How to Help New Preachers Grow in Confidence and Clarity - Pilgrim Benham

So if they are the most gifted teacher you've ever heard but they're not teachable,

then don't give them a pulpit, give them a plunger. In other words, allow them to serve the

church before they're up in front. The church needs more servants, not more sabants, amen?

Secondly, faithfulness. Faithfulness, we know this means being ready to steward the trust placed

in us from one person to another so that we can pass that along to the next generation.

Honoring God in His Word by applying what we've learned.

Hey, welcome to the Expositors Collective Podcast episode 426. I'm your host Mike Neglia.

The voice that you heard is that of our guests for this week Pilgrim Venom.

And this is a recording from our 2025 Expositors Collective Training event

at St. Petersburg, Florida. Pilgrim Venom gave a timely and practical message on preaching mentorships.

As Dean of Students and a professor at Copy Chapel Bible College in Bradenton, Florida,

Pilgrim brings both wisdom and experience to this important subject. Reminding us that

preachers and Bible teachers don't grow in isolation, but through humility, getting honest feedback

and the guidance of others. So if you're listening to this and you think, man, I wish I could

have been in the room. Well, fret not, because we're traveling to Southern California

for our next in-person training weekend. It's taking place May 15th and 16th at Reliance Church

in Temecula, California. You can visit our website, expositorscollective.com, our social media

on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or the show notes. And you'll find links for registration.

Also, details about our returning guest discount. If you've been to a previous event and you want

to come back and bring your team or continue to upskill, we have a discount code for returning

attendees. And there's a lot more details about who's speaking and what you can expect.

So check out the show notes or the website or our socials. But in the meanwhile,

here's Pilgrim Benham on the importance of preaching mentorships.

Second Timothy chapter two. Second Timothy chapter two. If you have your workbooks,

I want to encourage you not to read them in this module. Some of you may think preaching

mentorships don't apply to you. But I want to sort of convince you in the next hour and a half or

two, actually 20 minutes, that these are important. So to set this up, we're going to begin with

the true story. In Florence, Italy, during the Renaissance, there was a young aspiring artist who

entered the workshop of Andrea del Virocchio. I'm probably butchering that. But this is a renowned

painter and sculptor. Virocchio was a master craftsman. He was respected across Italy, but his new

student who walked in was a raw talent, eager to learn everything. And for years, the student worked

under Virocchio's careful guidance, learning the techniques of painting and sculpture anatomy,

even engineering. But Virocchio did more than just teach the raw skill. He actually modeled

excellence and discipline and innovation. The close mentorship helped shape the young

artist into the legend we know him as today, Leonardo da Vinci. Now I tell you the story in order to

set up a big, obvious idea. And that is that if even the genius we know as Leonardo da Vinci

needed a mentor, who are we to think that we don't? Consider this incredibly comforting and yet

sobering truth. With the exception of a few outliers like John the Baptist, maybe Barnabas,

there really isn't a single effective leader in the New Testament who was an island to

themselves. No one found themselves sort of accidentally or randomly raised up by themselves

for ministry. Now every effective leader in the early church seemed to be discipled by or

mentored by someone who equipped and trained them. So second Timothy 2, just the first two verses,

says, you then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And what you've

heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust a faithful man who will be able to teach

others also. Hmm. Now, maybe you missed it, but take note of this gospel relay. Notice with

me there are four generations in these verses. Paul, Generation 1, instructing Timothy,

Generation 2, to strengthen himself in the grace of Jesus Christ, to take what he learned from Paul

and to entrust it to faithful men, Generation 3, who would in turn transmit it to others as well,

Generation 4. Paul had poured into Timothy, but not just Timothy, he poured into Titus and Luke

and so many others, but even Paul had Barnabas who originally invested in him. We know this eloquent

speaker, Apollo, right? He had Aquila and even his wife Priscilla. The 11 disciples, of course,

had Jesus investing in them until they became apostles. John Mark most likely had Peter, his cousin,

Joshua had Moses, Samuel had Eli, Esther had Mordecai, and so on. So how do we do this? How do we

pass this baton of faith from one generation or just from us to the next person? Do we do it aimlessly,

half hazardly? Do we just pray that by accident people figure out discipleship or figure out

leadership or preaching? And in our brief time together, I want to say no, there's a better way.

