CHAPTER 6
DEEP MENTORS: WHY AREN’T OUR MENTORS GETTING AS DEEP AS WE’D LIKE?
Kara Powell
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 1 (DISCERNMENT): NOW?
DEEP DESIGN PROMPT
I’ve become a soccer mom.
Nathan, our oldest, is four years old and now eligible to play soccer. He loves soccer. Actually, he loves kicking pretty much any type of ball. Baseballs, tennis balls, volleyballs—it doesn’t matter to him. Anything that’s round and rolls, he tries to kick. So soccer seemed like a logical sport for him.
The day I went to register with the American Youth Soccer Organization, they asked if I would volunteer to help coach his team. I don’t have much soccer experience, but these are four year olds. How hard can it be?
So I asked how many hours it would take.
Twenty.
Twenty hours of training. Seriously?
Twenty hours of training to teach four year olds how to kick a soccer ball into a net. Sure, there are a few funky rules—such as what it means to be offsides and whether a penalty merits a direct or an indirect kick. But basically we’re talking four year olds and a soccer ball.
How many hours of training have you received this year to do youth ministry? Two hours? Eight hours? Maybe even 15 hours? If so, you’re doing pretty well. Probably even better than average.
It’s not that the AYSO has it wrong. I think they’ve got it right—and we in the church should take some notes. In youth ministry Now, we ask adults to live out the kingdom before teenagers, but we give them only a fraction of the training our culture gives those who teach children how to kick soccer balls.
Hindering God’s transformation: We don’t invest enough in training.
I know one youth worker who wished she had more training before she started hanging out with kids. In her first five years as a youth worker, she sailed through three different definitions of mentoring. Her first was quite simple: toiletpapering. A firm convert to relational ministry, she figured the best way to spend time with kids was to do whatever they wanted. And there was only one thing her freshman girls wanted to do: go toiletpapering. In the midst of the planning, driving, toiletpapering, and giggling—lots of giggling—the youth worker felt she was building valuable friendships with the girls.
Creating space for God’s transformation: Youth workers recognizing the power of building relationships with kids.
Hindering God’s transformation: Often in the midst of the “fun,” we never get deep.
But after a few years of toiletpapering, she began sensing that her mentoring wasn’t deep enough. There was lots of laughter and lots of talking, but not much real or personal sharing.
Creating space for God’s transformation: Asking a few questions about God when we’re with students.
So she moved to her second definition of mentoring: frozen yogurt with a question about God. As long as her girls had a few spoonfuls of God over a few spoonfuls of yogurt, she felt she was really mentoring them.
While that gave the relationships more depth, after a few years she still felt she was splashing in the shallow end. She figured the only way to dive into the deep end was through her new, third definition of mentoring: telling kids what to do. What kids needed was guidance, and she was going to dole it out.
Hindering God’s transformation: Maybe a few questions about God aren’t enough.
In your own past or present as a youth worker, can you relate to any of these definitions of mentoring? All three sound very familiar to me.
That’s because the youth worker I’ve been describing is me.
Part of me wishes I could go back to the kids I “mentored” in those early phases and ask them for a do-over. Sure, relationships were built, and sure, God worked. But my poor definitions of mentoring were like Water Wings around our relational ministry that kept us from swimming deeper.
Creating space for God’s transformation: Working in the midst of our flawed mentoring.
My current definition of mentoring is empowering others toward God’s purposes for their lives.23 Note the absence of toilet paper, frozen yogurt, or lectures. It’s no wonder that mentoring is all the rage in youth ministry Now. More and more youth workers are realizing the value of mentoring in helping kids fall deeply in love with Jesus. Whether it takes the form of one-on-one relationships or small groups, mentoring is becoming an integral part of urban, suburban, rural, and international ministries.
Creating space for God’s transformation: More ministries are integrating mentoring into their strategies.
Nonetheless, we’ve Now bought into a number of myths about mentoring that keep us shallow. Without spending a lot more time and energy in our mentoring relationships, are there elements we could be incorporating that would produce more intimate relationships? In order to move into deep relationships, what myths about mentoring do we need to toss overboard?
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 2 (REFLECTION) : NEW?
Myths about Mentoring That Keep Us Shallow
Myth 1: Something is better than nothing.
