Several years ago, a new friend asked why we don’t invest more heavily in worldview and apologetics training in our ministry. Initially, I was surprised, because I think we do invest quite a bit in those things. But what he meant was hosting weekend seminars on Critical Race Theory or how to prove Jesus rose from the dead. Great ideas, but not where we put our focus. Here’s my account of why we do it the way we do.
Clearly, the evangelical church has utterly failed our youth; the American church is losing them in droves. I agree that training in worldview and apologetics is absolutely essential, but at the same time I know plenty of people who’ve had that training and wandered away anyhow. I’d say there are a couple other necessary ingredients for the apologetics training to bear fruit.
For instance, consider a guy like Russell Moore. He’s had those classes; he has all the access to apologetics resources you could ever want, and just look at him. On the other hand, remember Kim Davis, that county clerk from Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses once they told her that two men or two women could constitute a marriage? She was definitely not the articulate spokesperson we would wish for in a highly charged cultural debate, but she had courage enough to stand firm even when she didn’t know what to say. Kim Davis needs apologetics training, but teaching someone like her what to say is much easier than discipling someone like Moore out of his idolatrous lust to sit at the cool kids’ table.
Apologetics is hard work, and well worthy of study. I’ve written a whole year of worldview and apologetics curriculum with that in mind, and I’ve taught the apologetics portion of that in multiple churches, schools, and other venues. But years of practical ministry have shown me that apologetics training is the last thing, not the foundation. Apologetics gives you good things to say, but it’s character – love for God and others – that moves you to step up and say them. Apologetics training only helps if you have the courage to stand up and speak to start with.
Part of growing that character is getting grounded in the Story of Our People, getting your loves and loyalties rightly ordered, and learning what to expect in this part of that Story. I agree with you that there’s a lot of rough water between where we are now and the obvious, end-of-history winning, when Jesus breaks the pagan nations with a rod of iron. But I also think we need to grasp what winning looks like in the middle of the Story. There was a day when winning looked like God Himself being nailed to a cross by the very sinners He came to save. On another day, it looked like Stephen praying for his murderers; on another, they stoned Paul and left him for dead. This to say, God always leads us in triumph, but I don’t expect it to look good from the vantage point of the people who write headlines. They’re going to dance on our martyr graves – and we’ll still be winning. We took Rome in three centuries, and they were killing us the whole time.
So we need to conduct ourselves like we’re winning, even as we expect to be persecuted, driven from the public square, deplatformed, marginalized, and even martyred. We proclaim the truth, and God uses it to confound the “wise ones” of this world, even as they do their worst to us. Our testimony is a powerful part of the total picture here: loving God, loving our neighbor, loving what is true, good, and beautiful. If our marriages are thriving while theirs are falling apart, if our children are healthy and whole while theirs are neurotic and desperate, if we live with purpose while they drift rootless–that’s very hard to argue with, even if they think they have arguments. Apologetics training helps us highlight those things to pagans who are programmed not to see them. But it’s all for nothing if we got nothing to show.
What people need and what people want are frequently two different things. In ministry, the observation “That’s not what the sheep want” gets used to justify all kinds of defections. “I’d love to teach more Bible, but it’s not what the sheep want!” “I’d love to have more prayer in our church, but that’s not what the sheep want.” “I’d love to care more for the poor, but that’s not what the sheep want.”
The sad fact is, these things might be true. But it’s the shepherd’s job to lead the sheep where they need to go, not where they want to go. They have their own will and they get to make choices, but that doesn’t relieve us of our responsibilities. If they’re headed the wrong way, we chase them down and turn them toward what they actually need. If their desires are disordered, it’s our job to help them want the right things. Let’s get to work!
I have to admit, leading the sheep toward what they need is a lot harder than giving them what they want. Bright-eyed guys coming fresh out of seminary and hoping to just be good shepherds and make a living wage at it may well be disappointed, and it’s discouraging to see ear-ticklers prosper while good shepherds struggle. But remember Who we’re following: foxes have holes, etc. While there’s nothing wrong with making a paycheck in pastoral care, that’s a relative rarity across the sweep of history and cultures.
Even in our prosperous times, shepherding work is mostly not what churches pay for, at least in my experience. My pastor father was a great shepherd, in a place where they certainly had the means to pay him. He got paid for teaching Christian school and media distribution; the shepherding he did–which was a lot–he did on the side, for free. I once served a church for two years with the title “Pastor of Discipleship and Ministry Logistics” and got zero support for the discipleship side of things. Nobody above me on the org chart ever asked how discipleship was going — not my boss, not any of the elders, nobody. My spending request for curriculum (a whopping $60) was turned down; I ended up buying what I needed out of my own pocket. I got plenty of support and accountability around making sure the bulletin got done and we didn’t run out of copy paper, though. Part of the answer here is to adjust your expectations; churches, like sheep, don’t always want what they need. Helping them want what they need is the job.
That particular church is where I learned this lesson the hard way. They’d hired me because they knew they didn’t know how to disciple or shepherd. They wanted me to bring those skills to the church, and I did. I expected them to support me intelligently in the task. I look back at that now and think, “Well isn’t that cute!” Of course intelligent support is a reasonable thing to want, but it’s very naive to expect people that don’t understand your job to support you well. Of course they didn’t know how to support me, for the same reason that they needed to hire me in the first place — they didn’t understand discipling or shepherding! The wise course of action would have been to actively train the leadership in how to support my work. Instead, I was struggling to do my job in spite of them, and was therefore constantly frustrated at the lack of support. As I say, that was the place where I learned this lesson. Feel free to profit from my error: go thou, and do un-likewise.
