You Can Mentor: A Christian Youth Mentoring Podcast

“Mentorship is amazing; it’s discipleship at it’s finest.”  More true words could not be spoken.  If you look at Jesus’ ministry, it WAS mentorship with his disciples.  He was teaching them a new way of life.  He taught them new ways to approach old situations.  He changed their perspective.  When that’s done well, it impacts both people in a mentoring relationship.  Gabriel Prusmack, a local artist in Galveston, TX speaks these words in this week’s episode of Unsung Heroes.  He joins John to talk through his inspiration for his artwork, how he got started making art, and who the unsung heroes are in his life that have influenced both his artwork and his walk with Christ.  Tune in to also find out what a seven foot banana has to do with anything on this topic.

Check out Gabriel's work:
https://gabrielprusmack.com
https://www.instagram.com/gapsmack87

Purchase the You Can Mentor book:
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

70% of men and a third of women say they are currently struggling with unwanted sexual behavior.  According to the Matrimonial Lawyers Association, in 56% of divorce cases a major contributing factor is one spouse's obsessive use of pornography.  Even more sobering, the average age of first exposure to hard core pornography for a child is 11-12 years old, which means on average a child has been exposed to pornography before they've even reached junior high school.  The sad reality is that pornography is pervasive in our world and highly addictive.  It is a multi-billion dollar industry that preys on women, trafficks them, and abuses them. Even worse, nobody is having the conversation about the dangers of porn; either because they don't know of them or they don't care.  Yet, the problem of unwanted sexual behavior is surprisingly common.  Sam Black is on the mission to change that.  He is Director of Recovery Education at Covenant Eyes, which is a resource that aids in online accountability for people seeking to find freedom from unwanted sexual brokenness, and the author of The Healing Church, What Churches Get Wrong About Pornography and How To Fix It.  He joins Stephen this week to have an incredibly vulnerable conversation around pornography, the challenges addressing it in churches, and how you as a mentor can support your mentee and have conversations with them around sex and the dangers of pornography.

Struggling to quit watching porn? YOU'RE NOT ALONE. Join over 1.5 million people who've used Covenant Eyes to experience victory over porn. Learn more at https:// www.covenanteyes.com/

The Healing Church is a powerful "field guide" for churches and ministry leaders to address the issue of pornography extensively & with grace. Learn more at https://www.thehealingchurch.com/

Download the Victory App:
Apple

Android

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

Stop right now and think about the most influential person in your life.  Who is it?  How did they impact you?  What did they teach you?  How long were you in a relationship with them?  Do you still talk to them?  Do they know how much of an impact they had on your life?  Now think about the people you’re impacting now.  Who are you guiding through life?  How are you impacting them?  Do you even realize the impact you’re having on somebody in your life?  The simple truth is relationships change lives.  For good or for bad, every single relationship has some kind of impact on the people in that relationship.  Recently, we’ve shared a few stories of prominent people in the music scene and the mentors that have impacted them the most.  This week, John flies solo to share his story of one of the people who has changed his life through mentoring, how he was impacted, and how he’s paying it forward.

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

One day, your mentee is going to turn 18 and graduate high school.  Chances are, they’re going to go through a period as a new adult where they will have no idea what to do.  There will be so many questions coming at them that they feel they need to have an answer for.  Where are you going to college?  What are you going to major in?  How will you pay for that?  What happens if it’s too difficult?  Some of these questions come from other people.  Some of them are questions your mentee is already facing within themselves.  Even worse, trying and failing in college is something that can generate a significant amount of shame in them.  Sadly, all too often, new adults don’t get taught that it’s ok to take a gap year.  They don’t HAVE to go to college right away.  John is here this week with his guest Tammy Dorsett from The Gap at Sawmill Meadow to talk through what it looks like to run a program that supports new adults as they transition into adulthood, support them in discovering themselves and their goals, and doing all of this in a faith-based way that roots their participants in a deep faith that carries them into adulthood.

