When It Is Time to Mentor
I don’t know when it happened exactly, but one day I was in a larger church meeting and I realized I was the old guy in the room. I had more experience than most of the people, I had more white hairs than anyone else, and I was almost 2x older than some of them. The odd thing is, I don’t remember when I got old. Sure, my 25th anniversary passed and sure some of my peers I came into ministry with are now talking about retirement, but I don’t remember becoming the old guy. After all, shouldn’t I have a grasp on what I am doing yet?
image of a word bubble with mentoring in it pointing to words like advice, goal, coaching, direction, etc.
While I write that in jest, I also write it with a small gripe. Please allow me to yell at a cloud before I get to the main point of the post. The gripe is I don’t feel like I should be old yet because I also never got to be a true leader in the church. I don’t necessarily mean me, personally, but rather my generation- the Gen Xers. Our generation got completely passed over as the previous generation held on to leadership positions and churches and now that they are older, they are looking at us as too old, so we are getting passed over for younger generations. Gen Xers never really got to shape the church in a significant way. It seemed we were always course correcting or apologizing for previous mistakes rather than creating something new. Yet, we are now the old people in the room. I will stop yelling at the cloud now and go back to the main point.
Yet, that is part of the main point, I don’t want to be the person that the next generation of clergy is looking at and wondering when I will get out of the way.
Fair or not, I am realizing it is time for me to move out of a main leader role and into a mentor role, offering what wasn’t offered to me. It is time to teach about mistakes I made, healthy boundaries, knowing when to say no, and encouraging the next leaders to thrive.
At a workshop I attended recently on the state of clergy, one of the biggest discussions was around mentoring. The statement was that what is needed most in ministry is for older pastors to pass their knowledge to younger pastors, but older pastors aren’t doing that because they are still trying to take leadership positions for themselves. What they should be doing instead is sharing wisdom and knowledge, walking with a younger leader, but not being in charge.
I’ve been thinking about that in my own life. Currently, I am one of two deans and we are both similar in ages. When I went to a recent deans meeting, I saw a bunch of other deans who were also in my age range and some have been in the position since I was a younger pastor. Both of us will need to step down within the next few years and we had a choice- we could either run again, holding the position for ourselves until possible retirement or mentor the next generation of deans. We chose the latter. My partner will step down this year and a younger pastor will be stepping in and we will work together. Then in a year or two, I will step away and that person will pick someone else to work with in the person’s age range. We will be available if they need us, but will step out of the way, so they can shape things their way.
As much as I may feel I got passed over and my time is now, I know that the truth is my time is passed and it is time to pass on what I have learned because that is much healthier than how I was treated. The funny thing about working in unhealthy systems, to borrow a friend’s analogy, it is like being passed a wrapped gift. This wrapped gift has been passed from generation to generation and everywhere it goes, it brings the same unhealthy behaviors. The only way to stop it is for someone to finally open it to take its power away. As difficult as it is, Gen X pastors who have been at this for a few years, it is time for us to open the gift and start to step back into a mentoring role, rather than a leadership role.