By Ed Thompson

If I had one piece of advice to give to pastoral leaders, it would be “Get a coach.” In the same way, if I had one piece of advice to give to church members, it would be “Encourage your pastor to get a coach.” A second piece of advice would be “Pay for their coaching with funds over and above their continuing education allowance.” This will be the best investment you can make in your pastor and for your church.

Coaching is not a panacea, a cure-all, a magic bullet. However, I think it can help a church find its way in the face of an uncertain future. A coach will not teach you what you need to do. This is not like a football or basketball coach who knows more than you do and who can help you develop better skills and better tactics so that you will be a better preacher, a better pastor, and a better administrator.

A coach, in this sense, is more like a stagecoach in that they will help to get you where you want to go. You set the direction. You decide what you want to work on. The coach will help you clarify your thinking, explore available options, push you so that you can articulate and then decide what’s most important, and challenge you to act or at least take steps to obtain the additional information you might need before you start.

Pastors know a lot of things. However, they don’t know everything. Seminary education, the classes offered as part of commissioned pastor training, and many continuing education events are valuable, perhaps invaluable; however, they don’t teach you everything. For those who graduated several decades ago as well as for those who graduated even several years ago, the world has changed. And whether we like it or not, the world keeps changing. We’re not able to keep up, and we’re not going to be able to learn our way out of the challenges that we’re facing.

That doesn’t mean that we give up or that we don’t try. It certainly doesn’t mean that we go back to what worked 50 years ago, 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago. I suppose we could try to do that, but we would be wasting our time.­­

A coach doesn’t give you the answers. A coach asks questions to help you understand your options as well as your assets and to help you better understand your context. I think that’s what we need moving forward.

As a pastor, you may want to find a mentor. That can be helpful. We can certainly learn from people who have more experience than we do, who have been through the “wars,” who have done it all before. (Well, except that they haven’t done it “all” before. There may be a few people still alive who lived through the “Spanish flu” pandemic at the end of World War I, but none of them would have been active pastors at the time.)

As a pastor, you may want to find a spiritual director. They can help you see and better understand how God is at work in your life. The more I think about it, the more that seems like a good idea. Many of us stay so busy that we forget about or miss experiencing as well as enjoying where God is at work in our lives. So, maybe you should find a spiritual director as well as a coach.

I would start with a coach, however, to help me figure things out, to help me focus my efforts. I would also explore training to be a coach, so I can ask better questions to help the members of the church and the people that I work with discover what they want, what they need, and what they can do to be more faithful as well as more effective. Pastors don’t have to do it all. Pastors don’t have to know it all. Pastors do need to “serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.” A coach can help you do that and help you explore how to do what you want to do and what you feel called to do.

I am grateful for my coach and for all the coaching training that I have had. I am trying to remember to ask better questions. For whatever reason, that doesn’t happen as automatically as I wish it would. But for all of us, I think coaching will be the best thing we can do to move past this pandemic and into a new and very different world.