A Mentor in the Ministry
How my entire life's ministry is based on a visit I made as a teenager with my Bishop
Bishops, please know that a relatively short time spent with a … young adult can help them understand the power available to them through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It can provide a vision that will have a profound influence upon their entire life.1
Elder Quentin L. Cook
One Sunday when I was a teenager in Florida, the bishop2 of my church, Stan Padgett, asked me to accompany him on a visit he was making to a lady in our congregation. He picked me up in the evening and explained as we drove that the woman was experiencing some domestic problems and, in an emergency, had fled her home. Someone had arranged for a temporary place for her to stay, and she had arrived there a few hours ago. We were going to see how she was doing.
We pulled up to a little run-down house. It was getting dark, and I remember that a single light on the porch lit the doorstep. Bishop Padgett let me carry the tray of brownies his wife had made while he knocked on the door.
As we stood there for a moment waiting for her to answer, I wondered why the Bishop had brought me along. I was sixteen and didn’t know anything about domestic abuse. I didn’t know how to comfort an adult woman, much less one who had been forced to flee her home. I was at a loss for any way that I could be of help. But despite all of that, I didn’t actually feel uncomfortable. Bishop Padgett was next to me, and he was an experienced minister. He would know how to act and what to say and what to do.
The woman gently opened the door and we stepped inside. I looked around the small living area. There was no furniture because the house had been procured only earlier that day. All I remember seeing is several black trash bags of clothes on the floor.
Bishop and the woman talked for a bit. I don’t remember any of the words that were exchanged, but I know that they were words of comfort coming from a man who knew how to follow the Holy Ghost to know what to say.
There must have been a folding chair or something like that in the house, because before we left, the woman sat down and Bishop laid his hands on her head and gave her a blessing in the name of Jesus Christ. Then we said goodbye.
We were only there for a few minutes. Somehow the brownies we had left with her seemed insufficient to address her desperate situation, but I knew that our visit had nothing to do with brownies and everything to do with comforting.
I remember looking at the single porch light shining into the dark night as we backed out and drove away. For some reason, the image of that porch light has remained forever in my memory.
The first time you do anything new, you learn so much just from being exposed to the situation. For example, on my first day as an intern for a residential developer, I did almost no work, but I learned a ton just from hearing real estate terms that people were tossing around the office.
Similarly, on my first experience in the ministry with Bishop Padgett, I learned so much from simply standing next to him and seeing how he treated a suffering woman. I learned how to greet someone when you’re standing on their doorstop. I learned how to deflect attention away from an embarrassing situation. I learned how to have a conversation with someone who is in crisis. I learned how to express love. I learned how to end a visit and say goodbye. These were things that as a sixteen-year-old, I didn’t have much practice in.
So, for me to truly grasp what a good minister did, what helped the most was to watch an experienced minister do the ministering. In the moment, I didn’t realize how much I was learning. But I’ve based my entire life’s ministry since then on what I learned that evening from a visit by a gentle Bishop who thought to bring along a young teenage boy.
As disciples of the Savior Jesus Christ, a lot of the ministering we perform is everyday acts of service: calling a friend, holding open a door, or offering a smile. Those small acts grow people’s trust in us little by little.
That trust is what allows others to feel comfortable asking us for help when emergency situations arise. As I’ve gotten older, God has placed me in high-stakes situations equivalent to what He knew I could handle. I’ve been called for car crashes, hospital visits, and middle-of-the-night blessings when someone’s parent was dying. I’ve had friends confide in me a wide spectrum of personal struggles, worries, and fears. All of this is part of becoming a minister who is growing in awareness of the world and the trials in it.
At this point in my life, sometimes I still feel a little scared when I’m called to go “to the rescue”3 in a new situation I’ve never faced before. But that fear is usually well overpowered by confidence from having been supported by the Savior in every prior instance of ministry. Jesus himself promised his disciples who were beginning their ministry,
“Don’t worry about what you’ll say or how you’ll say it. The right words will be there; the Spirit of your Father will supply the words.”4
Today I give thanks to all my mentors in the ministry—the first being Bishop Padgett—who have trained me how to minister like the Savior would.
I think that the goal of each disciple of Jesus Christ is to be like the single porch light on that woman’s house: a beacon of light in the dark for those fainting, struggling men and women who need rescuing, who need saving.5
Indeed, Jesus told his disciples, “Ye are the light of the world,”6 and that includes my mentors, it includes me… and it includes you!
Bishop Padgett ordained me a priest in 2012, around the same time that this experience occurred. Several months later, I had a volunteer appreciation breakfast at a local restaurant and was waiting outside on a bench for my teammates to show up. As I waited, the Bishop pulled up in his car for a breakfast meet-up of his own. “When does your meeting start?” he asked. “Eight a.m.,” I responded. "Good, mine too,” he said. “Will you give a prayer for us?” He then called me to be his assistant, which calling I held until he participated in my ordination to elder in early 2014.
I love Bishop Padgett. What a dedicated man he is. I pray for him often, that he might be strengthened in his calling. He is a role model, and I’d like to be very much like him.
From my journal, May 13, 2012
Bishops—Shepherds over the Lord’s Flock, Elder Quentin L. Cook, April 2021 General Conference
Depending on your denomination, a bishop in my church is like a priest or a pastor
See To the Rescue, Thomas S. Monson, April 2001 General Conference
Matthew 10:19-20, The Message translation
See “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” Hymns, no. 335.