Building Church Leadership Using Coaching Models
For additional copies, please contact:
Communications and Education Team
The Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
2000 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103-3298
[email protected]
Other books in this series:
• Report on Clergy Recruitment and Retention to the 216th General
Assembly (2004) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Conversations on Candidacy of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Supporting Mid-Career Pastors of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Transitions in Ministry of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Growing Healthy Churches in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Here is the church, Here is the tall steeple, Look inside and…?
• Presbyterian Leadership; Reflections on Leadership Renewal in the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Encouraging Generosity in Difficult Times in the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.)
To download copies of these publications, visit Pensions.org or contact
the Board of Pensions at 800-773-7752 (800-PRESPLAN) for printed
copies.
Building Church Leadership – Using Coaching Models is the ninth volume
in a series produced by the Board of Pensions. In the tradition of its
predecessor volumes, this book serves as a means to initiate conversation
for leaders at all levels of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), as we endeavor
to help our ordained clergy hone the skills and competencies needed to
successfully conduct the ministry and mission of the Church.
Each year, the Board of Pensions has reserved a morning session at its
Regional Benefits Consultations to explore an area that is of particular
relevance both to the PC(USA) and to those who’ve accepted the call of
governance for our congregations.
For the 2010 Regional Benefits Consultations, we examined the topic of
coaching as a means of developing pastors. Coaching provides learning
opportunities in ways that fall beyond the teaching parameters of seminary, yet are vital to pastors for coping and thriving in the modern world.
This volume, Building Church Leadership – Using Coaching Models, is a
written adaption of the presentation of the same name delivered by the
Rev. J.C. Austin, director of The Center for Church Life at New Yorkbased Auburn Theological Seminary, for the 2010 Regional Benefits
Consultations. Coaching has become a widely accepted method of
professional development for business executives, secular organizations,
and of particular interest to those of us committed to the health and
welfare of our PC(USA) community – church leaders. Coaching is
intended to assist individuals in developing their skills with the help of a
professional coach who, as an objective partner, can provide guidance,
focus, and feedback to enhance leadership skills. Through a coaching
relationship, individuals and organizations can identify areas for growth,
set goals, and receive objective feedback that ensures accountability for
their development.
We are grateful that Rev. Austin shared his insights into the applications
of coaching as a tool our pastors can use in strengthening their vocation.
As both anecdotal accounts and a growing body of empirical research tell
us, it is becoming increasingly important to explore pathways of learning
that equip pastors to remain energized and engaged in their call, especially
in the face of the many challenges that can weigh disproportionately
upon them.
The Board of Pensions extends its appreciation to The Center for Church
Life at Auburn Theological Seminary, and all of the individuals who made
development of this resource possible. We trust that it will serve as a
valuable starting point for further reflection upon, and exploration of, this
valuable and flexible methodology. And we hope that the ideas presented
here encourage pastors and leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to
explore the potential to strengthen their ministry through coaching
relationships as we continue to discern God’s will for the Church.
Robert W. Maggs, Jr.
President and Chief Executive
The Rev. Peter C.S. Sime
Vice President, Assistance, CREDO
& Funds Development
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
Building Church Leadership –
Using Coaching Models
In considering the constant reminder from the Board of Pensions to engage in
Stewardship of Self, we find in it a very holistic vision of how pastors and other
church leaders need to be cared for, and how they need to care for each other and
themselves.
I think this lies at the heart of what we’re trying to do with coaching in general
as a movement, as well as the particular way in which we do it at Auburn
Seminary, where I work. What I want to do, in the brief course of this book, is
to share a bit about the overall concept and method of coaching, because it is
something that’s relatively new in the Church. It’s something that hasn’t been
used over a particularly long period of time, but is becoming more and more
popular and influential. That’s in part because of the profound impact that
coaching is having on pastors and their ability to not only function, but to thrive
in ministry.
The next few pages will lay some groundwork as to what coaching is as a movement and as a concept. Then you’ll read more about how it works and how it can
be implemented in particular models. Then, and quite importantly, you’ll read
about some ways in which you can use it in your own areas and presbyteries, as
well as the larger ministry in the denomination.
What a Coach Is … and Is Not
Let’s begin by examining what coaching is by using the obvious metaphor of
sports — after all, it’s the most familiar one for most of us. When we say the
word “coach,” probably the thing that comes to mind is a sports coach. There’s
an old story that well illustrates this traditional image we have of a “coach”: There
was a baseball coach who once sent a rookie player into centerfield for a game.
The young player was a bit nervous, and he ran onto the field. His very first time
out, the ball was hit to him and he dropped it — a very easy fly ball. The coach
shook his head but decided to be quiet because this was the rookie’s first time
out. Next chance the centerfielder got, he let a ball go through his legs, and then
he picked it up and threw it to the wrong base. The coach, frustrated, threw his
hat down on the ground, but he didn’t say anything yet. In the rookie’s next
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chance, he got out to his position in centerfield; it was a hard-hit ball headed his
way, and it just sailed right over his head. The coach finally stormed out into
centerfield and demanded the baseball glove. He said, “I’m going to show you
how to play this position.” He sent the rookie back to warm the bench. The next
batter came up, hit a ball right past the coach, who turned to run around and
catch it — falling down in the process. The coach stormed back to the bench,
threw the glove at the rookie centerfielder and said, “You’ve got centerfield so
messed up, nobody can play it!”
I’m relating this story because it illustrates some common misconceptions about
what coaching is.
Developmental, Not Remedial
The first and most important thing to point out is that coaching is not remedial.