When I was a college student and a junior high volunteer, our team leader tried to encourage us by saying that when it came to building relationships with kids, “Something is better than nothing.” As a hard-working college student trying to squeeze in time with junior highers between classes, homework, and hanging out with friends in the dorm, his words made me feel much better about the crumbs of time I gave kids. He made our whole team feel better. After all, we were busy students, stay-at-home parents, or business leaders. We couldn’t give much time to mentoring relationships with kids, but that was okay. Something was better than nothing.
Experience: We often give kids scraps of time and energy.
I wish that were the case. I really do. But New research tells us it’s not always true. Sometimes something is actually worse than nothing.
There’s a surprising scarcity of actual research on youth mentoring, especially when you consider how widely it’s practiced in church, parachurch, and secular youth organizations. But one of the consistent findings is that relationships are most effective when two things happen:
The adult and the youth meet for at least 10 hours per month, 24 and They meet for at least 12 months.
Secular research has examined the effects of mentoring on high-risk students’ self-worth, family relationships, drug and alcohol abstinence, school attendance and performance, and positive social behaviors. The good news is that all these tend to improve if an adult meets regularly with a kid for a year or more. But now comes the bad news: if adults meet with troubled kids for less than six months, these kids tend to have lower rates of drug and alcohol abstinence, school attendance and performance, and positive social behaviors.25
Research: Sometimes those scraps actually damage kids.
While the researchers don’t suggest any reasons why a truncated mentoring relationship actually harms kids, it may connect with what we’ve already discussed in Chapter 4 on discipleship. To kids who already feel abandoned by adults, a mentor who severs a relationship is just one more adult who walks out on them.
That theory resonates with other research findings. The negative effects of a short mentoring relationship are even more severe if the teenager highly values the relationship.26 If kids take the time to build trusting relationships with adults, and then for some reason those relationships fade away, kids are even more likely to engage in antisocial behaviors and have greater difficulty in school.
While these New findings relate specifically to higher-risk youth, they are relevant to youth in any social situation. No matter what kinds of kids we’re spending time with, we have to consider what kind of damage we might be doing if we don’t meet with them regularly, or if we decide to end the mentoring relationships before they expect it. Adults who want to be mentors or small group leaders should ask themselves: “Can I do this for 12 months, and can I give close to 10 hours each month?” If not, then they should wait until they can.
Research: We need high expectations for our mentors. We can’t “settle” for less.
The power of such long-term commitment is illustrated in Jesus’ relationships with those he closely mentored—his disciples. The scribes and religious teachers of Jesus’ day generally trained their followers through formal teaching and mandatory rituals. Jesus’ strategy was different: he was with his followers day and night and talked about what they experienced together. The essence of Jesus’ mentoring ministry was hanging out, and hanging out for a while (Mark 3:14).
Scripture: Jesus modeled long-term depth with those he most closely mentored.
Why did Jesus spend so much time with his disciples 2,000 years ago? And why does it take so long for mentoring relationships to change kids’ lives today? Because true mentoring means changing not just external behaviors, but also internal perspectives. Dallas Willard writes, “One of the greatest weaknesses in our teaching and leadership today is that we spend so much time trying to get people to do things good people are supposed to do, without changing what they really believe.”27 Commenting specifically about youth, Willard continues, “We frankly need to do much less of this managing of action, especially with young people. We need to concentrate on changing the minds of those we would reach and serve.”28
History: Mentoring takes longer when our goal is to change not only external behaviors but also internal beliefs.
Longevity in mentoring is important because the beliefs we need to change aren’t merely those that are secondary to our faith. Willard proposes that our transformation of beliefs must start with the most central component of our faith: the gospel. In the theological spectrum of Christian proclamation and practice over the last century, two extremes have developed. According to Willard, right-wing (or more “conservative”) theology has focused on forgiveness of the individual’s sins; left-wing (or more “liberal”) theology has emphasized the removal of social and societal evils. Willard suggests that these are both examples of the “gospel of sin management.”29 Giving students a fresh approach to the gospel that includes both of these elements under a larger rubric of God’s work in the world through his people cannot be accomplished overnight. That type of deep belief and life transformation requires more than drive-by mentoring.
History: Too many of us have reduced the “good news” to the “gospel of sin management.”29
Myth 2: Once you recruit adult mentors, your work is done.
Experience: We often think most of our work is done once we match up students and adults.
