Hungry Souls, under the direction of Karen Mains, is a distance-mentoring outreach for those hungry people looking for kindred spirits to walk alongside them. Our goal is to help you develop spiritual intelligence, learn how to experience God, facilitate (not interfere with) your unique journey, and guide you toward a point of self-directed spiritual growth.

Through years of ministry, and even more urgently in these recent days, we have been deeply concerned that there are so many believers, sincerely desiring growth, who are seeking wise spiritual mentors but who cannot find them. Spiritual leaders are often too busy, stretched thin with unending responsibilities and often in need of spiritual direction themselves.

Mainstay Ministries can now offer a unique growth opportunity to people here at home and across the world at minimal expense to us and low cost to them. In addition, we are now at the ripe age for "wise mentoring" as are many of our friends who have spent lifetimes developing tools for ministry as well as their own personal spiritual practices. Consequently, after much prayer, we are launching a (mostly) web-based outreach called Hungry Souls.

Hungry Souls is a ministry dedicated to those sincere believers longing for spiritual depth, searching for wise spiritual mentors, and open to the kind of accountability that combines tenderness with honest firmness. Though this is mostly a distance-mentoring approach, we are also designing personal encounters in various ways. We hold to the historical precepts of Christian faith and joyfully work with all in the Body of Christ despite their particular confessions.

Our goal is to create lasting, measurable spiritual transformation by contemporizing centuries-old spiritual growth practices (or disciplines) as well as using more recent tried-and-tested methods. We believe that an adult learner has not truly learned any Scriptural concept until he/she is integrating that concept into his/her every day life and then affecting the society in which he/ she lives with that same truth. We want Christ to be formed within us and to aid in that dynamic but often painful process in the lives of all we touch.

Our website, hungrysouls.org, is scheduled to open in April 2002. For more detailed information, please visit us there. Or, if you prefer, inquire at Mainstay Ministries 1-800-224-2735.

We feel we can help you, if you are a hungry soul, through:

• The resources of credentialed, degreed, and certified teacher/mentors who specialize in spiritual development training.
  
• One growth concept for each year so there is time to learn, to understand, and apply.
  
• The website www.hungrysouls.org, our communication center.
  
• A meditation page, www.thisquietplace.org, changing weekly to enhance learning.
  
• Soulish Food, a short weekly e-reminder about the yearly growth concept.
  
• Alongside, a twice-a-month e-newsletter emphasizing life exercises.
  
• God's Sacred Rhythms, a bi-monthly (6 times a year) print newsletter.
  
• A schedule of telementoring conference calls, Serious Talks, for those who want a live voice and the opportunity for questions and answers.
  
• Bibliographies, recommended growth tools, tested spiritual retreat plans.
  
• Discounts on growth tools and retreats sponsored by Hungry Souls
  
  

Convinced that the average believer suffers from information overload without comparable spiritual application, we are choosing to emphasize one mentoring growth theme for each year. It takes time to understand a spiritual concept, to allow the Holy Spirit to teach us the meaning of that concept, to start and fail and start again, then finally to weave that truth into practices (or disciplines) that transform our everyday lives.

The annual growth concept from April '02 to September '02 is: Being Hungry. Beginning with the start of the church calendar year, Advent '02 (to give us enough lead-time, October '02) and continuing through October '03, the growth concept will be: Dancing with God: Stepping in Time to God's Sacred Rhythms.

There is an annual fee of $50 to Hungry Souls, so that we can carry out this ministry without the necessity of raising outside funds; this will allow for our energies to be solely concentrated on lovingly and carefully mentoring those who find they are hungering for God. Charter members who join this membership from April '02 through September '02 will receive a copy of Karen Main's Lonely No More, one woman's personal account of being a hungry soul.

In addition, with God's help, we are planning:

• Spiritual growth retreats, beginning in the Chicago area
  
• Pilgrimages for small groups with spiritual mentors where the itinerary and discussions are designed for growth (See Trip to Spain '03)
  
• Training for people who desire to be spiritual mentors, beginning with articles on our website, then expanding to mentor-training for churches
  
• Bibliographies of books, tools, and courses that we feel are the best in the area of spiritual growth;
  
• Publications of retreat plans from the files of those who have been successfully leading small retreats and spiritual growth events for decades (See Cultivating the Soul: A guided retreat for individuals or small groups.)
  
• Phone consultations for those desiring a more personal touch