Coaching is not about addressing the weaknesses, shortcomings, or errors of the
person who’s being coached. Anyone who’s been coached in any aspect of life
knows the difference between a good and a bad coach. A good coach is one who
helps you identify your strengths and build on them, not one who points out
your weaknesses and criticizes you for them; nor does a good coach focus on
fixing what’s wrong. This is one of the biggest barriers to coaching within the
Church: Pastors often don’t want to use the method of coaching because they
perceive it as remedial. As a result, they picture that going to their congregation
or session and saying, “I’ve engaged a coach to help me in leadership will be then
perceived as, ‘I’m doing something wrong, I’m not very good at my job, I’m really
on the edge here … I need somebody who’ll help me shore up the things that I
don’t do well so that maybe I can skate by.’” That’s often people’s perception of
coaching, and it is the antithesis of what coaching is supposed to be. Coaching
is about identifying strengths and building upon them. It’s about using strengths
in the best available way. The best business leaders, athletes, singers, and high
performers in general all use coaches not because they’re doing things wrong, but
because a coach helps them enhance their performance. Coaching, therefore, is
developmental — it is not remedial.
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
Coaching Does Not Equal Mentoring
The second thing to note from the baseball coach story is that true coaching is
not mentoring. Now, this guy from the anecdote may not have sounded like
much of a mentor to you, but in a sense, he was. Essentially, mentoring boils
down to an expert practitioner saying, “Do this the way that I’m doing it.” Or,
“Here’s the way that I’ve done it, and you can learn from that, so I’m going to
show you how to play centerfield.” With any luck, your mentor will be better
than this quick-tempered baseball coach was. But mentoring done right is great
in terms of passing on the wisdom of experience. I think there is a growing
awareness and a desire in the church to identify quality mentors and to match
them with people, particularly younger pastors, and develop them in a way that
passes on the mentor’s knowledge.
When I was a young pastor, I was fortunate to have several very influential
mentors in my life, and one of them just completely walked me through how to
perform a wedding service. This mentor taught me things that included not just
how to put the liturgy together, but important little reminders such as keeping
the bride and the groom from locking their knees so they didn’t pass out. I’ve
done sixty weddings, and I haven’t lost a single person because a mentor taught
me that. I have never been on “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and hope to
keep that streak up. Mentoring is passing on this sort of wisdom, and in very
practical sorts of ways. When you watch mentors at work, you can debrief
afterwards on certain activities, such as moderating a session meeting, managing
a staff, or sharing practices.
Mentoring, let’s be clear, is fantastic, but mentoring is not coaching. The
problem with mentoring is that it can’t help you when you need to differentiate
yourself from the mentor. No mentor is perfect, and it takes a strong mentor and
mentee to allow themselves to differ on various points. It’s difficult because the
temptation is always to become the image of the master practitioner — that is,
the mentor. Many people have either had direct experience or indirect experience
with the shattering of a mentor/mentee relationship. And it’s often over these
feelings that the mentee harbors, along the lines of, “I’ve got nothing left to
learn,” or disagreement over a particular method or an issue in the church, that
the mentor-mentee pair will experience a sense of betrayal. And it happens
because there’s an emotional investment in the relationship between the two.
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Helping You Access Your Potential
A coach is different from that. A coaching arrangement is, first of all, not a personal relationship. And no matter how much we structure mentoring, it
inevitably develops a personal aspect to it. In fact, it works best when there is a
personal investment between the mentor and the mentee. A coach is a professional. He or she is an outside person. A coach is somebody who is not invested
in an individual emotionally. Coaches are invested in you in that they’re invested in guiding you to ways in which you can succeed.
A coach stands outside of whatever system that you’re in, and that’s the real
strength of that model. A coach is helping you differentiate from your own
context so that you can stand outside of yourself. It’s a bit like those movies
where somebody has an out-of-body experience and is able to see the third-person perspective of the action going on, while the person is still participating in
it. The best coach is able to do that by stepping outside of the relationship or outside of the circumstances with you.
And coaches are not invested in you being like them. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
The coach’s whole purpose is to help you be the best that you can be, to borrow
a phrase. A coach helps you to:
• find your own style
• find your own strengths
• identify the things that you need to work on
• go out and find appropriate resources for taking action
In these ways, a coach becomes sort of a central hub that helps you network into
different resources that are out in the community, as well as helps you in your
own process of evaluation.
Coaching Does Not Equal Consulting
The final point on defining coaching is that coaching is not consulting.
Consulting is great. Consulting is very important. It’s really designed for when
you need to identify problems in a system or in a situation; the consultant, if he
or she is a good consultant, will offer you some solutions for just that. You bring
in a consultant to analyze the way in which a staff is working or is not working,
and then your consultant provides a set of recommendations for you to act upon.
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
A consultant may be someone to whom you actually outsource particular expertise.
So if you’re about to engage in a major capital campaign for your congregation,
you’d hire a development consultant — a capital campaign consultant. That
person or team would come in and analyze the situation. They’d do a feasibility
study. They’d tell you the steps that you should take and would help you take
those steps by creating a whole system around you.
Now, that consulting model is very helpful for solving particular problems, but
the limitation of consulting is that it doesn’t have the developmental aspect to it
that coaching does. Consulting offers a solution and then solves a problem.
A coach helps you identify problems or issues, or, more positively, helps you
identify goals for yourself, for those you’re working with, or for your organization. A coach then helps you identify what the solutions are. So as a result of that
process, you are in fact developing your leadership capacity. Somebody’s not
handing you a set of solutions that you’re then deciding whether or not to
follow. Instead, you are actively involved in the process. In fact, you are the one
who is carrying out the process, and the coach is helping you do it.
