For years I have been hearing about the importance of "mentoring" in the congregation. I have even been to workshops on this topic - but I could never really get a handle on it. Then one of my Elders informed me of how much she learns by our one on one times. Once a week she would come by for prayer and we would spend 20 minutes to an hour in conversation about prayer, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, leadership - whatever was on her mind. It dawned on my one day that I was mentoring. And then I realized that mentoring was not a program, it was simply sharing and imparting to others what I had learned from the Lord.
In the Spring of 2009 I had an interesting encounter with the Lord. As I was praying in my office, I had a vision. Appearing in front of me was a document - and on that document was a questionaire. I wrote down all the questions that I was seeing and I distributed it to all the folks in the congregation (over 60). Forty seven questionaires were returned to me. The questionaire was about intercession, prayer and spiritual warfare. The results were very diverse but there were two things that EVERY questionaire had: everyone wanted to learn more about spiritual warfare and everyone wanted to learn to hear the voice of the Lord. Now what do I do with this ? The Lord told me in prayer - "write and teach". I wrote a booklet on spiritual warfare and I followed that up with an all day seminar. But what was fascinating was what happened next. To teach people how to hear the voice of the Lord, I didn't write a booklet and I didn't have a seminar. Instead, the Lord directed me to launch a "One-2-One Prayer" initiative. Those who were interested could have one on one time with me to learn how to pray and discern the voice of the Lord. Sixteen people signed up for this. It was based on their schedule and it personal mentoring time with their pastor. We launched it in January of 2011 and we ran it for 5 months. Almost all began having experiences of the Lord in prayer; one experienced the infilling of the Holy Spirit and three were raised up to join me in engaging in spiritual warfare through intercessory prayer. This One-2-One Mentoring is begining to take on new life; some are asking for very specific things to be discussed next time. Since we focus on the Christian Year (Advent to Pentecost) I have decided to expand the mentoring season from November to the end of June. This is how I learned to let Jesus lead me in mentoring (feeding) my sheep. May you be encouraged by this.
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