But mostly, that’s not a problem shepherds have. Most of the shepherds in Christ’s flock, most of the time, support themselves. Even Paul did, sometimes — if he’s not too good to make tents, who are we to balk at it? I can tell you, self-supporting ministry comes with a certain kind of freedom. If you’re self-supporting and you have a small network of godly men who will provide wisdom and accountability for your work, you don’t need anybody else’s approval. Just go forth and shepherd, and be glad you have the time to do so! During a big chunk of that two-year stint I mentioned above, I was tracking my time in 15-minute increments. Since I found the practice helpful, I continued it for a while after I left that position. Fun fact: in the weeks after I left, I spent *more* time shepherding than I had when I was on a church payroll, ostensibly being paid to shepherd and make disciples. Fewer distractions, you see. No marathon staff meetings. No copy paper to order. No bulletins to make. Just people who needed pastoral care. So I cared for them.
Effectiveness comes from focus. Focus is mainly about what we don’t do.
When someone has–as far as we can tell–come into the faith, but then walked away again, it can be hard to tell exactly what happened. Three things are possible:
1) This person was hanging out with us, being a social chameleon to ‘try on’ Christianity, and never believed any of it. That’s certainly possible–it’s been a time-honored way to access a Christian dating pool, for example. (It’s also a little dangerous; people who start out like this have a way of meeting Jesus if they hang out for long enough.)
2) This person did not understand the gospel and was trying to work their way into being a Christian. Your group may present the gospel clearly, but as every preacher knows, people hear very selectively, and it can be hard to overcome their prior programming. The ‘folk Christian’ idea that good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to hell is very, very strong, and some people will hear absolutely everything you say through that filter. These folks leave because nobody can actually live the life they’re trying to live. They’re exhausted — of course they are! — and they don’t want to keep up the pretense anymore. Who could blame them?
3) This person understood and believed the gospel, and then left the faith for whatever reason. Often this is because Scripture told them a hard truth they didn’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s a costly moral demand, and they’d rather retreat from the faith than grow into obedience. For more status-conscious people, it’s often a realization of just how much their faith — if they take it seriously — will separate them from the cool kids. For prophetically gifted people, it’s often a preference for demonic lies over the hard truths of the Spirit. But then, sometimes it’s none of those things. Sometimes it’s exhaustion from faithfulness, as the readers of Hebrews were experiencing.
Happily, we don’t actually have to know which of these things happened to know what to do. Where this person belongs is back in the fold, walking with Jesus. No matter whether that will be a prodigal son returning or a fake believer becoming a real one, we preach the gospel to them and the goodness of God that calls them to repentance. Paul preached the gospel to the Romans (Rom.1:1-17) even when they were faithful. We can certainly preach it to the faithless, confident that it’s what they need to hear.
If it turns out this person actually grasped the gospel all along, great! This is an opportunity to help them see how the same truths they’ve already grasped work out in daily life. For MANY Christians, their honest answer to Paul’s question in Gal. 3:3 (“Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?”) would be “Yes, of course! How else would you do it?”
Anytime someone says “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” I always ask them what it was they were doing that they could no longer stand to do. Because, mark it down, they didn’t get sick of all the Spirit-produced love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control that was overflowing in their life, and wish instead for hatred, misery, conflict, short-temper, cruelty, evil, coarseness, betrayal, and impulsiveness.
But something happened. Listen. Find out what, if you can. But even if you never figure out what happened, bring them to Jesus. That’s always the answer.
If you read the gospels carefully, you will discover that Jesus goes to the places and the people who are totally respectable, and to the people who are…at the other end of the spectrum, shall we say. (Note Luke 7:36-39, which nicely encapsulates both ends of the respectability spectrum, or compare John 3 to John 4, or Luke 11:37 to Matthew 9:9-11//Mark 2:14-16//Luke 5:27-30, Luke 19:2-7, Matthew 11:19). There was a point in my Christian life where I noticed that fact in a more-than-theoretical way, and it’s had a profound impact on me. For your amusement and edification, Gentle Reader, here are a few of the places I’ve been….
Bacon, Beer, and Body Paint
Once upon a time, I had a minor role in launching/promoting an event to benefit an oil field worker named Dan who’d been handicapped in a vehicle rollover. Insurance covered his medical expenses and bought his motorized wheelchair, but didn’t cover the necessary modifications to his house so he could get around in there. Doors needed to be widened, etc. And of course, he also needed a new job, and training for it. Dan’s brother had a few thousand bucks, but that wasn’t nearly enough to fund everything that needed to get done.
But Dan’s brother was also a good salesman and knew a little about event planning. So he piled the money into a fundraiser: a beer-and-bacon festival. He got a local business with a big parking lot to let us use their property for the weekend, and a handful of other businesses to sponsor the event with give-aways, door prizes, etc. They had a couple of breweries, Denver Bacon Company, I think some insurance and real estate brokers, a local pot shop, that sort of thing. They got musicians, face painting for the kids, all kinds of stuff. A good friend of mine worked for one of the businesses, and asked me to help promote the event. I took posters to businesses in high-traffic areas, personally invited everybody I knew, everything I could do to promote it.
Come the day, I showed up and hung out most of the day. I still have a set of 4 tin cups from Sailor Jerry’s rum that I won in the door prize drawing. It was all going swimmingly until the spokesmodel from the pot shop visited the face painters. I recall passing through that area and noticing one of the painters doing a piece on her back, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Half an hour later, I see a huge crowd over by one corner of the building. I wander over to see what’s going on and discover this same model doing an impromptu photo shoot wearing nothing but her Daisy Dukes and expertly applied body paint. So then I get to decide, do I just leave? Do I just avoid her? Something else?