From Where You Are … to Where You Want To Be
So what does coaching mean? If it’s not mentoring, it’s not consulting, it’s not
remedial, but it is developmental, what is it, exactly? What’s the background?
Where does this term “coach” come from? Have you ever thought of that?
This is a word we use constantly, and we associate it with sports, but that’s
actually not the original meaning. So stop for a second and think about the
associations you have with the word “coach,” and see if you can figure out what
the word originally meant.
Did you think of a mode of transportation? If so, what kind of mode of transportation was it? Were you perhaps thinking “stagecoach?” You’ve seen them in
Westerns — those horse-drawn conveyances with the big wheels, right? The
word “coach” actually means wagon, and it also means wagon in Hungarian.
This bit of etymology gets even more interesting, though. There’s a village in
Hungary called Kocs. Kocs sits on the main road between Vienna and Budapest,
which were two of the major capitals in Central Europe for centuries. Naturally,
this was a very important and well-traveled highway that ran between Vienna
and Budapest. But we’re talking about the Middle Ages here, so although the
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highway was important and well traveled, it was in no way comfortable. This was
not an autobahn. Nor was it the Eisenhower interstate system. It was bumpy,
difficult, and not graded. It was slow, and it was uncomfortable to traverse. And
so a need was felt for something that would help people to be conveyed quickly
from one place to another. In particular, they wanted to be carried quickly and
comfortably from Vienna to Budapest. So this little village of Kocs, Hungary,
became very invested in wagon building, and the locals started developing that
craft. In fact, they did it quite well and came up with a highly innovative design
that could be pulled by multiple horses. It even had a suspension system underneath it that would cushion against the bumps.
People could go much faster and much more comfortably in these wagons from
Kocs. The design was so good and so popular that it became known as a “Kocs,”
or coach, as we now call them in English. You didn’t just want a wagon back
then, you wanted a coach, just like you want a Xerox or Kleenex or other brand
name consumer good. It was similar to the way in which champagne became the
generic name for sparking wine, because that’s where it was invented — the
Champagne region of France — and everybody liked it so much.
That’s how wagons became known as coaches. Metaphorically, it signifies the
ability to take somebody from one place to another, or more precisely, to take
them from where they are to where they want to be. The coach is something
unlike a train or a bus. It’s something over which the person who’s getting in it
has some level of direction and control. Therefore, it’s a way of getting there
faster and more efficiently.
Coach as Learning Facilitator
The term coach actually developed further than that, and this next way of thinking about the word is helpful, too. For those who don’t like sports metaphors,
which is often the context in which the word appears, you may take the following
to heart. Quite rapidly, the word “coach” spread across the continent from
Hungary all the way over to England. By the time it got there in the 19th
century, it became a slang term for academic tutors — now there’s a fun fact for
those who don’t like sports, but were good on the academic team! The coach was
someone who served as a private tutor that helped students through their exams.
These coaches would help students develop the skills they needed for taking a
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
test. They would help students anticipate what would be on the test and then
practice answering those questions. The students would take the tests, come
back, and complete an evaluation. Then they would think about where they
would go from there. It was not until later that the athletes borrowed the term
from the academics.
So that’s the development of the image. A coach is somebody who helps people
get from where they are to where they want to be, faster and more effectively
than they could have done it on their own. And maybe they wouldn’t have done
it on their own in the first place.
Not a Free Ride
To be sure, the image has limits. Coaches don’t carry people — I’m talking about
personal coaches now — professional coaches, not wagons. When you’re being
coached, you aren’t being carried from one place to another so that you can sit
back in leisure and enjoy the ride. That’s not what a coach does. And coaches
don’t drive people to places they wouldn’t otherwise go. It’s important to keep
both of those pieces in mind; a coach helps you get where you want to go,
further, faster, and more smoothly than you could without one, but does not
perform the work for you.
Okay, so what does a coach do? Coaching fundamentally is about learning.
That’s not a very impressive explanation, is it? But it’s such an important point
that it warrants repeating — coaching is about learning. In fact, let me ask you
a question to illustrate this point: Is it possible to teach pastoral ministry? Don’t
answer, just think about it for a minute. Such a question may sound crazy coming from someone who works in theological education, but I don’t think you can
teach pastoral ministry. We could have a lengthy debate on that, but stay with
me for a moment as I explain. I don’t think you can teach pastoral ministry
because the practice of pastoral ministry is something that can only be learned. It
can’t be taught.
I don’t mean that there isn’t a lot of teaching that needs to go into being able to
be a good pastor. The M. Div. degree is essential, I think, to being effective and
excellent as a pastor. The education that you get from that degree curriculum in
terms of scripture interpretation, preaching, and understanding the tradition of
the church through history and theology, how to apply that to the contemporary
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age, practical skills like teaching in small groups facilitation, how to write a
sermon, is all important. And all of that is teachable. But that’s not pastoral
ministry. Those elements are dimensions of it. They are aspects of it. Those are
skills and capacities for it.
There are plenty of things that the standard M. Div. does very well, and there are
plenty of things that we could do to make the standard M. Div. better, but that’s
not the point of this conversation. The point is that no matter how well we do
M. Div. education, students will never come out of seminary fully formed. They
will never come out of seminary having been taught pastoral ministry. And that’s
because I think ministry is an art. It’s not a science. There’s some science to it, as
there is with any art, but it is an art.
