The way the Christian pattern works is that a new believer comes into the faith, and the new believer should be adopted by someone in one of our churches who loves God and can be a good role model. And Titus chapter 2 says that the older women are to do that for the young women, and then we just see all kinds of biblical examples of men doing it for the young men. That’s what Paul / Timothy was all about.

This is normal, standard operating procedure in the church, or it was. Now, as the church became more institutionalized about the third century, you began to see a breakdown in this pattern begin to develop, and we lose it completely in Catholicism. It just sort of disappears.

And then you began to see a change back in this direction beginning to develop about the turn of the century, and a book was written by a man named Trina, and he began to talk about how Jesus had trained people, and then others began to pick it up and see it and talk about it. More books were written. A man named Dawson Trotman came along, and he saw how this could work with the laity, and God greatly blessed his ministry, and that’s why we have a whole organization called The Navigators today.

Bill Bright and others began to see it, and before long, theologians. Robert Coleman wrote the fabulous book, The Master Plan of Evangelism, and explained to us how the mentoring process was a part of training people to share their faith naturally. And so it is that little by little in this last century, it’s taken about a hundred years, our eyes have been open to the fact that we’ve got to get back to the basics, back to the way the early Christian community did it.