Denver Seminary

Welcome to this newly designed mentoring section of the Denver Seminary website! Thanks to DJ Turner and Susan Arnold for their work on this upgrade. We hope you’ll benefit from easier access to important information about the Denver Seminary mentoring process and also find fresh vision for your mentoring relationships. Our regular mentoring newsletter has been renamed One-on-One and will now appear in blog form. Mentoring directors and others involved in our mentoring process will offer helpful tips and perspectives on how to engage mentoring relationships in a life-transforming manner. Along the way we will also recommend resources and offer suggestions for fostering healthy mentoring relationships in other settings.

Our commitment to mentoring makes up one part of the high value we place on connecting. Just as mentoring depends on connecting, we want to stay connected with you, whether you are a mentor, student, friend of the seminary, or thinking about being any of these. A seminary community that forms people well for ministry goes beyond the faculty, facilities, and curriculum. It truly requires a community of people who are willing to invest their lives in those preparing for ministry. It requires students who are committed to living mentored lives, both during and beyond their seminary experience. This takes connections way beyond the level of mere networking. We take the risk of opening our lives to others, coming alongside each other when the answers are not easy or clear, when there are no textbooks to guide us, and when grades won’t tell the whole story of what God is doing in our lives. That’s the type of connecting we must always strive to cultivate!

One of the new connection opportunities we will soon make available to you is a free web service called MentorSphere. This is provided by the Uncommon Individual Foundation, a non-profit, foundation-sponsored organization committed to facilitating healthy mentoring relationships in all types of settings. MentorSphere will provide a place for all Denver Seminary students, mentors, and approved prospective mentors to create a personal mentoring profile and more easily connect with each other. This can be especially helpful to students who are new to the area and are looking to establish mentoring relationships with those who have similar ministry interests. It will also help mentors connect with and resource each other. The link for the Denver Seminary MentorSphere will be posted soon. We encourage you to complete a profile and take advantage of this wonderful mentoring resource!

The Training and Mentoring process at Denver Seminary is now completing its 12th year! We thank God for the deepened and broadened impact that He has made in hundreds of students’ lives through the relational investment of mentors like you. Every single semester we receive encouraging reports of profound transformation in both students’ and mentors’ lives as they explore together those vital dimensions of life, faith, and ministry that could never be adequately covered (or personalized) in a classroom. What happens in mentoring relationships takes the formal, classroom experiences to places they could never reach otherwise. As we anticipate the next 12 years, we invite you to pray for us, for our students, and for those they will serve. And we hope you will be willing to consider mentoring a student if approached. If you’re a current or prospective student, we invite you to join us wholeheartedly on this journey. Yes, it’s more than what is required at most seminaries...but the dividends are lifelong! Know that we pray for you as you dive into mentoring relationships; we really do! That creates the most important connection of all as our Lord undergirds and guides our relationships, taking them where they need to go when we don’t see the goal clearly. Thanks for taking that journey with us!

Don J. Payne
Associate Dean