Learning from Practice
If you think about that image of art, of the practicing of an art, then yes, there
is a substantial amount of education that goes into that. The great artists have
usually studied the great artists that have gone before them. They have imitated
their predecessors in the manner they would imitate a mentor. They have developed particular skills in terms of brush strokes and the way in which you look at
things and the way you put pieces together. But at
some point, they have to strike out on their own,
“…it’s only when
and they have to find their own way of practicing
you get out and
their craft. And the only way to do that — the
start practicing
only way to find your own voice — indeed, the
ministry that
only way to find your own excellence, is to actualyou know what
you don’t know
ly do it. You must produce your own art and not
that you need
somebody else’s. So I think this is where the issue
to know, right?”
of the transition from seminary to the practice of
ministry comes in.
At Auburn Seminary, we helped pioneer the field of continuing education about
fifty years ago as a way of trying to get at this sort of problem. With the recognition that you never have been taught everything that you need to know, it’s
only when you get out and start practicing ministry that you know what you
don’t know that you need to know, right? I used to actually keep a list of all the
things that I should have learned in seminary, just as a way of keeping track.
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
I remember a while ago, I was a pastor in New York City at Madison Avenue
Presbyterian Church, which had a significant membership on Wall Street.
In September of 2008, I put on that list of mine, “credit default swaps, mortgagebacked derivatives,” and things like that, because that was what I was spending
my pastoral ministry dealing with. Of course, it would be ridiculous for a seminary to teach that, but the point is this: it’s not until you get out there and start
practicing things that you realize what you don’t know that you need to know.
That is what continuing education was designed to do. Fifty years ago, it was
pioneered as a way of doing short-term courses on particular skills or practices
that weren’t part of the standard M. Div. curriculum, but helped you update your
skills. Or they helped you develop new skills that you needed once you were out
there; hence, the classic sort of three-day continuing education seminar on how
to preach through Lent, or how to deal with a lectionary cycle that’s coming up,
or how to run a stewardship campaign more effectively, or how to talk about
evangelism and church growth. All those things are great and are important.
All of those things still need to be done, but they, in and of themselves, are not
adequate to the practice of ministry, nor to learning how to do ministry.
They are arrows in the quiver that you pull out at different times. But ministry
is that whole quiver and knowing which arrows to pull out at which point.
So in terms of this model — this continuing education model — we often hear
pastors who are five to ten years out into the ministry say that there’s nothing left
for them in continuing education. Now, that’s probably not true, and it’s always
dangerous when you say “I have nothing left to learn,” but it may be that there’s
nothing left that can be taught to them in that sort of format. And there may be
some real truth behind that — it could be that they’re not getting the benefits
out of continuing education programs that they need. I had one pastor tell me
not long ago, “I don’t need another seminar on church finances.” Now, the truth
is that he did, but he had never internalized what he had been taught. He hadn’t
actually learned it. He hadn’t learned how to make that connection between the
classroom and the actual practice of ministry, and that was a real issue. As a
result, he hadn’t been able to actualize his learning.
Pastors in the first five years of ministry often talk about skills development being
very helpful because they start realizing all those things that they didn’t know.
Maybe they didn’t have a mentor who taught them not to have their brides and
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grooms pass out on them at marriages and things of that nature. But they’re hungry for a more holistic approach. In fact, what we hear increasingly more from
young pastors isn’t, “I need this course or that skill or this particular emphasis.”
Instead, they talk much more in terms of identity formation; they talk much more
in terms of general leadership development. Questions arise like, “How do I lead
a congregation? I haven’t been taught this. I know how to read the Book of Order.
I passed the Polity exam. But how do I really use that as a resource for ministry
that empowers the mission of the Church rather than gets in its way? How do I
lead a congregation in a changing demographic area to recognize that as an opportunity and take the risk of embracing it, rather than circling the wagons?”
None of those things can be taught, but they can be learned, and that’s what I
think coaching accomplishes. What we in continuing education have tended to
do is teach not what people need to learn the most, because what they need to
learn the most can’t be taught; it has to be practiced, it has to be reflected upon,
and they have to do the learning. So they don’t need a teacher. They need somebody to empower their own learning, and that is what coaching does. Coaching
empowers the person to learn what needs to be learned when the person needs
to learn it.
Responding to the Resiliency Crisis
So what do pastors need to learn the most? In a word, I would say “resilience.”
And this is a great theme that we use at Auburn, but it’s not unique to us.
Pastoral ministry right now in the United States is facing a crisis of resilience.
There was a recent study by Duke Divinity School that found that, “Even taking
into account differences in age, income, employment status, insurance status,
and gender, the rates of disease for clergy were much higher for diagnoses of
diabetes, arthritis, asthma, and high blood pressure, and the rate of clergy
depression is roughly double that of everyone in the United States.” For a
community that’s concerned about the well-being of clergy and taking care of
them, and also concerned about long-term health benefits, like the Board of
Pensions is, this is a crucial issue. You can review the findings of that study online at
the Duke Divinity School Web site: http://divinity.duke.edu/initiatives-centers/
clergy-health-initiative/learning.
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
So presuming that the study is correct, or at least close, the practice of ministry
is literally sickening, incapacitating, and killing people in the United States!
That’s not good. Now, why would that be? In seriousness, this is important
because with studies you always want to ask what the other variables are. And
part of what’s interesting about the study is it factors out a lot of variables in
terms of age and insurance status and other possible contributors. Is it possible
that naturally depressive people just get into pastoral ministry more often? They
have a wide open field. Sure it’s conceivable, but I don’t think that’s the case.
To help answer the question of what’s driving those research findings, let’s think
about what pastors are. It’s become something of a cliché that pastors have an
almost impossible range of duties. And I think it was probably always true on
some level. Consider the old joke about the pastor and the railway town in the
19th century. He would go out and watch the 12:02 train go by every day and
jump up and down excitedly about it, and people thought he was crazy. They
finally went up to him and said, “Why do you do that?” And he said, “Because
it’s the only thing in this town that moves without me pushing it.”
