January 15, 2008

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

1 comment:

Travis said...

Chuck,

I think you are right on with your thoughts on the importance of mentoring. If I look back on my college experience, it was the mentorship that took place for me that really helped me grow the most in my spiritual life. Perhaps we can sit down and discuss what this might look like at Resurrection sometime?