Life is full of contradictions! I have said often that you can’t teach mentoring through a lecture. People need to actually experience the love, care, and interest of someone walking with them in their journey to becoming what they were meant to be in Christ. But here I am promoting a video course on spiritual mentoring. In our second venture into microlearning with our BGST friends, we are offering a microleaning course on Spiritual Mentoring. It will consist of 12 segments of about 10 minutes each. As with our other micro-learning course on Spiritual Friendship, you can learn at your own pace, 10 minutes at a time.
I realise that there is still value in a video course like this for various groups of people.
First, there are those who are already practitioners. This video course may help give language to what they are doing. There is a lot of good material out there. I hope this is one more. My hope is that folks will improve on what is presented here. Mentoring is so key to spiritual formation we need to be looking at how we can do it better all the time.
Second, there are groups and individuals who want to start mentoring programmes. Often, there is a call to those who want to be mentored and to those who want to mentor. Then those organising this try to match up mentors and mentorees. Too often this has led to disaster as there is no explicit understanding as to what is mentoring and what are the qualities of good mentors and mentorees. Mismatched expectations have led to conflict and disillusionment, with some backing off from being mentors or being mentored. If organisers, potential mentors, and potential mentorees were to go through our video course, there could at least be the beginnings of a common understanding.
Third, there has been an exponential increase in the number of those who are asking Graceworks to provide training in mentoring. I really enjoy teaching live. But I realise that I will burn out if I were to give the same lectures on mentoring again and again in close succession. One possibility is to direct folks to watch the microlearning course and then spend face-to-face time fielding questions and working out how mentoring can be introduced into a particular community. I don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach when helping different groups start their mentoring journeys.
We still believe that mentoring training must have an experiential component. Bernice and I often invite mentor-training groups to our house for dinner so that we can model spiritual friendship. We will continue to do this. We still believe you can’t teach mentoring just by telling people what it is. You need to show it. But we think it is timely that we now have a microleaning course on mentoring as well.
Recently, someone I had the privilege to journey with wrote this:
Mentors are people who help you to be the best version of who God made you to be.
Couldn’t have said it better. By God’s help, this is what I try to do when I mentor. It is my hope that all who seek to do spiritual mentoring have this same goal.