Transition

Jesus was a mentor to the disciples, and that involvement changed the world.  He was to lesser degree mentor to Mary, Martha, Lazarus, even Mary and Joseph.  Anyone answering our life and work questions, including spiritual and physical factoring, is playing (even for a single contact between them) a mentoring, ministering and problem-solving person in lives.  There must be some wisdom in the relationship, with one member presumed to be more knowledgeable, understanding and therefore wiser in some instance or way.  It happened with Barnabas as mentor to Paul, until the mentored person surpassed the mentoring in the areas of the relationship.  This did not mean that Paul became more spiritual than Barnabas, but that he likely became more competent to missionary ministry than did Barnabas.  The secret, of course, is in the attitude of the listener, student, son/daughter, friend, even stranger who then has some personal investment in the conclusion of the application and its consequence.  The mentoring process may have, and usually does, a beginning, middle and end in context and process – but lasting.  It almost always leads to great benefit in the development of the mentored, early and late in the experience of the mentored: the individual or the group.  Persons accepting mentoring, and following it with care to opportunities, self-energies and gifts may be doing the single best experience for personal development and professional competence.

During the 1970s, Bill Hybels caught a vision from his professor, Gilbert Bilezikian. The vision related to founding a Church in the model of what appeared at the beginning of Christianity – illustrated in Acts 2.  More than 25 years later, Bilezikian is still his mentor and close friend.  (Christianity Today. 11/13/2000. Page 49)  The story of Hybels and the Willow Creek Community Church he founded with 125 adherents in 1975, and expanding to 17,000 each Sunday in 2000 is identified with the Hybels and Bilezikian relationship of mentoring and mentored.  Christianity Today included the following statement in its article on Bilezikian: There would be no Willow Creek – no small groups, no women in leadership, no passion for service – without Gilbert Bilezikian. (Page 57)   (At this editing in 2019, the Willow Creek Church is going through one of those similar episodes noted of the seven churches by John in The Revelation. Conflict arose among good people, that too often has characterized magnificent projects perhaps infected by any factor from immoral episodes to interference of clergy family differences for controls.  As the Apostle John noted breaks in biblical attitude and conduct, addressed the church about Christian meaning, so we remind ourselves to prepare repetition of Christian propriety and protection of first meanings in any church body, in both spiritual and natural management.  To manage well we need prayer, Scripture and wisdom.)

We here ought to advance mentoring as part of Christian ministry.  We currently help in various ways, like giving money to projects, but many of us have more to give of ourselves to selected persons, persons who can get by generational differences and other differentials to become what they would not likely become without shepherding.  Many might make it on their own, but mentoring moves the process along and adds value to lives that would surely be reduced without the process.   Churches would do well to find a way to cultivate mentoring in the lives of promising youthful members and adherents.  Confirmation helps. I am surprised that there have not been large mentoring programs developed for young persons in the general society.  Small programs have been introduced and appear to have been quite effective.  In the colonial period in America, recalcitrant and troubled youths, perhaps having committed some crimes, were sometimes assigned to families in which the father of the family was willing, with the support of his wife and children, to take on the project.  With the use of mentoring we would almost certainly see a recovery in some anti-social persons relegated to jails or stocks.  With my family, I took on the responsibility of a nephew, who was in trouble but released to me by the court.  During the period we comforted his mother. A year and a half later I released him to return to her, but had to come back if he messed up.  He made it in school, took on a meaningful profession, raised a family and, at this writing, is a caring grandfather.