College campuses are known for plucking eighteen-year-olds out of real life and placing them in a sort of alternate universe where the daily contact they have with people of other age groups is typically professional: professors and staff.

Sue Jackson, an OP elder’s wife who lives in State College, Pennsylvania, home to the sprawling public university Penn State, wanted to begin to build relationships with students, but wasn’t sure how. At an open discussion at a congregational meeting at Resurrection OPC in early 2022, she hesitantly threw out an idea: what if she sat on Penn State’s campus with a sign that invites students to come and ask a mom whatever they’d like?

No one in the meeting said anything. “It felt like a dud,” Jackson laughed.

But afterwards, to her surprise, fellow OP elder’s wife Lori Rose walked up to her. If you do it, she said, I’ll do it with you. But “what you need is a dog,” Rose followed up. “And I have a dog.”

So the two women carefully parsed out the university’s on-campus policies and packed a copy to take with, just in case. Not allowed to affix anything to the ground or to any campus building, they also packed up two camping chairs; seventy homemade cookies from Jackson’s kitchen; a cart with wheels from somewhere in Jackson’s house; and, of course, Rose’s gorgeous nine-year-old Welsh springer spaniel, Ellie.

The first time they visited campus, around forty students stopped by. The next week, it was more. After that, they couldn’t keep track. “Everybody flocked to us! We weren’t trying to get attention, but people just flocked to us,” Rose said.

People chat, enthuse about the dog, and grab a cookie, saying things like, “this was the best part of my day,” when they leave. Others stay off to the side until there’s a lull, and then they approach. “We’ve had profound questions about grief, about anxiety, about relationships, about mom relationships,” Jackson said. One young woman asked whether they thought unconditional love was real. A young man described his debilitating anxiety.

“After that first visit, when we were walking back to our vehicles, we kept saying, wow. Wow. There were no words for it. We lie awake at night thinking about the encounters,” Jackson said.

“We were blown away,” Rose agreed. “We go home and process it all.”

Actual Conversations with an Older Person

The students’ desire for conversation surprised Rose. Her daughter graduated from Penn State; her son is currently taking classes as a nontraditional student. Rose exudes warmth—she’s the kind of person who could chat up a rocky boulder. She has been on campus frequently and knows its feel. “People don’t talk to each other; they’re all on their phones. Or if they are talking, they’re not actually talking, they’re texting.” What she couldn’t believe about their visits was “how many people want actual conversations, with an older person especially.” Students seem hungry for it, she said.

The popularity of their weekly visits has not gone unnoticed. Rose and Jackson have received requests for media coverage from student newspapers, local newspapers, and local television channels, which they have begun to turn down unless made by a student.

Jackson, however, isn’t sure they’re doing anything worth reporting on. She looks squarely at the result: they’ve built some relationships, but it’s slow going. Their dream is that God would use their visits to point students to Christ. But that hasn’t happened yet. “It’s a tiny effort. We’re just being available. [I’m] a weird mix of appreciating the enthusiasm, and almost being ashamed that we have nothing to show for it. Why all this hoopla? It’s a nothingburger!”

Rose agrees. “We don’t feel like we’ve been innovative.”

But then again, they’re the only gray-haired women sitting on Penn State’s campus with cookies and a sign that welcomes students to ask them anything.

Cross-Generational Conversations within the Church

College campuses are not the only age-homogenous alternate universe. As a ten-year-old National Review article points out: “America today is startlingly segregated by age relative to historical norms, a change that is as lamentable as it is unremarked upon. . . . the hearth around which three generations of one family could gather is now archaic.”[1]

The obvious and glorious counterpart to locales split along generational lines is the local church, where all ages can worship side by side. There, like at the hearth of the natural family in previous eras, three (or more!) generations of spiritual family can gather.

Yet although church attendees may come from the campus, the cul-de-sac, and the retirement community into one geographical location, the interpersonal distance can still be a hindrance to mentoring relationships—those relationships wherein the older comfortably and often informally share wisdom from their walk with Christ with those not so far along the path. Or, in other words, actual conversations with an older person.

Jackson and Rose parking at Penn State bridged a tangible divide. Their example illustrates bridging a second, non-tangible divide between generations, for the sake of mentoring relationships: the expectation to be a sort of professional.

The Business of Mentoring

The word mentor comes from the name of a character in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey who is entrusted with the care of the son while the dad, Odysseus, does his thing. The term lived a quiet life, however, used chiefly to describe literary relationships, until the mid-1900s, when social-psychological research into adult development began to latch onto it. When man is in his “novice phase,” the influential Seasons of a Man’s Life in 1978 rather authoritatively explained, he has the major task of “forming mentor relationships” (90).

In a 1979 survey of top executives, the Harvard Business Review asked how many had mentors. Most did, claimed the article—titled “Much Ado about Mentoring.” The business world quickly mainstreamed mentoring, with companies first creating formal mentoring programs in the early eighties.[2] Self-help shelves included books about mentoring at the popular level, and Christian publishers quickly caught on with titles such as Connecting: The Mentoring Relationships You Need to Succeed in Life in 1992 (NavPress), or Mentoring: Confidence in Finding a Mentor and Becoming One in 1997 (Broadman & Holman).

