not change the substance of our work each time we speak with an accreditor, a professional association, or a ministry partner. We learn each group’s concepts well enough to communicate the substance faithfully.
Become a student of partner cultures
Christian social service organizations do not all share the same assumptions. Rescue missions, the Salvation Army, Adult and Teen Challenge, CCDA, Citygate Network, and other groups have distinct histories, leadership structures, and ways of thinking. Even organizations with similar goals may approach race, social class, poverty, ministry, or institutional change differently.
We cannot build useful partnerships by treating those differences as minor details. I have spent years reading, meeting with leaders, and learning the Salvation Army’s culture, for example, and I still have far more to learn. Deep familiarity with one movement does not automatically transfer to another.
Our strategy is to develop multi-sided fluency: learn the cultures involved, communicate across them, and work with leaders and advocates rooted in those communities. Groups committed to tradition and groups committed to innovation may distrust each other, but lasting change often needs both.
Develop leaders for the new model
Hiring creates another challenge. People trained in conventional higher education understandably bring familiar approaches to research and course design. People hired from ministry networks bring the strengths of their own settings, but often also bring a narrower set of assumptions about how ministry should work.
If we simply assemble those inherited practices, we risk reproducing the systems we set out to change. That is why internal development matters. We need people who can design education differently, lead confidently with technology, and work across cultures and social classes. Those capacities take training and sustained practice. Building a new movement means developing leaders who can carry its values, not only recruiting people with the right job titles.
Define Success Beyond One Organization
Our partners’ outcomes sit at three levels. Keeping all three in view prevents us from confusing a useful course or project with the full change we hope to support.
- People served: Programs become more effective by aligning with their organization’s vision and values and adapting to changing needs.
- Organizations: Leaders gain the capacity to align strategy with values, innovate, and respond to a rapidly changing context.
- Movements: Partners become sources of ideas and innovation that help Christian movements grow while retaining their distinct commitments.
We think of City Vision as a change agency. Students and partners become change agents in their organizations, and organizations can influence broader movements. Our role is to help people recognize the need for change and turn that recognition into practices that last.
Match the Innovation to the People Adopting It
Not every setting needs the same degree of change. Much of our undergraduate and master’s education supports incremental improvement. Doctoral work places greater emphasis on more radical innovation, although the boundary is not absolute. The aim is to help people choose a level of change appropriate to the problem in front of them.
There is also a difference between our role and the role of an association. In the diffusion of innovations model, we put substantial research and development effort into work with innovators and early adopters. An association, however, must serve a membership that includes people at many stages of adoption. It cannot organize all its work around the most experimental members.
These roles can complement one another. We can help develop and test ideas with organizations ready to experiment. Associations can help translate useful practices for a broader membership. Expecting either kind of institution to do the other’s entire job would miss its particular strength.
Make Research Useful, Affordable, and Shareable
Culture-making requires more than conducting research. Ideas need durable forms that people can find, assess, adapt, and pass on. A project may begin as a change within one organization, then become a workshop, webinar, publication, course, podcast, book, or online resource.
We want to help students and partners create those cultural artifacts within their own movements. We are doing the same through our research and publishing. Just as we aim to reduce the cost of education, we want to reduce the cost of producing and distributing worthwhile research. I believe there is potential for a tenfold reduction across that process, provided we use tools thoughtfully rather than flooding the world with low-quality AI-generated material.
Citygate Network offers an example of an association with many channels for sharing knowledge, including publications, a resource library, conferences, site visits, webinars, and board resources. Our own contributions include the Rescue Mission Report, toolkits containing hundreds of documents, partner conversations, and a podcast. These are not substitutes for relationships or in-person gatherings. They give useful knowledge a life beyond a single meeting.
Preserve the knowledge a movement has already created
We recently scanned about 100 out-of-print books from rescue mission history, much of which was difficult to find online. We are placing those books on Internet Archive so they can be discovered through online searches and research tools. We have also created podcast material about that history.
The broader principle applies well beyond books. Conferences generate years of hard-won knowledge, yet a workshop or keynote can disappear after the event. With appropriate permission and attention to privacy, selected sessions can become resources that remain accessible years later.
Moving knowledge online is not a claim that every conversation should be public. Some material should stay private. But when a movement leaves its publications, archives, and useful teaching inaccessible, future practitioners may struggle to discover the work that came before them. Preservation is part of culture-making.
Develop in One Movement, Then Adapt Across Others
We began much of this work in the rescue mission movement because City Vision grew out of it and has deep relationships there. Those relationships make it possible to study programs closely, build case studies, and test ways of turning practical knowledge into resources.
From that starting point, we can adapt what we learn with related movements such as the Salvation Army, Adult and Teen Challenge, and other networks focused on poverty. Beyond those circles are students working in education, government, nonprofits, business, and contexts outside the United States.
A model built with rescue missions will not arrive perfectly tailored to every setting. That is the point of adaptation. We can show how we conduct case studies, preserve historical books, build a podcast, or organize practical resources. Students and partners can then decide which principles apply in their own industries and communities. We cannot write a separate playbook for every context, but we can equip people to develop one.
Turn an Ecosystem of Knowledge Into Practical Tools
Innovation does not come only from a research office. It emerges from conversations with partners, the experience of students, communities of practice, departmental advisory councils, existing documents, published work, and the expertise of faculty and practitioners.
At City Vision, we meet with partners hundreds of times each year and serve more than 500 students. In those conversations, we may encounter a particularly strong approach to vocational training, counseling, staff development, or another domain. We can study it, compare it with other resources, and turn what we learn into courses, programs, podcasts, and toolkits.
Our toolkits bring together hundreds of working documents across areas such as staff training, values alignment, counseling, human resources, development, and food services. We also draw on books, articles, workshops, association resources, curriculum, vendors, subject matter experts, guest speakers, and AI tools. The work is continuous: notice a useful practice, investigate it, organize it, and share it in a form someone else can use.
Another organization’s map will look different. What matters is identifying its own sources of learning and creating a reliable path from those sources to better practice.
Design an Innovation Strategy That Fits Your Context
City Vision’s strategy is shaped by being a university rooted in particular Christian ministry movements. It should not be copied wholesale by an organization with a different mission. The transferable task is to connect the pieces: values, desired outcomes, financial and human capacity, external systems, partner cultures, leadership development, research, and distribution.
A useful starting question is: Where is valuable knowledge already being created in your organization, and what prevents it from becoming lasting change? The answer might point to a staffing bottleneck, a language gap with a regulator, an assumption imported from an old model, or useful work that never gets documented and shared.
Innovation becomes more durable when those obstacles are treated as part of the strategy rather than surprises along the way. Build the capacity to serve people well now, develop leaders who can work differently, and give worthwhile ideas a form that can travel.