Mentoring Communities
-- peers who care about your soul
by Jacqueline Schmitt

The first time Marla came to church, the door was locked. It was the first Sunday in Advent, and our congregation had gone to a local church for Lessons and Carols. I got a scribbled note from the seminary dean, who happened to be in his office near the chapel when she tried to get in.

"Here's a student for you," he wrote. "Marla Johnson," and he gave me her dorm and e-mail addresses.

Despite that inauspicious beginning, Marla persevered. We contacted her, invited her to church, assured her we would be there this time, and included her in our Canterbury student community.

Sidebars: Finding religion in the young-adult years What can a church do for us?

One day I had lunch with Marla. It turned out she had been thinking for some time that God was calling her to ordained ministry.

"I remember being very young the first time it occurred to me that I should be a priest," she said. "I was in church listening to the sermon, and I thought, 'God gave me all the right gifts to do what that man does.' I realized that God had blessed me with an incredible intuition, good speaking skills, intelligence, creativity and compassion. I felt then that God gave me those gifts so that I could use them to serve as a leader in the church."

Marla had grown up in the Episcopal Church and her family were active members of the parish to which she still belonged and attended when at home. In spite of that predisposition to find the Episcopal Church a friendly place (an experience by no means shared by all young adults), she did not come looking for us until the last service of the fall quarter during her freshman year. She kept her Episcopal identity to herself on a campus of students either blatantly secular or conservatively faithful.

"It has been very difficult for me to embrace a Christian identity in the presence of members of my own generation," Marla told me. "The majority of those whom I associate with consider organized religion to be the Antichrist. So many people have been hurt by the judgment dictated by the rigid rules of the church. It has taken time for me to understand that the more verbal I am about my beliefs, the easier it is for people to see that not all Christians fall into the same category, and that there can be a place for free-thinking people in the church."

Community member, then minister

Marla became an active member of the Northwestern Canterbury community. She attended services regularly, went on retreats, worked with our seminarian on outreach projects, began hanging out at Canterbury House. The students wanted to make Canterbury House more open to the community, to be a place where students could feel comfortable to drop in and stay to talk with friends, study or hang out. As we talked about who would live at Canterbury House the next year, which would be Marla's senior year, it became clear to the community that these two student residents should take some leadership roles. At other campus ministries, these students are often called "peer ministers."

Marla and another student, Teresa, were interested in living at Canterbury House, but they were definitely not interested in being called "peer ministers."

"Just what would you want us to do?" they asked. My reply was that they should do the things I could not do: Plan the social events that students would want to come to, organize the outreach projects that students would be interested in, contact and invite new students to join our community.

"Oh, we can do that," they said. "We just don't want to be peer ministers."

In the beginning of the year, Marla and Teresa were tentative about their evangelistic duties. They had no interest in thinking of themselves as evangelists, but they wrote the welcoming letter that we sent to the new students who identified themselves as Episcopalian and we planned how we would advertise our community as the school year began. The day after the new students moved into their dorms, Marla visited everyone whose name we had received, invited them to church the next day, left them some candy and a magnet that told who we were and where we were. The next day, most of them showed up -- and stayed throughout the year.

Marla and Teresa quickly moved from being shy about organizing our community activities to being very imaginative and bold. They sent out weekly e-mail messages, they planned parties, they cajoled students into going on service projects, they joined the planning team for our provincial retreat.

"My friends thought I was crazy," Marla later reflected. "Even the people at Canterbury were thrown off a little. Although I had always participated, I had kept to myself most of my first three years and suddenly I was everywhere, doing everything. I don't think anyone understood how much I was loving it."

Asking for discernment

But it was soon no surprise to the community when both Marla and Teresa said, "We need a discernment group."

"Discernment" has become a buzz word for those in the "ordination process," and yes, Marla and Teresa were both exploring calls to ministry. But vocational questions are larger than trying to decide what one wants to do to make a living. The eight students in the group were looking at all aspects of what God might be calling them to do, looking at patterns of how their communities had recognized these callings over the years.

"In junior high," Marla said, "I took a career quiz which dictated that I should be a photographer, a dental hygienist, or a priest. My friends thought that the idea of my being a priest was hysterical, and they teased me for a long time. My teacher looked at the list, and said, 'You'd be a good priest.' However, it was the words of my peers and not my teacher that mattered the most to me. I dismissed the idea, saying that I could never do something like that."

What the Canterbury community gave to Marla that year was the chance to try out what it might mean to answer God's call to be a minister and to try it out among a community of peers who wouldn't laugh at her. Far from it -- the community thrived with Marla as one of the leaders. She is lively and fun, and she grew comfortable with her role as organizer and evangelist.

