Lecture

We have Homer to thank for that word. In The Odyssey, Mentor is a friend of Odysseus who undertakes the education of his son, Telemachus. When Telemachus separates from his father, Mentor helps the young man find him, although Mentor has already been possessed by Athena, the Greek goddess of war, patron of the arts and crafts, and paragon of wisdom. Nevertheless, in the guise of Mentor, Athena leads Telemachus past ambushes and other hazards to ultimately accomplishing his quest; and so from all of this fanciful mythology, in the late twentieth century, we have the common word mentor. And today that word depicts a wise and helpful friend, a teacher, a leader, who uses his or her experience to show others how to best walk life’s path and to accomplish goals and meet life’s challenges. Mentoring has always been primarily a family activity, I think, carried out by fathers and mothers, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. And then the concept moved into society, and apprenticeship became very popular. Apprentices learned their trades under craftsmen who had gone through the same process themselves through a mentoring system. And for centuries, that mentoring was the only way one could break into certain skilled professions.

So already we have a hint to the difference between mentoring and teaching. Teaching to a great extent deals with knowledge and information, offering a heavy emphasis in our day on books and paper. Mentoring implies a hands-on conative approach to learning. Though we might not see it often among carpenters and cobblers today, the medical profession still practices mentoring as the major step toward becoming a doctor. Hospital internship in some specialty is crucial before one can earn the proper credentials to practice that particular form of medicine with the approval of appropriate credentialing organizations.

Within the more defined context of leadership, mentoring means everything we have already discussed but with a more highly focused goal. According to Bobby Clinton, mentoring refers to the process where a person with a serving, giving, encouraging attitude (the mentor) sees leadership potential in a still-to-be-developed person, the protégé is the word that Clinton uses. “That mentor is able to promote or otherwise significantly influence the protégé along in the realization of potential. A mentoring process item refers to the process and results of a mentor helping a potential leader. The mentor is a special kind of divine contact, one who may offer prolonged help or guidance.” Of course Clinton goes on to call our attention to one of the great New Testament examples of mentoring, the work of Barnabas with John Mark which began after the split up of the missionary team at the end of Acts 15. Obviously the work of Paul with Timothy or Titus, Epaphras and others also give us ample evidence of this biblical activity.

What are the general qualifications of a mentor? Can we learn anything from observing the characteristics of people who seem to have successful ministries? Obviously we can. And when we do, we discover their qualifications are not profound personality traits found only in very special types of people. We find rather common behaviors which almost any experienced leader can offer with the help of God’s Holy Spirit. Certainly some leaders have greater aptitude toward mentoring than others. Those who have worked closely with their own children at home, for example, will probably display greater patience and willingness to work with followers on the job. Leaders who have a background in teaching or have been trained in leadership and management skills can function better in a mentoring role than those who have not.

Mentoring is not just the activity of a nice person who wants to help. In leadership, the helper must know quite precisely what it is she has done and is doing and should do in the future, thereby guiding the follower along that general path. One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s play Getting Married in which a character says, “I am not a teacher, only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead, ahead of myself as well as you.” Every teacher who has functioned in that role for decades can point to individual students perhaps all over the world, who have been influenced by their instruction and personality. Teaching is a ministry of multiplication. Its reflective recipients can very well run in the hundreds, maybe even in the thousands over the years. But only a handful of those hundreds may be the results of mentoring.

Teachers stand before large groups in classrooms and sometimes may never see those students outside of class. Pastors preach to large groups on Sunday morning in medium-sized or large churches, but only a small minority of the congregation, perhaps only one or two members of the pastoral staff, could be called, if I may neologize, mentees, those who learn hands-on ministry under the direct supervision of a mentor. And furthermore this is not necessarily something everybody can do. Clinton says not everyone is suited to be a mentor. Mentors are people who can readily see potential in a person. They tolerate mistakes, brashness, and abrasiveness in order to see potential developed. They are flexible and patient. They recognize that it takes time and experience for a person to develop. They have vision and ability to see down the road. They suggest next steps that a protégé needs for development. And they usually have a gift mix that includes one or more of the encouragement spiritual gifts, mercy, giving, exhortation, faith, and word of wisdom.