There is a real-life dimension to this. Think about all the real job descriptions
that pastors have. There’s another great thing that used to circulate among
seminary students when we were looking for jobs, and it said, “Church wants a
pastor who’s 40 years old, with 30 years of experience, who’s married with four
kids and who takes care of his or her family, yet is always available for pastoral
counseling and is at every committee meeting, but empowers the lay people
to do their own ministry.” In other words, a whole list of mutually exclusive
expectations. But even aside from that tongue-in-cheek reference, even in a
functional situation, pastors fulfill myriad functions: they are teachers, social
workers, therapists, program executives, fundraisers, mediators, building
managers, community organizers, and all of those things wrapped up into one
package. So that’s clearly part of the explanation behind the alarming depression
rate. Trying to be all of these things will wear you down.
But more to that point, there’s something that is particular to our age that is
separate from that ridiculous range of responsibilities and high performance
expectations. This phenomenon is that among pastors themselves and among the
congregations, you have limited authority, you often have dwindling resources,
and you have profound personal and professional isolation.
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Put it all together and you have a “perfect storm” that threatens the destruction of
all but the heartiest people.
There are a lot of different quantitative studies out there in terms of burnout,
what it means, and how it impacts the Church. It’s a helpful sort of image — this
notion of burning out. There are those who flame out through misconduct —
sexual or financial. Then there are those whose fires just sort of steadily dwindle
down to soft embers — those who, as they say in the military, “stand down in
place;” they’re just marking time, waiting for retirement, waiting for the Board
of Pensions, waiting for that release from service. And then there are those who
wrap up those coals like ancient hunters and leave — they take the fire with them
and leave pastoral ministry.
So there are a lot of different theories on how many of those burnt out individuals there are and where they are, but it’s clear that those are three significant
issues facing pastoral ministry.
So the antidote to burnout, we’re going to argue, is resilience. And if that’s
correct, the question then becomes, “Can resilience be learned?” Some people
would suggest that resilience is an innate characteristic; you either have it or you
don’t. And there’s some truth to that, in that there are some people who are
innately resilient to the point of being stubborn. Nothing fazes them. They are
able to stay there in the midst of the maelstrom and remain calm. They’re the
people who get calmer when things get crazier. There is some innateness to that.
But there are others who would say, “No, no, no, it’s not that you have to be born
that way, it’s an attitude. Be resilient.” “Be resilient” is a more polite way of
saying, “Don’t let ‘them’ grind you down.” Princeton Seminary has the Latin
version of that saying at the bottom of the stairwell of the largest dormitory on
campus. Every time you’re going down to class you see the words “illegitimi non
carborundum” to remind you, “don’t let ‘them’ grind you down.”
And there’s some validity to that, too, right? Resilience is an attitude.
But it perhaps oversimplifies things to leave it just at that. Resilience is not something you can just decide. It reminds me of when Paul said, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed.” Well, how do you ‘be transformed?’
You can’t just say, “Hi, I’m transformed.” Transformation is a process. It’s something that you step into, but it’s also something that God works within you. It’s
a process — it’s something that you have to grow into, something that you have
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to learn, and it changes you in the process. And so it’s not that it comes out of
you, it’s that it comes into you and finds fertile ground to plant, grow, blossom,
and prosper. That’s resilience, too.
So it’s not a fact of nature, and it’s not a matter of willpower fundamentally, that
resilience is something that can be learned. I want to talk about what it means
specifically. It’s not just the ability to endure.
We don’t need pastors who can simply endure,
“…resilience
right? That’s not good enough. It’s not good
is the ability to
enough for the Church. While that might guard
thrive right in the
against misconduct and departure-type burnout,
midst of stress,
it doesn’t guard against that standing down in
confusion,
place — the dwindling of the fire. You endure in
change, and
that you keep blowing on the coals perhaps, but
challenge.”
there’s not resilience there. Resilience has to be
more than mere endurance. It’s the ability to thrive.
In fact, resilience is the ability to thrive right in the midst of stress, confusion,
change, and challenge. And we believe that resilience can be learned, and that
coaching is one of the most powerful tools for enabling that learning.
A Coaching Model for Growth
Coaches develop resilience in pastors in two main ways. The first way is common
to nearly every form of coaching. Everybody’s aware that coaching is not inherently part of theological education. Coaching is something that developed outside of the church. It developed in executive circles — business circles — and was
brought in. It’s a methodology that has been brought in. Pretty much any form of
coaching has what we would call a horizontal plane: That means it’s something
that you can progress along horizontally, establishing goals, identifying action
strategies, and moving toward them; evaluating, coming back, and then doing it
again. There are all sorts of models for that, and if you go online, you can just
“google” “coaching models,” and it’ll spit out all sorts of great acronyms like
OSCAR, GROW, and many others.
The GROW model is, I think, the clearest way to illustrate this. It will give you
a sense, if you haven’t been coached, of what the process involves. GROW is an
acronym, G-R-O-W. Again, this is not the only coaching model — it’s simply
one way of understanding the actual process.
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So “G” stands for goal. You and your coach together agree on the goal of the
conversation; you agree on the topic of discussion; you agree on the objective
that you’re trying to reach in a particular coaching session; and then you agree
on the objectives that you are trying to reach in your ministry. You want to set a
long-term aim, but then you want to break that down into more reasonable
action steps to get you toward the goal. And that’s what the coach helps you do
in terms of thinking about these targets.
This is why coaches don’t have to be expert practitioners: That’s because the
coach’s job isn’t to tell you how to do it. A coach’s job is to help you figure out
how to do it, because you know yourself, you know your context, and you know
your ministry better than anybody else. So the coach guides you through asking
questions, providing challenges, and reflecting back. It’s a process — a learning
process — and not just conveying information through teaching.
