I have been having conversations with folks who have been asking me about what exactly coaching is. And so, I thought it might be helpful to talk about that today to give you a little background and insight on that, and I think it will be helpful to you as you think about your local church and ministry.
I want to start with a little bit of history.
In my life, coaching has been an essential thing since about the year 2001. In 2001, I hired my first coach, and my coach was somebody I found by googling clergy coach, and Rochelle Melander, her name popped up. She was a pastor, and she had written many books, and I reached out to her, and we worked together on and off for about ten years.
So, I reached out for coaching because I was reading many different kinds of books as I was younger in ministry, and one of the things I noticed was that people were starting to use coaches. And so, I wondered if there were ministry coaches, and I thought that might help me because I was in a new season in the church I was serving.
We were in a season where we would start a new worship service, which was a ton of work on top of leading a growing church and being a young mom. And so, I found myself not sleeping, too often frustrated, and not wanting to dump all my stress on my husband and child, and I was also looking for somebody who had been there. Someone who knew about the experiences of being a local church pastor. Someone who had walked these roads and had some wisdom in that.
Rochelle was a fabulous coach, and she probably saved my life.
Now, I know that sounds a bit dramatic, but the next church was even more complicated after that first church. My coach offered a lot of wisdom, insight, and just a lot of holding space for me to share what was going on, and without her, I don’t know what I would have done. She was a godsend to me at that season of my life.
Now, after Rochelle, I worked with a wide range of coaches and sought out different coaches depending on what I needed. In my last four years, I hired a large church pastor to be my coach since I was serving a church of 500 members.
Now, these days, I get coached every week. That’s right. Every single week, I have a coaching appointment, and I find that it’s what helps me move forward and helps me move forward with some more awareness and some more confidence, no matter what is going on, either personally or professionally.
Today I want to share a little bit with you about coaching and encourage you to consider if you need a coach’s support because there are many great coaches out there. Having a coach, like having a doctor and getting my haircut, is one of the things that I do that lets me function as my best self. Let’s talk a little bit about what coaching is.
Coaching, in its purest form, enables us to grow in the ways we want to grow. Coaching helps us move in the direction that we want to move in. Yes, we could get there on our own, but coaching offers us the shortcut because it offers us the opportunity to travel with someone else, and that helps us to achieve and dream, and grow more quickly without as many seasons of stumbling around in the dark.
Coaching supports us in becoming who we want to be by building awareness, exploring roadblocks, and helping us as we stay the course.
Coaching is used for a variety of things: It’s used to grow some skills to share burdens, to brainstorm ideas, to hold one accountable to goals and commitments, to help one think more deeply about life and about what really matters.
Strictly speaking, coaching differs from other things we might be familiar with, like mentoring, counseling, or consulting. Mentoring and consulting can be part of coaching. I know that they are part of my skill set as a coach. The coaching in its purest form is grounded in something different, and this difference matters.
So, what is this difference? The most significant difference is that coaching focuses on the belief that you do know. Coaching is grounded in the understanding that your inner wisdom, your inner knowing, is accurate and it can be trusted. You are the expert in knowing what is best for you. You are the authority in coaching.
A mentor is someone who shares information about what they know. So, the mentor is the authority. It is the same with consultants; they are the authority. Both mentoring and consulting are helpful, but coaching says that your agency, your wisdom, and not someone else’s experience is foundational.
And let’s be honest here for a minute. Most of us don’t do what others tell us. People give us advice all the time, but most of the time, we don’t take it. We step forward when we’ve come to an understanding within ourselves when we’ve seen it and come to it on our own. So, a coach can help us explore a situation, explore our thoughts and circumstances, and then help us come to our deep understanding of what is next and where we need to act. I also like to look at coaching from a faith standpoint as well, and here’s what I mean by that.
As people of faith, we often talk about the power of the Holy Spirit that lives within us. This is God’s power and wisdom that lives in us and is available to us all. Coaching turns the light on that, and it says that, even in the midst of all that squeezes it out, the rush of life, others’ needs, even our desires to be successful, there is that inner wisdom that light of God that is with went in us and coaching helps us listen to that internal knowledge, to that Holy Spirit. In coaching, we are asked questions, helped to see connections, and given real insights into our own lives.
A coach helps facilitate all of this by creating a space where we can be deeply heard. This was initially so powerful for me in coaching, and it continues to be an essential piece of coaching. So, whether I would have a 40-minute session or an hour session, depending on the length, I had an opportunity to share what was going on to be heard by another human being, whose job it was to really listen, to really hear what I was saying and then to reflect it back to me.
This helped me here and put things together in various ways I didn’t even see until that conversation. Just today, I was talking with the coach about a missed opportunity, and she asked me why it bothered me, and I thought about it and realized something about my motives. This was something I would not have seen as quickly without her help.
Some of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in coaching have been when a coach has reflected back to me things that I said that I didn’t even hear myself saying. Bringing those things to my attention has allowed me to listen to my own stress, anxiety, or concerns that maybe I was just pushing to the side, unaware of. That listening piece in coaching is often called “holding space” for others, and it makes coaching very different from many of our conversations.
Most of our conversations are a give-and-take, and if we share some difficulty or challenge in our life, we look toward a friend who will jump in and share their thoughts and opinions on what we should do and what has happened. Coaches don’t do that. Coaches listen and reflect back to us, and this has real power.
That’s a little bit about coaching in general. I want to discuss what coaching can do for clergy, and I have three things to share.
First, coaching can help us with a skill gap.
While coaching in its purest form doesn’t focus on teaching new skills. In practice, most coaches work with folks who are dealing with a skill gap.
So, suppose you are moving from seminary to being an associate pastor. In that case, you have a skill gap, or if you’re moving from being an associate pastor to a solo pastor, you have a skill gap, or if you’re moving from doing fresh expressions or a new church start to moving into part-time parish ministry, you have a skill gap. If you’re running your first stewardship campaign or dealing with your fallout at your first church, or planning your first church planning retreat, you may have a skill gap.
Now, you can read some books and do some googling which I hope you do, but if you have a coach, you can also get some training on a skill you need for ministry.
We all have skill gaps, and an experienced coach can help. In my years working with coaches, I have learned how to raise money better, deal with difficult people, and organize my time better than I had been able to come up with on my own. Skill gaps are expected, and a coach can help.
Now, of course, you want to coach that has skills in these areas. So, knowing your coach’s background helps. But here’s a thing about coaching, I have experienced things with coaches where they may not have had the exact skill I was looking for, but as they asked me questions, it tapped into some things that I did know, but I didn’t realize I knew where I had forgotten. This is one of the beauties of coaching; it helps us look at our forgotten inner wisdom.
I have found coaching helpful after I’ve gone to a conference. I usually come back with some notebooks when I go to a conference. Some things I’ve learned, and sometimes I don’t know where to begin. So, I have had too many conferences where those notebooks in that learning have just gone up on a shelf. When I take this to a coaching session, I have had the space to unpack these learnings, and the conference has paid off significantly.
Also, a coach who specializes in ministry will love to read and gather information on the latest trends and then share that knowledge with those they coach. I read three church trend newsletters a week and interrupted my podcast earlier today because Amazon was delivering a book on church ministry I’d been waiting for all week. So, coaches can help with skill gaps.
Second, coaches can give you the support you need to do ministry. Parish ministry can be lonely. Often, we can feel the burden of ministry, and we don’t want to dump all those things on family or friends and our supervisor, and in my case, a district superintendent may have enough on their plate. So, we don’t even pick up the phone.
Where do we go when we can share what is going on? When can we get a second pair of eyes on something? When can we hear from someone who will listen and keep things in confidence?
Coaching has always been an excellent support for my ministry. I don’t know what I would have done without it. With all my years having a coach, I have been able to struggle with my coaches, cry amid challenging times, rejoice for what God is doing, and give thanks for everything I’ve witnessed in the local church. My coaches have made a safe space for me, and in times of crisis, they have resourced me and given me unconditional support.
In addition, Rochelle gave me support as I was setting ministry goals, working through difficult choices, and learning how to find balance in my ministry as a mom, wife, daughter, and pastor. Her support helped me set boundaries and process guilt when I felt it. She helped me to see what I needed to do in my ministry in a more balanced way. And she helped me listen to my body when it reminded me that I wasn’t a machine with unlimited energy. We all need a place to process; coaching has always done that for me.
And last, coaching is essential when I have a belief gap. Now, what is a belief gap? A belief gap is a gap between what I’d like to believe about myself, my congregation, and our possibilities and where I may find myself on any random Monday morning. That gap can last for 30 minutes or 30 days, three months, or even longer. We all need help filling that gap.
A recent article I just read called Seven Ministry Insights, Pastors Wished They’d Known Sooner. The article spoke about the importance of personal development in ministry. I agree because it’s easy to fall into a belief gap and feel discouragement, despair, and cynicism in ministry.