Even as generations were become more segregated, then, mentoring began to flourish within professional contexts. Discipleship as a concept and a term within the church, which had always been a part of the faith, began to bleed back and forth with this new concept of mentoring. At some churches and ministries, the mentoring lingo, lifted as it often was from adult-development research and business-world practice that had no Christian roots, became littered with burdensome expectations of what a “mentor” ought to be or do. Is a mentor someone who levels up your sanctification? Someone who holds the keys to your next spiritual endeavor? Someone “powerful” (albeit in faith), someone “successful” (albeit in service)?

Unprofessional Care

No, not at all, says Anneke Fesko, the OPC’s care coordinator for ministers’ wives and no stranger to the corporate world after working as an IT project manager at Siemens. She left to raise three children alongside her husband, OP minister and seminary professor J. V. Fesko.

“Something that surprised me about mentoring is that the people who matter most at first seem the most unlikely or unimportant. They are the quiet ones who come alongside me and befriend me. They ask good questions and are rarely the center of attention,” Fesko reflected.

Here Jackson and Rose’s approach begins to make sense. They invite students not to ask an expert on a campus full of experts, but just to ask a normal mom. The pressure is off. The two women have some idea what not to say—“we’ve failed our own kids often enough that it’s like, well, I won’t say this because that wouldn’t work,” Rose explained—but they are not advertising solutions. They’re demonstrating care.

In her role as a seminary professor’s wife, Fesko will sometimes be approached by young female acquaintances who are eager to meet for a cup of coffee, to be mentored. But “they haven’t actually gotten to know me,” Fesko reflects. “How do they know I’m someone they want to get advice from?” They are looking to her role, not to her, for some sort of spiritual advice, like one might look to a plumber or a lawyer. Rather than pursuing a relationship, the request sounds more like asking for a consultation.

In contrast, a mentoring relationship is characterized by truth-telling and vulnerability. “If we are unwilling to tell the truth about ourselves and those around us, then how can we discover, confront, and change our shortcomings and sins?” Fesko pointed out. “All too often we are unwilling to open ourselves to scrutiny and accountability because we fear correction, embarrassment, or being hurt.” Truth-telling and vulnerability only exist where love is found. That is why love, demonstrated love, is key.

Mentors will not always say the right thing, give the best advice, or offer the most helpful counsel. Jackson and Rose, for example, often realize a better way to phrase an answer about two days too late. But within a loving relationship, mentees can “glean the very best and let the wind blow away the chaff,” Fesko said.

In Fesko’s work as care coordinator, she purposefully provides opportunities for relationships to develop naturally between ministers’ wives that may turn into formal or informal mentoring. And when students ask her, or her husband, where to find a mentor, they direct them to a local church and encourage them to get plugged in and then to “look around you.”

If expertise is what you’re looking for, it’s easily accessible online: many excellent Christian ministries have a searchable database of thoughtful experts weighing in on matters spiritual and practical. That, however, is not really mentoring. And mentoring is not really that. Nobody we share a pew with is going to be a searchable database of thoughtful, expert opinions. And no searchable database can discern our hearts.

Out of Touch?

Losing the expectation of expertise in a mentoring relationship allows all generations to have a sense of humor about how quickly tech is changing every aspect of our lives. Increasingly, the expert in the room about life online or tech in general is rarely the oldest person—and might not even be the college student, if a tween is around.

In fact, some argue that the pace of social change is actually accelerating[3]—that the differences in daily life between you and your children, in other words, are likely as great as the differences between you and your grandparents. Less theoretically, it is undeniable that for those of us who live comfortably online, our social media and apps and games and online communities can spawn habits and conversations strange to outsiders. Some translation will be required, which takes vulnerability and humor on both sides.

Jackson and Rose feel it. After one female student had chatted with them and walked away, others leaned in. “Didn’t you recognize her?” they asked Jackson and Rose. No, they hadn’t. She is an influencer with 7.2 million followers who rose to fame in 2020 with Amazon unboxing videos. They hadn’t heard her name before. And they hadn’t ever seen an unboxing vid, either. So, they just laughed.

“Each generation must rest assured that the Lord preserves his people, the church. One thing that never changes is the sinful human heart, and the only thing that can change it is the gospel,” reflected Fesko. “When we interact with the people the Lord places in our lives and make ourselves vulnerable, we open ourselves to sanctification and growing in holiness.”

Something to Learn

As we seek to know each other better in the local church context, we may come up hard against a divide in experience or perspective between younger generations and older ones—a divide that is not new to our era, but may be more pronounced, thanks to tech and rapid social change.

Jackson and Rose’s example of persistent, unassuming presence may help us to bridge that divide.

Perhaps older generations who are endeavoring to mentor both inside and outside the church can learn from their love, guts, and availability.

And perhaps younger generations can learn from Penn State students about how to receive it—at a recent visit, before Jackson and Rose had even set up their chairs and their sign, two young women came running toward them. They were both shouting. “We found you! We found you!”   

Endnotes

[1] Matthew Shaffer, “Ages Apart: How Modernity Has Separated the Generations, and Why We Should Care,” National Review 68, no. 11 (2011): 35–37.

[2] International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring 19, no. 1 (2021): 137–151.

[3] See Carl Trueman, “A Critical Theorist Worth Reading,” review of The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa, First Things (Sept. 2021), firstthings.com.

The author is managing editor of New Horizons. New Horizons, February 2023.