So mentoring holds a strategic role in the future of evangelical organizations. “Who will be the leaders in 2015,” asks Lyle Schaller, before he goes on to talk about the widely neglected issue of leadership development (those are his words), to go on with Schaller.

Everyone is convinced of the perpetual shortage of competent, willing, and dedicated volunteer leaders and workers. On a long-term basis, however, another facet of this issue is identifying and listening, educating, socializing, nurturing, and training those persons who will be the leaders of the churches in the year 2015.

Let me go out on a limb here and note that Schaller’s book, now at least eleven or twelve years removed from its original manuscript form, comes out of a day when formal leadership development programs for defined groups worked rather well in the church. To some extent, churches and Christian organizations must still find some formula to conduct training classes which take potential leaders beyond the basics. But it may be quite fair to say, as we approach a century change, that the real development of a leader works better today through individual mentoring in which the functioning leader prepares future leaders to serve effectively in the same kind of ministry. Many churches today, especially those with large staffs and elaborate facilities, believe that seminaries have focused too much on the cognitive domain to the point at which their graduates know a great deal but can do very little. The reactions of these church staffs is to develop leadership in-house, some kind of a system that looks very much like informal mentoring. Whether that’s right or wrong, good or bad is not the point here. The point is that people look toward mentoring as a better way to do this leadership development process than lecturing.

Mentoers must control their own emotions. There are several guidelines here that are important, and that’s what we’re focusing on. We gave a long introduction to these general qualifications, so let’s get started now in looking at some of the specifics. Mentors must control their own emotions. How often Paul warns about this in his pastoral epistles; particularly in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 2, we see repeated references to the issue of self-control. Leaders who cannot discipline their own lives and emotions cannot serve effectively as leaders. They certainly do not qualify as mentors for developing leaders. If God uses us to help others develop in ministry, it will only be because His Spirit has enabled us to control the peculiarities and deviations of our own personalities.

Conger, in an interesting book, Conger and colleagues talked about the negative side of charismatic leadership, those regressive forces which can give rise to irrational, even pathological behavior. I need to state here that I do not agree with most of the things in their book, although it is very interesting. I don’t even like using their title Charismatic Leadership, not because of any theological issues but because of the implications that terminology has for leadership style. Nevertheless, they have a good point here on the emotions. Listen to them.

It is important for both leaders and followers to be cognizant of the existence of the destructive side effects of charisma. For this realization is the first step toward corrective action. Clinical research has revealed that if individuals are made aware of their transference reactions, these valuable insights into behavior can be stepping stones to productive change. When we notice frequent mood shifts, sudden irritability, feelings of envy, a sense of being watched, and excessive concern about what others think or the continuous need for an audience, we may be on the track to possible transference distortions. Obviously not every leader is a candidate for mentoring.

Second, mentors must be good listeners. This is so obvious. The listening process is helpful in itself, but its purpose is even greater. Listening enables a mentor to identify and understand the mentee as a person. It lays the groundwork for all and any help that will result from the mentoring process. And as we’ve noted, mentoring is more than telling. It depends on thorough and adequate feedback and mutual cooperation. I think, third here, mentors must be friendly. In the history of mentoring, one can certainly imagine a snarling blacksmith, grudgingly teaching his trade to a village boy while neither caring very much to be around him nor caring what happens to him. Nevertheless, it was the way of village life. It had to be done.

That type of thing will not work today especially within the boundaries of churches and Christian organizations. Experienced Christian leaders and developing Christian leaders both understand the relational dimensions of biblical life and ministry. It’s highly unlikely that effective mentoring could result without a significant friendship between leader and follower. Contrast leadership mentoring with professional psychiatry. Even though the psychiatrist may be warm and friendly, one should not engage in delusion that she is anything more than a professional doctor whose interest in the patient is less than personal. In fact, the whole point of not getting emotionally involved is absolutely essential for that kind of profession. A mentor, on the other hand, does get emotionally involved. The mentor counsels because she has demonstrated herself to be a trusting confidant of the person to whom she ministers. Obviously this involves keeping confidences and the warm receptivity that encourages people to seek out such a mentor for help with their problems.

