Be Your Brother’s Mentor
“Thank God I don’t have to go to church anymore.”
It might surprise you, but that’s what I told myself when I went away to college. Yet through the rather sly intervention of a dear woman who (although I didn’t know it at the time) had been praying fervently for me, I went off on a Christian retreat. And there, God, in essence, turned my world right side up. I went back to college as a very different person.
My Mentors
A part of what God was gracious to do at that point in my life was to send me, a man who ran a large Sunday school class at the church I was attending. And he became, over the course of my four years at college, a genuine mentor. He took a personal interest in me, and I wound up going with him when he spoke at retreats to see him in action, which meant teaching, preaching, laying hands on people and praying for them in rather supernatural ways. It was a new door that God opened in my life, and I walked right through it.
But this man wasn’t my only mentor. Over the course of about the next 12 to 15 years, God sent me a succession of mentors, five different men who were very different from each other. Besides the man I already mentioned, one was a farmer, one a successful businessman, one a bishop and one a priest. Their personalities were different, their giftedness was different, but each of them had something I needed to receive to become the leader I knew God was making me. And quite honestly, I am a lot of who I am today precisely because of those five men.
After about age 35, things began to shift. It was as if God was saying, “OK, now it’s your turn.” Now, I was in the mentor role. Both are vital—and supremely biblical.
Biblical Mentors
Do you know the names Titus, Timothy and Silas? All are men whom Paul mentored and raised up into life and ministry. They didn’t get their start with him, but the Lord used him in each of their lives. We know most of that by his letter to Timothy about how God spoke into his life in a way that shaped who he was as a leader.
The Bible assumes mentorships, that we will always have people walking beside us, people who are both teaching us and whom we are also teaching. There’s a kind of organic unity to how we function as people growing in discipleship that’s clearly laid out by example in the whole flow of the New Testament.
You see, the Bible never assumes we’re doing this Christian life on our own. Instead, it speaks to the fact that God is working in a whole series of relationships through which He is shaping us, and that He is using us in turn to shape others. That’s considered normal Christian life.
So Paul, who had an ongoing mentoring relationship with these three men, would urge you to answer these questions: “Who is mentoring me in my Christian walk? To whom am I reaching out as a mentor to help bring them along? Who are the people whom I consider companions in the faith, with whom I am engaged in ministry?”
Mentors Matter
Why is mentorship so important? Because the task of discipleship is so high. If I know my own heart, I realize I need the input of other people to become the person God has called me to be. I can’t do this on my own. Not if I’m going to reach the call of God on my life. And the church cannot grow in the ways we hope it will if these kinds of mentoring relationships aren’t in place, functioning in ways that allow us to, as it says in Ephesians 4:13, “come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.
That’s the standard, which means we are always–at one level or another—becoming. If God has given the church to the world as a light to the nations, if God has made a covenant with us as his people and the world, that we might be people to whom they go to see the very light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, if God expects our church to be a place where prophets function, where miracles occur, where we walk together in unity in a way that shows the world the love and the forgiveness we have received in Jesus—I need all the help I can get.
And that’s the standard, you see. The standard’s not the best local Episcopal church you know. The standard is a body of people expressing corporately the life of Jesus. And if that’s the standard, that means I need to continue to become. I ain’t done yet.
We need to ask, “God, are there people you want to put into my life to lead me, as well as people you want to put in my life that I can serve and help?” Because that’s how the body functions best—that we as a church might be that light to the nations, that others might also know the Jesus we love and serve.
“Who is mentoring me? To whom am I reaching out as a mentor?” Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.
(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on January 26, 2017, in the Bishop’s Oratory of the Diocesan Office, Orlando.)
Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.