Gail Curry chats with Melissa Kruger | Word First

my name's gayle curry and i look after the baptist women's department of the association of baptist churches in ireland and i have melissa krueger today and i'm so glad you're able to join us melissa and tell us a little bit about what you do and where you're living and just how you find life during the strange days that we're living in um my name's melissa and i actually work for the gospel coalition i'm director of our women's initiatives there and the good news about my job is i work from this desk even when it's not locked down um so this is this is my home office and we kind of um are all over the country we don't have a set office that we work from so i was actually zooming before coven which is you know we we are our team zoomed before we had to live this way um and so in a lot of ways my life didn't look extremely different you know i was like maybe i live in lockdown mode which might be kind of sad um but you know this is what um we do we zoom and we talk and we direct these women's initiatives through um a lot of great people and great resources that we do for tgc so thankfully um we've been well our family's been all well so um the time has not looked it's definitely looked different you know but it it it has surprisingly not looked as different as i know a lot of people's worlds have looked so i've been thankful for that it is amazing the technology that we have and how we have been able to adapt i think um in these um times that we've had here as well um lockdown for us came in towards the end of our women's ministry course the baptist women run and so when we went into lockdown we decided well we'll do something online and we did your contentment course that you have through ligonier and we just find that so helpful you pointed us to our god who is sovereign and good who is in control of our circumstances and who uses our circumstances to make us into the women he wants us to be and i have to say we find that so helpful and especially as we came in to into total lockdown which was very strange and quite scary um for a lot of people so thank you so much for making that available and for us to be able to go through but you do have a new book that has come out in the states um i think it's due for release here on the 31st of july and growing together taking mentoring beyond small talk and prayer points and tell us why you wanted to write that book yeah yeah it's it's actually been the book that i probably wanted to write for about 10 years um and part of it was before i worked at tgc i worked in my local church doing women's ministry and i did that for um like i say around 10 years and what i would have i had a lot of younger women desperate to to they wanted to know older women they wanted advice they wanted insight that older women had and so when they would ask an older woman you know would you mentor me the older women would be like what does she want me to do with her i don't know what what on earth am i supposed to do and so there was this disconnect um between the younger women and the older women how can we come together and have spiritual conversations so a lot of times it just kind of devolved into oh we'll just get coffee and catch up but it wasn't necessarily um going towards spiritual growth it was just it was relationship and it's good to have relationships and friendships with people in all stages of life that's great to have but mentoring i see is a little bit different spiritual mentoring um it's normally for a set season where you say i really want someone to ask me questions about important spiritual disciplines really i mean yeah spiritual growth is just as basic as physical health yeah if you ask anyone how do i stay in shape it's exercise and eat right i mean that's what every physical plan basically comes down to and the same is true for spiritual growth it's not difficult but it's really hard to do on our own we need one another and so what i tried to do in this book it's that it's not actually a book about mentoring so much as it's a book that like you and i could do together and so each chapter walks through important parts of our relationship with god our relationship with the world and our relationship with the church and so we talk about topics like prayer we talk about evangelism we talk about temptation we talk about contentment we talk about suffering and trials and all these different things and and it allows the mentor and the mentee basically a springboard for those discussions to take place so rather than kind of feeling like you're being intrusive with someone saying well so tell me about your prayer life the chapter you can kind of use as the springboard to have that conversation and say well she said this about prayer what's your favorite way to pray and so it just leads your conversation rather than being about the weather and how bad it's been for a week you know it leads your conversation naturally into the things of god because i find that we want those real conversations but sometimes we have a hard time getting there so i was hoping to kind of provide a pathway for women to be able to have those real and deep conversations that was my goal i'm writing it that sounds ideal just really to bring those spiritual conversations around in a very natural way i mean do you think that mentoring is something that you do with someone for the rest of of your life with that same person how do you see that then working out yeah and actually that's in chapter two chapter one and two do you talk a little bit about mentoring because i really do think it's it's very important to set expectations um and so what i because you really can't commit to someone for the rest of their life except one spouse like that's what you mean and your children you're committed to your you know but in the church you may move they may move you know i mean so i think it's really actually healthy to make sure from the beginning that you say hey let's meet once a month for a year or maybe we'll meet once a week for 12 weeks you know or maybe we'll meet every other week for this amount of time um sometimes you say let's