Foundations Class and mentoring 

By living in the neighborhood, facilitating classes and renovating homes, we have been entrusted with the unusual privilege of bringing Christian mentoring relationships to the students in our classes. Mentors walk alongside the students in our classes. The mentor shares the love of Christ with the student and encourages them to become future mentors.

As a Christian ministry, we know that the Great Commission requires us to “go and make disciples” of Christ. We take four weeks at the beginning of our Foundations class to teach and proclaim the gospel. Mentoring is discipleship. A saving knowledge of Christ is the best foundation on which to build a mentoring relationship. In addition to sharing our faith in Christ, mentoring also involves showing a family how to establish and follow a budget and many other life skills.  The most important thing a mentor can do is simply be there for their disciple-in-training - to walk alongside.

In the short time we have been engaged in mentoring, several students have professed faith in Christ for the first time and many more have expressed surprise to discover that they were taught a different gospel that now seems wrong. Several students have become married, a marriage that would have ended is being held together and a mother who left her children alone overnight has learned why this is wrong and how to avoid this. Mentoring allows the ministry to wait on providing a home to a family until the necessary responsibility and accountability is in place and the mentor can vouch for it.  We are using the practical experience gained to teach people how to become mentors no matter where they plan to use this training.

The Foundations class meets on Tuesday evenings for several weeks in a row and then rests between class subjects for a few weeks. These classes create a strong sense of community, and teach many life skills including budgeting, job readiness, parenting, marriage enrichment, and nutrition - all with a Biblical perspective. The students in our Foundations class are loved, challenged and encouraged to grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, our one and only hope of salvation.