​Mentor for Wisdom
Once students have committed God's Word to memory and understand it well through intentional conversation, they are ready to both apply it and present it to others. This is best done under the guidance of a mentor. Mentorship on some level occurs in the normal course of life as students observe their mentors, and this real-life example shouldn't be discounted, but mentorship can also include intentional, planned opportunities. Mentoring with God's Word is always useful, but the specific activities discussed here are best employed with teenagers and older. Seize a few simple, wisdom-building opportunities to coach your student to both apply God's Word in their own lives and clearly communicate it to others.

Ideally, mentors will be able to coach students in real-life circumstances as they practice putting God's Word into practice and navigate how to trust and obey Him even when their own inclinations would prefer to do things a different way. That sort of mentorship can (and should!) happen simply in the course of life events. However, it's also possible to make intentional opportunities for wisdom-building experiences through investments in time, treasure, and energy in mission trips and local service projects. These sorts of endeavors can be highly formative to teenagers, and allow them to trust God and see Him work, validating both His Word and His care for your students.

There are other options for intentional wisdom-building growth. Some experiences may not be logistically feasible or even advisable to subject students to in the real world, such as a Christian's response to state-sponsored persecution of Christians, the struggles involved in evangelizing hostile people groups, or the practical actions that a governor of a State would need to pursue. However, teens can still grapple with all of these issues and others through simulations and literature. Simulations and literature allow teens to assess their actions and the actions of others in the light of Scripture and under the tutelage of a mentor. A few simulations that could provide this sort of opportunity include mock trials, student congress, and some board games. For literature, here are a few books that you may find to be helpful suggestions: 

• Through Gates of Splendor, Elizabeth Elliot

• Bruchko, Bruce Olsen

• Things We Couldn't Say, Diet Eman

• Peace Child, Don Richardson

You need not agree with everything in a book for it to be valuable fodder for mentorship, but you do need to talk about those things with your student.​

Another opportunity exists for wisdom-building mentorship if your student will be sharing God's Truth to others in the form of video or audio media, plays, stories, poems, songs, sermons, direct teaching, performances, or other creative presentations. When they do this, it will be helpful to have them first identify their audience (children at church, senior adults in an assisted living center, unbelievers on the street, etc.) and then lead them through the Five Canons of Rhetoric, an ancient tool designed to help develop and present content to others.

 

Invention
Invention is the process of coming up with what to say. If a student already has a general idea of the subject for the message that they'd like to convey to others, have them identify the topics that pertain to the subject. For example if the subject is "God's Love," the student might come up with a list that includes "We are made in God's image," "God loves us so much that He sent Jesus to die for us," and "God wants us to love other people, too." The student now has a list of things to talk about, all of which are applicable to the big idea that they had of "God's Love." There is no maximum or minimum number of topics that a student can or should generate, but longer or more complex presentations will necessarily require more topics.

 

Arrangement
Arrangement has to do with how the student's content is organized, given their audience and their purpose. Should they organize their topics from most important to least important, or vice versa? Should they save their best argument for last, or present it immediately at the beginning? Does the presentation need an introduction? A conclusion? Help your student think through how they want to organize their content.

 

Elocution
Elocution has to do with making a presentation accessible and pleasing to their audience. From repetition, poetic forms, and anecdotes to rhetorical devices such as schemes and tropes, there are numerous tools of this nature that your student can include and employ to improve the audience's reception of their message. Even for projects that are visual rather than verbal in nature, encourage your student to polish the style of their final presentation to make it shine.

 

Memory
For in-person performances, it may be necessary to commit either portions or the entire script of the student's presentation to memory. Students may be able to employ many of the strategies and skills that they learned for the memorization phase here. For some sorts of visual or recorded presentations, this canon will be irrelevant.

 

Delivery
Finally, the actual delivery of an in-person presentation deserves some attention. Students can employ hand gestures, facial expressions, and vary their volume, speed, and verbal emotion to help their message shine. Have your student practice their presentation, and then give constructive feedback to help their content make the maximum impact.

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The most important mentorship activity you can do with any of the above activities is to debrief with your student when it's over. What worked well? What worked poorly? Did anything you did (or read) align with Scripture? Did anything differ with Scripture? What does God's Word have to say about the whole thing? Debriefing conversations allow for mentors to help students think through the implications of what they experienced and view it in the context of Scripture, helping to develop Biblical wisdom.

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One Final Thought

Many parents and caring mentors struggle with feeling unready for the task of mentorship, but God has put the students into your life with a purpose, and you are already mentoring them simply by being with them. Your influence need not be perfect to be effective. In fact, provided you are an ardent follower of Jesus, even when you falter in your efforts, your students can still learn from how you respond to those failures. Do you apologize when you fail? Do you forgive when you are wronged? Do you work to speak the truth in love? Do you strive to follow Jesus? God's Word will not return to Him void; take solace that He can use any of us for His purposes. It is simply our task to put our faith and trust in Him as we serve Him and do what He calls us to do. May God bless you in the ministry He's given you to your students!

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The Expedition Phase in Bible Quest

The final, wisdom-building phase in Bible Quest is called the Expedition Phase, and it is focused on the presentation side. Bible Quest provides Expedition students with multiple context and purpose options to choose from as they develop messages to share with others.

 

For more about Biblical mentorship to help develop wisdom, feel free to explore these resources:

• A general about the value of discipleship between Nathan King and Yvette Hampton of Schoolhouse Rocked: The Discipleship Quest, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

• Here's an article that specifically addresses teaching the Bible in the broader context of discipleship.

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