…Of course, Paul expected the training of future leaders to involve the handing on of doctrine. But, as is clear from a later statement by Paul in this letter, such transmission of the faith also involved the development of lifelong convictions and goals and the nurture of character -- making the leader a person of love, patience, and steadfastness (3:10). Timothy knew exactly what Paul was talking about, for this was the very way the apostle had mentored Timothy.
Timothy had joined Paul's apostolic band early on in what is termed Paul's second missionary journey, that is, around 48 or 49 AD (Acts 16:1-3). As he traveled with Paul he saw firsthand what Paul later called his doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance, persecutions, and afflictions (2 Tim. 3:10-11). Timothy grew to know and embrace Paul's theology and doctrinal convictions. He learned that at the heart of all genuinely Christian theology is God: the Father, His Son, and the Holy Spirit. He came to be grounded in the fact that the gospel is centered on the death and resurrection of Christ, the only way that men and women can come into a true and eternally beneficent relationship with this God, the creator of all that exists.
But Timothy also came to follow the way Paul lived, how he made decisions and determined the best use of his time. He learned Paul's purpose for living, namely, the glorification of God and of His Son, Christ Jesus. Timothy absorbed Paul's love for the church and compassion for those who were held in the darkness of sin. And he saw the way that Paul responded with patience and perseverance to difficulties and the fact that the apostle did not waver in his commitment to Christ despite persecution and affliction. In short, as Paul and Timothy spent this large amount of time together, Timothy's soul began to mirror that of Paul, and his mind became increasingly attuned to the wavelengths of the apostle's thinking (Phil. 2:19-22). This is mentoring.
What a wonderful idea this is, older men mentoring younger men. As Haykin later points out, the hard part is that this takes time:
The great challenge, of course, in this way of incarnational mentoring is that it takes time.
You can’t mentor someone quickly because it simply requires time, lots of it. Haykin is speaking about this in the context of a seminary setting, where men are trained to be vocational ministers and are supposed to learn how to do this in a few years. I am not sure that the seminary is the best place to mentor and train men because unless you are a cruddy student, seminary only last a few years.
I would ask the question, who are the mentors for young men out of seminary? You spend a couple of years in the seminary in intense training in a hyper-religious atmosphere where everyone around you (more or less) is far more fervent than the average church goer. Then you graduate and are called to a church where the vast majority of people are nominal Christians at best with a handful of fervent people. Here is your church brother, now go lead these people who are going to utterly depend on you. You are the senior pastor, so everyone looks to you for leadership! In a setting where a man is on staff with more senior pastoral staff, it works better but a lot of young (i.e. under 40) pastors are the sole pastor in their church and go it alone. I know how lonely that can be, how isolated you become. You can’t have a bad day or people look at you funny. You can’t get frustrated or the people lose heart. You don’t wear a tie and you are a lib’ral or emergent. You can’t make changes or make mistakes or people leave one assembly for another. Your kids have to be perfect and your wife has to be a living paragon of Christian virtue and womanhood every second. There are very few places to turn so you just figure it out yourself or you give up. That is not how it was when Timothy learned from Paul and that is not how it should be today.
I think this is so important and so missing in the church. We have an enormous amount of experience and wisdom right in the local gathering of the church and yet we so rarely tap it. In fact we typically leave to find wisdom. We don’t seek wisdom in stooped backs and gray hair, we seek it from men with letters behind their names or at conferences with the best speakers. Young women have so much they can learn from older sisters. It is not like you get a Biblical view of how to be a wife and mother from the media and education establishment and you can see that clearly in the confusion about gender in the church. Young women take their cues from the world and then try to make it “Christian”. That doesn’t work. Young men need to learn from older brothers. Desperately. The solution to apathetic young men in the church is not more “relevant” services, it is an older brother to firmly and lovingly kick them in the butt and telling them to man up. When we spot a fervent young man in the church, do we encourage an older saint to mentor him so he can minister where he is or do we encourage the young man to leave and go to seminary? Praise God for your desire to serve, now go away and find a congregation somewhere else! How does that make sense?! The wisest Christian I know is not a seminary professor or a pastor, he is an old man with a lifetime of wisdom and a heart brimming with Scripture, a man as Reformed as I am but far more humble about it, a man who spent much of his life in prison ministering to the unwanted of society. Those are the sorts of people we segregate out in many churches because we think that they have nothing to say to the young people, we ship them off to nursing homes where they won’t be a bother, we pit them against the young economically and politically. The greatest treasure in America is not in Fort Knox, it is rotting away in nursing homes, waiting to die. We should tear apart every young couples class and mix them in with the “Silver Saints” or whatever inane title we give the classes for our older brothers and sisters. I am far more interested in hearing what a 70 year old celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary has to say about marriage than I am listening to a fellow 30 something guy moaning about how hard marriage is after three years.
Christian education is not something that takes place primarily in schools. Not in public schools but also not in conservative seminaries and Bible colleges. A textbook doesn’t teach you how to grieve with a brother or sister. A lesson plan can’t capture even a fraction of what you will experience in life. Why should we reinvent the wheel every generation when we have so much wisdom there for the learning?
I believe that it is better to learn your theology by studying with and observing others than to learn it in a formal setting and then try to apply it later on to the real world. You want to know about depravity? Visit someone is a prison. You want to hear about irresistible grace? Talk to my friend James Lee. Books are wonderful and we need to read them more, but there is more to the Christian life than academics and there is no better place to learn than at the feet of an older brother or sister who has been where you are. John Piper is not and does want to be your mentor. The old guy sitting in the pew next to you be can be and should be.
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