Mentoring ... a Function, not a Form

As you look back over your life and leadership one thing that surfaces in everyone's development story is relationships. Relationships that helped shape who we are as people and leaders. Yet one of the hardest things to do from a transformation perspective in a church family is to develop mentoring relationships at a scale that produces massive life change.

As we wrestle with how we create a culture where life on life transformation happens, there are two obstacles that surface to the top fast:

First, mentoring can't be prescribed or programitized (is that a new word?). You can't manufacture relationships that will work, so it has to be more organic in nature.

Secondly, people are intimidated by mentoring and the concept of mentoring.

It is this second obstacle that I think is the bottleneck for most churches, those who can mentor and should mentor ... are scared to mentor and confused as to what mentoring is.

Too many of us have a picture in our head when we hear the word "mentoring" that is very limiting to the relationships we can develop. We either have a master / student picture, where one person dumps their full bucket of wisdom into someone dry bucket. Or we have an accountability relationship picture where you ask me 7 questions and I will ask you 7 questions. Everyone I talk to seems to have a mental form in their mind when it comes to mentoring, usually a pretty narrow form.

For mentoring to ignite in a church, we have to help people have a new mental picture. The picture that I've adopted, most due to a mentor of mine Rowland Forman, is that mentoring is an intentional spiritual friendship. It can take many shapes and forms, but it is simply a friendship that is intentional about helping each other live well. If it is a friendship, but not intentional ... that isn't mentoring. If it is intentional without the friendship, that isn't mentoring ... that's someone's project, and no one wants to be a project.

As you think of mentoring, let's think of it as not a specific form but the function of intentional spiritual friendships.