Right on Target
I was down at Centerpoint chatting with one of my regular guests. He was a bit drunk, as is usual for him, and he asked me to pray for him about something. I did so. When I finished, he thanked me, and then he grabbed my shoulder and said “Now I’m gonna pray for you.” I didn’t want to tell him not to, so I let him. In minutes, there were tears in my eyes — without knowing it, this Jesus-loving drunkard was praying for the deepest concerns I had that week. Was he in active sin? Yes. Was he being led by the Spirit despite that? Undoubtedly.
“Tim won’t go!”
Went to a friend’s thirtieth birthday party. She’s one of my favorite felons, and has a friend group to match. We closed the restaurant where we started out, and then tried to go to a pop-up haunted house down by the highway (this was in mid-October). By the time we’d re-convened in the haunted house parking lot, they were closing. So we’re standing in the parking lot as the last carload of our people arrives. Someone catches them up on the situation and explains that we’re trying to decide where to go next. One of the guys says, “Titty bar!” My friend vetoed it immediately: “No, because Tim won’t go.” She wasn’t just assuming (although she was right); she’d been there when I declined an invitation from her boyfriend a few weeks earlier.
If it’s spiritually risky to be like Jesus, it’s spiritual suicide to knowingly refuse to be like Him.
Suicide by Tim
I’m sitting at a kitchen table with a man who’s threatening to kill me. It’s not an idle threat; he’s a combat veteran, a Marine turned cop. I know he’s drunk; I assume he’s armed. If you were watching through the window, the scene would look pretty calm. Samuel (not his real name) is talking; I’m sipping a glass of water. Below the table, I’ve quietly drawn and opened my carry knife. Plan A is talk him down; Plan B is “I go home to my wife, no matter what happens to him.” At the moment, the most likely approach is to send the water glass flying at his face while three inches of very sharp steel comes in low for whatever I can reach, before he can draw whatever he’s carrying.
This was not in my plans for the day. I’d gone down to the Springs to spend an afternoon with my friend Jack on his day off. We’d eaten and talked, and I hung out for a while at his church’s coffee shop while he worked a volunteer shift. (That shop itself is a cool story for another time.) Afterwards, we went back to his house, and a bunch of his friends and coworkers came over to hang out. The beer and whiskey flowed freely, and in due time Samuel took offense at something I said. The initial threat was just a generic “We can take it outside” type of thing — I forget the exact words — but things turned ugly when Jack tried to intervene.
“You don’t want to do that, Samuel. Tim would do you. Just let it go.”
That was like pouring gas on a fire. “I’ll kill him!” Samuel said. “I don’t care!”
He didn’t, in fact. Samuel’s squad had been on patrol when their humvee got hit by an IED, killing his three buddies. He had a massive case of survivor’s guilt that he medicated with whiskey when he was off-duty. Samuel really didn’t want to be alive; the only reason he hadn’t killed himself was because he was afraid to face God after committing suicide. Jack’s attempt to deter Samuel had the opposite effect: Samuel wanted to die, and Jack had just told him I could get it done for him. He escalated and threatened my life in a roomful of witnesses in order to create a situation where I’d kill him. But that didn’t mean he’d go down easy.
Until He Stood Up
Back when I first started Centerpoint, I would have one of the guests assist me in serving the Lord’s Table. One night a fellow I’ll call John asked me if he could assist me. He had been interacting reasonably well during the service, so I didn’t see any reason why not, so I said yes. He stood up next to me, and it quickly became apparent that he was drunk enough that he wasn’t going to be able to continue standing without help.
By this time, we were serving, and I couldn’t see how to swap him out for someone else without conveying a rejection I didn’t want to convey. So I got my arm under his elbow to give him a little extra stability and soldiered through. Right decision? Probably not, but I couldn’t see my way around it in the moment, so I went with it.
And So On…
Am I telling you that you should be willing to go anywhere, with anybody, anytime? No. Please note, they knew I wouldn’t go to the strip joint. If a particular place or group of people presents you with a temptation you can’t handle, then don’t do it. “Flee youthful lusts,” remember? If you can’t go to the place and be with the people and give God thanks, then turn down the invitation. “Whatever is not of faith is sin.”
But if your misgivings about going to the place or being with the people are founded in some ridiculous notion that Christians are supposed to be country-club respectable, if you’re worried about what other people will think of you, if you think “it’s just a bad testimony,” for vague and unspecifiable reasons…repent. You need to re-read the Gospels and have a hard look at how Jesus ministered, who He was willing to talk to, what He was willing to be accused of. They called Jesus a glutton and a drunk that pals around with traitors and whores. When’s the last time anybody accused you of that? Never? So that would be a way you’re not like Jesus. A servant is not greater than his Master. Repent.
I’ve got more such tales. I wouldn’t handle them all the same way now that I did then. Sometimes that’s a matter of brainstorming after the fact and coming up with a more gracious or wiser approach. Other times, I’ve grown in discernment and interpret things differently than I used to. I didn’t do everything right in the past, and I have no illusions that I’ll do everything right in the future. And you know what? Back when I refused to go to those places and spend time with those people, I never made any of those mistakes.
But avoiding people and places that Jesus wouldn’t avoid was just one more thing I needed to repent of. I did, and I’ve no regrets. If it’s spiritually risky to be like Jesus, it’s spiritual suicide to knowingly refuse to be like Him. Get out there. Whoever those people are for you, Jesus loves them. You should too.
