Getting and Keeping a Mentor

18 March 2025

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….

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“Shouldn’t we at least have…?”

2 July 2024

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.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruin it for Them

25 June 2024

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?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Terrifyingly, Discouragingly Competent

16 April 2024

It is common in more conservative circles to think of the American church as ineffectual, diffuse, bumbling, incompetent. I have come to believe this is a comforting lie, and that the truth is far less flattering: the American church is terrifyingly competent at getting nearly anything it really wants. I know that sounds preposterous, but hear me out. 

Maintaining a typical American church is no picnic; starting one even less so. Even well-established churches die, and many, if not most, church plants fail within 3 years. But show me any major city in this country that doesn’t have a handful of hip, urban churches with that industrial coffee shop vibe. Show me any major suburb that’s not home to a few suburban megachurches that look like a mall or an airport concourse. The American church wants those things, and we make sure that we have them. 

Within most churches, the weekly worship service is a major priority. Go visit; sit through a service, then pull aside a church staffer. “That was amazing!” you say. “Would you mind telling me how you do it?” Ask the right person, and they can tell you, down to the literal nuts and bolts. After all, the Sunday service isn’t happenstance; they make the same thing happen every single week. 

  • They know exactly what tasks need to be done, by when, in order to pull it all off. 
  • They know what skill sets are needed to accomplish each task. 
  • They have identified people who have those skills, hired them (or installed them in volunteer positions), and empowered them to carry out their tasks. 
  • They make sure to provide those people with what they need to get the job done. 

We all know what this looks like. If a microphone cord goes bad, or a speaker goes out, they’ll replace it. The office manager orders the right kind of paper to print the bulletins. The PowerPoint (Keynote, if you’re really cool) slides will be carefully crafted and ready by Saturday so they can be loaded into Pro Presenter. The sound techs have an established rotation so there’s always someone on duty, and a backup in case of illness. The musicians will have the set list and be ready. The ushers who take up the offering will know who they are. The greeters will have been reminded to arrive 20 minutes early. And on and on….

I’m not knocking any of this. It’s a prodigious, brilliantly-coordinated effort, and a metric ton of work. Bringing it all off smoothly every single week is one of the great unappreciated labors of the modern church, and it’s not even considered some sort of extraordinary accomplishment. It’s just our baseline expectation — after all, it’s literally what we pay our church staff for, right?

…and that’s exactly my point. You want to know what it looks like when we really want something to happen? That’s what it looks like. We are absolutely competent at getting what we really want. 

Hold that thought.

Now go back to that same church staff, and ask them if they care that their kids grow up continuing to know and love Jesus. “Of course!” they will say. So then ask them “How do you make sure your kids don’t walk away from the Christian faith?” Inquire as to the plan. Ask the same set of questions that you asked about the service: 

  • What tasks need to be done, and by when, in order to accomplish the goal?
  • What skill sets are required to execute each task? 
  • Who has those skills? Who is empowering those people to use their skills?
  • What do those people need to get it done? Who makes sure they have what they need? 

You know as well as I do what’s going to happen. You’re going to get a deer-in-the-headlights look, a stammering recitation of some platitudes, and a quick exit from the conversation. And then we wonder why it’s getting sort of hard to find a 22-year-old who’s still Christian.

Someone will complain, of course, that discipling our kids is a multifaceted and organic process much harder to map than simply putting on the Sunday production, and so it is. But it’s also our primary job. All the more reason to have a plan, yes? Jesus never told us to make a Sunday morning stage production; He commissioned us to make disciples. So why is it we’re so competent at the one, and so helpless at the other?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Great Resignation Might be Good

2 January 2024

Pastors are leaving the church in droves. Why? This week, I spent some time reading one man’s answer. It would be worth your time to skim his account. As Rev. Lang articulates his reasons for leaving, not just that particular church, but the pastoral vocation altogether, I find myself sympathetic. There’s a lot in the article that I don’t agree with, and some of the things he says cause me to wonder if he’s called to the pastorate at all; good shepherds have to be tough, and I don’t think he is.

But his list of the seven proficiencies expected of a pastor really struck me. In his experience, church members expect their pastor to be…

  1. A professional speaker
  2. A CEO
  3. A professional fundraiser
  4. A counselor and conflict mediator
  5. The HR director for both paid and volunteer staff
  6. The Master of Ceremonies for a wide variety of community events
  7. A pillar of virtue

That’s true in most churches. I don’t have any trouble seeing why ten years of his job left him burned out. I’m surprised he made it that long.

You know what’s missing in it all? Any sense of what biblical shepherding ministry actually is. Rev. Lang tells us why he stepped into the role which church culture defined for him, and why, some years later, he stepped out of it again. That’s worthwhile information for a church to absorb, but one of the things it’s missing is, well…the Bible. There is no such biblical position as the one his church asked him to occupy. He shouldn’t have been doing that job; no one person should have been doing that job. More importantly, no church should be trying to hire one person to do that job.

“This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself ‘pastoral ministry?’ It’s not.”

I’m hoping that the masses of men leaving the ministry will provoke some soul-searching in congregations. We need — all of us — to be stepping into the work of the ministry. Every Christian should be a disciple, and every disciple should be a disciple-maker at the level they’re able to be. Those who are called to equip congregations to do that work are the leaders we need. More and more of them are bivocational, in part because it gives them greater freedom to do what they’re actually called to instead of getting sidetracked into various backwaters of institutional administrivia. Back when I was on staff at a mid-sized church, I used to keep track of how much time I spent on different activities. When I left that position, I continued keeping track for a while. You know what happened? Fewer people wasting my time, and more disciple-making.

This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself “pastoral ministry?” It’s not. For any young man who finds himself in the unfortunate position of being hired to do that job, I recommend that he resign forthwith and get involved with a ministry where he can heed the Bible’s counsel rather than flouting it as a necessary condition of his employment.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No Real Discipleship

7 November 2023

For so long as the Holy Spirit restrains the wickedness of the world, culture can only get so bad, and for so long as Messiah tarries, culture can only get so good. We will not descend into the Great Tribulation of our own accord until God permits it, and we cannot ascend to the consummated Kingdom of God of our own accord in any case.

However, between these two great boundary conditions, there is a lot of play, and between these two great boundary conditions, God calls His people “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

The Old Covenant shows us that we cannot do the first two, and the New Covenant shows us that when we do the third, we are given the first two as gifts — a heart of flesh in exchange for a heart of stone, as the prophet said.

This has to include God fulfilling in us His very first command: to tend and keep the earth, the root from which all culture springs. To be engaged in glorious culture-building is a gift God gives His people, and always has. There is no real discipleship without it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No Coffee in Israel

14 March 2023

My latest article is up at Theopolis. Have a look!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

All They Got Was Lunch

21 February 2023

When I talk about community pastoral work with other believers, there’s one question I get more than any other. It’s not how to prepare, what books to read, or how to evaluate seminary choices. It’s not what to say to a new widow, or how to be at the bedside when someone is in their last hours. As they hear the stories of what God is doing — the alcoholic that got sober and is working toward a senior shotput championship, the single mom that needed new tires, the felon that designed my first business card, the young lady punishing her own sins by serving as as the sexual plaything of a malevolent man, the gay man who’s frustrated by his progressive friends’ unwillingness to actually do anything to improve the city, while the Christians are working their fingers to the bone — almost every single person has the same question: “Where do you find these people?”

I never know what to say.

I know the literal answers: the severe weather shelter, a failing coffee shop, the cafe on the corner, a local massage therapy school, a church that’s focused on meeting the needs of the homeless population. But that’s not what they’re asking, is it?

They’re asking where I find this special class of people that are ready and waiting to be ministered to, as if there were some secret place to find them. And that’s absolutely the wrong question. It’s not where I’m looking; it’s how I’m looking. Lost people are everywhere; the harvest is heartbreakingly plentiful.

Jesus once taught this exact lesson. He was taking the Twelve through Samaritan country, and they had to stop to buy food. Jews have no dealings with Samaritans if they can help it; I’m sure it made a bit of a splash when an obviously diverse group of twelve Jewish men walked through town. How many people did they walk past to get to the market? Five? A dozen? Two dozen? How many merchants did they interact with to buy what they needed? How many people did they pass on their way back out to the well?

Of course, you know the story: while they’d been in town, Jesus accosted a lone woman who came out to the well to draw water in the heat of the day. She believed in Him, and when the disciples came out, she went back into the village to tell everyone about the Man she’d met by the well. As the inhabitants of the town began to come out toward the well, Jesus tells His disciples — with, it seems, some irony — that they should pray for God to sent laborers into the harvest, because the harvest is so plentiful.

Don’t miss this point: the harvest Jesus is talking about is the population of the town He’d just sent the disciples into.

Jesus had one shot at interacting with one person, and He got the whole town out to the well. The disciples walked past who knows how many people passing through town to market, interacted with the merchants, and walked back through town on their way out, and all they got was lunch. They were there, but not as harvesters. They simply weren’t on task.

Where did Jesus find all these people? They were there the whole time.

Better question: what did Jesus do differently? A little further into the story, He tells us: “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things.” (John 8:28)

The harvest is right in front of you. Listen. Listen to them. Listen to God. Say and do what He tells you. I promise you, the Lord of the Harvest knows how to send you as a harvester.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Without the Glue

8 November 2022

Back in college, I was part of a “cell church.” The idea was that the actual church meeting was the small-group meeting that happened during the week, where we shared a meal and spent time discussing how to apply the Bible to our lives. The Sunday morning gathering, where all the cells came together (in our case, in a rented synagogue), was not the church meeting proper, but a time of celebration and teaching. The goal was to get a little closer to the kind of church life we see in Acts 2, and it worked…we got a little closer.

Over the next couple decades, I had a variety of formative influences, and I grew as a Christian, but I never really learned how to disciple effectively. I learned how to teach effectively. Every attempt to make disciples devolved into teaching, and while teaching is part of the task — a necessary part — it’s not the whole job. I knew I was missing something, and didn’t know what, or how to get it.

Moving to Englewood, Colorado, changed that. Here, the local pastors gather monthly and pray for one another and the One Church in Englewood (which happens to meet in separate buildings). One of the older men in the group, a Dutch Reformed pastor named Dave, took several of us under his wing. Over the next couple years, Dave taught us to disciple effectively, and also pitched the concept of missional community: a spiritual extended family on mission together, as it were.

Now, most of the writing around missional communities at that time wanted to market it as some exciting new move of God, which didn’t make any sense. To the extent that there was a solid New Testament case for something like it–and there clearly was, in the first-century oikos–the missional community obviously couldn’t be new. Certainly there was a New Testament case for making disciples; that was hardly some exotic new move of God; it was Christianity 101.

And yet, the North American church, desperate for effective interventions in the culture, was doing everything but that. If we total up all the time, talent, energy, money, etc. that the churches were expending — a sort of ecclesiastical equivalent to the GNP — we’ll find that the vast majority of the Gross Church Product goes into things that really have nothing to do with making disciples. That being the case, the great need was and is simple repentance: We have occupied ourselves with secondary things at the expense of our primary mission. Time to get back to it.

No shortage of ink has been spilled on that particular subject, so I won’t belabor it here, except to say this: in the intervening decade or so, nearly every “missional community” I’ve seen, heard about, or been part of, has fizzled out, stagnated, or fallen back into being a standard-issue church small group (not necessarily a bad thing to be, but hardly the heady vision were were sold, is it?). Not coincidentally, there’s a significant difference between the first-century Christian oikos and the twenty-first century missional community that is supposedly emulating it. Joining a twenty-first century missional community was a boutique lifestyle choice. The members’ survival needs were attended to elsewhere; missional community was a leisure-time activity.

The preindustrial oikos was not a choice; it was a survival strategy. In the preindustrial oikos, members spent their days working shoulder to shoulder to care for one another and serve their larger community in ways that generated income for the oikos — whether they were making purple dye like Lydia’s household in Philippi or bringing fish to market like Simon Peter’s in Capernaum. An oikos like Lydia’s and Peter’s got transformed into an engine for mission when its members came to Jesus, of course, but that was never its only purpose. The preindustrial oikos was how people survived. Your oikos was not just a social club; it was your job, your living arrangements, your educational system, your medical care, and your retirement plan, all rolled into one. You couldn’t opt out of your oikos without cutting your own lifeline.

When we tried to replace the preindustrial oikos with a social club devoted to serving a particular group of people–however noble the cause–it overwhelmingly failed. Of course it did! We were trying to have an oikos without the glue that holds an oikos together.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Some Pastoral Prayers

16 August 2022

These are in no particular order; just prayers I’ve found myself praying for people who (as we all do) needed Jesus. I hope they will be a blessing and a help to you.

Lord God, my friend _____ is afraid as the Exodus generation was afraid of you in the desert. Please teach him to be like Joshua and Caleb and trust himself to Your kindness and mercy. Please show him Your mercy in tangible, hard-to-miss ways, so that he can see it and learn to trust you. And as for the disordered loves in his heart that cause him to be attracted to the dark path that shrinks away from You, please excise them. We ask for this in the strong name of Jesus, who lives and reigns at Your right hand, and through the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us. Amen.

Lord God, who revealed Yourself to us as our just and loving Father through Jesus Christ your Son, grant to this son of yours, __________, an unmistakable and unshakeable knowledge of who You are to him because Jesus Christ’s blood washes away his sin, through the Holy Spirit who seals him forever into the family of the Triune God. Amen.

Father God, you made your daughter ________ to be free, and we know that you mean to set her free from every lie and false obligation, from every bad habit and weakness. We confess that sometimes it’s hard for her to tell the difference between those things: when there’s a weakness that needs to be purged, versus when there’s an impossible false obligation that needs to be repented of. So we’re asking you to give her bucket-loads of discernment, to know the true from the false, the good from the evil, to see the difference between sin and finitude. Pour out your Spirit on her, give her Your eyes to see. We ask in the name of Jesus, who died for her, that she might be free. Amen.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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