We often think the hardest part of connecting adults to kids is finding the adults who want to be connected to kids. We spend months beating the bushes, asking others we know, placing appeals in church and ministry newsletters, recruiting, and praying that God will send workers for the ripe harvest. When he brings workers our way, we meet with them for coffee and answer any questions they might have. Then we connect them with a few students and chalk up another effective mentoring relationship for our ministry.
Not so fast.
I wish mentoring were as easy as pairing people up and then letting them march into mentoring heaven. But research tells us otherwise. New findings tell us that recruiting is just the first step in the journey of learning and growth.
There are three steps that seem to contribute to deeper mentoring relationships that may not be part of your current ministry.30
1. Proper Screening. Sure, an adult seems nice and has the right answers when you ask him why he wants to mentor kids. But do you really know him? Can you really trust him?
Research: We need to conduct a thorough screening of our potential mentors.
As I tell youth workers in seminars, “If you want to molest kids, volunteer in churches.” Jaws tend to drop, so I continue. “Youth ministries are terrible at making sure the adults we send out for pizza with kids, or even on overnighters, are really out for kids’ best interests.”
When you meet with volunteers to explain their potential roles in your ministry, view it not as a sales pitch but as an interview. Your goal is to see whether or not they are worthy to hang out with kids. It’s not to convince them to get involved, but to see if they pass the high bar of mentoring kids. That means you ask them questions about their journeys with God, past relationships, and temptations they struggle with.
In addition, please check with two to three of their references. Ask questions about the potential volunteer’s relationship with God, relationships with others, and moral behaviors. Some ministries have even decided to partner with local police stations and conduct fingerprint screening to make sure volunteers don’t have criminal records. While some critique this as being anti-community, I applaud these efforts. I can’t imagine anything more pro-community than making sure we protect kids.
After you’ve conducted proper screening, New research reveals the importance of a second step:
2. Proper Training. In a survey of 700 secular mentoring programs, fewer than half provided volunteers with more than two hours of training. More than a fifth of those programs offered no training. Mentors who received fewer than two hours of training had lower levels of satisfaction with their relationships with kids. The flip side is that those who received six or more hours of training had the highest levels of satisfaction.31
Research: The more training, the more happy and effective the mentor.
While there’s no guarantee that six hours is the magic amount of proper training time, it does raise a question for anyone who wants a deep youth ministry: how much training do you offer for mentors? If you’re involved in ministry as a mentor, have you received enough training? If you’re not satisfied with the answers to these questions, perhaps it’s time to schedule some periodic training so mentors get the skills they need to go deep. (Or maybe hook up with your local soccer team since it seems they’ve got the goods on training!)
Yet it’s not just training that mentors need. They also need a third step.
3. Ongoing supervision and encouragement. According to New research, several types of ongoing encouragement and support are meaningful and seem to make mentors more effective:
Having supervisors check with them regularly to see how the relationships are going and offer perspective. Providing support groups for mentors to gather and problem-solve roadblocks they’re facing. Probably least practiced by youth ministries is offering small stipends to offset the costs associated with mentoring, such as transportation, baseball game tickets, and meals.32
Research: Ongoing nurture is essential to keep mentors effective and motivated.
If you lead a team of mentors, how regularly do you check in with each of them? Do you just ask them quickly as you walk past them in the hallway, “Hey, how’s it going?” Or are you regularly asking them questions such as What is going well in your mentoring relationship? What is your greatest struggle? What can I do to help you go deeper?
If you’re not a team leader but are mentoring kids, what can you do to get the support you need? Is there someone you could meet with regularly who could mentor you? Or could you gather a few other mentors for coffee and prayer and commiserating about how tough it can be to care about kids? As you empower kids, you need to be empowered, too.
Myth 3: You can become the “end-all, be-all” mentor.
Wouldn’t it be great if our ministries could offer the kind of mentoring Luke Skywalker received in the first Star Wars movies? First, he had Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was instrumental in beginning Luke’s light saber training and single-handedly freed Luke and his buddies from certain death by sacrificing himself to Darth Vader. Then, Luke gained Yoda as a mentor—a wise Jedi Master whose 900 years of experience were unmatched in the galaxy. What a vast treasure trove of wisdom!