One of my daughters sent me Aaron Renn’s interview with David Murrow a while back. The subject of the interview is “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” which is also Murrow’s book title. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I encourage you to listen to it, but one particular thing jumped out at both of us: safety.
Murrow talks about how virtually every Christian radio station has a tagline that’s something like “listening that’s safe for the whole family,” which is obviously designed to appeal to Christian moms. That makes good business sense for the stations, since mom is the one who decides what to listen to in the car. Murrow points out that at the same time Mom is getting her safe listening option, little Johnny in the back of the minivan is getting catechized that Christianity is the safe option that appeals to his mom. By age 11 or so, testosterone is flooding his body and he’s looking for danger and adventure and the opportunity for hijinks…and we’ve spent his whole life teaching him that Christianity is safe. Then we wonder why he’s turned away!
My daughter is a teacher and youth minister, so kids abandoning the faith is something of a preoccupation for her, as it should be. “You were raised on Christian music,” she said to me. “How did you avoid this trap?”
As it happens, part of the answer is that I wasn’t really raised on Christian music the way she was thinking, not like Murrow is talking about. I grew up on a lot of old music: everything from old cowboy songs to bluegrass to classical to native American chants recorded on the reservations to the soundtracks of Victory at Sea and Hatari! (Yes, on vinyl, but not because it was cool; it was just all we had.) Contemporary Christian music wasn’t really in the mix much at home, although I certainly heard plenty of it at church.
But there’s a much more significant answer: I grew up around people on mission. I never thought Christianity was safe.
My parents weren’t missionaries (although they tried, to the point of attending candidate school once upon a time). My pastor wasn’t a missionary either, but he’d tried, hard. After getting rejected by around 30 mission boards, he concluded that the Lord was telling him to stay stateside, and accepted a pastorate. My pastor’s brother, however, founded a little mission agency called World Evangelical Outreach. WEO (pronounced “wee-oh”) was headquartered in my hometown, first on the church grounds and then in the same little office building as my dentist. I still remember walking into the office and hearing the secretaries answer the phone “Wee-oh, how can I help you?” (Later on they changed their name and moved to a bigger location, then ultimately to a KOA property outside Orlando. You would know them today as Pioneers International. They’re, ah, a little bigger these days.) A lot of their missionaries passed through our church, along with others with New Tribes, Sudan Interior Mission, Arctic Missions, China Inland Mission, Baptist Mid-Missions, Greater Europe Mission, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and many more.
These people were not safe; they were badasses. Men who smuggled Bibles into Communist countries and evangelized whole villages on their way back out, who made contact with reclusive tribes in deep jungle, seeking to save them from extermination by loggers and oil workers, who spent nights on an Albanian warehouse roof with an AK-47 to protect the winter’s food supply for an orphanage, who flew in and out of tiny jungle airstrips to get someone to life-saving medical care. Women who saved abandoned twins in sub-Saharan Africa, brought girls out of sexual slavery in Saigon, defied apartheid to bring the gospel into villages that would never otherwise hear. Couples who travelled the Sahara together to find nomadic Tuareg camps, built houses in the New Guinea highlands to bring medicine, literacy, and Jesus to remote villages, ate and shared Jesus with Hezbollah fighters, their wives, and their children.
Of course we didn’t stay stuck in our own century either: we read tons of missionary biographies and all kinds of Christian history, too. I learned about Mary Slessor, David Livingston, Amy Carmichael, Corrie Ten Boom, Brother Andrew, John Wyclif, William Tyndale, Polycarp, the Forty Soldiers. So as I write these paragraphs, I have names and grainy photographs and artists’ renditions in my head for some, but I also have memories of men and women around my dinner table. One of them taught me how to play dominos; I showed another how my Transformer worked; a third explained to me how he lost his ring finger. The stories from centuries ago are real to me, part of an unbroken legacy that stretches from the Old Testament prophets through Jesus and the apostles and right on down to the guy sitting next to me at the kitchen table, asking me to pass another of Mom’s sourdough muffins (which are in fact delicious).
Some of them came back every four or five years to tell us how things were going. Some of them came back on medical evac flights. Some of them came back on medical evac flights and then went back again, and again, and again. (Ralph and Maridee Sauers, I’m looking at you.) Some of them didn’t come back at all; we’ll see them again in glory.
Obviously their Christianity wasn’t the safe, Mom-approved path. It was the biggest adventure in the world, far superior even to joining the Peace Corps or the military (which some of them had also done, before). Tourist travel was childish and self-indulgent by comparison — not even in the same league. For the longest time, I thought I was going to join them overseas. I did short-term hitches doing child evangelism in Spain, a building project in Trinidad & Tobago, teaching English and computer skills in central Russia. Closer to home, I served on street evangelism teams in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, various locations in metro DC, and a series of places in the southeastern US, especially Florida. I knew that God could call me anywhere, and I was ready to go!
Imagine my surprise when He called me to California, of all places. We had a long argument about that, and I lost. After all, I did tell Him I would go anywhere! So I went. After I finished seminary, He took me into the desert for six years, and from there to the heathen wilds of Denver, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been overseas, training pastors in Australia and such, but it seems likely that the majority of my calling is stateside.
These folks’ legacy of following Jesus anywhere He leads has informed my decisions my whole life, is with me today, and I’m pleased to pass it on in turn to my students, my daughters, my disciples. There’s another little kid I ate with last week, and I’m the guy at his kitchen table, asking him to pass another muffin while he shows me his Lego model. (And because God’s fun like that, his name is Timothy too. Wild.)