We want to talk about what a preaching mentorship looks like. And my hope is that no matter where you're

at, you would find yourself desiring to be a part of one or to launch one. So we're going to work

through a definition for a few minutes on the screen again. It's a little bit different than what's

in your workbook. So we're going to define it this way. A preaching mentorship, yep, brings together

a worthy mentor, a willing mentee, and a working method so that Christ is proclaimed and the gift

entrusted is stewarded well. So in this module, we're going to walk through this definition,

a worthy mentor, a willing mentee, a working method. Sound good? All right, number one, a worthy mentor.

So first, we have to have a worthy mentor. Now it goes without saying that the only one who's

truly worthy is Jesus, amen? Especially as we look at Revelation 4 and 5. So what we mean here

is someone who brings worth to the relationship. So in business, if you're a new entrepreneur,

you want to learn lessons from someone successful, like Jeff Bezos, not from someone like Jeff

the big Lebowski. That was my one joke. That's all I got. So sorry, if you're at the gym, actually,

I have two. If you're at the gym, you don't want a personal trainer whose only six pack is in the

fridge. You want someone who actually has lived the discipline and not just talked about it.

So that's who we want to mentor us. We want someone who's been through the fire. If you're younger

in the faith, you want someone who's been faithful, who preaches in a way that inspires us.

When we want a mentor, the motto is better done than said. So what does a worthy mentor look like

in ministry or in preaching? Well, it may mean the pastor you're currently serving with or

under or you're a part of their fellowship, that they've directly influenced you by setting a

good example worthy of following. I've experienced that and some of you have as well. But in a lot of

cases, God puts you in a place where, let's just be honest, when you observe your leadership,

don't raise your hand, but you find learning how to preach by learning what not to do. What's not

exempt, exempt for you. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean a mentor who's worthy, has a large church,

has an influential or international influence or even name recognition. I suggest, as we've been

talking about this weekend, we just look for who has been a faithful Bible expositor. Who is a good

shepherd? Who's a powerful storyteller? Not necessarily someone who has a brilliant mind,

but someone who's passionate. Someone who, most importantly, as we've heard about earlier,

someone who loves their family, who loves their wives, who fathers their children lovingly,

and who leads their churches humbly and courageously. But here's the rub. Mentors,

we tend to choose our mentors rather than mentors choosing us. And we tend to emulate who we

want to be like. In other words, we don't go and say, I would like to mentor you. A lot of times,

we are the ones who choose our mentor. And today, we have a generation of young men coming up. And

listen, in our churches or out of our churches, they're disciples of Joe Rogan, or Charlie Kirk,

or Andrew Tate, or Ben Shapiro. And as influential as those men are, or as good or bad as their

messages are, they aren't necessarily in relationship with their followers. And so I don't want a

follow-in, right? I want followers. I want someone who I'm in intimate connection with,

relationship with, so that I can personally invest in them. You think about Jesus, and he didn't say,

come follow me, and then, as much as I represent the Bible College, he didn't take them to a

Bible College, or an institute. He said, come follow me, and then they learned the patterns of

ministry one-on-one. Paul would say, follow me as I follow Christ. And so they learn the rhythms

of life, they learn the pace, and much of it is caught, not just taught. So the question is,

who is your mentor? Like Da Vinci, we all need worthy mentors to invest in our lives. But that's

not the only thing required. We secondly need, number two, a willing mentee. So it's hard to have a

working mentorship with a student who's not willing to learn. We all know someone, whether

they're young or old, who believes they are God's gift to the church. Have you met that guy in

your church yet? You will, eventually. Just this week I spoke to two different pastors, two different

cities. One guy in his church came to him and said, hey, just so you know, I have all the spiritual

gifts. So sweet, we don't need the rest of the church, we have you. Another pastor in a different

context said, hey, pastor, just so you know, I have the same ministry and calling as Jeremiah.