Remember mentors must hold on to friendship regardless of the mentee’s decisions. In the mentoring process, mentees may often yield to the voice of Satan and the influence of the sin nature within choosing paths obviously opposed to the will of God. The mentor faces at that moment the temptation of discouragement, and you want to turn away from somebody who has clearly rejected the will of God as you’ve been trying to teach it. But to turn away from the learner at this time only guarantees that he will develop destructive self-doubt. Many such disappointing moments occur in the ministry of mentoring, but we must live with them and work through them and try to help another day as God gives us the opportunity.

Mentors must also learn to ask catalytic questions, the questioning process so crucial to effective mentoring. In effect it is a part of the listening process. There is no need for mentors to appear overly inquisitive or just snoopy. Questioning seeks to uncover the real issues involved in the mentoring process and to direct the thoughts and behavior of the mentee. Kouzes and Posner talk about moments of truth. They argue, along with Tom Peters, that the most powerful mechanisms for modeling or mentoring are found in the way a leader goes about his daily routines observed of course by the follower.

The message about what really counts in the organization is delivered, demonstrated, pointed out, and emphasized by the leader’s moments of truth and how well those moments are orchestrated. Leaders and would-be leaders must consciously structure moments of truth to communicate and reinforce their intangible values. The most typical moments of truth center around things like how leaders spend their time, questions leaders ask, leaders’ reactions to critical incidents, and what leaders reward.

When dealing with the actual questions, Kouzes and Posner emphasize that the routine questions, not the formal questions, highlight the issues. This holds true primarily because the questions demonstrate the leader’s values and, therefore, convey on a regular basis to the mentee what priority system that particular ministry holds high. They argue questions provide feedback about which value should be attended to and how much energy should be devoted to them. When we examine how leaders make people aware of key concerns or shifts in organizational focus, it is readily apparent that the leader’s questioning style has a pervasive effect on the issues that organizational members worry about.

Next, mentors must see things in total perspective. Thought fragmentation characterizes immature people. They develop fixations on one event or idea and do not seem to be able to bring it into proper relationship with other matters. In short, they don’t see the whole picture. And this makes it difficult for some would-be mentors to identify their own leadership properly though their failures may be quite obvious to many friends and family. The particular problem at hand may have a history deeply rooted in the relationships and interrelationships of a very complex society. Part of this perspective requires us to recognize the vocational aspect of ministry.

As Christian leaders and teachers draw heavily from secular research and integrate those findings with Christian theism, vast progress can be made in our understanding of leadership development. But one uniquely biblical dimension is the idea that God calls and gifts people for leadership positions. In dealing with the subject of the leader’s example, Hudson Armerding talks about long-term accountability. He says,

For me, the prospect of divine assessment is a stimulus to excellence and an antidote for indolence. In addition, our experience of God’s love powerfully motivates us to “climb the steep ascent of heaven through peril, toil, and pain.” The challenge to the Christian leader from the Reginald Heber hymn from which I just quoted says this, “Who follows in our train?” I believe our example of accountability can summon others to this kind of life. They will need to see specific, tangible instances, however, to assure them that what we propose is practicable.

Mentors must resist the temptation to be only a teller. I mentioned this at least once already, but the temptation is complicated by the fact that many leaders and many followers want precisely this kind of relationship. At times it may seem logical simply to tell a mentee what he ought to be doing. Such telling, however, takes the burden of thinking through the problem off the shoulders of the learner and makes it even more dependent on his newfound adviser. Should the solution be effective, the mentee returns again and again for solutions to other problems maybe even of increasing complexity. If the advice proves inadequate, however, he can always pass along the blame for any negative results directly to the mentor. Simply say I was only doing what he told me to do.