I’m not surprised when God calls me somewhere surprising, if I may put it that way. The darker the corner, the more it needs light. Some of the corners have been pretty dark, but that’s another post. The point for today is, your kids don’t need more vapid CCM; they need time with Christians doing dangerous things for Jesus.
One of the basics of good shepherding is to remember what you don’t know. When they say “We had a fight last night,” you don’t know if it was a minor argument, a shouting match, or a physical brawl. You have to ask more questions if you need to find out. But there’s also another key mistake you can make: missing what they are telling you.
Jack and Jill have been dating for a while, and things are starting to turn a bit more serious. Then one day, Jill breaks it off. “I just don’t think we can have a good relationship if we’re not honest with each other,” she says.
Jack is baffled. Over a beer with his buddy Eli, he vents: “I don’t know what she’s talking about! I’ve worked so hard to communicate clearly and listen well! I’ve been as honest as I know how to be! I just don’t get it!”
Eli nods. “She thinks you’re dishonest with each other, but you’ve been honest with her.”
“Yes!” says Jack.
Eli sips his beer and steeples his fingers. “So what does she know that you don’t?”
Obviously, when Jill tells Jack that they’re not being honest with each other, she’s confessing that she hasn’t been honest with him. She thinks it’s mutual; she may be right or she may be projecting. But she’s wildly unlikely to be wrong about herself.
When people say things like this, don’t get so caught up in defending yourself from the embedded accusation that you miss what they’re telling you about themselves.
In Part 1 of this series, we considered finding a mentor. Now, let’s talk about the other half of the equation: finding an apprentice.
Lack of mentorship is of the biggest problems the West faces today, in and out of the Church. The Boomers as a generation shrugged off mentoring. When they were young, they were famous for saying “Never trust anybody over 30.” (I think it was Joe Queenan who observed that as they aged, they have done their part to ensure that it remains good advice!) As a result most of them were never mentored themselves, and then didn’t know how to mentor when it was their turn to give back. Mostly, they assumed every generation behind them would want to be neglected, which explains most of what you need to know about how Gen X was parented. This assumption was highly convenient for the Boomers, who as a generation were focused on enjoying life and couldn’t be bothered with the inconveniences of legacy. (Yeah, I know, not all of them. But a critical mass, easily enough to create a crisis of mentorship.)
But let’s assume, Gentle Reader, that you’re willing to embrace the hard work of mentoring. Probably the most common question I get from would-be mentors is, “Where did your apprentices come from? Where do you find these people?” Here’s what you need to know about that.
(1) They’re everywhere. People are desperate for what a mentor can provide, young adults especially. I can almost guarantee that you talked with someone I’d consider a candidate in the last couple days. It’s not about where you look, it’s about how you look. You need to learn to see what’s in front of you.
(2) Mostly they don’t walk up and ask for mentoring. But they definitely signal need:
“I guess I don’t really have a dad.”
“It must have been great to have had someone to show you how to do these things.”
“I just don’t understand those people!”
“I don’t really know what else to do.”
In a hundred little ways, people signal that they need what mentoring can provide, and that they are aware of the need. They often don’t know that mentoring can meet that need, but they have something going on where they’d be happy to hear “I think I might be able to help with that.” That’s where it starts. Don’t wait to be asked; go fishing for men!
3) Since you’re not waiting to be asked, you’re going to do some work up front. You know the white-bearded master that pupils climb a mountain to find? Being that guy is a cool little fantasy, but most of the time that’s what it is–a fantasy. In real life, they’ll show you a need, and you’ll respond with blessing and service, demonstrating that you can help meet that need, and that there’s more where that solution came from. They might jump over hurdles later after you’ve demonstrated what you can offer as a mentor, but they aren’t going to do it to start with. Expect to be generous with your time, money, effort, attention. If you’re not willing to do that, you shouldn’t be mentoring.
3b) One of the other common things I hear is “I’m investing everywhere I can, but nobody’s taking my advice!” If you’re having that problem, reconsider the nature of your investment. Invest your gratitude, your praise, your effort, your connections, your money. If there is anything virtuous, if there is anything praiseworthy, invest in it! Bless what can be blessed. If you can’t see what’s good, nobody will listen to you about what needs correcting, and nobody should. Quit pontificating and do some actual work.
4) The most straightforward way to “fish for men” is to make the initial overture and invest in the people around you, and then pay attention to what happens next. Most people won’t reward the investment. That’s fine; plenty of people didn’t reward Jesus’ investment either. Think “Parable of the Sower” here: some never start, some are drawn away by shiny objects, some quit when it gets hard, but some pay off –some just okay, some well, and some handsomely. But none of that happens if you don’t sow the seed. Start the ball rolling. Notice the need and do something about it; at least make an offer. When you see a return, invest more, and let the relationship grow organically from there.
When that works, congratulations! You’re a mentor. How do you do it well? Stay tuned.
Young adults need mentors, and a lot of them even know it. Most young adults never get a mentor, because they don’t have the first clue how to find one, and more importantly, how to behave in a mentoring relationship. It’s not their fault; nobody is born knowing these things. Unfortunately, most older adults no longer teach this skill set — not even parents. From the Boomers onward, far too many adults don’t know how to mentor, don’t want to, and simply refuse to assume the responsibilities and moral authority to do the job well.
So if you’re in the market for a mentor, but don’t know where to start, pull up a chair, grab yourself a fine brewed beverage, and let Uncle Tim lay some wisdom on ya. There’s two skill sets you need here: finding and acquiring a mentor to start with, and then living in a mentoring relationship.
The first thing is identifying the person you would like mentoring from. This can be really simple: look for someone who…
is who you want to be when you grow up, or
can do a specific thing that you really want to to do.
