Mentoring

As you might imagine, one of the toughest things about being in Canada for these months is making sure our time is productive while we wait to return to Mexico. Obviously for me, getting through the stages of treatment takes some doing, but there is time left over. Ironically, it feels like one of the busiest, most fulfilling times of life, because I am for the first time in my life taking time to steadily write. It’s my new job. For Robert, with his penchant for action, it’s tougher, I think. He’s used to spending his time working hard or talking hard, usually both together. Already he’s helping his brother train an apprentice in woodworking, he’s now driving with someone from our church to the World Mennonite Conference, where he will meet the editors of The Anabaptist Witness that have been publishing articles he’s been writing, and as soon as he comes back, he will be hosting a Christian brother from the DRC. And he finagles coffees and teas and suppers and desserts with people, mentoring when that works. He’s a natural born coach, mentor, teacher, and I have lost count of the hundreds of people he has taught to plane a board or question an assumption about church.

He’s had excellent mentors himself. Rick taught him how to make guitars in a shop in Catacamas, Honduras, while apprenticing him in church-planting. During the day, the team of Hondurans and Canadians would work in the shop, but they would quit early so that after lunch they could be out hacienda amigos, or “making friends.” They would walk around Catacamas, chatting with neighbors, strangers, and friends, and they would invite people to know Jesus. They studied together, prayed together, and grew a church right in the shop. As a team. There were four guys who were the elders, and though Rick mentored them, no one called him pastor because that’s not what he was after. He wanted those four guys to go out to other neighborhoods and towns and villages and do the same things he was showing them how to do now. And they did. These guys started dozens of churches all throughout central Honduras. And that was Robert’s education in missions and church planting and pastoral training—an apprenticeship in a guitar shop.

The best thing about this training is that it was eminently practical. Immediately reproducible. All the guys were out mentoring other people, assigning the same simple training booklets they used themselves. There was no waiting time, no being sent away from their networks for special training by experts who’d never seen your village. No. this was something anyone could do right out the gate. And they did, Robert included. Rick was a good mentor.

My guess is that the hardest thing for Robert this year is being gone from our team in Mexico and the many others he mentors there. He skypes, emails, calls, and goes back to visit them whenever he can, but it’s tough being this far away. Thankfully, every member is immersed in Indian culture and everyone is hacienda amigos and mentoring others, too, including each other. Because that’s the job. We learn and bless by passing on to others what we have received. Recently our mission board reported that they are switching their training model to that of field apprenticeships, and we think this is a good thing. Don’t you think that we let discipling get too complicated sometimes, if we do it at all?