"I know that this is the right thing for me. Even when I am unhappy or stressed, I find myself passing people on campus whose lives I have touched or been touched by through Canterbury, and I know that this is what my life should be about."

A 'true' mentoring community

Marla's vocational search was more meaningful for her because it took place in the context of a community that mentored her. To have her junior-high-school teacher affirm what she saw in Marla's vocation was not enough, nor was it enough for me, as the chaplain, to say, "Marla, be our peer minister." The role elders play in the mentoring community is important, but the process is enriched by peers who see in you your exciting potential and affirm who you are and hope with you about who you may become.

During the young adult years, when we move from adolescence into adulthood, mentors play important roles in our lives. They serve as guideposts into the grown-up world, they answer our questions, they help us imagine who we might become. Most importantly, they take us seriously. They affirm who we are and encourage us along the way we need to go. A mentor, above all, is someone who cares about our souls.

The term "mentor" has connotations in the business world, where young employees are assigned mentors to guide them through the corporate structure. Such mentors are especially helpful, we hope, to women or members of minority groups new to the corporate culture. Yet one cannot always say that these mentors care about the souls of the trainees under their care. The business is, of course, interested in what the new employee will produce and how it will affect the bottom line, but a true mentor plays an important role in our growing up, and is someone who is interested in who we may become. A mentor in one profession may well recognize that the young person under his or her care may leave and do something else.

Mentoring communities are places where this process extends beyond a relationship with one older (and, one hopes, wiser) person, but includes a community of peers. Students know that classes that operate like this are the most exciting, filled with learning both for teacher and students. Indeed, surveys of students here at Northwestern often reveal their yearning for both significant connections with faculty who can both teach them and get to know them and for time for significant conversations with their peers. They know that being part of a community of learners helps them really learn, helps them integrate what they learn into their lives.

Campus ministries are, at their best, mentoring communities. They are located at places where younger adults wrestle with questions of vocation, identity, intimacy, loyalty to institutions and where they test the trustworthiness of authority. The more intentional these ministries are at keeping the concerns of students at their core, the more successful they are in supporting the faith development of the younger adults in these congregations.

Church mentoring beyond the campus?

The church beyond the campus, however, demonstrates less commitment to younger adults. Last February, Charles N. Fulton, of the Episcopal Church Building Fund, wrote, "The average age of a person in the U.S. is estimated to be 34.6 years old. The average age of an Episcopalian is estimated to be 57 years old." A new Alban Institute study found under 4 percent of Episcopal clergy are under age 35, compared with just over 19 percent in 1974.

Young adults want to connect. They want to make a difference in the world and in their lives. They live in a society with fewer and fewer of the markers which traditionally have guided the way toward a responsible, healthy and committed adulthood.

The way some professions recruit young adults is instructive. I knew a student who decided by her senior year that, after two years in the Peace Corps, she wanted to go to graduate school in geology. Each summer of her undergraduate years, she participated in significant internships at university-related research facilities. She was invited to professional conferences where undergraduates presented papers on their research and graduate schools sought them out to apply to their programs. She was accepted at a graduate school, which was happy to defer her admission until after her stint in the Peace Corps, because it recognized the importance of the experience. As a 22-year-old she was valued for her abilities and her potential.

There are parallels in other graduate and professional fields, as well as in the trades and the workforce. There are few opportunities in the Episcopal Church for young adults to be encouraged to try out lay or ordained ministry, to be recognized for the contributions they make now or for the potential they have for leadership in the future. As an institution, we cut our adolescents and younger adults off after confirmation, where they drift in the sea of culture until we hope they come back with their children as a pledging unit for a suburban parish.

Alarming as they are, church membership statistics should not be the only impetus to care about younger adults. We should care about them because they are valuable people. We should take seriously the vows we took for them at baptism and care enough to provide mentors, mentoring communities and mentoring experiences that support their growing into the adults they hope and dream they will be.

Jacqueline Schmitt is Episcopal Chaplain at Northwestern University and editor of Plumbline, the now on-line journal of the Episcopal Society for Ministry in Higher Education, <www.esmhe.org/Plumbline/>.

Finding religion in the young-adult years

We in campus ministry credit the work of Sharon Daloz Parks and her colleagues in giving us a theoretical underpinning to our work with younger adults. In Common Fire: Lives of Commitment in a Complex World (Beacon Press, 1996), Parks and her colleagues looked at 100 people, not "superstars," but people who had lived lifetimes of conscious work on behalf of a larger world. They wanted to find out what these folk had in common, what experiences led to their commitments and beliefs, who supported and challenged them. They discovered that what happens during the young adult years is, indeed, critical to their development into "good" adults. A mentoring environment and opportunities to engage constructively outside their home communities are two marks in that development.