You’ll be tempted to think of internet personalities or celebrities. Stop it. Work harder; find someone less famous, and preferably someone local. Once you’ve identified the person, move in for a closer look, as close as you can get. Do you want the whole package, or some specific skill? Are there particular things about this person you definitely do not want to pick up? Think about that one long and hard; if you spend significant time with this person, you may end up more like them than you wanted to be.
Once you’ve found the person…then what? Ask, of course! But there’s an art to maximizing your chances of getting a “yes.” First you need the right mindset, and then you need a good approach. As a potential apprentice, you need to have a clear understanding of the nature of mentoring relationships. In no particular order, here are some key things to know:
If you’re just getting started, all you need is someone a little ahead of you. As you grow, you’ll come to need (and be able to attract) mentors with much greater experience and skill.
Every beginner dreams of being mentored by a master teacher from day one. That really does happen occasionally; I’ve met a few such people. Usually, that person is the teacher’s kid, favorite nephew, or something like that. If you get such an opportunity, by all means take it, but don’t sit around waiting for it to magically happen. Normally, a master teacher’s time will be spent with advanced practitioners who have already put in the time to master the basics of the craft, and who have already proven their commitment to continuing in the work. Those people are a much better investment than you are as a beginner. If you’re the kind of person who won’t engage unless you can be guided by a master, then you’re also the kind of person no master will take. Nobody needs an apprentice who won’t get over himself.
It’s really rare that anybody worth following actually needs your help. Unless you happen to have some special skill your prospective mentor really needs, this isn’t going to be an even exchange at the beginning, which means you’ll be asking for an investment, not a trade. (There are ways of evening up. I have a colleague who cold-approached a world-class practitioner and asked him to mentor her; she offered to pay his regular hourly rate for any time he spent on her, so he wouldn’t lose money. He said yes; she worked her tail off, and today she’s highly and uniquely skilled. She also spent a small fortune getting there; not everyone can do that. But it was money well spent.)
Since it won’t start as an even exchange, you will be a net drain on the system in the beginning. Teaching you has an opportunity cost; your mentor is going to get less of something this year because he’s spending time and effort on you. What the cost is to him depends on the situation; it might mean slowing down his work so he can teach you as he goes; it might mean taking fewer jobs in order to make time for you. The time he spends with you might otherwise be spent with his wife, his kids, his friends, reading, learning some new skill, or binge-watching UFO documentaries, but count on it, that time is coming from somewhere. No need to feel bad about that; your mentor thinks you’re worth the investment, or you wouldn’t be here. But he has an expectation that the investment is going to pay off; it’s up to you to make sure he’s right.
Speaking of the investment paying off, here’s a basic rule of human behavior: everybody always gets paid…somehow.
You will get tutelage and experience.
Your mentor will get…something. In order for the relationship to work well, you need to know what he’s getting out of it. Find out what it costs and don’t be put off by the inconvenience. Training an apprentice isn’t convenient either; this is your end of the deal. If it’s not worth the cost, then find a different mentor. If it is, then pay it and make it look easy.
It’s an asymmetrical relationship, but it’s not asymmetrical everywhere, all the time. There are things your mentor will do for you that you couldn’t do or wouldn’t be expected to reciprocate. That’s fine. There are other things that you absolutely should reciprocate, and you’ll blow up the relationship if you don’t. Know the difference.
Balance is a moving target. Your obligations mount as your skills grow and your mentor’s needs change. Keep an eye on ways you might be able to reciprocate now that you couldn’t have when you started.
If you have integrity, you will at some point disagree with your mentor. That’s okay. Your mentor is not God, and it’s ok to disappoint him—but make it count. If the relationship is worth having, then it’s worth taking good care of; don’t become a disappointment through inadvertence or over something stupid.
Knowing that’s what you’re getting into, do you still want this person to mentor you? If so, then you want to ask in a way that maximizes your chances of getting an enthusiastic “Yes!” Here’s what you need to do:
Do your homework.
Know as much as you can about the field.
Know who you’re approaching. Study websites, social media pages, curriculum vitae. Whatever’s publicly available about where your prospective mentor has been and what he’s done, learn it.
If your prospective mentor has already produced material for up-and-coming workers in your field, get it. It’s gauche to ask an expert to tell you a bunch of stuff for free when their livelihood comes in part from selling that same information. If it costs money, then spend some! Read the books; watch the videos; listen to the podcasts. Digest that material ahead of time; don’t ask your prospective mentor to waste time telling you things they’ve already put out there.
Have something to show for it
Having done your homework, showcase it. At a minimum, come in with some intelligent questions: “I read where you said X, and I was wondering….”
Better: “I’ve been following your instructions from [book/podcast/article], and here’s what happened. I have some questions about my next steps.…”
Ask boldly
We all fantasize about our chosen mentor seeing how we’ve applied their work and begging us to come study with them. It’s okay to have the fantasy, but know that it’s a fantasy. People worth following already have plenty to do; mostly they don’t go about asking for more work.
Be very clear ahead of time about what you want from this mentor. Do you want them to give you a book review? Help you put together a business plan? Edit an article before you submit it? Help you figure out which school to go to? Find an investor? Talk about life over coffee for an hour a week? I strongly suggest writing it down clearly. “I want [person] to [action] for me.” You may not get what you want, but you should know what you want.
Don’t be coy. You’ve showcased your work; you’ve made the best case you can that you’ll be a worthwhile investment. You know what you want from them. So ask clearly for the specific investment that you want.
It’s ok if you’re just asking for something small, like “Would it be ok if I call or email to ask about advice on next steps every couple months? It doesn’t have to be a grand request.
