Posts Tagged ‘fully online seminary’

Rockbridge Seminary requires students to recruit a local mentor for each course. Here are definitions of mentoring that communicate the kind of healthy mentoring that we teach and encourage:

• “Mentoring links people to the resources of others, empowering them for greater personal growth and ministry effectiveness.”
• “Mentoring is a relational experience in which one person empowers another by sharing God-given resources.
• “A mentor is someone whose hindsight can become your foresight.”
• “The mentor is the person who shares the God-given resources. The mentoree is the person being empowered. The transfer between the mentor and mentoree is called empowerment.”
• “Mentoring is making available the mentor’s personal strengths, resources, and network (friendships/contacts) to help a mentoree reach his or her goals.”
• “Healthy” mentoring is when the mentor’s focus is helping the mentoree develop to the point that the mentor is no longer needed.

Unhealthy mentoring on the other hand is when the mentoring relationship is built on a dependency, either on the part of the mentor or the mentoree. In other words, the mentor may enter the relationship because there is a need (felt or unfelt) to be needed. Instead of guiding the mentoree to become empowered, the mentor manipulates (either consciously or unconsciously) the mentoree to become dependent. The reverse can be true as well where a mentoree resists empowerment but seeks to move the mentoring relationship toward dependency. The reasons could be one of many – fear, self-doubt, guilt, etc.

Empowered for Purpose

The most effective mentoring relationships are often for very specific reasons, instead of a long-term relationship where two people just “hang out and talk.” Most mentors who can add value to your life and ministry do not have the time or inclination to enter into an open-ended mentoring relationship. They may want to, but are just not able to do so. On the other hand, if a mentor has a particular ministry strength God has given him or her and you need to develop in that specific area, many mentors will gladly invest in your life to coach you in a specific area for a specific period of time.

Therefore, the goal of mentoring is to help you become empowered to fulfill God’s purposes in and through your life. That means that BEFORE you seek a mentor:

• You understand your design and shape.
• You develop some idea about how God wants to use that design and shape for His purposes (your call).
• You determine where you still need development in order to move toward your call.
• You seek the coaching of a mentor to help you in a specific area of development.

Suppose you need to develop in knowing how to build and lead small groups. But you’ve never done this before and know nothing about it. You’ve got materials, books, and tapes, but you need someone to coach you along the way. This person is not your teacher as much as your coach. He or she comes alongside of you to show you how to do it and to help you learn. When you’ve learned, the need for that mentoring relationship is completed.

Rockbridge Seminary students in all seminary programs are introduced to mentoring that empowers in the Touchstone Course “Developing the Focused Life” through Terry Walling’s Focused Living Resource Kit: Mentoring Workbook. Additional materials are based on Connecting: The Mentoring Relationships You Need to Succeed by Paul D. Stanley and Robert Clinton.