Online Mentoring

Over at the Life Church Blog They are talking about a new tool called Imantri which matches mentors with mentees around core competencies, skills, and goals. I woke up this morning thinking bout an idea to bring people together for spiritual guidance/mentoring that would employ web 2.0 social networking etc. Then I went to our men's bible study with Jeff Kirby and we were all talking about the need to do more daily bible reading etc. I wonder if this might be the killer app of an internet campus.

In my time in campus ministry, we focused on the Worship event and Small groups - certainly. But the real impact came in an intense focus on one to one discipleship. One of my mentors - Gregg Taylor at the University of Arkansas was fond of saying you can influence people from a distance but you can only impact them from up close. He wasn't talking about physical up closeness, i don't think, rather the intensity of a one on one relationship that guides and develops people along their spiritual journeys.

Clearly we would have to have a heavy focus on training people to be spiritual guides/mentors , but a tool like this could be developed to facilitate the matching and interaction..

Chuck