COACHING BASICS: HOW to start a Coaching Ministry in your Church

Hi All,

Coaching is a powerful tool to assist in the task of making disciples in your congregation.


The final installment in the "Coaching Basics" series relates to HOW?  We've already covered the WHY you need a coaching ministry and the WHAT coaching is.  Plus, last week I gave you that inside look at one recent coaching session which I completed.  So, now...HOW do you get a robust coaching ministry started in your church?  I'm going to be sharing with you much of what we did at our church, and hopefully you will find some of it useful for yourself.

There is a great Christian coaching ministry out there called "Coachnet.org".  It is headed up by Bob Logan, who is the author of "Coaching 101".  This book is a great primer on how to do non-directive coaching.  Non-directive coaching is very effective, because the three rules of non-directive coaching are: "1. The client does the work.  2. The client does the work.  3. The client does the work."  The book focuses on the five stages of coaching, as Logan uses them, of:  Relate, Reflect, Refocus, Resource, and Review.  And the Coachnet. org website is filled with great and awesome tools to help you coach well.

So, the first thing I would say is connect with Coachnet.org, and check out the site.
Second, sign up for some training, which Logan provides.
Third, read the book "Coaching 101".

Those are all preliminary steps, and it is best to do it with a team.  We had a very strong start to coaching at our church, as we sent three staff people to get the training they needed.  The training consisted of several days in Hollywood (the unpopular side of town), followed by another couple days of training several months later in Chicago.  Because there were three of us, we were able to glean so much more from the training than just one.  That gave us a great foundation for going back to our church and getting it started.

The Coachnet.org actually has a coaching excellence performance test which you must pass in order to be credentialed by them and able to use their system and mentor others as coaches.  It consists of a series of on-line questions which review your behavior and how you handle the various aspects of coaching.  It is a surprisingly accurate survey, and we use it with all of our coaches in training before we certify them as Coaches or Coach Mentors.

In our system, we define a Coach Mentor as someone who has completed the 9-month training process and has passed the on-line assessment.  They are then in a position to train other coaches in our church.  A Coach is simply someone who has completed the process but does not desire to train other coaches.  They simply want to coach people in our church who are looking for help in various areas.

We are looking to train Coaches for four areas in our church:  Life Coach, Small Group Coach, Ministry Coach, and Money Coach.  The last one is a specialty area which also requires some training from Crown Ministries.  Currently we are doing the best at Small Group and Money Coaches.  The reason for that is because we have a more clearly articulated need, and a concrete process of training for each of them.

Once your coaches are trained, they must each take on two other people to be coached, the coachees.  Two is just about the perfect number because if you are going to do it right, it is a bit time-consuming, and any more than that gets to be unmanageable.  One of our staff initially started with three and it almost overwhelmed him.  Two is also just about right because sometimes, one of the coachees doesn't work out, and that way you still have one good coachee whom you are working with.

So, if you have read the book, gotten the training, and begun coaching then you are on your way.  Now, this part is very important:  Don't try to do too much at once.  Quality is better than quantity.  Logan has noted that many, many churches start with a whole crew of people, because they may be a large church and need a lot of coaches.  The problem with this is that you cannot maintain the quality.  It takes a lot of infrastructure and one-on-one meetings to maintain a high-level coaching ministry.  The number one mistake which churches make is to try to do too much.  As one of my homiletics professors said in seminary, "Start low, go slow, rise higher, catch fire".  What applies to preaching can apply to coaching as well!

We have been coaching for a while as a church now, and what we have discovered is that the hardest part is finding people who are willing to coach, and put in the time commitment.  A lot of people try to squeeze coaching in with everything else they are doing in the church.  That will not work.  You must find people who want to focus on being coached, and coaching two others.  If you start slow the first year, and each of them find quality people to coach the next year, and so on, in a while you will have a very strong coaching ministry.

We have also discovered that we very quickly needed some infrastructure and regular coaching meetings to keep it going.  So we are in the process now of training two men to be our coaching directors.  And we have just started to gather all of our coaches together for breakfast meetings to stay in touch with them.  Coaching is a decentralized ministry, but you need some structure to help hold it together.

So, that is where we are at.  This is certainly not the only way to do it, but it is how we are doing it, so I thought I would share that with you all.  Coaching is a powerful tool to assist in the task of making disciples in your congregation.

