ORG350/ORG650: Mentored Ministry & Leadership

Instructor & Contact Information

The People tab in Canvas provides information on the course instructor and you can send a message to your instructor following these instructions. Faculty are expected to: 1) grade and return assignments, with feedback, within 7 days from the date of submission; 2) reply to your Canvas messages within 72 hours; 3) reply several times each week in total in the discussion forums (not to each individual student); and 4) demonstrate the core values of City Vision University.

Course Description

While much of learning is often centered around courses and content, the goal of this course is to center learning around a mentoring relationship with someone with significant experience and expertise. The goal of this course is to be more mentoring relationship focused and less content focused. To achieve this goal students taking this course will be able to choose one of three options:

1. City Vision Online Mentoring. You can choose a mentor from City Vision's list of mentors.  You will meet with your mentor via Zoom or another video conferencing tool.
2. Local Mentoring (current work context). You can choose a mentor based at your work or ministry location. The goal is that you would interact with a mentor who will direct, encourage and evaluate your activities as you minister and work in real life situations. To choose this option, you must send in a signed mentor agreement two weeks before the term starts. If you select a local mentor, you should let them know that they will not be paid for mentoring. To receive academic credit, City Vision will assign you a faculty member to do the grading for the course.
3. Local Mentoring (new internship). Select this option if you do not currently have a work or ministry context, but you still would like to have local mentoring and an internship experience. To choose this option, you must send in a signed mentor internship agreement two weeks before the term starts. If you have not yet identified an internship, you can enroll in ORG201 Job & Internship Search Strategies (1 credit) to help you find an internship.

Course Prerequisites
Before taking this course students must:

1. Have completed at least 12 credits with City Vision for undergraduates or 6 credits for graduate students.
2. Be working or volunteering in a context related to your degree or have identified an internship site with a signed agreement.
3. You must have at least a 3.5 GPA for undergraduates (3.0 for graduate students) or be working in executive leadership (C-Level or VP Level) in a nonprofit or ministry.

This course may be taken up to three times in an undergraduate program (as ORG350, ORG351 and ORG352), or up to two times in a graduate program (as ORG650 and ORG651).

Course Outcomes

After completing this course, you will be able to:

1. Develop a mentoring plan of how mentoring in this course will help you achieve your growth goals.
2. Reflect on your meetings with your mentor and work environment toward your mentoring goals in this course.
3. Apply the material from reading two books to help you achieve your mentoring goals.
4. Integrate your growth from mentoring meetings, readings in this course and reflections on your work experience in a final paper synthesizing your growth toward your mentoring goals.

Course Structure

1. Mentoring Goals. You will be required to write out the goals of your mentoring identifying in what areas you want to grow, what skills you want to develop or what are the biggest challenges you are facing that you could use mentoring to help address. You will want to work to match your goals with the strengths of your mentor. These will be the learning outcomes of your course.
2. Required Reading. Based on the goals, you must select two books to read through under the mentor (related to your mentoring goals). For each meeting with your mentor, you should discuss what you learned from the book and get input from your mentor. Because of this, the student may want to either ask the mentor for book recommendations, select books the mentor is familiar with or see if the mentor would be willing to read the books in parallel with the mentor. Students may not use books that are used in another City Vision course that you have taken or will take.
3. Bi-weekly Mentor Meetings. You will be required to meet for at least one hour every other week with your mentor and have a log to record the meeting times. 
4. Clock hours report. You will be required to submit a clock hours report of your time in your work context related to this course.
5. Final Paper. You will write a final paper reflecting on your progress toward goals.

Required Texts

Students are required to purchase these texts before the first day of classes. 

• Books: students self-select 2 books. You may find it helpful to review the book recommendations here.

Guidelines for Written Work

All written work must follow our Writing Format and Forum Requirements. You must read these to understand how to cite sources appropriately.

Critical Policies to Read for This Course

Note: These policies are critical for all students to read. In case of change, we have linked to the versions on our website to make sure you have the latest version.

• Grading Scale 

• Deadlines to Drop Courses

• Attendance, Late Policy and Extensions

• Technology Requirements for Courses

• Standards of Academic Integrity & Plagiarism Policy

• What plagiarism is and how to avoid it 

• Credit Hour Policy, Grading Policy and Other Academic Policies

• ADA Policy, Learning Accommodations & Disabilities Services
• Student Code of Conduct 

• Library Services

Additional Policies:

• Privacy Policy

• Consumer Disclosures
• Additional policies are listed in our catalog

This syllabus is subject to change without notice up until the first day of the semester. Last updated: November 11, 2022