And the pastor said, I'm sorry, that's good luck with that. The irony is that person maybe

God's gift to the church, but not without humility, not without submission to authority. That person

is going to be a problem. Even our Lord Jesus able to teach and astonish the teachers of the law

as a teenager still submitted to his earthly authority, in that case his mother and father.

So as a mentee, would you jot these four things down? We need to embrace a four-fold

posture of teachability, faithfulness, diligence, and humility. Let's walk through each one of those

real quick with a question. Teachability obviously is the willingness to receive correction

and to learn from the mentor's experience. This will take time. And so the question we ask is,

what thing or things do I need to learn from this man or woman of God? It's going to take time.

Now in that mentorship, it could be a predetermined amount of time. Maybe it's a year. Maybe it's

less than that. But it's going to take time to develop the gift of preaching. Effective,

biblically faithful, as we've talked about, Christ-centered preaching, it does not develop in a

microwave. This is just a weekend, but it's going to take a lot longer, thank God, than just,

you know, two days to grow in this. So the key attribute you're looking for as a mentor in those

you're training is not teaching ability as much as teachability. See what I did there?

It's not teaching ability. It's teachability. So if they are the most gifted teacher you've ever

heard, but they're not teachable, then don't give them a pulpit, give them a plunger. In other words,

allow them to serve the church before they're up in front. The church needs more servants, not more

servants. Secondly, faithfulness, faithfulness. We know this means being ready to steward the trust

placed in us from one person to another so that we can pass that along to the next generation,

honoring God in His word by applying what we've learned. Okay, so here's a great question. What can

I focus on right now? What can I focus on now? Maybe it's my pacing. I know some young people

talk so quickly that it sounds like we are mimicking an auctioneer. We're just talking way too

fast. Maybe that's something I can improve and start to slow down, like Brian Broderson, speak

a little slower because he's amazing. Maybe it's my body language. I didn't realize that I do this

one hand motion all the time and it's making some people dizzy as I do this. So hey, I didn't

realize that till I saw myself on video. Maybe I'm long-winded and I need to learn to trim down as

we said not to say everything I put in my 48-page sermon notebook. Okay, so listen, can everyone

just take a deep breath, especially my type A perfectionist friends here? You are never going to

truly arrive at the destination of being a perfect preacher. It's not good news. It's good news.

But listen, neither is that an excuse for mediocrity or messiness. We should always be getting

better. We've been given a gift. We're to steward that gift. That means growing in it. So lock in,

it's going to take time. It's going to take tons of practice. What do they say? Practice makes...

No, not perfect. Progress. Not perfect. Progress. Stop being a perfectionist. Listen, you're not an

influencer who's trying to choreograph the perfect shot. You're a herald of God's truth. So honor him,

honor his word. Get better and take a deep breath. Relax. Jesus doesn't say well done to perfect

preachers. He says well done to those who are faithful with what they've been given. Okay, number

three, you're going to need diligence. So the question to ask is, how is God pleased with my efforts?

So diligence is being committed to that rigorous study prayer and preparation. We know that this

is a calling that requires effort and not shortcuts. Okay, so I want to make an important point here.

I know that you love your favorite theologian chat GPT, but Godly preachers don't plagiarize.

So we don't use AI to pop out sermon content. Yeah, assist you with an outline? Sure.

Help me think of a better word. Help me with some grammatical help because I can't spell.

Maybe even a little bit of research. That's within bounds. But if you use a prompt like

write a Christ center sermon on Luke chapter 15, which I did for last night. No, I'm sure.