That's all for now,
Yours for the Kingdom of Heaven,
and the Church of Jesus Christ,

Dr. Bill

COACHING BASICS: An Inside Look at a Coaching Session

HI ALL,


We are continuing our third installment in the series on "Coaching Basics".  I'm just sharing with you some of the things which God has taught me related to coaching.  I've learned a lot, and found coaching to be tremendously useful in helping people to take control of their lives and experience success.  


Two weeks ago we looked at the WHY:  "How to know if your church needs a coaching ministry".  Last week, we examined the WHAT:  "What Coaching Is and Is Not".  


Now, I would like to give you an inside look at exactly what one coaching session looks like. I've asked permission of one of my coachees, if I could make anonymous reference to a recent coaching session which we have had.  So he's given me permission to summarize parts of our discussion.


The person being coached is actually in the business world.  As we began the coaching relationship recently, I asked him to fill out the Coaching Agreement form which summarized what he was hoping to achieve through coaching.  This is the Coaching Agreement.  


When he returned it, here's how he answered the two key questions about Focus and Objectives.  His Coaching Focus was related to his career.  He has been working in the same career now since college, and with the same company for 13 years; he is in his mid-forties, and he is thinking about the future.  So he wants to develop a plan to move ahead his career.


His answer to the question on Specific Objectives, included the following:  to refine his personal mission; to demonstrate value to his company, including his immediate boss, as well as the CEO;  to use his time better and more effectively; to be able to present himself as a more decisive person in both his informal conversations as well as his presentations.  

So he had four objectives.  Fortunately, he had already developed a personal mission statement at some point in his life.  But he really had not looked at it seriously for several years.  During our first session then, I asked some clarification questions about his mission.  In trying to understand it better, my questions helped him to examine his mission statement more closely, and see what made sense and what did not.  We discovered in the course of the session, that some of his statements were actually a bit redundant.  So one of the decisions he made was to re-write his personal mission statement between sessions.  By the time we met the second time, he had reduced his personal mission statement from eight separate statements down to four.  These four had a lot of clarity, and real distinctiveness from each other.  


His second objective was to demonstrate value to his company.  This has a lot of elements to it, many of which are not really measurable.  There are elements of general credibility, authority, and experience which are a bit hard to identify, but which absolutely do make a difference in perceived value.  So he began giving thought to these issues.  We realized that part of the perceived value is going to be achieved if he can make forward progress on his fourth objective, which is to communicate with more decisiveness.  So those two are linked to each other.  He also identified that some of the ways in which his job responsibilities are delineated tend to down-play his importance to the company.  Parts of this are related to the specific tasks he is asked to do, some of which have value, and some which do not;  the other part was simply related to his job title.   He realized that other individuals at a similar level in his company have one type of title, while he has a different title.  So besides redefining what he DOES, he wants to have a conversation with his boss in which he also redefines what he is CALLED.


His third objective is related to more effective time use.  During our session, he decided to keep a time log, and track those items which he feels are truly useful, and those which are actually helpful to the company and to him as an employee who wants to be valued.


For his fourth objective, he wants to be able to speak more decisively and boldly.  Because this is more of a top of mind issue, in which he simply needs to aware of when he sounds indecisive, we asked for some help from his wife.  Her job was to let him know, just in the course of day-to-day conversations at home, when she perceived that he was having a hard time making a decision, or sounding indecisive.  By the time we met for our second monthly session, he said that he was already much more aware of his conversational habits.


So, that is just a very brief summary of our one hour coaching session.  We meet via the phone every month, and keep working on his objectives and goals.  So far, he has a more concise mission statement, and he has been developing action steps which are consistent with his long-term career objectives.  


And the key to understand here, is that 90% of the ideas and actions developed during the course of our coaching session, were conceived by the coachee.  I, as the coach, simply helped him to think clearly, plan objectively, and be accountable for his own stated goals and intentions.  He owns his own plans, and executes them, because they are his plans.  That is the power of coaching.


That's all for this week.  Next week we will finish this series on Coaching Basics, by addressing the matter of HOW; how you can begin a coaching ministry in your church.


For Christ and His Kingdom,


Dr. Bill Miller