This Month's Issue

Pastor Trevor Kinlock gives these tips to those who want to start a mentoring ministry:

1.  Gauge the need within your church and community.
2.  Pray for and seek committed leaders with a passion for youth.
3.  Organize a curriculum that ministers to the social, spiritual, cultural and educational enrichment of teens.
4.  Plan trips and activities that broaden the mentees’ worldview.
5.  Provide vision and the resources will come.
6.  Identify your target group and launch the ministry.

Read and share these stories from the September 2015 Visitor:

Teaching Boys to Trust Again

Story by Tompaul Wheeler

Pennsylvania Conference’s Grace Outlet church has taken on its own challenge—fostering connections with the male residents of the Children’s Home of Reading. Grace Outlet chose the center as a way to meet one of their main missions, to “connect the disconnected.” Church volunteers have a very simple goal, to spend quality time with teens that have lost their ability to trust and interact in healthy ways with adults.

Some leaders and members of the CROP program. Photograph by Hayne Photography

Bringing up Boys

Story by Tompaul Wheeler

As many as 24 million children in the United States live in a fatherless home.* Without present or involved dads, boys especially are less likely to graduate high school and more likely to use drugs, be incarcerated and commit suicide, and generally struggle to succeed. Who can offer these youth a more promising future? Positive, Christian, male role models—and the Columbia Union has some you should meet: