HISTORY

Servant Partners was created to be a work that combined God’s call to proclaim the good news to every nation, and God's call to love and serve the poor. Though Servant Partners began with a call to global mission among the poor, we focused our early efforts on inner city communities in the US.

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Servant Partners grew out of a renewal movement that spread across American college campuses in the 1980's and 1990's. John Perkins and Viv Grigg, Christian leaders with hearts for justice, influenced this movement profoundly through their prophetic biblical teaching and example. Inspired by God's Spirit, hundreds of graduating university students relocated into American inner city neighborhoods to serve as ministers of racial and economic reconciliation.

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Servant Partners was founded in 1993 to facilitate a work among the urban poor that God's Spirit had already begun among graduates of InterVarsity's campus ministry. Servant Partners was created to be a work that combined God's call to proclaim the good news to every nation, and God's call to love and serve the poor. Though Servant Partners began with a call to global mission among the poor, we focused our early efforts on inner city communities in the US. We wanted to serve faithfully in our own context before moving to the ends of the earth. Over the years, Servant Partners teams in four Los Angeles area neighborhoods have strengthened or planted new churches, and helped create separate non-profits for increased ministry impact in their communities. From the beginning, we have placed a strong emphasis on training. Every year since 1995, young adults have entered our two year internship program and learned to love the urban poor by living, ministering, and studying in inner city neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area.

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In the late 1990's, God led us to expand our ministry into the cities of the developing world. Today we have ten teams planting churches, training leaders, and organizing communities across the globe. In 2003, we began the Research & Innovation to strengthen and expand the work of indigenous national leaders who are developing cutting-edge models of urban poor ministry, and to help mobilize new missionaries from developing world countries to the urban poor of the nations. Currently we are serving in North America, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

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Servant Partners is a Ministry Partner with Fuller Theological Seminary and a Member of ECFA, CCDA, and the Micah Network.