I spent the day Saturday at Ignite 2010, a local one day training event for youth workers, volunteers, parents of teens and students.  It was put together by the Coalition of Local Youth Ministries.  I gotta admit, it was a lot more than I expected!  They set it up with four different learning tracks, with different speakers and labs.  I came away from it looking forward to next year – we’re definitely making it a regular part of our Joshua Team training (Joshua Team is our leadership team made up of students).  I loved meeting a bunch of other local youth workers and networking types – there’s something exciting when you get a room full of youth workers together.

I was asked to lead a session on mentoring, which was a lot of fun (at least for me, anyway!).  It was the first time I had done that type of session on mentoring, so I put some stuff together – little bit on the history of mentoring, it’s place in culture back in the day, the Bible and today.  Then we spent some on characteristics of a mentor, and then some action steps for mentoring.  Some self-evaluation: I wish I had a little less content.  As much as I would have a hard time cutting any of it, we really didn’t have any time for discussion which was unfortunate.  I would have loved to have spent some time getting ideas from other leaders on what they’re doing to create opportunities for mentoring and relationship building.  Anyway, other than that I was pretty happy with it.