Leadership development is key to the transformation of the church, and mentoring happens to be a critical part of that development.
“Mentoring is an intentional effort to build leaders through intimate relationships, ” said Dr John Ng who conducted a recent mentoring workshop jointly organised by NECF Malaysia and Eagles Communication (Singapore).
The Eagles Executive Vice-President said, “Leaders are naturally lonely people and mentoring provides a way for them to develop friendship and companionship. Many leaders have fallen out for lack of accountability.”
Over 120 people comprising pastors and church leaders who attended the interactive workshop gave it a high rating in terms of usefulness in helping them consider a ministry in mentoring.
Dr Ng kicked off the workshop by giving participants a biblical perspective of mentoring. Since mentoring is a relationship, he used Paul’s relationship with Timothy as a model of the kind of relationship that should be emulated.
According to him, mentoring is “a trust and synergistic relationship that seeks to support and develop individuals in their personal growth to be a God-centred person, holistic personal development and improved performance.”
In any relationship, there is always the fear of failure and breakdown in the relationship. “Leaders therefore need to learn how to recover from failed relationship. Paul was a good example of a leader who never stopped building relationship even after experiencing failed relationship. He realised people would fail and disappoint him, yet he found strength to recover and risk again because he realised that was the way to pass his legacy,” Dr Ng pointed out.
He then moved on to the purpose or goal of mentoring, which is learning (for the mentor) and helping people to learn (for the mentoree). “How do people learn?” he asked the participants. Some of the answers were: observing, asking relevant questions and imitating or role modeling.
Dr Ng felt role modeling was a critical aspect of learning and he related the story of Roger Bannister, the first man to run one mile in under four minutes in 1954. Six months after his historic success, three people broke the record 26 times. Why was it impossible before Roger Bannister accomplish the feat?
“The reason is that runners copied his (Bannister’s) techniques. – where he practised, what he ate, what he did and how often did he do it and so on. That was role-modeling at work,” he stressed.
Good mentors must provide a climate that is conducive for growth. “You can’t change people. You can only provide an environment for change,” Dr Ng said.
He then took participants through the Mentoring Framework, which provides a structure to start a mentoring relationship. The framework addresses issues such as the goals and values of mentoring, the types of partnership to base the relationship on, the structure or system of mentoring and what obstacles to expect in a mentoring relationship.
The session was a beneficial exercise as it provided participants time to discuss the issues addressed in the framework.
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