In this manner, you move from goal to reality. With a coach’s help you say,
“Okay, here’s my goal, now, what’s in the way of that? What are the issues here?
What do I need to do to get to those goals in terms of my own development, in
terms of the system that I’m in?”
Reality Check
The next set of questions to ask includes the following: “Am I assuming the right
things? Do I actually have an accurate read on what can and can’t be done?”
These encompass the second letter in the GROW model, “R” for reality.
Weighing Options
The third letter, “O,” is for options. You identify what the options are for moving forward. Look at the full range of them, and then you identify the ones that
are the best for you in this particular time and in this particular situation. The
right option may be going out and getting those skills that you need that you
currently don’t have. There may be options for how you interact with particular
leaders in the congregation, in the presbytery, or with people in the community.
There could be options to weigh with programs you’re trying to initiate. There
is, obviously, quite a variety of things you could consider. A coach helps you
identify those options and may give you some suggestions on how to think about
them, but ultimately it’s you who is going to have to decide.
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
“W” in our GROW model actually gets defined in many different ways. The
commonly accepted view is that it stands for “wrap up,” but that doesn’t really
inspire me very much. It just sounds like you’re at the end of the session and
everybody says, anticlimactically, “Okay, wrap up, we’re done.” But coaching
really is a process, so I think a better interpretation for the letter “W” is the way
forward or perhaps the will. “Do you have the will to do this? How invested are
you in this process? And how are you going to drive it forward?”
All of this is just to give you a sense, if you haven’t been coached, of how you
drive along that horizontal plane. Coaches are like therapists or teachers or
anyone else. All of them have their own theory. All of them will sit down and
argue with one another about which is the best way to go forward. In fact, if you
want to be entertained, just put a couple of them in the room and ask, “What’s
the best coaching model?” and stand out of the way. I don’t want to get into that
particular debate here. I’m just trying to illustrate how the system works. That,
in essence, is the secular model.
But that’s not enough for pastors, and there are all sorts of different models for
coaching out there. There’s professional coaching, there’s life coaching, there’s
performance coaching, there’s a multitude of them. You’ll see the ads for them
popping up every time you go online — each touting a different kind of coaching direction. But I want to suggest that pastoral coaching really needs to have
the two dimensions, as I mentioned. It has to have a horizontal dimension and
it has to have a vertical dimension, which isn’t part of the secular method.
So if you’re talking to coaches or thinking about incorporating this, find out the
method or model the coaches use for this, and find out if they have a vertical
dimension. Do they have an understanding of how pastors have a deep sense of
call and purpose and an experience of God working in their life and ministry?
That last point is crucial. It’s not just crucial because it’s theologically correct, it’s
crucial because that is what gets pastors through those tough times in a lot of
ways.
The horizontal gets you the way forward. It’s the vertical dimension, though, that
actually roots you down and leads you to say, “No, I belong here. This is who I
am, and I’ve been called here. And I might wish right now that I hadn’t been, but
this is what I’m here to do.” Or, alternatively, you go through a discernment
process and say, “No, I’m not called to be here. Somebody else is called to be
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here, and I’m instead called to be somewhere else.” It’s an issue of identity
formation and discernment. The Presbyterian CREDO program is an excellent
example of how you take this vertical dimension seriously and have a holistic
vision for it and the church.
Good pastoral coaching has to attend to both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, and when you put them together, coaching allows for sustained engagement over time. That makes it praxis oriented. The practice that you are doing,
you reflect upon. And you evaluate and do it again, in yet a different way. It’s
sustained, it’s practice-oriented, and it’s individualized. There’s no template, no
cookie cutter, no Seven Best Habits-type books that provide the definitive,
“right” way to do it. You may learn all sorts of things from available resources,
but coaching actually helps you see which among them are helpful for you and
in your context, and allows you to go forward from there.
Putting It into Action
With that framework established, let’s look at some different models for how you
actually put this together. To begin, consider how we’ve developed this at
Auburn. We decided that we wanted to work on pastoral resilience, particularly
through coaching. It was stimulated by the aftermath of 9/11; responding to
9/11 ground everybody down who was a pastor in New York City. They felt a
great sense of purpose. They also were immeasurably depleted in many ways, and
so it exacerbated the many other stressors that we mentioned. And so Auburn,
in conjunction with Union Seminary and New York Theological Seminary,
created what was called the New York Sabbatical Institute, which was a way to
try to create some Sabbath space for rest and renewal for pastors who were in
danger of burning out. These people were either pastors in New York who had
been responding to 9/11 in some form or capacity, or they were elsewhere in the
country and fit the demographic groups that were deemed to be at risk. That
category included women, the young, and racial ethnic minorities. Those were
the people at highest risk for burnout in this process. This institute created a
whole system around them of spiritual practices and Bible studies on Sabbath
practice, and retreat experiences, and we put coaching into that.
The attendee evaluations indicated a very favorable overall response, but the
thing that was consistently ranked the highest was coaching. Virtually none of
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the participants had any experience with it before. People said things like, “This
hasn’t just renewed my ministry, it’s renewed my sense of what it means to be a
minister” … “It helps me connect my skills with my sense of call” … “I know
what I’m doing now, and I know why I’m doing it” … and, “I know I’m
supposed to be here.” That’s the kind of feedback that we got from coaching. So
we paid attention to that. And that’s how Auburn got into the coaching business.
As a result, we developed something called The Comprehensive Program.
