Weekly Insights
What church leaders need to know about young people and the decision-factors they care most about in their careers.
Stat of the Day:
56% of young people believe it is extremely or very important to have a mentor to help them achieve their future professional goals (YPulse)
Why It Matters:
The church has long been a social hub for the local community. Despite the complexity of religion in America (especially having many different local churches to choose from), churches retain a high level of community influence, and not only on the immediate area around them. Many of our churches are full of qualified professionals with a wealth of experience in their fields. These are often the people working in and owning local stores, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, firefighters, nurses, and more.
Given the importance young people place on having mentors to guide them in achieving their career goals, and the repository of trained professionals in our churches, there is much that local church communities can do to support the young people in their midst as they consider their own professional futures.
Connecting the Dots:
Clergy themselves are in a privileged position in the community—usually knowing the lives of their congregants intimately, including their professional hopes, frustrations, dreams, and plans. Consider using that knowledge to organize a professional-mentorship program in your local congregation. Compile information about congregants’ careers (many clergy and church elders will already know this information) and use it to organize them into groups by profession (or simply have that individual’s information if there is only one person in the group).
Church leaders can work with youth group and young adult leaders to glean what careers are attractive to the young people in their midst and help set up a mentoring relationship to encourage them along. For example, if mentees are over eighteen and in college or working, mentors can treat them to a coffee out to discuss aspects of their daily work life, share their joys and concerns, and provide candid insights about what their careers are really like. Alternatively, if your mentees are still in high school, the church can organize a mentor-mentee luncheon of some sort to discuss the same—whatever makes the most sense in your context to try to keep it fun while following the Safe Church (or equivalent) guidelines of your community.
Creating a mentorship program like this can help young people to feel connected to and supported by the congregation (especially if they’re about to leave for college!) while also providing an opportunity to more seasoned congregants to share about what they have learned and experienced through the years. Intergenerational relationships can be awkward, especially when they involve young people who are not your young people (from the perspective of middle-aged and older adults) or people your parents’ age who aren’t your parents (from the perspective of younger people). Fostering an intergenerational mentorship program can help older congregants feel more connected to younger members and younger members to feel like there’s a religious community in which they truly belong, knowing how much it cares about them and their success. These kinds of networks may have the added benefit of fostering mutual understanding between older and young workers that can ease some of the intergenerational workplace conflict that workers and managers alike are concerned about.