What is the difference between discipleship and mentoring

They may need both. It will help you to understand two of the main ways Christians learn and grow. While I was researching discipleship and mentorship I realized the purpose behind them was different. This helped me to understand how they are different as I knew what their purpose was. I hope this helps you too. The purpose behind discipleship is to help Christians live out their faith and then they can share the gospel with others and eventually disciple those people as well.

The goal is to lead others to become more like Jesus. We cannot live without Jesus on our own. On our own, we sin and can easily fall away from God. We need to seek God and ask Him to help us become more like Jesus.

We are not supposed to keep our faith to ourselves. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. Jesus told his disciples to go and tell other people about the good news. Then, make them disciples. To be a disciple is to be committed to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and committed to following Him every day. To be a disciple is also to be disciplined in our bodies, minds, and souls. Mentoring is a Biblical tool used to help followers of Jesus through challenging situations or simply life in general.

The purpose of being mentored is to have a wiser believer be able to help guide you in your life. They are a safe person you can confess sins to and be honest with about your struggles. They are a person who can speak truth from God to you and encourage you. Along with being a person to listen to you. Jesus trained the disciples and spoke to them about the importance of the parables He taught.

He was mentoring the disciples and giving them instructions, advice, and loving them. A mentor should be someone older than the mentee who is strong in their faith and is wise.

The mentor needs to be able to listen to the mentee and truly listen to what they are saying. They should be a listening ear. The mentor can help the mentee with any current relationship struggles or sin they are dealing with. By speaking about their issues, it will help them walk in the light and be honest about what they are dealing with. Most importantly, the mentor should pray with the mentee. God should be put first during the meeting times and His name can be glorified through people learning and seeking to grow and live in the fruits of the spirit.

Being mentored is a wise choice to make. It helps to be kept accountability and gives them someone to help them walk in the light. The mentee can grow in their relationship with Christ as they open up to their mentor and seek wise counsel. One of the greatest values of mentors is the ablility to see ahead what others cannot see and to help them nagivate a course to their destination.

One of the differences between mentorship and discipleship is directing versus listening. With discipleship, either you are being directed or you are helping to disciple and direct a new believer. Whereas, a mentor is someone who listens to you. They most likely will not tell you directly what to do but they may help guide you in a Biblical way and listen to you and pray with you. They would call you out if you were acting in a sinful way and denying it.

Since the purpose of discipleship is to make disciples, they would need to direct people in how to live in a Christ-like way and how to make disciples. I would offer advice and refer her to appropriate books or other people who might help guide her.

We would also pray together. As her mentor, I wanted to offer what she felt she needed in this life role. Mentoring is a general term used when someone asks another person to advise them in a certain set of skills or a life area.

I asked that before agreeing to do so, she come to my home so we could chat and clarify what she was looking for. As we conferred, I could tell that what she was asking me for was exactly what I hoped to offer as her discipler.

I was excited. In spite of the immediate connection we made, I suggested that we both pray for a week to see if God wanted us to meet together in a one-on-one discipling relationship. And He did. Both mentoring and discipling are relational in tone. Both offer advice or content to some degree. Both focus on helping someone else learn, usually one-on-one. But there are some differences; one is that discipling is spiritual in nature, founded and authorized by God and an integral part of His Kingdom design for growth.

As we engage as disciple-makers, it is important to keep in mind that there are three foundational ways in which disciple-making is different from mentoring:. But discipleship always looks at these areas by asking the question, how do they relate to Christ?

How does following Christ affect my personal life, my work, my relationships, and so on? Mentoring, at least when practiced by Christians, certainly ought to center everything on Christ.

But mentoring is less about instruction than it is about initiation — about bringing young men into maturity. For my own part, I do not make a hard and fast distinction between discipleship and mentoring. There is a great deal of overlap.

But I like the concept of mentoring because is focuses on relationships. That is what we are missing in education today, whether we are talking about formal instruction in schools and universities, or informal instruction at home, in the church, and in the community. Men are not involved in vital relationships the way they once were. As a result, boys are growing up with no concept of what it means to be a male.

Many have poor role models, or even no role models, for what constitutes a godly husband and father. Most are going into the work world with a distorted picture of work. And because our culture has few means of inviting young males into the circle of men, countless men are living in fear of other men.

The worst of it all is that we are passing down to the next generation a giant void about what it means to be a man in Christ.