Doing What Works

By Doug Franklin June 19, 2012

If we know that mentoring works why don’t we do it more? I guess there are many obstacles to mentoring like getting enough adult volunteers to be mentors. I would also guess that mentoring is hard because we have to convince students to open up to an adult one-on-one. Maybe one more obstacle is we as youth workers need to constantly keep mentors accountable to meeting with students. Honestly is this that hard? Have we gotten so soft that we can’t overcome these small obstacles? It’s easy to invite students to a night of programming where we speak for 30 minutes but honestly it doesn’t make a difference in students’ lives. Them listening to you speak is a waste of their time because they don’t remember what you said the next morning. We have to get smaller and more personal. We need to focus on recruiting and training volunteers to get into students’ lives. We need to recalculate students’ thinking about church. They are programed to come in and sit down and endure one hour with us. What would happen if we got them thinking missional?

I think it would be a great exercise for all of us to sit with our teams and ask the question, “so what’s working?”