Tag: mentoring

Mentoring Casts a Long Shadow

Melissa was the quietest girl in my group. She had dark hair and beautiful blue eyes. Once her grandma, who picked her up and brought her to our church each week, pulled me aside in the hallway and asked, “Could you keep a special eye on Melissa? Things are really rough at home right now.”

Melissa wasn’t one of the girls who would run up and give me a hug when I walked in the room. She wasn’t bouncing up and down, just dying to tell me about the prank they had just played on the boys. Melissa would just give me a shy smile. She hung back. She didn’t say much during our discussion and prayer time.

But in her eyes I saw a hunger for more. She was hurting. She was looking for hope.

By spring, the girls in my group had earned enough points (by memorizing verses, doing their quiet time sheets, and attending regularly) for a party at my house.  We decided to have an Orange Party—which meant we would wear orange clothes, eat orange food, and do an orange scavenger hunt in my neighborhood.

After an orange-filled afternoon, I pulled the girls into a huddle on the floor in my basement, and told them the story of Jesus dying on the cross and rising again. It wasn’t the first time I had told it. It wasn’t the first time they had heard it. But for two girls, it was the first time the story overlapped with their stories.

Melissa was one of those girls. I remember the sweet intensity of her prayer, as she asked Jesus to save her from her sin and be her Lord. And I remember her smile afterward—those big blue eyes sparkling.

I moved away shortly after this, and I didn’t hear from Melissa for about fifteen years. Then, last summer, she sent me a message via facebook.

Melissa was a young mom now. Life hadn’t been easy. She was expecting her third baby, and she wasn’t married. And even though she hadn’t made the best choices, she wanted to come back to God. She was reaching out to me because she knew I could help. And it’s been my great delight to do so!

As we’ve reconnected, I’ve silently wondered why Melissa thought to reach out to me. We live in different states now. We probably wouldn’t have recognized each other on the street. And there probably are Christians whose paths cross with Melissa’s.

I’ve thought about several other girls, too, who have reconnected with me over the years. One girl was in my cabin at a summer camp. Eight years after I led her to Jesus at camp, she was struggling with suicidal thoughts. So she looked up my address and wrote me a letter, asking me to pray.

Another girl contacted me via facebook, just after she got married. She said that she had just packed the little book mark I gave her in middle school. The bookmark’s glow-in-the-dark cross didn’t glow anymore, but it had been on her nightstand for years, reminding her of the things I had taught her about God. She said, “If you hadn’t been there… I really think my life could have gone another way.” She just wanted to write and say thanks.

To each of these girls, I somehow represented a time that their eyes were opened to Jesus. I’m the one who got to put their hands in His.

This is what youth ministry is all about! Putting their hands in His. We only have a few moments to walk with them. Pretty soon, they’ll be walking away from our church, our youth ministry, our influence. Will they walk with Jesus?

lf we never ask that question, I doubt whether mentoring will truly happen. If we don’t dream about who are kids are becoming and where they are going in life, we’ll be content to eat orange food, wear orange clothes, and call it a day of youth ministry.

But on the other hand, true mentoring casts a long shadow. When we care enough to cross over into our kids’ lives, we can make a difference that extends into the coming decades and ultimately crosses into eternity. We can bring little blue eyed girls like Melissa with us to heaven.

 

Shannon Popkin bio pic

Shannon Popkin is so thankful for the 10+ years that she got to serve in various capacities of youth ministry. Nowadays, she focuses on ministering to the three kids who constantly fill both her laundry baskets with dirty clothes, and her heart with joy. Shannon and her husband Ken have been married for almost eighteen years, and they are so thankful for the support they get from Ada Bible’s Lifeline (youth group) in raising their kids to know and love God.
As a writer and speaker, Shannon loves to encourage women to put their hope in God. Check out her blog, Tiny Paragraphs, at www.shannonpopkin.com.
photo credited to iamdogjunkie via Flickr

A Culture of Transition

Recently I was asked to describe our high school to college transition strategy and practices. Since this is one of my life’s passions I thought I’d give it a shot.  I hope you find it helpful and I’d love to hear your ideas and strategies.

Culture

What keeps me awake at night is the thought of our students walking away from Jesus and the church in life beyond our student ministry. I believe that our ministry has not been successful unless our students are continuing to pursue Jesus in college and beyond.

I think the mistake many youth workers make is jumping to practices that help students transition before stopping to consider the influence of church and student ministry cultures.  What students feel and experience is more powerful than what we say from the stage, especially for those who are involved in our churches from a young age.  Here are the culture pieces that I believe are crucial to healthy transition.

1.  A Culture of Community

I tend to believe that students walk away from churches where they never actually belonged.  Belonging is something that is felt and experienced not taught or preached.  We begin placing kids in small groups as soon as they can walk around.  We fight for a culture of community from the earliest days of involvement in our children’s ministry.  This is crucially important because kids learn:

  • Adults in my church care about me and my faith development
  • My story is important and valuable.
  • Faith is meant to be lived out in relationships.

Everything else that we do in our transition ministry is built around these values.

2.  A Culture of Mentoring

For years in student ministry we’ve talked about the importance of small groups in student ministry.  I believe that small groups are crucial but only when they are the right kind of small groups.  You see, more than anything the students of this generation need mentors.  On the whole, our culture no longer invests in the next generation.  It exploits them.

