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Mentoring with Intention

It’s more than just hanging out
Mentoring with Intention
Organic Mentoring

Organic Mentoring

It’s easy to confuse mentoring and friendship. Friendships are essential connections important to our sense of well-being. Women need friends. Times with friends bring laughter, listening ears, and encouragement. As friends browse the sale racks, their conversation may lead to an important question and an opportunity for biblical guidance. But the conversation often goes no deeper than bargains and the latest with kids. Friendly advice may be offered, but rarely are friends intentional about moving us toward maturity in Christ.

A pitfall with an organic approach is that mentoring relationships can get stuck on the friendship level. The women spend time together, tell each other about their lives, and encourage each other, but there is no spiritual movement. We mentioned previously that young women learn best through sharing life experiences, but mentoring is more than telling someone about your life. Mentoring is a relationship with a purpose. Without purpose the relationship can meander aimlessly, becoming little more than friends “hanging out.”

Mentoring is more than friendship or giving advice. Our purpose is to help young women follow Christ and be transformed into His image. Intentionality in the relationship allows us to move in this direction.

Listen with a Purpose

Mentoring that appeals to postmodern women starts with careful listening. Her world of connection-through-technology creates hunger for a patient, wise listener. When busy schedules rule the day, listening may seem like a waste of time. On the contrary, listening is a powerful mentoring tool. When you listen carefully to your mentee, trust is built and she feels accepted, valued, and understood. You begin to see her, and her heart begins to open to you. A mentee is unlikely to receive your input until she feels heard and understood. “I joined a mentoring program but dropped out after two months,” revealed a young woman. “My mentor kept telling me what to do, but she didn’t even know me.”

Develop Quality Conversation

An intentional mentor facilitates quality conversations. As you listen with purpose, eventually guide the conversation beyond what happened and who did what. Ask good questions that bring out what is going on inside your mentee. Questions like, What do you dislike about this situation? What do you dislike about yourself in this situation? What are you confused or upset about? Where do you need help? How do you want to change? What do you sense God wants you to do? Make no assumptions and give no advice at this point; only listen.

Good questions help you listen to your mentee’s heart and discern where she is spiritually. After she answers, summarize what you heard and let her verify the accuracy so both of you grasp her situation. When the mentee hears her own thinking, she begins to see the problem, and the door opens for spiritual growth. Good questions lead her to reflect, something she probably seldom has time to do, allowing her to process her life in light of God’s truth. Quality conversation takes the relationship beneath the surface and creates the depth young women crave. Her needs bubble to the surface. When this dynamic is present, she feels seen.

Discern Her Spiritual Situation

Spiritual mentoring needs to be both organic and organized. Coming from Auckland, New Zealand, which is called the “City of Sails,” I see the organized elements (such as showing up in each other’s lives, listening “fiercely,” and asking great questions) as hoisting the sails so that the organic elements (the wind of the Spirit, in an attitude of daily dependence) can hit our sails and take us to places in our relationship that we would never have dreamed.

Rowland Forman

Organic mentoring may be natural but isn’t without effort. As the mentor listens she works hard to discern the young woman’s place on her journey with Jesus. To do this you must listen to the mentee, the Spirit, and yourself—all at the same time. Now, that takes serious mental and spiritual effort.

As you listen to the young woman, be alert for unbiblical thinking, sinful or unwise behavior, harmful habits, strengths, weaknesses, gifts, knowledge of the Bible, her understanding of God. Is this mentee just starting the journey, or has she traveled the road for a while? What experiences with God does she bring with her? Listen for what the Spirit reveals and how He might direct the conversation. God is the one who causes growth, and He has opinions about the life of your mentee. How is He moving? You are there to help her hear and respond to God’s presence and activity in her life.

Listen to your own thoughts as well. What obstacles in her life do you observe? What comes to you from Scripture? Is there a similar experience in your life you can relate? Mentoring is a dynamic interaction between listening and discerning. This has been referred to as “wholly listening, holy listening, and holy seeing.” Mastery of this skill enables you to bring life-giving truth to your mentee and comes with practice over time. Give yourself grace and depend completely on God to work through you in the process. He will.

Use of Curriculum

As you and your mentee identify her needs, a book or Bible study could be helpful. Most next generation women are open to a “study” if it relates to their current need. If you don’t know much about the subject, no problem; you can learn along with your mentee. Mutual learning creates the collaborative atmosphere she loves. Remember, you are not the answer woman. She chose you because she trusts you and wants to learn from your life, so relax. If a book is selected, be sure to discuss it together instead of “teaching” the material.

It is our opinion that mentoring should include biblical truth. God’s Word is foundational for all of life and too many postmodern lives are untouched by it. Encourage your mentee to attend a strong Bible study to complement your influence in her life. We find that many young women already attend a Bible study and don’t want more of the same in mentoring. Nevertheless, in the mentoring relationship they are open to exploring Scripture that relates to their needs and growth goals.

Remember, the mentor is always responsible to bring God’s perspective to the table. If your mentee is not in Bible study, you want to think about how to introduce God’s Word into your relationship. If she has never done Bible study before, it may take some time for her to value God’s Word and want to learn from it. Once your relationship is established, the two of you may decide to choose Bible study as a growth goal, and you can teach her how to study God’s Word, or perhaps attend a Bible study together.

Summary

Traditional approaches to mentoring led us to believe that study of prepackaged material was the best way to grow a young woman. Our young women have voted and this is not their choice. Instead they want a mentor who listens to their lives. They hunger for truth presented in a believable format. They want to see firsthand how God works in a woman’s life, how to know and obey God in a messed-up world. Shared life experiences give them opportunities to connect their lives with biblical truth. If we want to draw our young women back, relationships must switch from a teaching focus to a relational focus where shared experiences are prominent.

When you make it your goal to see your mentee and respond to her needs, both of you experience a rewarding relationship. She grows, you grow, and God is glorified in your lives together. Isn’t this what we want? The results can be transformational when we put aside our workbooks and manuals, look into the eyes and hearts of our mentees, and begin the process of intentional listening, sharing, and loving.

Excerpted from Organic Mentoring. Copyright © 2014 by Sue Edwards and Barbara Neumann. Used by permission of Kregel Publications.


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