On a recent podcast, I heard the speaker say, “We have less capacity to listen in our culture today than we did in the past.” I disagree. I say, “No, our capacity is not the issue, our intentionality is.” Jesus said it: “He or she who has ears to hear, listen”
I’ve been musing on this and found myself coming to a new thought: What happens to the mentor when they have ears to hear? Does something change in you as a mentor because you engage in deep listening? I think the answer is yes. Read More
When she first sat at her mentor’s table, she couldn’t precisely tell you why she was there. Her life wasn’t falling apart, her prayers didn’t feel hollow, her faith hadn’t been shaken, but she was looking for something more. “I think I have settled for shallow waters along the shore, and I know deep waters are calling to me, I know that deep calls to deep.” She didn’t expect answers, but maybe good questions, presence, and trusted words to help in reading the stories she knew. God was still writing with her. In the weeks that followed, she experienced a slow, steady uncovering of grace in the deeply personal, ordinary, sacred steps of her journey.
Spiritual mentoring, or simply call it spiritual friendship, is an intentional and deliberate process of sacred conversations for the purpose of soul formation. From my own experience with the mentors of my own life, I know it to engage at least three common experiences… Read More
It was thirty-two years ago, and the memory is still strong. I was in my second year as campus pastor at my alma mater in St. Paul. A beloved faculty member was fired just days before the start of the school year. We became a community in pain, crisis, and conflict. Emotions were running high, and feelings were deep, and we needed to be ready for the students to watch us as we taught by our actions, words, and reactions. I wrote a pastoral letter to the community asking for calm and redemptive love as we muddled our way forward. The stakes are even higher for us in our divisions across our nation. I’ll share some of what I wrote then, never thinking it might apply so intensely today. Read More
In the familiar gospel story, Mary, newly pregnant, makes haste to see her cousin Elizabeth, who is surprisingly pregnant in her advanced years. We all need an Elizabeth.
You know their sons: Jesus and John, cousins, due to miraculous births. Mary knows that she has been given a mission, a future, and a sacred purpose beyond anything her own life drama could write or imagine. Why? Because she had experienced a “Theo drama,” in which God invited her to a task too large for a young Jewish girl to imagine on her own. Her response? “Let it be to me as you have said, I will set aside my own ego drama for something you intend for my life and through my life to the entire world.” Theos, of course, is the Greek word for God.[1]
Mary reaches out to someone else who has found her role in step with God at the opposite season of life to the teenage girl. Elizabeth has also seen her purpose in the larger drama of God’s explosive plan for the universe: “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Before John the Baptist and Jesus knew their sacred purpose, two women, mothers both, young and old, were overcome by the drama of God’s call and purpose for their lives. Two women, neither highly educated nor socially prominent, set aside their own plans and accepted a larger plan for them and through them. Read More
You have been asked to become a mentor to another. There are few honors in life more precious than to walk alongside a brother or sister on a journey of spiritual formation. If you feel overwhelmed and doubt your worthiness for the task, this is a good sign that you are ready and may be qualified, for the ministry of a mentor begins with humility. You may feel something akin to great unworthiness and are likely to exclaim, “Who am I that anyone should emulate me? I know my own flaws and failures, my contradictions, far too well, and the passions within that rise up in unholiness, as well as moments of holiness. And yet I feel the joyfulness of opportunity—maybe I could help this friend listen to life. I know that I can ask some pertinent questions and can help this friend think through these questions.”
Keith’s “Little Explorer on Board” blog last week caused me to think more about the connection between spiritual mentoring, leaving a legacy, and committing to our growth. This led me to recall one such person in my family whose influence has spread across several generations. My Uncle Tom was my dad’s uncle, one of my grandmother’s four brothers.
Uncle Tom was quite a humorous character. In our family, the stories abound. He was the sort of person who, when told not to touch the chocolate fudge cooling in the kitchen, was known not just to brush aside such cautions by taking a finger full, but he was known to take the whole tray with him to work. As a butcher, he was known to cause a couple of unsuspecting women to all but pass out by his sharp chop of the cleaver, followed by yelling and writhing as if he had just chopped off a finger or two.
My dad tells a story of Uncle Tom taking him and his sister fishing when they were still young at a creek a short walk from their house. Now, this creek was lucky to have a couple of frogs, some worms, and a stray snake or two. It majored mostly on mosquitoes. There were no fish to be found in that creek. But my dad and Aunt Harriet were very young, and they didn’t know better. So off they went with Uncle Tom and two fishing rods. He generated the enthusiasm of a serious fisherman at a raging Montana stream. Once they got to the creek, he set them up, and they started fishing. He didn’t place them right next to each other but spread them out a bit “so that we can find out where the fish are really biting.” As Dad tells it, Uncle Tom moved back and forth between the two of them for a bit. Read More
The silver-gray VW SUV stopped at the light on Highway 20 just in front of me. On the back of the car was a sticker with the words “Little explorer on board ” in cursive letters. As the father-in-law and grandfather of two firefighters, I know the sticker intends to alert first responders that a child is more than likely in the vehicle.
I mused about that idea for the rest of my drive home. What if we had a sticker like that on our Bibles?
Spiritual mentoring is too often understood as only something between one person and an older, wise mentor—end of sentence.
The driver of this SUV wants others to know they have a little explorer on board. Would they consider that their spiritual maturity, discipline, and growth have similar implications for their children or grandchildren? Read More
If you’re a Puritan, this picture might not scare you. If you lived in the 1650s, you might recognize this man whose name is Richard Baxter. He has a bad hat and a good heart and wrote an important book.
It is not about a Reformed theology but about formation, primarily how people in a congregation become spiritually formed. The book is older than the United States, is still in print, and is centuries deep. It’s had that kind of impact. I’m not sure he still gets royalties, but his words still need to be heard, especially by mentors, leaders, and pastors. I’m really not cool with his hat.
He wrote to his congregation, “See that the work of saving grace be thoroughly wrought in your own souls.” Then, four riveting words: “Take heed to yourselves, lest you be void of that saving grace of God which you offer to others.”[i] Read More
If a resume is necessary to be involved in the mentoring ministry, the most essential guideline should be that perfect people need not apply. Mentors are not superheroes or champions. They are those who stand alongside one another with unending curiosity, inexplicable faith, and patience. You might be considering a mentoring relationship yourself and wonder if special qualities, such as a highly successful spiritual life, are required.
What kind of person is best for this ministry? The more time we spend on scripture, the more we realize that there aren’t really heroes of faith or perfect people. Read More
Mentoring the next generation of followers of Jesus is not an elective; it is a required course in the curriculum of faith. Here’s why:
I sat in the back of remarkable architecture in a cathedral in Scotland. It was no longer a vibrant congregation of the faithful; instead, it was a museum of the past. Only a very few saw this as a place for the formation of faith, and this narrative is repeated across Europe.
Mentoring, discipleship, and spiritual formation for the next generation is not an elective for us; it is a required course in the curriculum of faith. Again, here’s why: Read More
"Practical. Insightful. In my 50 years as a pastor, I’ve read many of these. This is THE best. I ordered 12 to give as gifts.”