read this book together i do think it's really helpful to set the date and time so that then you're not both trying to scramble and your relationship devolves into this oh yeah we should get together sometime so i have a woman right now that i'm mentoring and we walk once a month on friday and then we just talk about the chapter contents and that's that's our time together but we set the time we set the method we're walking together um and again if it's raining or something we just have coffee or we do that but we worked it into when both of our schedules um were available you know so that we could have this time and we knew and it was on the schedule and that just helps so much rather than oh i think it's been about three weeks or four weeks so maybe we should get together again that's when it can kind of frustrate both people um and i think it's really important for both people to have an expectation you'll do the work um you know yeah if you're the mentee and want to be mentored you have to do the work it's not just um the older woman coming in and pouring into you you know as you're you bring your questions and you bring i don't know what to think about this and and then a really good mentoring relationship can happen so you need to be more deliberate about it um yeah thanks very much and then you've also backed the book up with interviews that you've done with other women and just tell us a wee bit more about that is that maybe just to draw it do we but more practically how the whole mentoring thing kind of can work and operate yeah i mean one thing i did not want people to think was this book is the only way to mentor um and so purposefully what i did in these interviews was to say just share how you have been mentored and how you've been mentored others and most of them are actually very organic you know it could be seasonal um you're a younger mom and you reach out to an older mom to say i don't know what i'm doing with these children it could be um topical you have an older woman in your church and every time you hear her pray you think that woman knows how to pray and yeah people would reach out to them and say can you help me with my prayer life so it could be on a topic like prayer or you see a woman who just seems to evangelize while walking through the grocery store and you say will you help me know how you do this so a lot of it happened as people just live life on life and community together um but what i was just trying to provide was another option when that's not happening or when people are struggling to figure out how to do this um just another pathway to follow but there are so many good paths and how we can invest in the next generation coming behind us and so that's what i've loved reading in these stories and i see some common themes i mean one of the biggest common themes is local ministry matters um i think sometimes we can think oh i'll be mentored by reading articles on this website or by reading this person's book and i think those can be wonderful stand-ins when my husband and i were first married we moved every year for the first five years of our marriage i didn't even have time to figure out who to get coffee with yeah and so books really were mentors to me and some by women were but that was that's not a long-term solution we need real people in our real life um who can come alongside of us and so that's been the one commonality i've seen it's always just the faithful women in the local church who are just living their life and what they do is they embody what it looks like to live gospels in our lives and we need that we need to see what kindness means we need to see what love means we need to see what patience means and we see it best when it's lived in front of us rather than you know it's real easy to be perfect in an article uh but but we need to see real women who who aren't perfect who are just trying to walk with the lord in the midst of a fallen world and so i am a big proponent of local mentoring ministry and it works two ways too doesn't it you know the younger woman also encourages the older women and as they do meet together and talk through things you have so many projects on the go at the minute you have another project um let's talk which is a new podcast tell us a little bit about that just as we finish off yeah it's been so much fun um a friend two friends jasmine holmes and jackie hill perry and i um just talk on this let's talk podcast and it's really all discipleship topics so in a world that kind of is always talking about the next big thing um we're actually not talking about those things we're talking about how to fight sin we're talking about how to be content that was what this week's episode was on contentment we're talking about how to share your faith and we're talking about you know how how to be hospitable in our home so we just try to take we feel like there are so many topics in the bible that just don't get talked about much and so we wanted to just be three women sitting around the table talking in hopes that it would encourage other women to sit around their tables and talk about these topics too so that was our goal it's been a lot of fun um it was a lot of fun to record them and it's it's it's just great to be able to have conversations about christ because it's life-giving and i think we miss out when we when we talk about just the local news or whatever is going on so we're trying to turn our conversations to these eternal things and hopefully our eyes and our hearts to those things as well well they're really interesting podcasts and you sound like you're really good friends it is just like you're sitting having a cup of coffee together and discussing those topics so i'd certainly um encourage the women here to tune in and just listen to your conversations melissa thank you so much for taking time just to to meet up over sim for and just telling us about your new book telling us about the different projects you have going on and just thank you so much for the way you use the gifts that god has given you to encourage women in his word so thank you for being with us thanks for having me it's so good to see you