One problem with the Star Wars images is that they set up unrealistic expectations for the kind of mentoring we can generally give and receive. Obi-Wan and Yoda were with Luke 24/7. They helped him with everything from lifting starfighters out of swamps to challenges of the will and body.
Experience: We wish we were “end-all, be-all” mentors, but we don’t have the time and energy.
In his study of mentoring, J. Robert Clinton of Fuller Theological Seminary created a New paradigm to help folks receive mentoring in the midst of limited time. Instead of expecting one perfect, all-encompassing mentor, Clinton recommends developing a constellation of mentors, a small galaxy perhaps, of which none is perfect but all can speak into lives.
ALL-ENCOMPASSING MENTOR
CONSTELLATION OF MENTORS
6.1
Research: The key is not one mentor, but a small constellation of mentors.
In his work with Paul D. Stanley, Clinton has grouped the various functions and roles an ideal mentor might perform and placed them along a “continuum of intensity.” By thinking of the different roles mentors might play in your youth ministry, you’ll have better chances of offering kids the mentoring they need.33
Research: There are different types of mentors for different needs.
Models
A discipler represents a very deliberate relationship that empowers someone in the basics of following Christ. This type of mentoring is crucial for teenagers, especially as they begin their spiritual walks. A coach represents a less intensive relationship that gives kids the motivation, skills, and application they need to meet a task or challenge. Common examples of coaches in youth ministry include adults who help kids learn to play a musical instrument, engage in drama, or build a home on a missions trip. A counselor provides critical advice and perspective that helps kids navigate their lives and relationships. At times this may even come through professional therapy. A teacher helps kids understand how God relates to their lives through discussions, Bible studies, small groups, and one-on-one conversations. A model is the least deliberate type of mentoring because it allows any student to receive mentoring by paying attention to others they admire, even if only from a distance.
Recognizing that I have different types of mentoring relationships with different kids has brought great freedom to my ministry. Instead of thinking I need to be every kid’s discipler, I’ve realized there are some kids for whom I am primarily a coach, and others for whom I simply model what it’s like to try to follow Jesus when the world makes that difficult.
What about finding mentors for you? If you’re interested in learning how to find the mentors you need, check out a free resource at www.cyfm.net.
If you’re reading carefully, you might be wondering Wait a minute! Didn’t you say earlier that I might be doing more harm than good if I don’t spend 10 hours each month with a kid for the next year? How does that fit with all this talk about different forms of mentoring that call for less time than that?
Research: It’s important that the adult and student both have the same expectations for their relationship.
The key is what kids expect you to be and do. If they expect you to be a discipler who spends 10 hours a month with them, and you’re only planning on coaching them for two hours a month on how to play the guitar, then they’ll be disappointed. They’ll feel let down and might be more likely to act in ways that reflect their pain.
But if you both have the same picture of your relationship, then they won’t be disappointed. You probably won’t have the same deep impact in just a few hours a month that you might if you spent 10 hours, but you can only spend that much time with a handful of kids (which is another reason you need a team—see Chapter 11 on the Superpastor for more on that).
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 3 (OBSERVATION) : WHO?
Imagine you’re a 13-year-old boy, and your dad is abusing your mom and sister. To escape your abusive dad, your mom removes you from your home, your school, and your friends and places you in a shelter facility 30 miles away. You end up dropped into the foster care system with no ties to your former life, no relationships that are constant, and no adult who really knows you.
Except one.
Your mentor.
It was your mentor who heard you say, “I hope you stick with me for the long haul,” and then actually did.
When your mom placed you in that shelter, it was your mentor who tracked you down by visiting your mom’s former boss and asking for the name of your new city.
It was your mentor who contacted that city’s school district to find out the name of your school and then reestablished a relationship with you.
And when you ended up in other foster homes even further away, it was your mentor who drove hours to come and visit you.
This is a true example of the deep impact mentors are having through a ministry in central Iowa called Serve Our Youth (S.O.Y.). For the last five years, executive director Stewart Vander Velden has equipped and expanded a network of congregations to provide high-risk youth with resources and relationships where God’s hope and healing are shared.34 To accomplish that vision, S.O.Y. works with more than 50 Iowa churches from multiple denominations to recruit mentors for kids in detention facilities, jail, shelters, or the foster care system. Regardless of the life situations of the youth you serve, the lessons Stewart has learned in developing a deep mentoring strategy can help your team start discussing how to get out of the shallow end in your own mentoring ministry.
