Mentoring of some sort is always part of the socialization process as new faculty members join the life and mission of a university. One type of mentoring is informal in nature. Newer members of a community pick up on the ways of an institution through "water cooler" conversations, casual interactions with colleagues, and even the unguarded comments of those who have been haunting the halls of the institution for much longer. Although it is inevitable and can be valuable, such informal mentoring also involves potential pitfalls. Accordingly, this article argues for the importance of formal mentoring programs. These formal mentoring structures require attentiveness to their built-in assumptions about new faculty members and about the institution itself. Formal, structured mentoring can easily default to the goal of initiating new faculty members into a static establishment. It is also possible, however, for mentoring programs to invite and empower new faculty to contribute to the institution and its mission in creative and revitalizing ways. In proposing an "invitational" ethos for formal mentoring, this article reports on early findings from participants in a mentoring program for newer faculty at Calvin University.