Mentor's Manual

74 For the Nex t Generat i on: The Urban Mi n i s t r y I ns t i tute ’ s Mentor Manua l

Literacy and Language Issues: Helping Students Succeed

The key distinctive of our student application and acceptance process is that a pastoral recommendation is the primary criteria for acceptance. This implies a number of things about the students you will mentor. • Your students are not just potential leaders. They are already leaders. It has been established that they are already functioning in some type of lay or pastoral ministry in their church. They are called by God and gifted by the Holy Spirit. Our job is not to confirm their fitness for ministry but rather to invest in them so that they become even better at what their church has already entrusted them with. • Your students are involved in the life of a church and represent a congregational or denominational tradition that creates the framework for the practice of ministry. • The church’s entrustment of leadership, not prior academic training, qualifies them for investment. As a result, your students may have a wide range of academic backgrounds. Some students may not have completed high school while others may have college degrees. Because our focus is on training leaders “especially among the poor,” it is not uncommon for some to have had less academic opportunity than middle-class church leaders. Although oral skills are usually strong among any group of leaders, some of your students may struggle with low literacy or writing skills. • Because of the multi-cultural nature of city populations and the high number of immigrants, some students may be very gifted inside their cultural context but lack some skills, training, or behaviors that people expect from leaders in the dominant culture. When possible we want to offer training in the primary language of the leaders. However, because of the large number of language groups in the city you will sometimes have students who are being trained in English even though it is not their first language.

Literacy and

Language Issues