Check out The Gap at Sawmill Meadow:
https://www.leanintothegap.org
https://www.instagram.com/tkdors/
https://www.facebook.com/leanintothegap

Connect with Tammy:
https://www.leanintothegap.org/contact

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

Who is the most influential person in your life?  For most people, the answer is one of their parents.  For some people, it's a mentor who spent countless hours pouring into them and teaching them how to be the person that they are today.  Maybe it's a friend.  Everybody has somebody who's impacted their life in a significant way.  It's inevitable given that we are by nature relational beings.  So who influences the influencers?  Who mentored the people who are now mentoring the next generation?  John is back this week with Mike Herrera, the lead vocalist and bass guitarist of MxPx, the frontman of Tumbledown, the bassist of Goldfinger, an old school skater, and podcaster in his own right.  This week, they dive into Mike's story and reminisce about skating at different skate parks, writing songs and making music, who Mike credits with mentoring him throughout the years, and how his own parents' influence helped steer him down the path of musicianship as a career.

Check out Mike's podcast:
https://mxpx.com/pages/the-mike-herrera-podcast

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

Who is the most influential person in your life?  For most people, the answer is one of their parents.  For some people, it's a mentor who spent countless hours pouring into them and teaching them how to be the person that they are today.  Maybe it's a friend.  Everybody has somebody who's impacted their life in a significant way.  It's inevitable given that we are by nature relational beings.  So who influences the influencers?  Who mentored the people who are now mentoring the next generation?  That's the heart of this new series that John is launching this week.  To kick off the series, he has Ross King, an influential songwriter, singer, worship leader, producer, and songwriting mentor in Nashville join him to talk through some of his musical influences as well as the people he points to as having impacted him key ways throughout his life.

Connect with Ross:
https://www.rosskingmusic.com

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

Have you ever thought about writing a book?  Do you ever wonder if somebody is going to want to read what you have to say?  Do you feel like you're not eloquent enough to communicate your ideas?  Believe it or not, so do most authors.  Writing books, though, has been a primary form of communicating ideas for thousands of years.  Anybody can write a book, but coming up with the idea can be the challenge.  Having both recently just written books, Zach and John come together this week to talk through their writing processes, how they got started, and address some of the challenges that occur while writing a book.  If you have a story to tell, we want to encourage you to tell it.

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;  it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.  1 Corinthians 13:4-8.

There are eight different greek words for love, and we experience each of them in a different way.  The greek word for the love God has for us, or the love a parent has for their child, is agape love.  It's the unconditional love we receive.  It's the love that is still there regardless of how badly we mess up or think we're unlovable.  It's the same type of love we strive for in our mentor/mentee relationships.  This love is the same love that's mentioned in the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians.  John and Zach kick off a new series this week where they explore how we can model the fruit of the spirit in our mentoring relationships, starting with love, and they share some truths around that topic. 

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

If you feel like you're not good enough to mentor, you're in good company.  So many of the Bible's characters had serious character flaws.  Peter denied Jesus three times, even after adamantly telling the Lord that he would never do so.  Moses was a murderer.  David, a man after God's own heart, was a murderer and an adulterer.  At the end of the day, we're all broken people; and yet God still can and does use us.  Time and time again, both in the Bible and in our current time, God uses the most unlikely people for the greatest impacts.  The same holds true for mentoring.  You may feel like you're not qualified to mentor, but the truth is none of us are.  God still uses us anyways.  Zach is back with John this week to talk through lies that mentors believe, and encourage you with the biblical truths that counteract those lies.

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com 

Distraction is all around us.  Our phones, social media, television, news outlets....the list goes on and on.  Our work productivity suffers and we don't invest our emotional capital into the relationships around us.  Our society is centered around instant gratification, and the notifications from our phones constantly pull our attention away from the task at hand.  These distractions can, and often do, impact our relationships with our mentees, and that can communicate to them that they aren't a priority in our lives.  John is back this week to deliver a word on the dangers of allowing distraction to enter into our mentoring relationships as well as some practicals on how to eliminate distractions while we invest into the lives of our mentees.

Purchase the You Can Mentor book: 
You Can Mentor: How to Impact Your Community, Fulfill the Great Commission, and Break Generational Curses

youcanmentor.com