We must become ministries and churches that pour into students.  We must walk alongside them and demonstrate the way of Jesus.  In our ministry, we pair a mentor with 5 or 6 students for 4 years.  We use the model of small groups to achieve this.  However, we are clear that the “win” is not small group discussions.  The “win” is mentoring.  Small groups are the spring board into a mentoring relationship.  This long term mentoring relationship is key to our transition strategy.

3.  A Culture of Honesty

Many students who walk away from faith in college were silently drifting long before they formally walked away.  These students never spoke their doubts because they weren’t welcome to do so.  Left in the dark these doubts became stronger and eventually overpowered their faith.

Our student ministries must become places where doubts are acknowledged, appreciated and talked about openly.  Our student ministry cultures must communicate that doubts are normal.  We need to stop providing quick and flimsy answers to deeply disorienting questions.  Faith isn’t the absence of doubt.  Rather, it is faith in the midst of doubt.  Doubts pulled out into the light of community lose their power over us.

4.  A Culture of Integration

Some youth workers may disagree with me but I believe that one of the biggest obstacles to students transitioning well is student leadership or ministry teams.  Hold on.  Let me explain.

Many students walk away from church as emerging adults because they never felt like they belonged to their church in the first place.  They felt a fierce belonging to their youth group but after graduating high school they never connected with the larger church body.  Leadership and ministry teams are often counterproductive because they foster intense attachment to the student ministry and not the church as a whole.

Our strategy is to encourage our students to serve within the larger church body rather than within our student ministry.  We want them to become attached to Ada Bible Church, not LifeLine.  We believe that the best place for a student to serve is in our children’s ministry.  There they can use their talents to serve kids and perhaps more importantly, they serve alongside and develop stronger relationships with more adults from the church community.  This way they can also continue to serve after graduating high school.  Integration is the friend of transition.

 

Helping students pursue Jesus after leaving our student ministries begins with culture.  It requires a culture of community, mentoring, honesty and integration.  Tomorrow I’ll outline the specific strategies we employ to promote long-term faith development.

 

A Simple Approach to Intergenerational Ministry

A lot has been said and written recently about the importance of intergenerational ministry.  The Sticky Faith research has pointed out the importance of adult mentors in the lives of students.

I think many student ministries assume they are doing well in this area simply because they put adults in proximity with students.  Personally, I do not believe that quality mentoring relationships will naturally grow out of proximity.  It takes intentionality.  Here are 3 ways we intentionally promote intergenerational mentoring.

1.       VISION VOLUNTEERS

First, we INSPIRE our volunteers to become mentors.  Before every Sunday or Wednesday night we hold an hour long leader meeting and one of the things we do in these meetings is tell stories of great mentoring.  We talk about how our volunteers have made a difference in the past and how each person investing in the lives of students today is altering the trajectory of a student’s life.

We EQUIP our volunteers to become mentors.  We teach them how to pursue students, how to manage and effectively lead a small group, how to interact with the parents of their students, and how to handle crisis conversations.  We don’t hold quarterly or even monthly training meetings; we train our volunteers every time we meet for large group.

We EXPECT our volunteers to become mentors.  We believe so deeply in intergenerational mentoring that we create standards.  I understand that it is impossible to quantify mentoring but we do our best to do it anyway.  We require a certain amount of small group activities, one-on-ones with students and parent interactions.

Although our mentors are volunteers, we still hold them accountable to their role.  If they aren’t performing, we carefully confront them.  If after a few more weeks they still aren’t performing, we fire them and find someone else who can mentor our students.  Yes, you can fire a volunteer.  This is how deeply we believe in intergenerational mentoring.

2.       STRUCTURE FOR MENTORING

We happen to believe that over time, small groups are a great place for mentoring relationships to develop.  Because of this we don’t ask students to opt into a small group.  We simply place EVERY STUDENT IN A SMALL GROUP and leave 30 minutes at the end of every LifeLine night for small groups.

Mentoring relationships take time to develop so we leave our small groups intact for all three years of middle school and all four years of high school.  Particularly in high school, we believe that SMALL GROUPS TAKE 1-2 YEARS TO BUILD TRUST.  The next 2 years are fertile soil for mentoring relationships.   

3.        SIMPLIFY PROGRAMMING

We believe that faith is best learned outside of the church building.  Students need to see faith lived out in action.   Because of this belief we require our volunteers to get on their students turf and to interact with them outside of our student ministry programming.

We know that volunteers only have so much time to devote to ministry.  Because mentoring outside the church building’s walls is a premium, we simply cut our programming to make space and time for our volunteers.  WE DON’T DO EVENTS.  Our senior high ministry literally has no events other than our Sunday night programming, snow camp and mission trips.  We simplify so that our volunteers can commit to pursuing their students outside the walls of the church building.

“No events!” You say?  Are you crazy?  Well, I guess that was a lie.  We have all sorts of events but we don’t schedule them—our small groups do, organically.  They are better and more strategically targeted than anything our staff could ever dream up.

 

So there you have it.  3 simple ways to promote mentoring in your ministry.  How have you promoted mentoring relationships in your setting?