History of The Institute

Phone: 706 830 0045

Email: mentor222@charter.net

             The description above became the method he used in the several churches the Lord assigned him until 1970 when he became the pastor of Village Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC. Dr. Waylon Moore was invited to the Fayetteville area to conduct a pastor's seminar on personal disciple-making. It was during this seminar that Dr. Owens was convicted by the Lord to begin emphasizing the need for teaching one-on-one discipleship and mentoring. His further examination of the Scriptures convinced him that the strategy in II Timothy 2:2 is Christ's primary strategy for building His church.

             While at Village Church, he began to write basic doctrinal Bible studies and he assembled the studies with other appropriate materials into a notebook. The notebook was first used by Dr. Owens in his New Members class and later incorporated in his discipling of hungry believers who showed signs of desiring to go deeper with the Lord. The notebook has evolved into the 222 Plan Notebook and Leader's Guide. (The material is offered on the Training Aids page of this web site.)

             Dr. Owens' last pastorate began in July of 1984 at Crawford Ave. Baptist Church, Augusta, GA. While in this thirteen year, six month, tenure he began to dream of an organization that would exist to provide mentoring, leadership, and one-on-one discipleship training for the local church. Out of this dream, the Institute was born in 1995. At first the only offering was the seminar on How to Build Leaders in the Local Church. The seminar utilized a pastor led process to begin a one-on-one mentoring using the 222 Plan Notebook.             About 1996 Rev. Herb Hodges of Spiritual Life Ministries , asked Dr. Owens to record on video tape his seminar on Christ's Strategy for World Impact. THI distributed over one hundred of these sets to those who were eager to follow the Lord in discipling others.

             Dr. Owens retired from the Crawford Avenue Church in 1997. After a couple of interim  pastorates he accepted the Republican Baptist Church in rural SC. He retired again in February of 2006. He now gives himself to preaching, teaching, conducting seminars, maintaining the THI website, and producing mentoring materials. He also is preserving on video the things he feels the Lord would have him make available to interested persons.

God is Our
Helmsman;
His Word
is Our Compass

The Helmsman Institute

Disciple-Making is the Goal——Mentoring is the Process

             William L. Owens began his pastoral ministry in a  suburban SC church in 1963. He was zealously evangelistic and souls were converted to Christ.  However, he soon noticed that the church was stagnated from evangelistic preaching. Believers did not seem to grow in the spiritual graces. The Lord convicted him about majoring on evangelism at the expense of consistent biblical doctrine. Therefore, he began a ministry of expositional preaching. He sought to follow the biblical admonition to preach line-upon-line and precept-upon-precept.  God began to bless the process of this pulpit method of instructing the people.  

Dr. William L. Owens,
Founder / Director