Women's Mentoring
Every couple of years, I hear a cry from young women wanting "mentors." It's always a little unclear exactly what they are looking for in a mentor-- whether they want traditional one-on-one discipleship, whether they want to learn or grow in a specific area, or whether they just want an older woman in their life. I think the latter is often the reason. Young women want to be in relationship with another woman who has been around the sun a few more times.
I had a great meeting with one of our NCC leaders earlier this week about launching a women's mentoring ministry. We love the idea of it and we even know what we want the end product to look like. But we aren't sure how to put the steps in place to make it happen. How do you engineer environments where women can connect in a way that is normal and not forced or artificial?
If you've got any ideas, feel free to email me or use the comment thread.
posted by Heather Z @ 1:35 PM
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Sacred Roads: Exploring the Historic Paths of Discipleship
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I lead the small groups/adult ministries area in our church. Our women periodically talk about a desire for mentoring too. Several years ago we had a mentoring program. Women were matched up with other women. Though I think they tried to do the matching somewhat intentionally, the result was still artificial relationships which didn't bond and the program fizzled.
Lately, our women have begun talking about it again. One thing I like to acknowledge is that mentoring is already happening in our church. I can name a few pairs of women and also men who are informally, unofficially, and naturally who are bonded in a mentoring relationship. However, we want to grow in this.
The direction we are headed is to have men and women who are passionate about growing a mentoring environment to brainstorm about how they can cast a vision for mentoring and possibly create a training class or maybe just a one page handout to help people who could be mentors actually make the leap to start mentoring someone. We're thinking of casting this vision in our small groups since the men or women who might want to initiate a mentoring relationship are likely already in small group together.
I'd rather see a vision for mentoring, inspiring examples of mentoring (maybe videos in a service), and some training/tools for mentors than having a big excel sheet where pairs of men or women are joined up, tracked, etc.
Then... just keep telling the stories of mentoring to continue building the mentoring environment.
Does this make sense? I'd love to hear what others think on this.
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