How great a blessing it is to meet a mentor who can help us grow. The story of Mencius’ mother moving three times for her son’s education is well known to us. Elisha stayed with his teacher until the very end to inherit Elijah’s spiritual authority. Without a mentee’s relentless passion to learn from a mentor, mentoring seems impossible. Yet the fundamental question we must ask to restore the ministry of mentoring is this: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In other words, who seeks whom? Is it the mentee or the mentor? Who should initiate the relationship?
The answer can be found in how the Lord Himself began His mentoring ministry.
“Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness” (Matthew 10:1).
“‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people’” (Mark 1:17).
“As he walked along, he saw Levi, son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax booth. ‘Follow me,’ Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him” (Mark 2:14).
“Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him” (Mark 3:13).
The Lord did not wait for disciples to come looking for a teacher. According to His own plan, He personally sought out and called those who had the greatest potential to carry on His ministry. For three and a half years, He shared His life with them and mentored them.
In the million-seller The Master Plan of Evangelism, Robert Coleman analyzes Jesus’ disciple-making process in eight stages: selection, association, consecration, impartation, demonstration, delegation, supervision, and reproduction. The goal of this eight-stage process is to discern and select people capable of reproduction, train them, and form them into spiritual leaders who can reproduce again. If the final goal of discipleship is reproduction, then its starting point must be the selection of those capable of reproduction. This is not the responsibility of the mentee; it is the ministry of the mentor. Disciples are not recruited. Rather, the trainer identifies, invites, and trains those who should receive discipleship—those who have the capacity for reproduction.
John Maxwell writes in The Principles of Leadership 2.0:
“A leader must possess not only an important but almost ‘sacred’ ability—the ability to recognize potential in others. One of the most important responsibilities given to successful leaders is to discover and train potential leaders. This is never easy, but it is critically important.”
Dale Carnegie, widely known as the pioneer of self-development books such as How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, passed away nearly seventy years ago, yet his influence continues through the Carnegie Leadership Course. During his lifetime, a newspaper reporter once asked him, “I understand that 43 of your company’s employees became millionaires. How were you able to hire millionaires and have them work for you?” Carnegie replied, “When I hired them, they were not millionaires. The fact that they became millionaires was simply the result of working with me.” The reporter then asked, “What was your secret to making those 43 people such outstandingly successful businessmen?” Carnegie answered, “People are developed the same way gold is refined. To extract one ounce of gold, tons of impurities must first be removed. But when we enter a mine, we do not go in looking for impurities—we go in looking for gold. The same is true when I look for positive and successful people. I search not for impurities, but for pure gold. When we look at people with positive eyes, we begin to see the gold within them rather than the impurities.”
The day Moses truly became a leader was the day he received mentoring from his father-in-law, Jethro. That mentoring was unsolicited advice from a father-in-law to a son-in-law—it was not help requested by Moses. If our churches and denominations are truly preparing for the future, they must raise future leaders. And this task cannot be entrusted solely to seminary professors. It becomes possible only when leaders seek out promising “gold ore,” remove the impurities, and train until pure gold emerges.
During the Trojan War, King Odysseus was required to go to battle. In his absence, his close friend Mentor raised and disciplined Odysseus’s son as if he were his own. Simply being warm, understanding, and accepting does not shape a person. Neither does harsh rebuke alone produce a moral human being. Discipline is not a science—it is an art. Over ten years, Mentor devoted himself to helping the latent character and emotional maturity within his friend’s son emerge healthily and maturely. When Odysseus returned to his kingdom after the war, he saw that his son had grown into a confident and mature adult. Overwhelmed with gratitude, he praised his friend, saying, “My friend, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You truly are worthy of your name—Mentor!” From that time on, the Greeks began calling great teachers “mentors.”
If every pastor in our denomination could become a mentor and discover and raise even one next-generation leader, the future of the denomination would be bright and strong. Let us remember this: the person who should initiate a mentoring relationship is not the mentee, but the mentor.