Okay, and then you copy and paste that into your word doc. Listen, in the love of Jesus,

close your computer, open your Bible in a notebook, repent before the Holy Spirit and ask the Holy

Spirit to use you. Amen. Preaching's hard work. The bulk of preaching does not even take place in

the one hour in the pulpit. It takes place in the 167 other hours of the week when God is

molding and shaping us and proving us. You have to commit to what second Timothy 215 says.

It says, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be

ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. How do we rightly handle the word of truth by being

an approved worker? And so this takes time. One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was actually

here at expositors collective by Pastor Nick Katie. And he said, don't try to preach great sermons.

Just preach a good sermon. God by His Holy Spirit sometimes takes mediocre sermons on paper,

and He makes them great sermons in the pulpit. And that's so true, so good. So it takes diligence.

Finally, being willing means you must have number four humility. Recognizing this is a lifelong

journey. And mentorship is a part of that process. So the question you can ask is what area or

areas still need improvement? And this is hard because we have to take an honest look and be willing

to change. Malcolm Gladwell asserts that you're not truly an expert until, listen, you've clock

10,000 hours in a skill. So I did the math. If you teach every Sunday and every Wednesday for a

full hour each for 52 weeks of the year, you won't be an expert until you are 96 years in.

So take a deep breath. So it was funny. I was looking for a word that encapsulated all four of

those principles. Teachability, diligence, faithfulness, humility. And so of course I asked

chat GPT. And what was the word it spit back at me? It's a discipleship. And I said, yes, correct.

So a worthy mentor, a willing mentee. These are great. But to have a successful preaching mentorship,

we still need one more thing. And that's thirdly a working method. So I believe this could look

differently depending on your context. Generally, this is what it has though. It has a period of time.

It has a meeting rhythm. Maybe it's weekly, maybe monthly. And then three big ingredients.

So in my past, my preaching mentorships were six months to a year. It included six to eight people.

It took place on a weekday morning from anywhere around 60 to 90 minutes. We would sit down,

listen to sermons. We would read scripture and books on preaching. Many of which have been

given away this weekend. And then we would have someone weekly get up and do what we did this

morning. They'd have that assignment for the week and they'd get up and then we would listen to

them. We would share feedback. And they would grow. Now, I didn't expect them to be David Goosec

by the end of six months, but definitely by the end of seven. So what are the three big ingredients?

Okay, here they are. Input, opportunities, and feedback. So first input. Input is transmitting

resources from the mentor to the mentee. It could be your personal experiences and wisdom.

It could be assigning students to read a book. It could be podcasts like the expositors collective

podcasts, which you should have already downloaded and followed on Spotify. Shame on you if you haven't.

It could be sermon videos, but this is input. Input is the raw material for growth. However,

not just input, because you could listen to podcasts and read books and watch sermons and yet not

be in a preaching mentorship. So this relationship also secondly includes opportunities. And this is

where the rubber meets the pulpit, where the mentor directly offers the mentee a chance to use

their gifts and training in the real world. And so when I was past reading my church plants every

Sunday, I would ask one of these guys to come up and do the scripture reading of the text that I

was going to teach that morning. And see, my argument is, hey, if you can't read three to four

minutes of scripture, how are you going to do 30 to 40 minutes of exposition? Maybe it's leading

communion. Many pastors give their mentees the opportunity to teach on a Wednesday night or to

share a message with the youth. But listen, if your pastor asks you to teach on a Sunday morning,

just say yes, then take Tylenol and Tom's and talk to your mom later. But say yes, go for it. What

an opportunity. So not only input, not only opportunities, thirdly, there's feedback. And I want

