Osmosis Mentoring

Osmosis:  The gradual, often unconscious, absorption of knowledge or ideas through continual exposure rather than deliberate education.

Okay, that's not the scientific definition of the word, but if I gave you that definition you would have exited this window after two lines of jargon.  But the definition is a legitimate one.

Maybe the last time you heard the word osmosis was the cartoon movie that Bill Murray played in - Osmosis Jones.

And it is how some of the best mentoring takes place.

Really good mentoring (like the kind Jesus did) takes place as mentor and mentoree do life together. Our more common practices today are mentor and mentoree getting together occasionally and with intentionality and strategy, focusing on an area of need. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is how I do most of my mentoring, but it is not the same as Osmosis Mentoring.

I love Paul's words to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:10-22.

You know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings - what kinds of things happened to me . . . the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them.

Yes, Timothy did know because Timothy and Paul did life together.

Here is another word. APPRENTICE.

I bet two ideas come to mind. Micky Mouse as the magician's apprentice and Donald Trump's reality TV show.

In the ancient and medieval worlds, apprenticing was the main way young people learned a trade. A master would take a novice as an apprentice and the apprentice would learn a trade or skill by doing life together with the master.

In the Judaic world of Jesus times, rabbinic students would be chosen by a Rabbi, to come and be with the Rabbi and to learn from him. In essence, they became apprentices.

In Apprentice Mentoring, in Osmosis Mentoring, much of the teaching and training is in the form of what is CAUGHT and not just TAUGHT. Things are taught in a classroom, in a workshop, in a seminar. things are caught as we do life together.

I think those of us who are interested in mentoring in the worlds of modernity and post-modernity have to figure out how to do life together in a more consistent way. We really failed to do that in modernity. it is a theme in postmodernity. But it will take some reconfigurations of life and ministry.

There are probably quite a few Christian leaders in the marketplace where you are with others in a pretty continual way. That may be the context for some Osmosis/Apprenticing mentoring to take place.

Brian Rice