Introducing the Center for Global Engagement

Brit Eaton (’04)

“To seek to learn is to seek to serve” isn’t just a motto. It’s who we are at MVNU, who we’ve always been. Since 1968, MVNU has placed lifelong learning and global service at the center of all we do as an intentionally Christian university.

Our brand new Center for Global Engagement — the only center of its kind among Nazarene institutions — provides dynamic and transformative global learning and service opportunities. It ensures that global perspectives and opportunities to learn, serve, and engage needs locally, nationally, and globally are woven into the fabric of the student experience as a strategic imperative for the university.

“Most MVNU students come to campus eager to make a difference in the world,” says Dr. Brenita Nicholas-Edwards, newly appointed Assistant Vice President for Global Engagement and Director of the Center for Global Engagement. “But if we really want to make a positive impact in it, we first have to learn about it, develop relationships and serve throughout it, find passion and compassion for it, and develop skills and dispositions to work effectively in it.”

Nicholas-Edwards believes the new Center will produce highly engaged, purposeful students who are learning from global practitioners and engaging real world needs and challenges in real time, ultimately bridging the gap between MVNU’s mission and vision for the future.

Our university-wide Mission and Vision are focused on fulfilling the great commission. And that involves all of us — everyone who claims Christ around the world.

Mission: Mount Vernon Nazarene University exists to shape lives through educating the whole person and cultivating Christlikeness for lifelong learning and service.

Vision: To Change the World with the Love of Christ.

Dr. Nicholas-Edwards isn’t the only person on campus committed to providing global engagement opportunities for students. Her team is actively partnering with departments across the university to provide students with both curricular and co-curricular opportunities to explore, connect, and participate in global engagement.

Programs including nursing, engineering, art, our newly transformed intercultural studies co-major, and more are already leveraging the Center’s shared resources for curricular engagement. A crossing cultures service-learning immersive course, which meets a core general education requirement, is also available.

Outside the classroom, co-curricular engagement experiences are offered to all students, such as the Justice Project through Campus Ministries and Festival Latino through Intercultural Life. Adding to a rich array of opportunities, the Center’s cocurricular offerings range from an annual Global Engagement Expo and monthly Global Spotlight Events to cultural celebrations like Chinese New Year.

Brit Eaton is an author, speaker, discipler, and all-around pursuer of the Kingdom of God. She helps corporate, nonprofit, and ministry leaders find the words to say to move people to action.

The new Center includes a Service Learning Collaboratory — a global community of students, alumni, faculty, staff, and global partners committed to providing global engagement opportunities, hands-on training, and networking opportunities for MVNU students and graduates, now and into the future.

The Collaboratory is intentionally engaged with the work of the Church of the Nazarene around the world. “MVNU is committed to shaping students who will make a significant impact in their professions and on their world” says Nicholas-Edwards. “The Center’s partnership with Nazarene Global Missions is one way to operationalize this as it provides students with ways to meaningfully engage in what the church is doing around the globe building important cross-cultural skills necessary to work and serve in the world, as well as expanding their imagination about ways they may be called to use their gifts and passions in service to others."

Stephen Sickel, the Global Coordinator of Partnerships and Work and Witness initiatives emphasizes the synergies that take place within this collaboration.

“The Church of the Nazarene and Global Missions is a body made of individuals, churches, and schools around the world. MVNU represents an important part of that body. The opportunity to come together and learn from each other in and out of the classroom is priceless. MVNU has a lot to offer the Global church as a resource, from research projects to potential future missionaries. The church and her ministry are stronger as MVNU, the professors and students take their knowledge and meld it with the experience of church leaders to find solutions, learn, and grow together.”

Global awareness. Global responsibility. Global participation.

The Center for Global Engagement will provide three different ways for students to get involved: on-campus engagement through curricular and co-curricular opportunities; off-campus engagement locally, nationally and globally; and Collaboratory engagement — each designed so that our students, alumni, faculty, and staff will continue to build cultural humility and competence, preparing them to make a difference in today’s world.