I often get asked about the term ‘mentoring’ and whether it has a theological and biblical base. This is a great question and an important area in which not enough work has been done. I will reply by sketching out the way we handle this in our training of mentors within John Mark Ministries. For interest I have linked just a few sample files from our training web storage.
While the term “mentoring” is an extension of the Mentor – Telemachus narrative from Homer’s The Odyssey, (the account in Fenelon’s Les Adventures de Telemaque is better and more applicable) and as such is extra biblical, the semantic framework commonly associated mentoring certainly is a biblical concept. I understand this framework to be:
An intentional trust relationship in which a more experienced person supports, guides and develops another in life, ministry and leadership.