Mission & Vision Statement
CMU is an innovative Christian university, rooted in the Anabaptist Mennonite tradition, moved and transformed by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Through teaching, research and service CMU inspires and equips women and men for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society.
CMU's mission statement, like that of any organization, is like a densely packed coil with the potential and the obligation to spring to life in a vibrant array of programs and projects, conversations and commitments. CMU's mission statement is upfront and out there in its particularity. Faithfulness to the story of God's creating and transforming work through Jesus Christ is the heartbeat, the mindfulness and the motivating impulse for the service, leadership and reconciliation through which CMU participates in church and society.
At CMU, reconciliation is academic work with all sorts of social, personal, theological, interpersonal, artistic, physical, and environmental dimensions - to name a few. Reconciliation, like education, is always about "building understandings." And "building understandings" is always about engaging in both knowledge and relationships, ways of seeing, engaging and sharing in a world that is wondrous, that is troubled, and that ever needs our best care and imagination.
The phrase, "rooted in the Anabaptist Mennonite tradition" is perhaps best approached through the testimony of CMU students. What catches on in their minds and theirs hearts at once is the coherence and consistency between what the professors teach in class and how they these "teachers of life" go about everyday living. Strong convictions towards reconciliation and integrity in life and faith were at the forefront of the emergence of Anabaptists in the sixteenth century. The integration of action and confession continue to be vital today, as do practices of community discernment in apprehending what is true. These convictions propose a bold vulnerability and a dynamic freedom, and these form deeply and only through relationships of trust. It is within relationships of trust and community discernment that CMU understands itself to be a church-related university, providing a forum for ongoing dialogue regarding how together we are called to speak grace and enact reconciliation in church, in society and in the world as we know it.
From the flow of this mission, CMU has established four commitments that characterize its work across all of its programs and activities:
- Educating for Peace and Justice
A commitment to educating for peace and justice colours all of our programs and our institutional life as a whole and is explicitly represented in some signature programs and in the work of several of our institutes (e.g., Canadian School of Peacebuilding). - Learning through Thinking and Doing
Academic analysis is complemented by experiential learning in a manner that shapes both thinking and living, particularly through our practica, Outtatown, co-op, and internship programs. - Generous Hospitality... Radical Dialogue
CMU welcomes all as it fosters dialogue across religious, economic, social, political, ethnic, national, and cultural chasms that divide humanity, within North America and internationally. - Modelling Invitational Community
CMU tempers the individualism of our time by modelling and nurturing invitational communities, which are diverse yet learn together, in which people support each other, and which foster compassion and represent hope to those in them and beyond.