This is where we get a group of about twenty to twenty-five people together for
a residential experience in the fall. They do workshops, plenaries, and keynotes
for basic issues focused on leadership development. Then they get matched up
with a coach. They have a couple of coaching sessions during the residential session, and then they have twice-a-month coaching sessions by telephone until
April. Then we bring them back together.
That is a model of what I would call “embedded coaching.” In other words,
coaching forms a key component of a larger program, and the New York
Sabbatical Institute was the same way. This has become a popular way of doing
such a program in the Church: You have larger group experiences, and then you
have the individual one-to-one coaching over a period of time.
As we developed that program, though, we saw a need for several other ways of
doing coaching. We didn’t reinvent the wheel in trying to develop them, mind
you — this material was all out there. We just realized there was a need for it in
the church context. So we adapted it, customizing the tools to work best for the
specialized needs of our audience. We’ll touch on some of those ways, briefly.
Individualized coaching is probably the framework most people are familiar
with. It’s where just one person says, “I want a coach … I want to work on
certain issues … I want to connect with them … and I’ll do a six-month
contract, with us meeting twice a month,” or whatever it might be. There’s not
a group process to that type of individualized arrangement — there are not large
didactic periods associated with it.
There is also what we would call a customized team coaching experience, where
instead of an individual, you might have the staff of a multi-staffed church all go
through a coaching experience together and be coached on how to work better
as a team. Or it could be a presbytery staff, or a group of people working on a
capital campaign together, receiving this type of team coaching.
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Those are three methods so far: embedded coaching, individualized coaching,
and group coaching. What we haven’t done at Auburn, which is performed out
there, is a different type of group coaching altogether. The way it works is that
there’s one coach in a small group, and this person facilitates the work of the
group. The coach is essentially coaching the different people in the group at the
same time, without a larger agenda. The biggest plus for that type of arrangement is that it cuts down on expenses. And the most challenging aspect of coaching is the expense. As a professionally provided service, this is how people make
their money, and it’s like therapy or consulting in the sense that you have to pay
for sessions and for people’s time. So group coaching has become a way in which
church bodies have tried to have their cake and eat it too. Sometimes it works
fine and sometimes it doesn’t — it really depends on the coach. So if it’s something that you’re considering for people in your presbytery as a clergy support
group, for example, it’s something that’s well worth exploring because of the way
in which it reduces costs. But, you want to make very sure that you have a coach
who’s not just a good individual coach, but who really can handle the group
dynamics of coaching multiple people at the same time, essentially in the same
session.
Purposes of Coaching + Opportunities
Let me begin to close by talking about two things. One is what I would call the
purposes of coaching; and the other is where I see some of the best opportunities
for coaching within the Church.
In terms of purposes of coaching, I think there are four basic areas that get teased
out on those horizontal and vertical axes at different times. One of them is just
a simple definition: A coach helps you identify what skills you need to develop
in your ministry — either acquiring them if you don’t have them, or making
them stronger.
Purpose #1. We’ll call this one “skills development.” It’s the simplest form of
coaching, and if you’re only doing that, it probably doesn’t take that long because
it’s really just a discernment process plus helping you then find those skills you
need. The coach functions as a networker of sorts. But the advantage of that is
you’re not left to figure out the applications for those skills on your own. By contrast, in classic continuing education, you go out and develop your skills on, let’s
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
say, stewardship: You go and take the three-day class, go home, and then it’s,
“Good luck with all that,” as you’re left on your own to sort out how exactly to
use that knowledge. With a coach, you go out and acquire the skills, you come
back, and you say: “This is what I learned. This makes sense to me. This is what
I’ve done, so these are the things I want to do to start using those skills.”
And you work out those insights and observations with a coach. Then you go
out and start using the skills as you discussed. You come back to the coach and
say, “This worked and this didn’t,” and your coach can help you redirect and
figure out how to use that experiential feedback to grow and improve. The developmental process is much stronger. In other words, it’s not that you can’t do
some of this on your own, it’s that a coach gets you from where you are to where
you want to be faster, more effectively, and more smoothly. And it’s particularly
true in skills development.
Purpose #2. The second purpose that I would highlight is what I call “current
performance.” Coaching is fundamentally about enhancing performance, but
this is larger than just skills development. This is helping you assess your basic
strengths and competencies for the role that you’ve been called to do. So what
have you been called to do? What is this place? What needs to happen here? How
are you equipped to do this well? How can you excel and set appropriate goals
and appropriate boundaries to go into that role and do the work? How can you
improve on that, and how can you move away from being in a reactive state,
which is where a lot of pastors are. That is, a state of just being controlled by
items that land in the inbox. And how do you move toward a really proactive and
responsive state, where you’re managing that flow and actually helping redirect
it? So it’s current performance for yourself, but it also may be current performance for your church. How do you lead change? How do you move these things
forward?
Purpose #3. The third purpose would be “future development,” which applies,
again, to the individual pastor as well as the church. So where do you want to go,
and what are the long-term goals?
Purpose #4. And that bleeds very quickly into the fourth and probably largest
purpose or issue, which is this concept of “identifying invocation.” This deals
with the questions of, “Who am I? What am I called to do as a minister?
How do I understand myself functioning as a minister? How do I live that out?
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What are the challenges to that? How do I balance my family with these responsibilities?”
So identifying the answers is not a step-by-step process. These things all get
brought in at different places through the coaching process.
We’ve covered the purposes, now let’s examine the final piece, which is represented by the opportunities for coaching. So if these purposes are the real opportunities for coaching, then where are the natural entry points? And for those who
are serving in presbyteries or are good colleagues in presbyteries as pastors or on
COM, the following are important things of which you want to make special
note.