On the other hand, if you want more, ask for more: “Could we meet for an hour every other week for the next year?”
You may well get a no. Take it gracefully. God has a way of bringing people back around in our lives; don’t burn the bridge. You never know what will happen later.
You may get “I can’t do that, but we could….” and an offer of some lesser level of investment. In that case, take it and follow up quickly. Treat it as a second interview.
You may just get an assignment. “I can’t meet with you, but here’s what you should work on next….” Frequently, your wounded pride will tempt you not to follow through on the assignment because they turned you down. Do what you want, but know that once upon a time, a very busy man gave me such an assignment. I did it, and it changed the course of my life. (God was being kind to me. In hindsight, he would have been a terrible mentor. But it was a great assignment. I’ll tell you about it sometime.) Also, again, treat it as a second interview. Sometimes it is.
If you got a “no,” don’t give up. Keep looking around. Locate another likely candidate. Do the same thing. Keep going until you find what you need.
On the other hand, perhaps you got a yes. Now you have a mentor! What do you need to know, to keep the relationship good? First, go back up to the top and review all the things I said about the nature of the mentoring relationship. Have all that firmly in mind. Then…
You got into this relationship seeking guidance. So take it. If it doesn’t work, come back for a debrief. But don’t come back with “I thought your advice was stupid/hard so I didn’t do it, and now I need help managing the fallout of my poor decisions.” Can’t complain about the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t do. If you screwed up, it’s not the end of the world; recover as best you can, go back to the drawing board, and do what you were told.
Some of the guidance your mentor gives will seem stupid. That’s normal. Real life is frequently counterintuitive, and if you already knew all the smart ideas, you wouldn’t need a mentor, wouldja? Go ahead and do what you’re told; see what happens. Usually, hindsight will provide all the insight you need. Sometimes, you’ll need further explanation. The best time to ask “Why?” is after you’ve gone and done the thing. Don’t ask for someone to invest valuable time and expertise giving you guidance and then argue with them about it. Show your commitment, then ask: “I woulda sworn that wasn’t going to work…and it did. I still don’t get it. Why?” Occasionally—because even the best mentors are fallible—it really will be stupid guidance. But as a newbie, you can’t tell whether the advice is wrong, or you are wrong. Accept that occasionally you’re going to follow bad advice. It’s the cost of doing business.
The above is a useful rule of thumb, but there are exceptions. Sometimes a promising-looking mentor turns out to be a tyrant who’s exploiting you and giving nothing worthwhile in return, and you really should just walk away. On the other hand, sometimes your mentor simply didn’t understand the problem. The easiest way to navigate that is to take responsibility yourself: “I’m so sorry, I don’t think I explained the problem properly. Let me try again….”
Some guidance will call for a metric ton of hard work, and you’re going to be tempted to seek shortcuts. Don’t. In the words of Scott Sonnon, “Until you have thoroughly mastered the basics, every ‘new’ idea you have has already been considered and rejected, with good reason.” That won’t be true 100% of the time, but close enough. Your time will be better spent working hard to master the basics; innovation can wait. (That said, look up the story of Gaston Glock sometime. There are occasional spectacular exceptions.)
You aren’t signing your life away when you apprentice to someone. You answer to God on the last day for yourself; you have to choose to follow your mentor’s guidance or not. But you can’t reasonably expect someone to continue to invest in you if you don’t take their guidance; conversely, if you don’t find their guidance worth following, you probably need a different mentor anyway.
So there ya go. I hope it’s helpful to you. Now, I know some of this is hard to hear, and of course I understand if you disagree. No worries; I’m fallible like everybody else. Maybe you know better than I do. And anyhow, I’m not holding a gun to your head; ain’t nothing stopping you from doing it your way. Best of luck….
When it comes to programs and services in the church, the answer to all questions that begin with the phrase, “Well, shouldn’t we at least have…?” is a hearty “Heck, no!”
Of course it seems unreasonable to answer the question without knowing what specific “improvement” is in view, but stick with me for a minute. I concede that a good case can generally be made for any single improvement of this kind. Considered in the abstract, the proposed improvement is a good thing, and would perhaps take relatively little effort. It’s hard to see what harm could come of it, and so it’s very hard to make a case against it—but this is a failure to see the big picture. The problem is threefold.
First, humans have notoriously low sales resistance to anything that involves other people’s work. It’s very easy to sell the idea that we “ought to have” something, but it’s quite another matter to assemble the wherewithal to actually do it—and it’s usually substantially more work than it sounds like, because everything is. In a church with a professional staff governed by a board, a few zealous congregants can often persuade the board to their way of thinking, thereby foisting the necessary work onto the staff. In our church, there’s additional resistance because no one is making a living tending to the needs of the church. All of us have jobs that support our families, and aren’t looking for ways to make our ministry more labor-intensive, especially not for secondary things that “would be nice.” If it’s not primary to our mission, we’re not touching it.
Second, this sort of task tends to travel in packs. First there will be one, which is harmless enough, but then there’s another, then a third, and before you know it, there’s a mountain of such obligations, all of which have to be maintained. Proponents will argue that we can always stop doing a given task, if it becomes onerous, but in reality they always oppose efforts to prune back whatever is presently being done (by other people—see #1!) The net result of these two tendencies is a ratcheting effect: it’s easy enough to start a church bulletin, or newsletter, or phone tree, or nursery, or whatever, but it takes an extraordinary effort of leadership to stop doing those things once you start them. It’s much easier and faster to kill it before it starts.
