Contact Name: Matthew Marcum
Your Title: Community Outreach Director
Company/Organization Name: Mentoring Partners of Cincinnati
Phone Number: 513-255-2325
Web Address: lifeizministry.com
- Please describe your ministry here:
Mentoring Partners of Cincinnati is a ministry that partners with families and local businesses around Cincinnati. Community adults are equipped to serve as mentors to youth 14-22 years old to be the one relationship that will deliver the gospel in relational, academic, and professional areas. This link is a great place to find students testimonials and learn how to get involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOiOBzykpXo&authuser=0
- How is your ministry different from others in the same line of work? How does that difference benefit your customers?
Our ministry has the distinct ability to take the individual testimony, profession, and location of our mentor volunteers and adapt them to use in their home community as they serve one life. We are also blessed to have our students job shadow, co-op, and intern at locally-owned businesses we are partnered with, creating a mutual benefit for students and our wonderful partners.
- How did you come to faith in Christ?
My sister invited me to attend church with her at the age of 15. My life and family environment was so dark and broken, that when Christ was revealed to me by the Holy Spirit there was no doubt in my heart I had been offered hope eternal. That light burns brighter every day, fueling every ounce of who I am and how I serve others.
- How does being a Christian affect how you conduct your ministry?
Christ’s call for us to achieve greatness by being a servant to all guides every relationship I build in every area of my life. Through serving in hospice nursing for 15 years, the Lord gave me the honor of serving the richest/poorest, faith-filled/faithless, inner city/rural, and every unique heart that fills our communities. I put that experience to use as our community-based ministry serves in every crack and corner of the Cincinnati area, building our focus to the story spoken by each life.
- What ministry/cause is near and dear to your heart, and why?
My heart is that each life would know their value in impacting the life of another. That is why I learn the story of every mentor and student to best align their path together, as they shall both be redeemed and sharpened through the years they spend investing in one another.
- What is one interesting thing about you or your ministry that most people would not know?
My wife also owns a dance studio that deeply and persistently impacts the Oxford, Ohio community. Our older teen daughters also teach there.
- Why do you advertise in the Christian Blue Network?
Isolation is the great obstacle our ministry seeks to overcome, as many men, women, and children have no redemptive relationship. It is also true of partnering with other gospel-centered organizations, that we are stronger when we join together, as “a cord of three strands is not easily broken.”