When faithful followers of Jesus step into vocational ministry today, they face increasingly complex roles. The issues range from budgeting and financial management, leading a capital campaign, growing elders when they are the bosses, hiring and (sometimes) dismissing staff, handling anonymous letters, preventing organizational issues from overwhelming a healthy spiritual life, and more.
A couple of generations back, most people thought church was a good idea. If a minister could preach an interesting sermon—at least as good as his predecessor and the pastor down the road—do decent weddings and funerals, and willingly make hospital calls, he could survive and the church might grow.
Today it’s a different, often hostile world. Many churches struggle for survival, and for those that are growing, there’s pressure to go to the next level. A pastor must be a compelling communicator, an entrepreneur, a marketer, a visionary leader, a developer of leaders, adept at social media, and do amazing things with limited resources on a short timeline.
The weekend is coming. Relentlessly. It’s a pressure cooker.
Christian colleges and seminaries have taken heat for not adequately preparing men and women for ministry. But they can’t do it all. Classroom teaching can provide valuable foundational knowledge, but much ministry is only learned on the job, with coaching.
Christian leaders face staff conflicts, organizational confusion, personal malaise, job searches, and just the normal week-to-week questions of ministry for which they frequently lack support and guidance.
In the last few years the topic of mentoring has exploded in ministry discussions. Today it’s not just young leaders who are asking for guidance; leaders of all ages are reaching out to those a few steps ahead in the journey. Learning ministry is a lifelong process.
Life to life.
Jesus modeled mentorship as He taught the Twelve how to live and how to serve. He sent them out to teach and to heal. One day they came back frustrated, having failed at casting out demons. He reviewed with them the basics of fasting and prayer in dealing with demonic powers. It’s likely this wasn’t all new information, but there are limits to what can be absorbed through lectures. Some critical lessons of ministry are learned situationally, on a need-to-know basis.
The heart of Jesus’s development of the Twelve wasn’t a class or a program, it was life to life. Much of the best ministry education comes through mentoring.
Mentoring doesn’t require one of the people to be an “expert”—just to have a little more experience. It’s not always about having the right answers and perfect solutions. It’s often sharing mistakes to avoid—things the mentor would have done differently, given present knowledge.
At its best, mentoring isn’t just about how to do the job, it’s also about how to live. Most pastoral failures aren’t because of a lack of knowledge of correct debt ratios, they are because of personal meltdowns. Good mentoring relationships take many forms:
- Some are structured, with regular meeting times and formats. Others are informal and irregular, but with significant depth in conversation.
- All good mentoring relationships involve open dialogue and frank discussion of personal issues, with challenge and correction when needed.
- Leaders find it hard to get good feedback. They tend to hear from their fans and their critics—neither of which is especially helpful. A good mentor brings objectivity into play.
- A key to effective mentoring is that it’s not one size fits all—it is by nature personalized. Mentoring is sometimes done effectively in groups. But it is more often one-to-one, as that allows for the maximum personalization.
Into the future.
On the one hand, mentoring sounds like a no-brainer. No one will dispute that leadership development is critical. But everybody is busy, and getting together for conversation requires time.
There are other challenges as well. Today a growing number of women are moving into a broader range of leadership roles. If the repository of leadership knowledge and experience is with men who are not sharing that with women, the church will be far less than it could be.
The last couple of generations of male pastors have grown up with the “Billy Graham rule” that a man should not meet alone with a woman. This has served an excellent purpose, but it has also severely limited the transfer of knowledge and experience to female leaders. Is it possible in the context of fully God-honoring relationships to find ways for women to benefit from the generations of ministry experience of their male coworkers?
Like most good things, mentoring isn’t a one-way street. Both parties are stretched to learn and grow. Mentoring people provides great meaning to the mentor in addition to providing great benefit to the mentee. Mentoring or being mentored by someone from a different culture can help a leader think beyond their community and beyond their own style of communication. Immense joy comes from developing these new relationships.
New opportunities.
Whatever stage you are at in your ministry journey, you can benefit from a relationship with someone who is just a little farther along. Sometimes these relationships are easy to come by—you might simply ask someone who has already been a guide to you along the way to become a more formal mentor. In other situations, though, there may be no mentors in sight. If that is true for you, consider pursuing mentoring opportunities within the broader Christian Church, like The Ascent’s leadership cohorts and coaches.
When you and a mentor commit to regularly growing together, you will gain from their knowledge, experience, transparency, and vulnerability. They will be able to offer you invaluable insight into handling the complexities and pressures of leadership.
Mentoring at its very best isn’t a program. It’s a culture of sharing knowledge and experience, where everyone is growing and willing to help others in the journey. When church leaders develop a culture of mentoring within a congregation, ministry will become more effective. There is no substitute for one life impacting another.
Let’s journey together.
You don’t need to do ministry alone. You can find opportunities to connect, plus more content and conversations about church administration, at XP Summit: xpsummit.org.
NOTE: This article was adapted from a previous posting by Dick Alexander, former CDF Capital board member and respected ministry mentor. We’re grateful for Dick’s insight and service to the kingdom through various ministries and the local church.
