Description

In this first episode of the Mentoring Intelligence Series, Phil share from why mentoring seems to be talked and written about, but fewer leaders seem to be actually investing in the next generation in an intentional way. He discusses some of the personal and structural barriers to a mentoring lifestyle and why Jesus’ model of leadership is the only one that reproduces life in others.

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Video Script

Episode 1 Intro: Why is Mentoring a Lost Art?

In recent years the term mentoring has become more common, even in the church. But is this just discipleship by a different name? or is it a different type of relationship altogether? In this introductory episode we want to look at what mentoring  really is and what are the hindrances to creating a mentoring lifestyle within our leadership. With all the books and teaching on mentoring , Why has it become such a lost art? Why is it more talked about than actually done? You might be surprised to find out some of the reasons why .

Some Good Advice for Jesus

If Jesus would have asked me for some advise when he started his ministry I am sure I could have been a big help. I mean with the added experience of 2000 years of  leadership training — after all he didn’t have access to any leadership development resources back then, right?  So if he would have approached me and mentioned that he needed to make a lasting impact in only 3 years, I am sure I could have made some great suggestions. It obvious that according to current leadership methodology he would have to gain an audience by doing something spectacular early in his ministry – perhaps something like raising someone from the dead. That would really impress people and then of course he could write a book and do a podcast with a full social media presence. The headliner would be, “How to raise the dead and influence the world for generations.”

Great advice, right? Maybe not so much. But instead, what did Jesus do? He began by walking along the beach and calling a few guys to follow him…..and let’s be honest, it seems he didn’t even choose the brightest Jewish boys. Didn’t seem like much of a team. Then he spent lots of time with them over the course of three years. By current leadership standards, doesn’t really seem like much of a plan for success.  It actually gets worse, at the end of this ill-advised strategy he gets murdered on a cross and only one of these twelve is anywhere to be seen. Hmm, seems like kind of a failed plan of leadership development, in both strategy and execution. Very few of us aspire to do ministry and leadership like this.

Why was Jesus so Successful?

So what was so successful about Jesus’ approach? Is this even doable today? I would suggest that to the degree that we understand Jesus’ approach and get back to that model of developing leaders is the degree to which we will be healthy leaders who reproduce other healthy leaders. Healthy leadership fosters healthy churches, which are grace filled places in this dark world. Only in retrospect do we see the genius of Jesus’ approach, and yet even though we see the long term impact, it is hard to follow this example today.

I wonder why that is. Perhaps it has something to do with what we consider to be a successful life, leadership or ministry. Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place for success in leadership. It’s important for me to mention that when I talk about “leadership” in this series,  I am not primarily thinking of position or title. As we use our gifts and abilities, we influence others….and that is leadership. It can be for the good or not so good, but in some sense we all have a sphere of influence or leadership.  But more about that later.

 Mentoring: A Difficult Lifestyle?

Well there is no shortage of books on the topic of mentoring. But why does it not seem to become a lifestyle with a vast majority of leaders?

Personally, my roots go back to the discipleship movement that grew out of the Jesus People movement in the 1970s. Though I grew up in a  Christian home and church, I was deeply impacted on both a personal and ministry level by the simple idea that ministry, and I would say Christian leadership, is passed on through relationship. It is more caught than taught. This was a bit counter to what I saw in the church I grew up in.

This relational approach was the focus of the discipleship movement, of course some guys went sideways using it to manipulate and gain power over others , what was to become known as the Shepherding Movement – which was more about control than developing and releasing others.

As a late teen and early adult I was deeply impacted by this relational approach to ministry, contrary to what I saw in most churches I was around. So in my early days in ministry, I longed for someone to mentor me, to come alongside of me and show me the ropes so to speak….and mentors were few and far between. Most of those in places of authority and leadership were busy building their own ministries, not turning around and helping a young leader find his way. If we were to chat over coffee, I am sure you would tell me that this was your experience also. I have heard this from leaders around the world. The reality is that we pass on leadership to others the way it has been passed on to us.

A Change of Priorities

You would be hard pressed to find someone who thought the idea of mentoring was a bad one. We all agree what an awesome thing Jesus did with his disciples, but usually we don’t know where to start or how to pull it off. But I guess what I am trying to say is, “If we are going to recover this lost art of mentoring we are going to start with a change in our priorities. Of course, we all want Jesus’ level of results, but are we willing to pay the price for Jesus’ methodology?

When I first wrote my book, Mentoring Intelligence, I was in mid-life and my focus was on the next, Millennial Generation. Since then they have grown up and are now in mid-life and Generation Z are now becoming young adults. In order to be engaged in mentoring the next generation we have to understand their values. The good news is that this is a learnable skill — but it does require some intentionality, it does not automatically come with whatever leadership position or authority we may have. I would suggest that this is the only style of leadership that is truly life-giving.

Glut of Info – Deficiency of Wisdom

The irony is that in our increasingly digitized world, with the explosion of social media – which are more pseudo-social than reality — there is a hunger by the next generation for leaders to engage in a more relational approach. Unfortunately, we often settle to pass on academic training or even use high-tech education, but the reality is that the best way to help others grow is to come alongside of them and spend time with them. That’s mentoring.

Over the last couple decades I have taught a series of seminars on this subject from Russia, Europe, China, Africa, Latin America. What I have noticed is that there are many more people wanting to be mentored than are willing to be mentors. There are many reasons for this, but the reality is that it is easier to just “google” and download information to someone than to get down in the trenches and help them with their leadership and life formation. The result is that we have a glut of information, but a deficiency of wisdom.

