Donnie H. and the Vision of Me
Posted by Melvin Jones on July 21st, 2008
You may or may not have heard of Donald Hilliard. He has been developing for at least the last fifteen years. I first ran across him at First Baptist Church of Glenarden on the
Now that he’s a bishop at the
Here’s what Donnie H. says about “mentoring“.
“This is where visions become reality!” says Hilliard. “Even the most successful people in the world have mentors and coaches from Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Ken Chenault to Debra Lee, Melody Hobson, Dick Parsons and Kevin Liles. They are all incredibly accomplished people. Each of them have mentors who guided and helped navigate them to the next level in business and other areas of their lives. It’s not always easy to find someone who is willing to make the commitment to be a mentor. My heart leads me to share the gift of vision that GOD has given to me with anyone who desires to establish a secure course in their business and personal lives.”
Maybe I’m not getting it. But it seems to me folks who claim to be Christian leaders (you know, the bishop thing) would be more Christ-centric. But if you take a look at the original ad, you notice an interesting thing. There is no mention of God. There is, however, a big appeal to “ME”.
First, a triple of questions:
1. How many of you believe mentoring can be done in a week end? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me mentoring is a years long process. It’s something you accomplish over a period of years as you are involved in another person’s life. You could even say it’s a little like discipling. Even T. Dexter knows this. He has a long term mentoring relationship with John K. Jenkins.
2. Do any of you really believe that by sending this pimp $175 and listening to him and several other folks speak for a week-end I’ll be mentored? I doubt it. The only things I’ll have accomplished at the end of the weekend will be the loss of $175 and the weekend. Let’s ay one hundred people show up for the seminar. Are all one hundred going to be mentored by him? Or let’s say twenty show up this time and eighty over the previous three seminars. Again, is he going to mentor all one hundred of these dudes and dudettes?
Third question: What is vision casting? I guess it sounds pretty good, but so does most of the techno-babble they spout on Star Trek: The Next Generation. If you’ve watched ST:TNG even a couple of times, you’ve heard Geordi or Data explain to the Captain Picard that the ship is a sitting duck because the Ion Flux Modulator is stuck in the manual position, or the High Energy Tachyon Conduit has developed a leak in the Magnetic Link Collimator.
It’s the same thing with these people. They put together a bunch of words until they come up with something that sounds impressive, even if it doesn’t mean anything at all. In this case they settled on the words “Vision Casting.” Yes, it’s the name of his company, but the combinations of words don’t mean anything as far as I can tell. Maybe one of you Hilliard drones can help me out here. I used to locate people who had liens against them and collect on them for the owners of the liens and judgments. My company was called Wolf Recoveries. The name meant something.
Oh, and of course it’s not enough for this to be Vision Casting weekend. The one they held in
I’m still trying to figure out if this is a religious event or a secular one. In the item I refer to by hypertext, Donnie H. mentions God. But on the e-flyer, there is nothing but an emphasis on “me”, an experience, and promises of super vision casting.
You know, I’m becoming more and more convinced that I am in the wrong business. I mean, only in pastoring a bunch of sheeple can you go from being a humble shepherd to being the bishop of a big, multi-thousand member church, a professional mentor, and an executive coach, able to charge people nearly two hundred dollars a pop so they can learn how to cast visions. Maybe I should go to that International Friends place, buy my doctorate and start making a few bucks.










