It’s important to me that Christian mentoring is not just a secular practice that we Christians have picked up and given a spiritual makeover. It’s an enduring element in the Christian tradition, from Biblical times, through church history and down to the present. And yet, Christians don’t own mentoring as a discipline. It’s actually a human thing, practiced in various forms and known by various names in every culture all around the world since, I would venture to say, the beginning of civilisation. Mentoring is a very broad category and Christian mentoring is a distinct subset.
In that sense, it’s a bit like the institution of marriage. We Christians have a particular understanding of marriage – that two people are joined together by God in a covenant bond. At the same time, we acknowledge that there are valid marriages in which the partners have no Christian commitment and do not see God being part of their relationship at all. In the same way, we can acknowledge there are valid types of mentoring in which God is not considered part of the equation. Some mentoring traditions don’t include God in the picture but the Judeo-Christian tradition definitely does.
So then, it makes sense to speak of ‘Christian mentoring’ as distinct from other forms and understandings of mentoring. When we call our ourselves the ‘Australian Christian Mentoring Network’ we’re saying more than that our members are Christians. We’re saying they practice, in a wide variety of ways, a special, distinctive form of mentoring.
The ACMN Code of Ethics, which all our members sign, states:
Christian mentoring is intentional partnering with others in a Spirit led and creative process that helps them to recognise what God is saying to them as they aspire to maximize their personal and professional potential.
For me, it’s not that I’m a mentor who also happens to be a Christian, like I might be an architect who also happens to be a Christian. As a practitioner of Christian mentoring, I have a particular understanding of mentoring that includes God – and that makes all the difference to how I go about what I do. I’m constantly learning how to deeply integrate my Christian faith into my mentoring – my understanding, attitudes, motivation, focus, process and methods.
Exactly what makes Christian mentoring ‘Christian’, and how we can develop in those things, will be the subject of our 2023 ACMN Seminar to be held online on 3 August. Together, we will explore how our distinctly different and rich approach to mentoring can be a powerful and precious gift to the people we serve in mentoring.
– By Rick Lewis