Let’s move now to the process of Christian mentoring. Mentoring is most effective when the contact is initiated by the mentee. Therefore, the leader who wishes to function effectively in this role should recognize some of the basic principles involved in the process. Way back in an early book in Christian psychology, The Psychology of Counseling, Narramore answered the question, “To whom do they turn?” when speaking of functioning in the counseling role within the Christian context. He suggests seven drawing characteristics of successful counselors which relate rather nicely to mentoring as well. People usually turn to someone they know. People take their problems to someone they like. People take their problems to someone they respect.

People are most likely to seek help from Christian leaders who indicate their interest in counseling. People turn for counseling to someone whom they feel is competent. People take their problems to someone who observes professional ethics. People turn to the counselor who knows God.

The process of Christian mentoring, be available. A mentor must be accessible to his protégé or mentee. This involves more than a geographical location. It represents an entire attitude toward other people. The available mentor somehow escapes from the workload on his own desk. Depending on the mentoring situation, the mentee may or may not need vast blocks of the leader’s time. As maturity and experience develop, we delegate individual tasks very much a part of the mentoring process. Our apprentices are not necessarily rookies, just people who need to take the next step or two in the leadership process. Nevertheless there are times when the mentee needs you, and he or she needs to be able to find you and to obtain the necessary guidance so essential for that critical moment in progress. Availability also implies an allowance of sufficient time for each learner so that her problem can be satisfactorily handled. Obviously, this puts a limitation on the number of mentees a mentor can handle at one time. My own experience indicates that in addition to my staff, with whom a mentoring relationship is always ongoing, I can probably deal with one or two developing leaders in a mentoring relationship over the course of a year. Sometimes that will linger longer than a year. Sometimes one or both will be replaced because of moving or other kinds of factors. It’s a very fluid, very flexible kind of thing.

Next, be credible. Let the mentee see your insides. Understand how you make the decisions you do and why you hold the values and priorities which characterize your leadership style since leadership is primarily relational and the mentoring process provides greater connection between leader and learner as persons than there is between leadership-followership roles. In their most recent book to which I’ve referred several times, Credibility, Kouzes and Posner emphasize that credibility requires self-discovery, appreciation of colleagues, affirmation of shared values, developing capacity, serving a purpose, sustaining hope, and acknowledging the contention between freedom and constraint in leadership. The leader who has operated his leadership role within a team framework, who involves people, relates to them satisfactorily from day to day, will be the leader who stands in a satisfactory position to mentor them.

Other leaders, students, people in the organization already feel an attitude of confidence toward the ability and commitment of the properly functioning leader. Nevertheless, in the actual mentoring process, we must allow our mentees to relate to us in an informal way, a relaxed, natural, open, vulnerable posture. Avoid stiffness in attitude and in jargon. Attempt of course to speak the learner’s language at all times.

Third, be ethical. We all know that parents talk about their children. Teachers talk about their students, and leaders talk about their followers. Within the boundaries of discretion, this is not necessarily harmful behavior. But the mentor-mentee relationship carries with it some boundaries of confidentiality which are not unlike the counseling situation to which I have frequently referred. Ethical behavior in mentoring requires that the mentor at times must invoke almost a lawyer-client or doctor-patient relationship unless prohibited by some institutional or civic legal structure. Part of the vulnerability is letting mentees see that we struggle with the same problems that they find so enormous in their own lives. That’s why it’s so important not to be flippant about it and say, “You know that’s not such a big deal. I have faced that. I’ve faced that every week. No problem, you’ll learn how to deal with it.” Rather, throw those questions back on the mentee. Oh really, they didn’t do what you wanted them to do? What happened next? What do you intend to do about that? Do you see any solutions here? That’s the way we want to mentor, not dumping our own experience history on the mentee.

And wise mentors never minimize the problem which the mentee describes. We never show shock at anything the mentee tells us. Throughout the process, we’re constantly alert for underlying struggles which hinder leadership progress: physical exhaustion, emotional disturbances, financial difficulties, and even evidence of sin in life, maybe a guilt complex which arises from real or imagined factors. In a fascinating approach to the subject, Koestenbaum turns our words around. Instead of suggesting mentoring means ethics, he suggests that ethics and leadership mean mentoring. Isn’t that interesting? Rather than developing people for the sake of jobs, he says, it is wiser to develop jobs for the sake of people. This statement may seem excessive, for companies must make a profit. But profit comes when people find meaning in their work. That’s a good sentence, good several sentences there. It’s fascinating.