Entry point #1. Clearly there’s a need for coaching in the first five years of
pastoral ministry. There is this fundamental issue of transitioning from seminary
to the pastorate, and we lose a lot of people in that process. Coaching helps make
that connection much tighter, and gives you a sense of support. Often people in
those positions are either in tough solo pastorates or they’re associate pastors on
staff. Both of those situations have their own unique dynamics, and a coach can
be very helpful with navigating them.
Entry point #2. The second obvious place is anytime someone is going through
a transition, trying to discern a new call. If you’re discerning a new call, it really
helps to have somebody who’s not invested in what your answer is to reflect upon
that with and to think about how to prepare for it.
Another transitional period: transitioning to retirement. (When is it time to
think about transitioning to retirement? How do I do that? How do I prepare
my congregation well for that? How do I figure out what role I’m going to play
post-retirement?)
When you’re doing a major change within the congregation, if you are doing the
first capital campaign in your church in forty years, you might want to have a
coach to help you think through the dynamics that are going to come up in the
church as a result of that. If you’re going through a mission review or a strategic
plan, thinking about adding a staff person, or thinking about cutting a staff
person, how do you deal with those issues? How do you think about the
emotional pieces, the systemic pieces? Who’s going to do that work that is still
expected to be done? How do you help the congregation let go of things?
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And then there are particular needs to hit the three basic pastoral areas where you
have people who are functioning as a solo pastor, those who are functioning as a
head of staff, and those who are functioning as an associate pastor. Each one of
those has particular challenges, particular opportunities, and particular expectations in terms of short- and long-term goals. A coach can be extremely helpful in
thinking those things through and considering what skills, performance, future
development, and identity of invocation needs must go into that.
Let the Conversation Continue
I’ll conclude by saying thank you for being a part of this conversation. This is
something that we really see as an ongoing conversation. As I noted at the beginning, this is a relatively new method in terms of its use to further the ministry of
the Church. We at Auburn are taking this very seriously, but we’ve only been in
the coaching business for a few years ourselves. We think what we’re doing has
proven very strong. We think it can get stronger and we’re interested in ways in
which we can be helpful to you, as well as be an advocate for coaching more
broadly in the Church. Likewise, if this is something that’s grabbed your imagination, then take some time to learn more about it. Seek out people who know
coaches or know coaching and find out more about it. If you’re serving on a
presbytery staff or on a COM and can be in a position to help people get access
to this resource at a time and in a place when they can use it effectively, then do
so. The more we can make this available as a resource for pastoral leadership
development, I think the better our Church is going to be, and the more options
we’ll have to be a vibrant community of faith in the future.
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Concluding Remarks and Next Steps
We hope this booklet offered some insight into the use of pastoral coaching
models to address some concerns with church leadership. Coaching is not
intended to be viewed as a panacea for solving the problems that a pastor
experiences in his or her call. But a coaching model can be an important tool to
help our pastors thrive amidst the stress, conflict, and challenges so often present
in ministry.
The Report on Clergy Recruitment and Retention, the first book in the Building
Church Leadership series, identified a number of factors that contribute to clergy
retention problems. The most significant of these factors are stress, conflict, and
burnout. Each of these factors is associated with inadequate skills; together they
signal a need for attention and support.
Stress may be caused by many factors. However, stress in the context of the
church is often experienced as a result of inadequate skills in managing expectations of the congregation and also in the expectations of pastors entering a new
call. Among the chief causes of conflict that pastors experience are inadequate
training in practical matters of church life, differences in leadership styles, worship
styles, and management issues. Finally, according to the report, burnout can be
attributed, in part, to lack of skills or knowledge, and inadequate ongoing
support networks for pastors.
Concerns about these matters of stress, conflict, and burnout among our church
leaders are not new; in fact, they are likely to be increasing as the denomination
wrestles with declining membership, declining revenues, and controversial issues
within the church. It is therefore increasingly important that we are not only
aware of these problems, but that we are actively engaged in implementing
supportive models that can still be effective.
CPMs and COMs may find coaching models particularly helpful to consider
when working with candidates and pastors in their first call. Governing bodies
and senior pastors may see the value of employing coaching to help develop
resilience in their ministries, particularly in these challenging times.
Coaching is not appropriate in every situation, nor is it the only avenue that is
worth exploring. Depending on need, there are many proven, supportive
programs, including clergy colleague groups, mentor relationships, and special
Building Church Leadership - Using Coaching Models
programs offered by the General Assembly Mission Council and the Board of
Pensions that are directed at relieving stress, increasing resilience, and moving
pastors forward in their ministry.
We urge you to consider the ideas presented in this and in the other booklets in
our series and we encourage you to continue the conversation on building
church leadership.
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The Reverend J.C. Austin, director, The Center for Church Life at
Auburn Theological Seminary
J.C. Austin became the director of The Center for Church Life at
Auburn Theological Seminary in May 2009. Previously, he served for
ten years as associate pastor for Evangelism and Stewardship at Madison
Avenue Presbyterian Church (MAPC) in New York City. J.C. grew up
in Atlanta and is a 1993 graduate of the University of the South in
Sewanee, Tennessee, with a bachelor of arts in English (cum laude).
In 1998, he earned a master of divinity from Princeton Theological
Seminary and received its Graduate Study Fellowship for the Parish
Pulpit Ministry at commencement. That fellowship enabled him to
spend a year in South Africa studying the public roles of the churches
in the apartheid struggle and the reconciliation process. J.C. has
maintained his ties with South Africa and is currently a Ph.D. candidate
at the University of Cape Town in the field of Christian Ethics and
Public Life.
2000 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103-3298
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© 2011 The Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
PUB-507 4/11