This month I’ve asked a High School Teacher, Baseball & Swim Coach, Bro. Houston Butler, to write the monthly article for the youth section of the paper. Houston is on staff at Lake Cormorant High School. God brought them to Central Church, where I pastor, last year. What a blessing they have been to us! He currently is working on his Master’s Degree. Here is his submission! Thank you Houston for all you do for the youth of Desoto County! – Anders Lee
by Houston Butler
Member of Central Church, Southaven, Mississippi
No matter what career or profession an individual enters, mentoring is a necessary aspect of the entrance process. Mentoring goes back as far as history itself. The very first man, Adam, was mentored by God himself. Genesis 2:15-17 shows the mentoring between God and Adam, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” God had a greater understanding of what was at stake and more knowledge of the situation than Adam, which is why God told him that he could not eat of the tree. It wasn’t a “because I said so” commandment, but God knew the repercussions of the actions if Adam did eat of the fruit. We can take a few lessons from God on impacting the youth of our day!
We continue through the course of history and we see a development of apprentices. A person who has experience in a field of work is essentially mentoring apprentices into a specific type of craft. We still have the same type of mentoring as younger individuals enter into careers. As a teacher, the last semester of my education I had to do student teaching, which is working under a more experienced teacher. Medical students have to endure months to years of clinical hours and residencies in their field of study. New police officers are partnered with an FTO (field training officer), which assists the rookie with how things are to be done, from paperwork to traffic stops and everything in between. As Christians we know that no matter what we do as a profession we need to mentor people as believers and let the bible lead us in all we do! Especially when it comes to impacting youth in our day! We need to remember that our vocation is our ministry location!
We also see mentoring in the Bible on two different occasions. The first major occasion is with Jesus and his disciples. Jesus hand-selected 12 men in who he would invest himself spiritually, emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Throughout Christ’s ministry, He taught and witnessed to a plethora of different individuals; however, at the end of the day, he poured directly into the lives of those 12 men (Mark 4:34, “He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything). Even further, within those 12, Jesus had an inner circle of 3—Peter, James, and John in whom He more intimately invested. Through the 12 disciples, we can also notice that mentoring is not 100 percent successful. Judas was one of the disciples and ultimately turned away and betrayed the relationship that Christ had invested in him.
The second occasion we see is the relationship between Paul and Timothy. Timothy was a young disciple—Acts 16:1-3; Paul came also to Derbe and to Lystra. A disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek. He was well spoken of by the brothers at Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek. Eventually he became the pastor at the Church at Ephesus. Paul who had years of experience in ministry and Jewish training took Timothy under his wing and trained and mentored him.
Dr. Tim Elmore presents three questions in his book Life Giving Mentors. Who are life-giving mentors? Why is mentoring necessary? Who should be my target?
Who are life-giving mentors?
These questions are vital in the process of mentoring. We have to answer each question and self-evaluate through those answers to ensure that we are mentoring correctly. The answer to the first question is one that I feel has already been answered but will restate. Life-giving mentors are individuals who mentor and lead through relationships and focus on the development of the mentee. Both Jesus and Paul were life-giving mentors.
The Bible provides us with several passages regarding life-giving mentorship: Proverbs 22:6 (Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it), Proverbs 27:17 (Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another), and Ecclesiastes 10:10 (If the iron is blunt, and one does not sharpen the edge, he must use more strength, but wisdom helps one to succeed). In each of these passages, the underlying theme is teaching and training through relationships. Proverbs 22:6 shows when this training should start. Typically this verse is used within the context of parenthood, however, I feel like that is underplaying the importance of the verse in its entirety. Training and mentoring don’t have an age requirement. Proverbs 27:17 focuses on the direct relationship of two people sharpening each other and building each other up through both encouragement and reproof and correction. Although this process is not always fun, and sometimes is even painful ,it is necessary for the growth of both individuals. The last verse, Ecclesiastes 10:10, confronts what happens if one is not trained properly from the beginning. If that individual has not been “sharpened” then more strength is required during the process. The verse ties directly into my favorite quote, which is by Frederick Douglass—“It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men”. If we are building and training from the beginning it will be easier than trying to repair the broken men later.
Why is mentoring necessary?
The second question, in my opinion, is the most important. Is mentoring really necessary? First and foremost, we have seen that mentoring is a biblical truth and principle. We can further see the importance of mentoring in 1 Corinthians 11:1, Titus 2:3-5, and Hebrews 13:7. The apostle Paul, who truly understood the importance of mentoring, writes all of these verses. In 1 Corinthians 11:1, he writes to the church at Corinth, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ”, he understood that mentoring at its core was leading through example. Leading by example can also be seen in Titus 2:3-5 (Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled): Paul was clear that the older women were to be examples and mentors to the younger women. The last verse that Paul writes is to the Christian community as a whole in the book of Hebrews 13:7, “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith”, for those to remember the example set for them through their faith and imitate that same type of faith.
Who should be my target?
The final question deserves both an individual answer and a blanket answer, which both can be the same. Who should be the target of our mentoring? The next generation should be our focus. Again, we can turn to scripture to answer this question. Psalms 145:4, provides us with the blanket answer to this question, “One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.” Each generation should mentor and train the generation that comes after them. Granted, a younger individual can train an older one, this is typically not the case. As we look back at the relationship between Paul and Timothy one last time in 2 Timothy 2:2—“ And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also”—Paul was not just training Timothy in efforts to benefit Timothy, but also the next generation. Paul ever so subtly commands Timothy to take what he has heard and learned and train and teach others. What we are taught we must pass on to the next generation.
Lastly, David writes in Psalms 71:18, “So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come”, a scripture that should be the prayer for each of us. That no matter how old we are or become that we should continue to proclaim Christ to the next generation. The more we can train and mentor, the more that can eventually be mentored leading to an exponential change in our culture and the youth of tomorrow.