Finally, this burden of (theoretically low-level) tasks has a way of compromising church leadership. The tasks themselves can usually be handled by some sort of administrative assistant, even a volunteer one. However, once ensconced in the position, the administrative assistant often ends up being a de facto elder simply by virtue of being willing to do a bunch of tasks that, while nonessential to start with, nobody can now imagine living without (see #2)—which is to say that this person has accrued power out of all proportion to his/her qualifications. In the church, directional leadership is reserved to a select group of men meeting specific biblical qualifications. The elders may not abdicate their core functions to a third party who doesn’t meet the qualifications God assigned for those functions, and therefore it’s best not to create perverse incentives that encourage such abdication.
The bottom line is simple. We have work enough and to spare just doing what Jesus gave us to do: make disciples. Things that “would be nice” are a distraction we simply can’t afford, and tend over time to choke out the work Jesus told us to focus on. If you need a demonstration of this fact, you need look no further than the five churches nearest you. I promise you, if you look around, you’ll swiftly find a church that does a dozen such “nice” tasks with real excellence, and hasn’t a clue how to make disciples.
Last week, we looked at matters of politics, class, and Pentecostalism discussed in Dr. Miles Smith’s summary of exvangelical memoirs. In addition, Dr. Smith also spoke of a type of clericalism, in which “the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.” In some of the churches Smith has in mind, this is because the church is effectively a cult of personality; the pastor’s opinion is effectively law on everything from the Trinity to parenting philosophy to the merits of the Chicago Bears.
While there’s undoubtedly a problem there, Dr. Smith represents an unhelpful form of backlash: an implicit contention that pastors exceed their mandate when they speak to this-worldly concerns. So it is that Smith opines one of his exvangelical writers “can be forgiven for retroactively wincing at the graphic depictions of copulation in a book written by Tim Lahaye and his wife Beverly.” He goes on to say that pastoral advice on sex is clear “evidence of a clericalist culture run amok.” The book in question would have to be The Act of Marriage; I read it years ago, along with a whole generation of evangelicals older than me. For what my opinion is worth, I don’t recall it leaving any scars.
Whatever the shortcomings of a particular book, one has to ask: as opposed to what? Should we have no books on sex written by pastors? If an accurate depiction of copulation offends Smith’s sensibilities, one wonders what he thinks of the act itself — or of the God who designed it! Would Smith have pastors remain silent about sex, or speak in tasteful generalities that offer no actionable advice? For two suburban virgins on their wedding night, a few “graphic depictions of copulation” are helpful. Where would Smith suggest that ordinary Christian people get practical advice on the details of sex? Pornhub?
Which raises a point: I can tell you that while some exvangelicals “checked all the boxes” while they were in the church, others very much did not. Some exvangelicals I know hated the discussions of sex at church because they were already daily porn users, even if they weren’t actually sleeping around themselves. They didn’t need to hear a “graphic depiction of copulation” from a pastor because they were watching it for entertainment already, and they didn’t want to hear about chastity, because they were already in high rebellion. They still recall those conversations with guilt and loathing, and nobody should be concerned about that.
Meanwhile, a number of the exvanglicals of my acquaintance complain of the opposite problem: their churches seemed preoccupied with the details of internecine doctrinal squabbles, and unable to offer substantive help for important matters of everyday life like dating, sex, and child-rearing. When we’re damned for speaking to sex, and damned for refusing to, one begins to suspect that talking about sex is not really the problem. “We played the harp for you, and you did not dance; we played the flute for you, and you did not mourn.”
But returning to the matter of pastoral advice: there’s a “great gulf fixed” between the earthy preachers who get into the details on one hand, and upscale ministry professionals who keep things at the level of luncheon conversation on the other. This cultural divide has been a feature of Western ecclesiastical life for centuries. The internet hasn’t really changed that, but it has made the divide easier to see, since anybody with access to Youtube can see plenty of both types, and the wide gulf between them. (See the last 10 or so paragraphs of Nathanael Devlin’s excellent essay on the Moscow Mood for a discussion of one such divide within the Reformed community.) What are we to do?
Obviously, not every pastor is well-equipped to offer advice on every subject, nor is the pool of people with helpful counsel about sexuality (or anything else) confined to pastors alone. The relevant command from Christ is to make disciples, and it applies to all of us! Where we’re able to offer a disciple-making influence to our brothers and sisters, we should, and we it makes little sense to confine ourselves to unhelpful generalities. In a culture where The Experts (all rise!) are wildly unlikely to honor God’s design for anything at all, God’s people dare not leave one another at the mercy of the secular wolves. On anything.
We are not gnostics; we proclaim Christ in all places and for all things, right down into the earthy details that don’t make for polite country-club conversation. Of course, not everyone will agree on everything, and we should relish the opportunity to foster robust discussion and debate on everything from sleep-training your kids to making fluffy biscuits to sexually satisfying your spouse. Nobody should be embarrassed to get into the details as required to offer one another meaningful help; loving your neighbor requires it. God made us of dust and breath, after all. There’s no shame in being material, nor in talking like you are.
Pastors above all have this responsibility; it’s our job to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Ministers who stand aloof from such “peripheral” matters are betraying their office, no matter how “gospel-centered” it makes them feel. “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed” — a very old problem, but no less pressing for its distinguished pedigree. Many ministers want to hold back, and many of the sheep want their ministers to hold back. They have acquired a taste for the sweetmeats of the secular wolves, and they’re not overly interested in having a pastor intrude “outside his area of expertise” and ruin it for them.
Let’s go ruin it for them! Jesus did; how can we do any less?
Posted by Tim Nichols 
Full Contact Christianity 