As you think about the hundreds of mentors who’ve been part of S.O.Y., what does a mentor need to be effective?
The first thing that comes to mind is a sense of commitment. Our best mentors are people who hang with kids through the thick and thin. Kids need mentors who won’t get frustrated and walk out on them when they make bad choices. Instead, they need mentors who will believe in them and truly invest in them.
What kind of commitment do you expect of your mentors?
We ask adult mentors to commit to meeting with a kid for one to two hours a week for at least a year. It’s the long-term relationships we’re after. After meeting for a year, mentors often decide to keep meeting with their kids even though they’ve fulfilled their initial commitment. They’ve developed real relationships with their kids, and they don’t want to stop meeting.
If someone contacts S.O.Y. and says they want to be a mentor, what type of screening do you do?
Our screening process is pretty extensive. We ask them to complete an application, and then we contact four of their references. We also conduct criminal background checks, sexual offender background checks, driving record checks, child abuse checks, and federal F.B.I. fingerprint background checks. Plus, we do a one-on-one interview. When it comes to matching adults with kids, I don’t think you can be too careful.
What kind of training do you offer?
Every mentor receives six hours of training before they are matched with a kid. During that time we describe the qualities of an effective mentor, what we expect of them, and the dos and don’ts of healthy mentoring relationships. We’d rather have our mentors say, “We didn’t encounter half of what you told us about” than “You never trained us how to handle that.”
How do you match adults with kids?
First, the kid expresses a desire for a mentor. We only assign mentors to kids who say they want to be mentored. Then we try to match mentors by interest. If a kid likes to cook, we try to find a mentor who likes to cook. If a kid likes to fish, we look for an adult who likes to fish. Plus, most of the time we match kids to adults of the same gender. The one exception is if a boy hasn’t had much contact with his mom, or if a girl hasn’t had much contact with her dad. But even then, our ideal would be to match those kids with a couple so they would have mentors of both genders.
Once the mentors start meeting regularly with their kids, what type of contact do you have with them?
We check in with them every month. Either by phone or e-mail, we check in to see how the relationship is going, and what we can do to support them. Our goal is to figure out if there’s anything more they need from us.
One benefit of checking in that has surprised us is that we can give an outside perspective that’s often encouraging to the mentor. When mentors are in the trenches doing the work, often they miss little steps of progress. But when we check in with them and hear how their kids are doing, we can give them reminders of ways their kids are improving compared to what they shared with us the previous month.
After that initial six hours, do you offer any additional training?
You bet. We do quarterly training with our mentors. Usually we invite professionals from the community to come and talk to our mentors about some of the issues we hear them asking about. Those topics have included relationship-building skills, supporting the student’s family, substance abuse, and how to relate effectively with the school system. Our list of training topics is constantly changing based on the needs of our mentors.
Asking adults for one to two hours a week is no small request. Do you ever have adults who say they can’t make that type of commitment but still want to be involved?
All the time. When that happens, we ask those adults to visit kids in shelters or detention facilities periodically. Sometimes those end up growing into weekly relationships. Simply hanging out with kids is a great starting point for people who want to test the waters before going deeper.
In the midst of all you’ve learned about mentoring, what are you still trying to figure out?
How to get more people involved. Almost every mentor who gets involved with S.O.Y. ends up saying something like, “Wow, I can’t believe how blessed I am. I thought I was doing this to bless someone else, but my life is now transformed.” I wish I could figure out how to take that experience and plant it in every adult so they all would decide to make a difference in kids’ lives.
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 4 (APPLICATION) : HOW?
Application Questions:
What is your definition of mentoring? If we were to ask others in your ministry for their definitions, what would they say? How do these compare and contrast with the definition of mentoring as “empowering others toward God’s purposes for their lives”? This chapter identified three myths about mentoring: something is better than nothing; once you recruit your mentors, your work is done; and you can become the end-all, be-all mentor. Which of these myths is most common in your ministry? After reading this chapter, how would you describe the training you give your mentors? If you were to view mentoring along a continuum of intensity, how would that affect you, your mentors, and your students? How is your situation similar to S.O.Y.? How is it different? Given your reading and reflection, how can you take your mentoring ministry to a deeper level?
How are we going to go deeper in our mentoring?
Source