A long friendship - Spiritual Mentors

Christian Century, Jan 19, 1994 by Wayne E. Oates

MENTOR, in Greek literature, was the guardian and teacher in whose hands Odysseus left Telemachus, his son, when he went to sea. His name is the source of our word "mentor," a wise teacher and counselor.

I have needed mentors at different times in my life because my family of origin contained no males who could play this role. In my school years I looked for wise counselors and teachers, for kind people who added gentleness to manhood. Though I was not conscious of it, I can see now that I was searching for an older brother.

I found my mentor in Olin T. Binkley, my religion professor at Wake Forest College in 1938. I had met him and his wife earlier at Mars Hill Junior College, When he spoke at a "mountain preachers school." As the student housekeeper for the dormitories where the conferees and their leaders stayed, I met him in the course of my work. I learned later than this Ph.D. graduate of Yale and pastor of the First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was only nine years older than I.

I listened to his and his colleagues' informal discussions after they had finished the duties of the day. They were studying the Bible together from the original Hebrew and Greek. I was astonished at such learning and deeply impressed by Binkley's wisdom, humor and gentleness. When I spoke to him, he responded with kindness and showed a deep interest in me and my plans.

A year later, I enrolled at Wake Forest College as a junior. Much to my surprise, I found that Binkley had left his Chapel Hill pastorate to become a professor at Wake Forest. When I reintroduced myself to him, he remembered me and was from that moment more than my professor. He accepted me as a friend and became my counselor. This was during the Great Depression, when classes were small and professors knew their students personally. I studied New Testament with Binkley and took from him one of the first marriage-and-family-relations courses ever taught at the college level in this country. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he had taught a similar course with Ernest Groves, a pioneer in marriage and family counseling.

Professor Binkley became my confidant as I shared with him my hopes for an effective and peaceful marriage and family. He guided me wisely as I told him my own family history. I learned that he had a health problem, a disease of the heart. Because neither his wife nor his mother wanted him to travel alone, he asked me to be his driver when he went on speaking trips. On one of these trips we visited his parental home, and I met his father, a farmer and a rural preacher, and his mother, a vigorous and knowledgeable farm wife. Their peaceful, tender regard for each other impressed me. During the rest of the journey Binkley spoke of his father's diligent way of preparing sermons and of the sacrifices his parents had made to enable him to go to Yale. His mother shelled black walnuts and sold them in the nearby town to help pay his tuition.

I graduated from Wake Forest in 1940, the year before America entered World War II. I was asked by A. C. Reid, professor of philosophy and psychology, to be an instructor. Binkley and I were colleagues now, and our conversations continued. I became pastor of two rural churches, Bunn Baptist Church, 16 miles from Wake Forest, and Peachtree Baptist Church, 35 miles away. When I met my future wife, Pauline Rhode, Binkley counseled me as we prepared for marriage. He was the best man at our wedding.

A year later I entered the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. When Binkley became a professor at this school in 1944, our steadfast friendship continued. In 1947, after finishing my doctorate, I became an assistant professor at the school, and we were colleagues again. He was the confidant and mentor to whom I turned in the many crises of my personal life. He taught me things that are to this day, 56 years later, integral parts of my personal being.

I learned from him how to be a steadfast friend. Harry Stack Sullivan has said that the capacity to form and maintain durable relationships is a mark of maturity and a test of character. Olin Binkley brought me into mature adulthood and was my mentor in character formation. In addition, he showed me by example and counsel how to be a considerate husband and father. Gentleness and wisdom became mine from God through him.

As a Christian, Olin Binkley taught me to combine the most rigorous scholarship with the kindest and wisest ways of presenting it to others. This came about through his ability to be both professor and friend at. the same time. Because of his example, I now treasure the constant, steadfast friendship of my own former students. A good professor affirms his students as unique persons and as colleagues, not just students.

Finally, Olin Binkley believed in me when I did not believe in. myself. His way of correcting my fears and turning them into courage has been a sustaining grace. For years before his retirement, we wanted to teach in the same school again, but that never happened. Nevertheless, we are still in regular conversation. Recently he broke a hip and an arm in a fall. Though both his wife and he are residents in a nursing home, we talk by telephone often. He is still my mentor. As, at age 76, I struggle with chronic pain, he teaches me that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, "and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Rom. 5:3-5).