Dave and Sue Build Community through Mentoring

When Dave and Sue Bartz heard about Faithful Friends through their church Rolling Hills, they felt that this was the ministry opportunity they had been looking for. “It is important to make sure that you build community, not just give your own kids lots of support,” Sue says. “Because the whole community is what makes a difference.”

Dave and Sue each wanted to be matched individually with a child. “Both of us felt like mentoring our own kid was a way of doing it together but also uniquely ourselves,” Dave says. So in April of 2022 Sue was matched with *Karis, and a couple of months later Dave was matched with *Lewis. 

In both of their relationships they noticed a similarity. “There’s time investment up front, and it’s kind of a flat growth in the relationship at first,” Sue says. “And then once they know you’re really serious and you’re going to bother to stay around, then it starts to take off. That longevity makes a difference in the relationship.”

Dave and Sue have loved the challenge of mentoring side by side. “It’s a great way of sharing ideas,” Sue says. “We share ideas of what worked and what didn’t work. If Dave tells me something he did with [Lewis], I can think ‘That won’t work with [Karis], but I can edit it to make it work.’”

Although they almost always spend individual time with their mentees, Dave has gone to some of Karis’ soccer games with Sue. “I think [Karis’s] mom thinks that it’s very unique to see a man who would bother to show up at her kid’s soccer game,” Sue says. “[Karis’s] dad doesn’t even show up to her soccer games.”

Sue shared that when she meets friends of Karis and her mom, she introduces herself as a friend of Karis’. “And the nonverbal response that I get from the other parents is ‘wow, that’s really cool! She’s got an adult friend? How can my kids have an adult friend?’ There is a significance when people see that other people are willing to invest in non-related children without anything to gain in the deal. And personally it’s been a good outreach conversation with lots of other people in our own community too. We don’t happen to have any people of color living down in this area, so when people see [Karis] and [Lewis] come and visit it intrigues them. They want to know more about who we are and why we are doing this. They all know that we are involved in our church, so it’s a good visual outreach to others.”

“We’ve really enjoyed our experience,” Dave says. “We had a meeting in May to talk about are we going to do this again? And there wasn’t any doubt that we were going to do it again. It’s been fun for us.”