The Power of Coaching
To help discern and articulate the motivating vision for her life and ministry, a pastor in the Reformed Church in America tried to listen carefully to God. A member of a pastoral peer learning group—which the RCA calls a “coached revitalizing network”—she and her group had spent time working on her vision, sharing preliminary thoughts, hearing feedback, shaping words. In the two weeks since the last network meeting, she had prayed, listened to her life and to God, and paid attention to what captured both her heart and her head.
During her monthly conversation with her peer group coach, the coach listened carefully, left space for silence to do its work, and asked questions. With each question, the pastor seemed to go both “deeper in” and “further up” at the same time. Gently prodded by the questions, she was able to give voice to things she didn’t know she thought and share dreams that were still mostly unclear and unformed. With the help of her coach she was able to name God’s vision for her life.
Elsewhere, another RCA pastor drew upon his network members to help him wrestle with a variety of issues in his congregation. From month to month, his church left him whiplashed. There were the highs that accompanied signs of hope and the lows that came from confronting the deep systemic dysfunction that had prevented his congregation from achieving its potential through successive pastorates. Regularly, the lows outnumbered the highs.
Finally, the pastor decided it was time to talk to the congregation about their church—about the reality he had experienced and perceived—and invite members to do the same. Beforehand, to prepare for the meeting, he met with his network coach. In a particularly intense coaching conversation, the coach asked questions that helped the pastor clarify what he saw and felt in the church and how he could best express his concerns to the congregation. With the coach’s help, he figured out how to share his own perceptions in a way that would invite others to do the same rather than shut down in defensiveness. With the coach, he rehearsed key parts of what he needed to say to the consistory (the governing board) of his congregation.
The night of the consistory meeting, the pastor was clear, open, authentic, and truthful about the reality he had seen and experienced. He opened a floodgate of feelings. The consistory members revisited a painful history. They acknowledged their disappointment with things they had done and allowed. Tears flowed. Behavior began to change. The leaders and the pastor began to face the future together.
These two stories and countless others like them provide a glimpse of the important role that coaching can play in sustaining pastoral excellence. In the crucial interplay that takes place between pastor and coach, both in the coached revitalizing networks and the individual coaching sessions, individual pastors are able to contextualize and apply what they have learned in network meetings to their lives and ministries.
Coaching as Empowering
When the RCA applied for a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence grant, it identified three elements that were essential for an effective coached revitalizing network:
- transformational learning,
- covenantal accountability, and
- collegial support.
Today, the RCA remains convinced that pastoral excellence is developed and sustained through relationships of transformational learning, covenantal accountability, and collegial support with pastoral peers. But we have also learned that excellence is greatly enhanced when consistent, quality coaching is used to help pastors apply in their own congregations the new insights they have gained in their network meetings.
Put another way, we now draw a distinction between equipping and empowering. Generally, equipping occurs through shared transformational learning, whether with peers in a coached revitalizing network or in shared learning between a pastor and congregational leaders. Equipping pastors with new knowledge and skills is essential to pastoral renewal and congregational revitalization. But it is not enough. A pastor who is equipped must also be empowered to employ this new learning.
People are empowered most effectively when they are coached in the use of their new knowledge as they try out a new skill or step up to a new level of leadership. We have come to see coaching—both of pastors by the network coach and of congregational leaders by the pastor or other leaders—to be central to fruitful ministry. When equipping and empowering are joined together, deep change is more likely to happen.
How the RCA Understands Coaching
Coaching is the process of coming alongside people to help them discover God’s agenda for their life and ministry, while also seeking the Holy Spirit’s guidance in making that agenda a reality. A coach helps draw out what God, through the Holy Spirit, is saying to someone, and then supports that person as, together, they help a God-shaped future emerge.
Coaching helps people listen to God about the ways they need to change and then equips and empowers them to actually make those changes. A coach begins with discernment, understanding, and new learning and then continues coaching the other person as he or she implements and takes action on what has been learned.
The coaching relationship is a place of customized, contextualized, transformational learning. It is a crucible—a strong, resilient, safe, non-toxic, dependable vessel—in which profound change can safely take place for the coached pastors, their families, friends and other people with whom they are in relationship, the congregation they lead, and the coach.