Recently, Parks has reworked an earlier book, The Critical Years (in which she identified "young adulthood" apart from adolescence and older adulthood as an era of life with its own challenges and advantages) into Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose and Faith (Jossey-Bass, 2000). In the process of this reworking, Parks discovered several critical social changes which have impacted development in the young-adult years. Economic changes, lengthening life span and increasing religious and demographic pluralism are among the background patterns against which we understand "faith in its broadest, most inclusive form as the activity of making meaning that all human beings share."

"This book," Parks writes, "describes primary features of the development of meaning and faith in the young adult years, during which ways of thinking, forms of authority and patterns of belonging may be recast."

Parks underscores the importance of gaining this understanding when we work with young adults. "If we are to mentor the next generations well," she says, "it has become a matter of considerable urgency that we more adequately understand the formation of the young adult imagination and its implications for forming meaning, purpose and faith."

A new book by sociologists Richard W. Flory and Donald E. Miller, Gen X Religion (Routledge, 2000), examines a variety of religious expressions among younger adults. The communities described in the book demonstrate the range of religious pluralism in America, from Christian tattoo parlors to the International Church of Christ movement to a Gen X shabbat. In this study of non-traditional religious communities, the authors raise questions about what Gen Xers have in common with baby boomers and what lasting impact their tendency toward fluidity and distrust of hierarchies may have on the American religious landscape.

Finally, Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning (HarperCollins, 1999) is a book campus ministers are reading with their students. The author, Scotty McLennan, now Dean of Religious Life at Stanford, walks the reader through, says one colleague who bought 20 copies to give to students, "the process of entering into the stream of a religious tradition." McLennan was Garry Trudeau's college roommate, and was the inspiration for Doonesbury's "fighting young priest," Rev. Scott Sloan (the cartoon character graces the book's cover).

McLennan tells the stories of young adults looking for meaning and wondering if they will ever find a place for themselves, and affirms that it is part of the religious quest to struggle, to be confused or alienated, and to be surprised at finding meaning in unexpected ways.

-- Jacqueline Schmitt

What can a church do for us without being pushy or apathetic?

People my age (24) are an interesting bunch. We are a potpourri of college students, working people, married, single, atheists and faithful all tossed into one big group commonly referred to as Young Adults. We are the folks who keep landlords in business. We are the ones who have made "Ramen Noodles" a household staple. We are the ones who will probably buy that beat-up old VW for $350 because we need to be able to get around. We are struggling for independence -- we need to begin careers and learn what our parents meant by the phrase, "making ends meet" -- but oftentimes don't know where to start. We are also struggling to define our own beliefs, morals, and priorities as our own, without the influence of parents, teachers or siblings.

Each of us is an individual and, while our challenges are much the same, we each have our own story when it comes to where we are coming from and where we hope to go.

Most churches don't really have a solid idea of what to do with us. There are few, if any, programs that are solely designed to help 18-30 year-olds learn about their faith in the context of all the massive changes and upheavals in our lives. That is no one's fault, of course, but simply a truth. We are hard to figure out. Many of us are already over-committed and the very thought of having to commit to one more thing is terrifying. At the same time, we are seeking community and that one consistent aspect of our lives in the midst of the maelstrom.

So what can a church do for us without being pushy or apathetic?

The ministry we are developing in the Diocese of Minnesota is one that allows a commitment, but also allows for flexibility. Based on a strategic vision which we developed in September 2000, we decided that the most important aspects of our mission would be: (1) putting down roots within the church, (2) discovering our identities in Christ with community and (3) living joyfully in our day. To that end, we have created four core teams to focus on the different aspects of making this program happen, including a team in charge of finding creative ways to fund events and our general operating costs as a whole.

Currently there are about 60 people who have taken an active interest in what we are creating. We have an average of six people per team who meet monthly to form new ideas and brainstorm possibilites that would allow us to grow spiritually -- because spiritual growth is at the center of what we are doing. We are seeking to learn more about the love of God and how we can live into that love.

It's an exciting time. At age 24, I find myself thrilled that even though I am headed for a time of great change, I will have this community upon which I can lean when I need to. And when someone else goes through a similar situation, I will be able to provide a shoulder for them as well. It is that which holds us together during a time when we often feel as though we are coming unglued. We ask for your prayers as we continue to strive to make this a reality in Minnesota.

-- Erika von Haaren