In higher education, I have long lived by a hiring philosophy rather reminiscent of the professional sports enterprise, not in salary I might quickly add, but in philosophy. Namely, take the best player in the draft. Sometimes one must fill a certain vacant position and can only use an employee with certain skills. If you need a tight end, you need a tight end. And a little running back won’t do it, and a three-hundred-pound center won’t do it. If you need a tight end, that’s what you have to get. But other times, there comes along a highly gifted, highly motivated, deeply spiritual person who doesn’t seem to fit any particular niche at the moment but whose maturity and leadership potential has been thrust in our paths by a sovereign God who almost shouts at us, “What will you do with this one?”

Next, be instructive. Having belabored some of the distinctions between teaching and mentoring, it may be useful to dwell for a moment on the similarities. Obviously, all three learning dimensions are at stake in both teaching and mentoring: the cognitive, the knowledge domain, the affective attitudes, and conative behavior. Since conative deals with doing, mentoring often focuses on that dimension. How does one conduct a meeting? How does one make public announcements? How does one go about the process of hiring or firing? These are all leadership behaviors, and they’re all conative issues. But they carry enormous baggage from the cognitive and affective domains. In other words, you have to know something and feel something before you can do something correctly: cognitive, affective, and conative. There’s a knowledge involved in structuring a meeting. There are extremely important attitudes in hiring and firing people. So the mentor really is always a teacher though more than a teacher as we have defined the process in this study. Back to Koestenbaum one more time. He says,

A leader’s obligation is to develop the people for whom he or she is responsible, to help them become more marketable, more qualified professionals, to further their careers, to help them feel better about themselves, to equip them to confront the toughest vicissitudes of life. Mentors are like loving parents who feel fully responsibility for developing the independence of their children. This kind of teaching is based on a high degree of loyalty and commitment to the individual employee and on the recognition that humans are not expendable. Employees also can be expected to adopt a similar attitude of dedication to the organizations for which they work.

Koestenbaum appears in the bibliography, but that’s from his book entitled Simply Leadership published in 1991.

Be committed, final thought. In the mentoring process, there will be times when learners feel let down by their mentors and other times when mentors feel let down by their learners. What bridges these difficult gaps? What keeps us together in these moments of tension? And the answer is commitment. When a mentor and mentee link up, one of the first things they discuss is their long-term commitment, perhaps even defining time boundaries involved. Commitment means that mentors empower mentees with portions of their own influence and authority. Commitment means that mentees go out of their way to please and satisfy the suggested requirements of the mentoring situation. They don’t cut corners. They don’t offer excuses. They don’t fall into sloppy and shoddy work. Within the realm of Christian ministry, this attitude becomes even more binding by our mutual allegiance to the Savior. Precisely the same glue which binds Christian husband and wife closer together than those outside the faith, namely, they are one in Christ; that applies in a lesser impact to Christian mentoring.

So effectiveness in mentoring is determined by a number of things: one, the degree of rapport we establish; two, the effectiveness of the process itself; and three, the willingness of the mentee to grow. In Christian mentoring, there resides a supernatural ingredient. It’s there in the life of the leader, and it’s there in the life of the learner. And that supernatural ingredient introduces a dimension which can never play a role in secular mentoring. It’s simply not possible. Christian leaders capitalize upon this plus factor as we apply the power of the Word of God and the supernatural dynamic of prayer and the vitality of the Holy Spirit in every mentoring situation. The yielding of the self to Christ, making death with Him the working principle that informs the whole life of the redeemed individual was Paul’s desire when he said, “For me to live is Christ.” Those of us who follow the Lord don’t place their trust in brilliance or eloquence but rather in Him and in His cross and in the sovereign power of His Father and our Father, the almighty God.