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Mission Houston received a grant from ExxonMobil for the Bellaire/Southwest Loop CSA’s volunteer work at Shearn & Gordon elementary schools. Karen Juul-Nielsen, the Mentor Coordinator for the Bellaire/Southwest Loop CSA, initiated the grant request to ExxonMobil where her husband Richard is an employee.

Similar opportunities may exist with your companies as well. This benefit exists for direct employees, retirees, and in some cases for the immediate family (spouse, children) of employees. Please contact your company’s Human Resources department to find out if there is an Educational Foundation that will support your work in your CSA.

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Closing Out the School Year

• Bring a degree of “closure” to Mentoring. Now, this isn’t “close the door” on the relationship between the mentor and mentee, or between the mentor and the school. It is our sincere hope that mentors will both remain their student’s mentor and maintain relationships with their mentees for multiple years. But that is not always our choice: sometimes a child will move to a different school, sometimes a mentor will have an unexpected life change that makes it impossible to re-commit to an hour a week for an entire school year, etc. And there are “seasons” of a relationship in which it is natural to recognize that one phase or stage has come and another about to begin. So, consider having some kind of event, with the school’s permission, at which you invite mentors, mentees, parents of the students, and the appropriate school staff members in order to say “thank you!” to all who gave permission for us to serve and then chose to stick with us and support us.” My guess is that you’ll get more thank you’s than you give, and that both you and the school will find a greater desire to move in to the next phase than when you first planned the event.
  

• Schedule a “Teacher & Staff Appreciation” breakfast or luncheon. Some find this easiest to get on the calendar late in the school year, or on the day after the students have been dismissed for the year and teachers must return for a day. Most find this easy to get on the principal’s OK list to be held during the week of in-service immediately prior to the beginning of the school year in August. Either way, it can be as elaborate or as simple as you prefer. What matters are two things: the effort made, and the heart attitude desiring to honor them.
  

• Stay in touch over the summer! With permission of the school officials, you and the mentors do well to get the addresses of your mentees, and of members of the school staff with whom you have made a significant connect. Encourage, and participate in, occasional notes written to let them know you’re thankful for them and thinking of them. Don’t be surprised in the years to come when you discover how many of those cards and emails are kept as mementos by folks who consider evidence that someone is in their corner as a rare gift from God.
  

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Is Anyone Praying …?

Karen Juul-Nielsen has been tireless as a member of the team in Bellaire-Southwest since she said “yes” to serving during CityFest. Though she is active in many parts of the B-SW team efforts, she is officially the Prayer Mobilization Coordinator. More than a few times Karen has confided that she has felt discouraged by a seeming lack of response to her attempts to enlist prayer and pray-ers in the CSA. (Some of you at this point may be thinking, “and she’s not alone!”) Getting commitments to unified prayer targets, let alone common times or places for folks to gather and pray, has been an elusive goal in spite of the rhetoric about how essential prayer is.

A few months ago as the CSA team listened to Karen someone made a suggestion: what if we scale back our expectations and gave congregations an easy way to incorporate a few items in their every Sunday prayers or in their bulletins? Willing to try, the team decided that the needs of the schools they had adopted would be a good place to start. But then they realized that beyond needing mentors, money and makeovers, the team didn’t know for sure what else was on the wish list of the staff. So several of them made a commitment to contact the principals and ask them directly.

It turned out that the principals deeply appreciated being asked, and knowing that it was because the team wanted to enlist people to pray for the school’s specific needs and wants. And the requests given by the principals made it easy for Karen and the team to produce clear, measurable prayer targets. They limited the list to just a few of the more pressing needs, and sent them out to contacts and leaders in local congregations with a note asking that congregation members be made aware of the needs of the two local schools and be given opportunity and invitation to pray for them. Lo and behold several of the congregations put the name of the school and one or more of the requests in their bulletin. At least one included the targets during the time of congregational prayer in their Sunday service. And a few people wrote or called the CSA team members to thank them for giving information about the schools to pray about.

This may not yet be “fervent, passionate, united intercessions,” but it is a start. Not only that, it is united, it is intercession, and it is a low-cost invitation to prayer from the Body of Christ in which there exists varying levels of commitment to prayer. I encourage you to try this relational and simple approach this month. Please let me and Karen know how folks and congregations in your CSA respond. And know that our team is praying for you as press on to mobilize united intercessions, clinging to the promise that “if any two of you agree as to touching anything …” (Matt. 18:19).

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