Breaking Tradition By Mentoring
(Continuing reflections on Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision by Paul R. Gupta and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter.)
Paul R. Gupta is a leader at the forefront of the movement to plant a million churches to reach India for Christ. As the movement has grown the challenge of leadership development has come to the fore. In this series of reflections upon their experiences I have been seeking to apply their insights to the African church.
Sherwood Lingenfelter writes about Gupta’s early experiences in leadership training and the realization of the necessity of mentoring. He says:
Training without mentoring by the pastor or another leader usually doesn’t succeed…Pastors did not know how to plant second or third churches without leader or peer mentoring. While they knew they should make disciples, their effectiveness was limited without mentoring or feedback. When gifted people finished the training to teach, they still were not effective without ongoing peer and master-teacher mentoring. To train new leaders and empower them for ministry they must have mentors, be mentored and learn how to mentor others.[i]
It seems that Gupta has returned to the basic first century method of developing leaders and as a result is seeing a strong church planting movement being established. This approach is what made Paul so successful as described by Roland Allen in his classic work Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?:
In little more than ten years St. Paul established the Church in four provinces of the Empire, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. Before A.D. 47 there were no Churches in these provinces; in A.D. 57 Paul could speak as if his work there was done…This is truly an astonishing fact. That Churches should be founded so rapidly, so securely, seems to us today, accustomed to the difficulties, the uncertainties, the failures, the disastrous relapses of our own missionary work, almost incredible. Many missionaries in later days have received a larger number of converts that St. Paul; many have preached over a wider area than he; but none have so established Churches. We have long forgotten that such things could be… Today, if a man ventures to suggest that there may be something to the methods by which St. Paul attained such wonderful results worthy of our careful attention, and perhaps of our imitation, he is in danger of being accused of revolutionary tendencies.[ii]
Specifically, why was Paul so successful and we often seem to see so much failure? Could it be as a friend shared with me in an email?
Maybe what Paul did (based on Jesus?) was to live with these new converts 24/7 for a few months. We must create (re-discover) ways to make equipping more thoroughly relational. It’s only partially about information.
Relational equipping is another way of saying, “mentoring,” which is a key element in the strategy employed by the church in India and which we need to take seriously in Africa.
What is necessary if mentoring is going to take place? It means there has to be a change of attitude by church leaders who must be willing to share what they have learned with younger pastors and leaders within their churches. One of the reasons I have discovered pastors don’t want to train others is that they feel threatened by those who may be more gifted than themselves. They are fearful that they may be supplanted by the younger men. And so they refuse to train and pass on what they have learned and gained by experience to the next generation.
Gottfried Osei-Mensah comments on this situation in Africa today:
Our national leaders want to stay in office until they drop dead, and when they drop dead nobody has been prepared to take over for them. It is the same in the church…But we cannot justify this by saying it is African culture…Scripture must judge our culture, and those things that are incompatible must go, however age-old, however authentically cultural they may be. The church today needs leaders who are able to disciple younger leaders and prepare them, not just as leaders of tomorrow, but as God’s servants to serve him today.[iii]
Church leadership should not be an elite club. Older pastors, if they are going to build the kingdom of God—and not their own—must break the tradition of hanging on to power and position and commit themselves to mentoring the up and coming generation of leadership for the church. They must become future driven instead of fear driven. If not, the growing church in Africa will be crippled due to lack of adequately trained and developed leaders.
[i] Paul R. Gupta and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision (Winona Lake, Indiana: BMH Books, 2006). p. 98.
[ii] As quoted in Ruth Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1983), p. 29-30).
[iii] Gottfried Osei-Mensah, Wanted Servant Leaders, (Achimota, Ghana: Africa Christian Press, 1990). p. 11.
