Mentoring and Being Anointed

Mentoring has nearly become a lost art.  Mentoring is the time-proven method for transmitting wisdom and knowledge through one-on-one or one-to-a-small-group relationship.  This is how Jesus led His disciples, and it is how discipleship is best achieved.

The fashionable “how to” conferences and books available today simply do not help most people.  Not that they are not good – they are – but they have a common weakness; namely, the book or conference shares with you a method which may be very good, but all you actually receive is the knowledge of the method.  You do NOT receive the ANOINTING of the person who has discovered this great method.  For instance, a pastor develops a great way to grow a church.  You attend his conference and he explains the method, and you buy his book.  You go back to your church and follow the instructions to the letter “T.”  To your disillusionment, your success does not even compare to his.  What went wrong?  You don’t have his anointing!

You cannot learn anointing by attending a meeting, a conference, a concert, or by reading a book; it is only bestowed by God.  And a method without the anointing is like a kiss over the phone: you hear it, but you don’t have it.

Mentoring, on the other hand, provides one-on-one, hands-on impartation that ensures not only the transferring of information, but also the anointing that is essential to bearing fruitfulness.  It also provides a close relationship to ensure counsel in the areas of your life that need grooming, such as family relationships, financial stewardship, ethics, and morality.

Mentoring is the age-old system of a father passing on to his son the secrets of the family business.  In a mentoring relationship, time is taken to guide you into fruitfulness, and that experience and wisdom are passed from one generation to the next.

It has been to my advantage over the years to have sought out and found certain men, fathers in the faith, who mentored me.  I learned more than the information they passed along to me; I caught their spirit.  It equipped me for ministry and life, and has served me well for many years.  Somewhere in that process God has given me my own anointing for service.

I still maintain a few relationships as these.  We never really outgrow our need for them.  Do we?  Yet I am now at a place in my journey that I think the best thing for me to be doing is to find a ministry son or daughter (or a small group of them) and mentor them closely.  There is a fresh anointing for such people.