About two years ago, our church board began talking about the need to train up the next generation of leaders in our church to one day, hopefully, be able to replace all of us! As individuals on the board, we recognized that we’re not going to be around forever, and we wanted to make sure that there were trained, capable leaders who could slowly start taking responsibility now so that, sometime down the road, they could lead and shepherd this church without us.
And so those conversations gave birth to a test program that we started last fall called the Emerging Leaders Team. And what we did, was we identified a handful of young adults who had displayed some good leadership qualities in their lives and we invited them to take take part in this program where we would train them to be effective leaders in their homes, in their church, or in any other realm of life where God may lead them.
But one of the cool things we did with them, is we had them form a shadow board – kinda like our church board, but without the weight of all the responsibilities. On this shadow board, they could discuss all the same real-life issues facing our current church board – and they could learn to make those decisions without any real risk of making a poor decision.
And so they held board meetings just like our church board does – and they used the same agenda and discussed all the same issues – and I think it was a great learning experience for them! However, we also gave them the freedom to bring up any other issues that they would like to discuss. We thought perhaps they would have concerns or see issues that our current board might not be aware of…. Well, they did!
And this is why I’m sharing all this with you today. One of the issues that they wanted to look at was the issue of mentorship. They identified that there were many people in our church (themselves being part of that group) who were really interested in having some older, wiser people in their lives who would be willing to share some of their wisdom and life experiences. They wanted a mentor who could share some Godly wisdom and advice – or at the very least, could encourage them and give them some practical support as someone who has “been there/done that” as they face the difficult issues of life.
And of course, this isn’t just a good idea – this is a Biblical idea! Actually, it’s many Biblical ideas! Biblical mentoring touches on many Biblical commands: things like encouragement, discipleship, fellowship, accountability, prayer, studying God’s Word, maturing together in the Lord. A mentoring relationship provides such a great framework for so many of these life-building activities that God commands us to do together!
So when the ELT shadow board identified this need for mentoring in our church, I was very happy to encourage them to put together a game-plan for how this might happen. And they did just that. They put together a committee to look at what mentoring might look like in our church and how people might become either a mentor or a mentee. They looked at what kind of training mentors might need and how to get people involved in the process. Overall, they did a really fantastic job and they presented this all to our church board. Well, our church board looked over everything they did and were totally excited to make this happen. In fact, everyone of our elders are planning to play a key role in the mentor-training process… But I’ll tell you more about that later!
Right now, I just want to tell you about the next few weeks. For the next few weeks, our Sunday morning messages will be revolving around some of the Biblical principles of mentoring. My message today will be a bit of an introduction and I’ll hope to define what exactly mentoring is and how that ties in with our call to make disciples!
And then our next two messages will be brought by a couple of different young guys who were on the Emerging Leaders Team and the mentorship committee who helped think through all these principles and processes. They’re going to share a bit of their own experiences with mentoring – along with some further Biblical foundations for mentoring.
And then after all that, we’re going to invite everyone of you to get involved in some way in a mentoring relationship! And of course, we’re going to explain all the details for all of this as we go along.
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