Habit #9: Week #1: Be a Mentor

9 Habits for Effective Life Group Leadership
Habit #9: Week #1: Be a Mentor

After six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John, the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. 
- Matthew 17:1-2

"My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better." 
— Steve Jobs

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." 
— Winston Churchill

“The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.” 
— Steven Spielberg

The last habit helps provide more spaces for people to experience what we know to be the way life transformation happens.  Week 1 will focus on being a mentor.  Week 2 will focus on having a mentor.  

An Effective Life Group Leader knows how to mentor someone so a new Life Group can be born.  

I can hear the wheels in your head churning.  When we get to this point every Life Group Leader hears something like this:  We want you to train a leader who can divide or break up your group and keep you from experiencing true fellowship.  This idea could not be further from the truth. 

You have been entrusted with mentoring and growing a new leader so new environments for life transformation can be formed.  THAT IS HUGE!! We want you to be like Jesus.  We want you to see the big picture of what God wants to do here.  

We just came off the biggest non-Easter or Christmas weekend Life Point has ever had.  We had over 1600 on campus over the four services.  We saw God bring our future here.  However, we do not have enough small group space or leaders to help see the life transformation those lives need.  

Jesus trained his 12 disciples and really focused on three to lead the next generation when he was gone.  I can draw a straight line from his lessons and the miracles Jesus performed in the view of his disciples to their actions such as the baptisms the disciples accomplished in the earliest days of their leadership without him. 

Question: How do you baptize 3000 people in one day?   

Answer: The same way you feed five thousand people.  

Jesus took his disciples to places they needed to go to learn the skills they needed to learn to accomplish the good works he had planned for them.  We need to do the same.  Growth Track and Life Group Leader training will only get them so far.  Leading alongside you in your small groups or areas you lead, like in Financial Peace, EHS (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality), or a bible study life group, will prepare them to be the leaders God has called them to be.  

We are all ahead of someone in leading.  Let's find someone to mentor today.  Please begin to look for the person God has placed in your path to mentor.  Please pray for them as they are choosing to walk the path of becoming an Effective Life Group Leader.