We need an ongoing commitment to those things that help us believe, that help us stay on the path. I have found that I need to believe harder than anyone else in ministry. I’ve had to believe that God wasn’t done with us yet. I’ve had to believe that we could grow. I’ve had to believe that the money would show up, and I have needed someone to help me grow my belief. We are all going to go through times of doubt. We’re all going to fall into times where we feel like, what is the point of this anyway, and coaching helps us with our belief gap. I have always needed a place to go where I can work on my stuff, my doubts, my fears, my taking it personally, and my own feeling that things are out to get me, and coaches have helped me. They’ve helped me separate fact from a bad mood, low sleep, and discouragement and have reminded me who I am and why I do what I do.
I have needed help believing in myself and finding my confidence; coaching has helped me. So, coaches can help with skill gaps. They can give you the support you need and help you with belief gaps.
What are some of the other things that you might work on in coaching?
One thing that I see a lot more of these days is vocational discernment. I have found that I always have two or three pastors I’m working with who are wondering if they are at a point where they need a career change. It could be hard to figure something this big out on our own. We may want to avoid involving other people who may worry and stress about this, so the coach can help.
I recently did some training around this topic, and I realized that while moving out of ministry is often a huge piece of vocational discernment for clergy; there are lots of little ones that happen a lot more often, things like moving to a new church or starting or ending a new ministry. Also, I find that coaching is helpful when we are looking at having a team at the church and helping them move to the next level. For example, I coach churches looking to do social media or take their social media to the next level. That could be a volunteer team or a church staff who directs communication or online campus for their church.
This kind of coaching is often different. It’s often richer in giving information, and it’s often shorter and more sessions at the beginning as people build skills. Now, of course, coaching focuses on things you’d think about, like church growth, deepening ones preaching, growing one spiritual life, and learning how to manage people and projects. It all depends on the needs and the coach.
What else would be helpful to know about coaching? One of the things people often don’t know is coaches usually work on a 12-month contract. What that does is it lets you work with one person as a coach for an entire year. Usually, you meet once a month, but there are situations where you might want to pay for six months of coaching and meet more often. There is flexibility; ask the coach.
The cost of coaching depends—the average coach charges between $125 to $150 a session for individual coaching. Usually, a session lasts between 40 minutes and 60 Minutes. Of course, there is a range. Ask the coach you’re working with about their costs.
Most coaches would ask for payment upfront. This is just because coaches often are self-employed, and tracking people down for payment each week is usually an extra amount of time and energy most coaches need. So, the industry standard is that a coach would be paid upfront for their coaching. Of course, many coaches are happy to work with you, so you just have to bring that up with them.
So where do you find a coach? I recommend asking your clergy friends or your larger denomination who they recommend. Recommendations are always helpful; you might try your clergy’s Facebook page if you don’t get a recommendation. You can also, of course, go on Facebook or Instagram and search under hashtags or coaching.
Now, coaching isn’t regulated like therapy or physicians. So, anybody can take an online $15 course and say they are a certified coach. So, you should ask them about their training.
The gold standard these days is the International Coaching Federation (ICF). They have set standards for education, continuing education, coaching hours, and supervision. There are other great organizations as well that certify people for coaching. You have to ask your coach about their training. Also, once you get a referral, I would explore the coach’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram to get a sense of them. And if that looks good to you and you want to explore it, ask if you can have a phone call with them. Those are always free, allowing you to see if you are a good match. If you are uncomfortable, keep looking for the coach who’s right for you.
If things look good and you want to move forward, a coach will send you a contract with everything spelled out, including confidentiality and payments.
Now, I want to close by saying I never really thought I would be a clergy coach because I was so busy being a clergy, but here I am. I got involved in coaching when I went to work for our denominational office, and I was working with clergy who were doing revitalizations and clergy who were doing new starts, and I want it to be more helpful. So, I started getting some coaching education. I found it a great way to support the next generation of clergy leaders. I’ve continued studying since then and received several certifications, including just this last week. I completed a heck of a test to be a certified professional coach, which is a PCC, and that means I’ve had 125 hours of education and 500 coaching hours. That’s the International Coaching Federation. I’m also certified with The Life Coach School, which has a different way of certification. ‘
Coaching is a great tool to have in your toolbox, and I hope that this episode gives you a better understanding of what coaching is and how it might be a tool to help you in ministry. (Transcript from Episode 37, So What Is a Clergy Coach?)