Ministry Innovation
We are excited to announce that the 2025 Innovation Fund award winners, with nearly $1 million in funding going to 12 mission agencies advancing innovative efforts among the unreached.
Click on the image below to view the 2025 Grantees.
Ongoing training opportunities and cohort-based learning groups will be offered throughout the next year to encourage education, shared learning, and innovative thinking in the ministry space.
Check out events like our upcoming Tower Event here: Missio Nexus Events
As of the fall of 2025 the Innovation Fund has been put on hold in agreement with our donor. We will continue to be a catalyst for innovative thought and practice within the mission community, and will perhaps re-open the fund at a later date.
Please check back regularly for updates and future opportunities to engage and grow through innovation.
Innovation Sprint Cohorts
Faciliated Innovation Sprint Cohorts will focus on bringing together multi-agencies intiatives to solve similar problems through innovation.
Innovation Crisis
Don't miss Ted's acclaimed book "The Innovation Crisis" where he explores the significant gaps in innovation within the modern church and mission organizations. This book is a clarion call to embrace creativity and risk-taking to advance the Great Commission.
2023-2025
Innovation Fund Overview
Information outlining the 2023-2025 Innovation Fund.
Innovation Explained
Resources to help you understand and apply innovation tools, and design thinking models in your ministry context.
Ministry innovation SHOULD...
The Big 3 for us are Church Planting, Evangelism, and Discipleship. Your innovative approach must fuel and further one or a combination of these contributors to gospel proclamation among the unreached.
If you have a new approach that is an iterative change from a past solution, the next question is how it improves upon existing or traditional approaches. Your project should have a strong argument for its approach and be more viable, impactful, or cost-effective than past solutions.
As we seek innovative solutions, we are not looking to invest in standard boilerplate projects. To meet our criteria, your project should be a novel approach that differs from solutions already widely practiced. We are looking for originality, uniqueness, and distinctiveness.
Especially in our Macro grants, we are seeking innovative projects that have the potential to scale to benefit people way beyond those focused on this project. Scaling can take place through any number of ways – we seek plans that have the most credible plans for scaling, sharing, and future collaboration to impact the global missions movement.
We look for innovative projects that have defined teams working together to solve problems they are tackling and understand the context in which they are working. Applicants should be able to clarify who their team is, what their roles are, and how they will work to execute the project.
We are looking for projects that pursue a pathway of empathy, definition, ideation, prototyped iteration, and testing. We are not looking simply for ideas but those that have, to some degree, gone through this process.
Your innovative project must be ready to be implemented upon receipt of the funds. If your project needs more work before putting it to the test, then we recommend you apply next year. There are expectations for reporting back in 12 months that the project was executed to the best ability of the team and has made measured progress.
End user empathy is essential to determining the viability of the projects. The more unique and descriptive the preferences of those being impacted are understood, the more likely the project will have the intended impact.
Your innovative project must be informed by evidence of what works. This evidence might focus on the changes in the lives of the unreached or how evidence on how your solution can be deployed or scaled successfully. Our expectation of the level of evidence increases with the level of funds requested.
Each applicant will define the quantitative and qualitative metrics that they seek to be held to. We are not seeking to place an arbitrary set of metrics on projects but want those to be defined by the project leader to ensure the metrics are achievable and defined to successfully implement the project.
Especially for our collaborative grants, we are seeking multiple organizations that are working together in unique ways to proclaim the gospel among the nations. We are seeking active partnerships that demonstrate an ability to work together and have already completed successful joint projects.
We are looking for organizations that demonstrate a willingness and passion to be a catalyst among the Great Commission community. As this fund seeks to push forward the community, we desire to partner with those that have the greater mission movement in mind and will be open to collaboration and sharing.