Discipleship vs. Mentoring

The early discipleship movement with its focus on relationship and accountability is what laid a foundation in my own  life. As my thinking has become more focused on this topic over the years, I now make a differentiation between discipleship and mentoring. While both should involve a relational approach, for our purposes, when I use the term, “discipleship” I am referring  to helping someone grow in the faith – while “mentoring” refers to helping someone grow in their leadership potential and capacity.

An Ancient Practise

The practise of mentoring was not foreign to either the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and so it is somewhat ironic that we in the church have only more recently rediscovered it. In my PhD research it was surprising to discover that in the 1950s business organizations re-discovered it before the church, as they saw the bottom line benefit of using it to develop business leaders!

Mentoring includes learning skills and being intentional, but it is also must become a lifestyle and attitude that creates the space for these skills to be effective and life-giving, rather than being overbearing and controlling.

Some twenty-five years ago, while living in Berlin I developed some Mentoring manuals to help train Church leaders in Europe. While the concept at the time was more common in the business world, at that time it was not a term used much within the church.

This was particularly the case in many of the countries in which I was doing conferences. I began to discover that were some obvious, and other not so obvious, barriers to implementing what everyone generally thought was a good idea. As I taught mentoring conferences around the world, I discovered little opposition to the basic concept, yet I also discovered many leaders were struggling in implementing the principles and developing a mentoring lifestyle within their lives and organizations. I would teach my introductory seminar and then leave hoping they would begin doing it. However, when I returned 6 months or a year later, very few had implemented this in their leadership.

Intentionality and Structure Necessary

I began to realize that without intentionality and some sort of structure, mentoring was unlikely to happen in a church or leader’s life. Good intentions were just not enough. There are just too many distractions, including many good and necessary ministry activities, that make the good the enemy of the best. The fact is that most of us, rather than following Jesus’ ministry example, have been taught a different way of doing ministry. So our basic ministry/church structures actually work against implementing mentoring to train up the next generation of leaders.

I have also noticed that in more western leaning cultures, one’s that typically are not relationally focussed, a relational approach which takes lots of “time” goes against our natural inclination and so it is difficult to become part of our lifestyle. On the other hand, in more naturally relational cultures there is also a struggle. While it is more natural to spend time together, it is often not focussed and so lacks accountability and intentionality. A mentoring relationship requires both a time investment and intentionality.

Mentoring is based upon a relationship, it is walking down the road of life together with someone who may be a couple steps ahead, but walking the journey with us. However, it requires some sort of structure or it likely won’t happen, but these need to be flexible…..it just can’t become another church program. This is why we have developed the Mentoring thru Intentional Relationships model which attempts to balance both of these.

Values of Next Generation

Mentoring intelligence refers to the ability of both the individual and organization in encouraging and fostering mentoring types of relationships. Some struggle in mentoring others due to the fact that they are not aware of the basic skills necessary in order to mentor another person. Others on the other hand feel inadequate, often due to a wrong ideas as to what mentoring actually involves.

Social media in the last ten years has been a huge driver of culture and has created pseudo connections, which do not really satisfy. We saw this most evident in the recent pandemic of 2020, for all the talk of “connecting” on video chats and social media, we discovered as a society that these were no substitute for actually in person, face to face connections.

I have also discovered that many youth cultures around the world have common values regardless of ethnic culture in which they are embedded. Typically they are looking for relationship and finding their  own truth, but they often don’t have the tools to achieve this goal. As I have shared this topic with youth on virtually every continent, I have discovered  that many may want a mentoring relationship, but either don’t know how to find it or fully understand the accountability required to benefit from such a relationship.

How to Develop Healthy Leaders

The main issue we are dealing with here is how to best develop leaders, remembering my broad definition of leadership. While there are some innate leadership skills that some individuals have, I am from the camp that believes that leaders are made, not born. So if we reproduce who we are, then it makes sense that we tend to perpetuate values and leadership the way they have been passed on to us.

In this series we want to look at a relational approach. How can we best reproduce healthy ministries and the next generation of leaders? The fact is that a church planting movement is really a leadership development movement.  Without growing healthy reproducing servant leaders the church will remain weak not fulfill its purpose. For the Good News to not die with our generation, we have to be intentional about investing in the next one. I don’t want to shock you this early in the series and be the bearer of bad news……but  we are all going to run out of time and die. And as has been said, “It is too late to dig a well when you start to feel thirsty.” We have to plan for this eventuality.

What is Success?

Healthy leadership is about doing something in our lifetime of significance, not just a focus on attaining  “success” by our societal standards of the time may be.  Often being engaged in activities of significance do not at the time seem to be all that successful, as we usually define success. I think this is why we can’t relate to Jesus method of ministry and leadership development. It still seems foreign and perhaps a bit naïve in the 21^st Century.

But God defines success differently and he has a pretty good track record. Abraham was given the promise or vision that he would be the father of a great nation that would bless all the nations of the earth, but he did not see it happen, neither did Isaac, Jacob arguably was just beginning to envision what had been promised to his grandfather…..in our ROI culture can we have the patience to have a multi-generational approach? This is the power of mentoring and what we are going to focus on in this series.

So, in our next episode we are going to explore our typical way of training leaders and identify some of the barriers that have arisen that actually work against developing these type of  mentoring relationships. I hope you’ll join me.

Some Leadership Matters to Consider

But before then, I’d like to leave you a few leadership matters to consider:

What is your focus in your leadership and ministry?

What does Success mean for you?

What are some of the barriers you face in being a mentor?