A coach is not a problem solver, teacher, advisor, instructor, or expert. A coach is a listener, sounding board, and awareness-raiser. A coach helps pastors explore and discover the truth. A coach helps them discern and fulfill their God-given calling.
The Three Primary Goals of a Coaching Relationship
The coaching relationship has three primary goals, each of which is generally addressed in a coaching session.
Expectations — A coach helps clarify the goals for the coaching relationship and the mutual commitments both parties bring concerning the objectives or desired outcomes of the coaching relationship and each coaching session.
Awareness — A coach helps pastors increase their self-awareness as well as their awareness of other people, their context, and their congregation. It is the coach’s responsibility to listen carefully and ask good questions. A coach helps provoke the type of learning that empowers people to interrogate reality and gain deeper awareness. Awareness is raised as the coach asks questions that generate factual answers and prompt deeper reflection.
Coaching assumes that a unique solution already exists within a specific challenge or situation. But this solution requires the appropriate environment in order to reveal itself. A coach tries to help raise awareness in order to create an environment in which the solution can be discovered.
Awareness is a product of focused attention, concentration, and clarity. It is generated by the pastor, prompted by the questions of the coach. A coach helps people become more aware of what is happening around them, while also increasing their self-awareness about what they are experiencing internally.
Responsibility — Responsibility for change and action lies with the person being coached. Ultimately, only the individual pastor can take responsibility for his or her leadership challenges and for the tough conversations, hard questions, and changes that are needed. To keep the responsibility where it belongs, the coach resists the temptation to offer advice, suggest solutions, or take the problem or issue from the other person, even if that person insists on trying to give it to the coach.
Because coaches do their best to keep the responsibility for awareness and action squarely on the person being coached, their role is to develop the other person’s capacity rather than create dependency. The coach prayerfully listens to the other person and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, asking the questions that emerge from this dual listening. In this way, a coach can help pastors become experts about their own life and ministry.
As the coached pastors assume responsibility to understand and address the challenges before them, they learn to trust God and the insight and power God gives.
Coaching and God’s Work in and through Us
As the RCA has experienced the power of coaching, it has sought to reflect upon this process biblically and theologically. Throughout Scripture we see God acting before we could even think to act, we observe God saving us apart from anything we do or contribute, and we acknowledge that God comes to us and transforms us whether or not we deserve it. Our role is to receive God’s gifts and cooperate with the Holy Spirit to see them more fully realized within us and through us.
In some ways, much of God’s work in us is already accomplished—we are called, we are justified, we are reconciled, we are a new creation. Our role is to work out our salvation as God continues to work in us “to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13).
Coaching is a way that we can cooperate with the Holy Spirit in one another’s ongoing transformation. The work of transformation and renewal is God’s work. Our part is to see and receive the gifts God offers and to open ourselves for God’s work to be done in and through us. We faithfully abide in Christ. God causes us to bear fruit.
A coach can help people more wisely and effectively prepare the soil, clear the underbrush, remove the distractions, and water the soil so that God’s grace, Christ’s reconciling love and the Holy Spirit’s empowering presence can have full rein.
A coach is someone who comes alongside others to help them be more fully who God is shaping them to be and to do more obediently what God is calling them to do. A coach is a human Paraclete—a companion and encourager who walks alongside someone else in a relationship of transformational learning, covenantal accountability, and collegial support. A coach is a very important partner in creating and sustaining pastoral excellence.
A coach joins with the Holy Spirit to draw out what God is already seeking to say and do through another. Coaches listen carefully and ask questions as a way to help “turn on the light” so that what God is showing the person can be more clearly seen. Then the coach asks more questions that, in turn, will help the person move toward action on what has been discerned. In the coaching relationship, therefore, questions are more powerful and compelling than statements or advice.
A coach operates from a posture of humility and mystery, not authority and knowledge. A coach serves as a catalyst in a journey of discovery. A coach is a companion in an individual’s change, a partner with the Holy Spirit in the development of another, an accountability partner as one commits to new behavior.
The RCA is convinced that pastors will be more likely to realize their full God-given redemptive potential if they are in a coaching relationship. The increased awareness and accountability that comes with coaching will help them be more faithful as they participate in and witness to the realm of God. By God’s grace, and through the Holy Spirit’s power, the outcome will be more fruitful ministry.
The Rev. Ken Eriks is director of revitalization and leadership for the Reformed Church in America and oversees the RCA’s Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program.
