According to the HDFS literature, mentors serve as alternate attachment figures to at-risk youth. A mentor can teach a child skills that he or she didn't learn in the home environment, provide emotional support that can increase the child's confidence, and help the child cope with difficult circumstances. A mentor ideally knows how to structure the environment and activities that help build a child's skills and provide emotional support. Good mentors know when to just be there and when to teach skills. They are well trained by someone who knows the research and understands child and adolescent development.
Spiritual mentors are very much the same :) I've come from a spiritual 'at-risk' environment where I was taught that God exists, but He is distant and not as reliable. We can do good to try and get into heaven, but we can't really connect with Him. This is what I believed when I became a part of Summitview. These beliefs had to be demolished and replaced with Truth after I became a believer. I also had very real attachment issues and other developmental issues that I had to deal with on top of growing as a new believer. One could say that I was at high risk for maladaptive spiritual development because I had added risk-factors that could hinder my spiritual growth.
Luckily God is the GREAT INTERVENTIONIST :) :) He knows my development better than even I do :) He put me in the best church environment for me to grow. Specifically, He provided older sisters in Christ that both served as actual and spiritual mentorship. I remember calling them and talking to them whenever I had issues. They served as my examples, and helped me work through a lot of my past and helped me grow in my spiritual development. They would 'structure' my environment by checking on me to make sure I had regular quiet-times and help me have conversations about the Bible. They also helped 'structure' fun things like Ultimate Frisbee. An older sister and Aaron Ritter coached me about how to play Ultimate Frisbee with much patience since I told them that I couldn't see well and was terrible at playing sports. It really was rewarding when they cheered me on when I threw the frisbee in the right general direction, even if my teammate didn't catch it. Through the love of my older brothers and sisters, I had alternate attachment figures and spiritual mentors in Christ that really helped those first few years of my development.
It's really uncanny - but not surprising that God actually did help me achieve developmental milestones that I missed. While playing on the playground with my Ritter teammates, we joked that we were going back to our childhoods. Suddenly I got really excited and I remember jumping up and down squealing: "Oh my gosh!!!! I'm really back in middle-childhood learning peer-peer interactions and receiving peer-group acceptance!! God's re-doing my middle childhood!" I'm pretty sure those were close to my exact words. Yes, I should've realized I was a super-nerd beyond most of the 1st year HDFS students. :) yet even in that nerdy realization on the playground, I had the first glimmer of hope that God would begin healing things in my past and work to grow me into a spiritually mature person :)
I'm in the stage now where I see younger sisters-in-Christ being mentored in much this same way and I have been able to serve as a mentor to some girls. That part is startling to me because I think "Can I really do this?" Then I realize, "God, the Great Interventionist placed me in this role to help this other person develop :)" That also means He helps me, and really He does the real work :) Seeing my younger sisters grow with their mentors and looking back on how God used my own mentors reminds me that He will complete the work He started in all His children and He is the solution to their spiritual and developmental needs :)
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