I want to make sure we see this. Feedback is what you got this morning, a handful of it. But I want

to give you a grid and a template to get and receive very good feedback. So we're going to work with

this grid. It's a little small, you can't see. But we're going to work from the top and sort of around

it. So we have general and specific and then we have positive and we have negative. So up here,

general positive feedback sounds sort of like an out of boy. It's like giving a dog a treat. Good

boy. Good job. And we hear these as pastors almost every Sunday morning. When after the sermon,

at the door, people shake our hand and they say great message pastor, at least Mike and Eglia,

here's that. So this is just basic help for our ego, general positive. It's going to build up

your ego. Now in contrast, general negative utterly destroys our egos. And so I don't know if we

could do this one down here, general negative. And you see it's sort of in pink and it says terrible

job, babe. Who do you think that is? If you've ever asked your wife on the way home from church,

how is the sermon, honey? Then you know what general negative looks like. My wife usually says,

not your best, not your best. This is not helpful on this left side of the grid, general feedback.

Where we want to be is on the right side. We want to be specific. And so whenever someone says,

good sermon, I want to say, well, what was good? What specifically was good? So positive specific

up here, it might be as short as that was a powerful closing or your opening illustration. It caught

my attention. You're outlined. It was easy to follow. This is going to be helpful for those learning

to preach. I'll never forget when I preached at the biggest church I had ever spoken out. I wasn't

sure how it went. And anxiously asked my friend Cody King who was here this weekend. And I said,

what do you think? And he said, bro, I love it when you preach about Jesus. I just love hearing

you talk about our Lord. And I was very helpful feedback. And I remember it years later. Okay,

so that leaves the one we're all scared of down here. And that's negative specific. Now this may be

hard to hear, but this is the most helpful feedback of all. This is where we're going to grow,

preachers. So it may sound like this. You used way too many illustrations on that one point.

One would have been impacting or, hey, you used um 49 times. I counted. May God have mercy on

your soul. Please stop. There's a pastor I love in respect. But when he preaches, he shifts his

weight like this. And so I could never attend his church or watch him on YouTube, but I love listening

to his sermons. And so one needs to give him that feedback. You're shifting your weight more and

more. And so we need opportunities. We need input. We need feedback to level up from a

dabbler to a da Vinci. So final thoughts. Number one, preaching mentorships guard gospel fidelity.

Paul said to Timothy, entrust this message to others. This is a changing world culturally.

This is a time of theological confusion. So having a mentor protects the purity and the power of

the word proclaim. Number two, preaching mentorships that cultivate character as well as competence.

This is not just about skill. This is about godliness lived out under the authority of the word.

And finally, number three, preaching mentorships. They're going to multiply your ministry impact.

You're investing in others. And before we close this part of it, I want to address any senior pastor

here or those in some type of leadership who have young or less experienced people in your care.

We began this module talking about Da Vinci and Virotio. Do you guys know that when Virotio was

painting the baptism of Christ, he asked Da Vinci to paint one of the angels. And some stories say

that Da Vinci did such an amazing job at just one of the angels that Virotio being odd at the mastery

of his student actually in jealousy gave up painting forever. In other words, seeing how far his

pupil had come, he was wrought with envy and discouragement and he decided to give up.

Is that you as a potential mentor? Don't let jealousy or competition keep you from crafting masterpieces

for God's glory. Their fruit is fruit on your account. So pour into them. Let's pour into the next

Leonardo. What about you, Timothy? You potential Da Vinci's. Who is your Virotio? Who's willing to

pour and invest into you for your growth? Maybe it's someone here at this weekend. Well, now we have

the tools to make a preaching mentorship that much more successful for the glory of God to the end

of the earth. Amen. All right, thanks for listening all the way to the end. And as I said at the

beginning, we are coming to Temecula, California in May. And if you live in that area or would like

to travel, it's a great thing for you to come to. Our social media and our website has details

and registration information. And while you're on our socials, please do drop a few likes,

leave a few comments. Let's get the algorithm working in our favor so that more potential people

come across this content and it helps them grow in their personal study and public proclamation

of God's Word. I will see you next Tuesday for the next episode of the podcast. Thank you. God bless.