March 29, 2024
Church Planting, Leadership, Adult Education, Coaching

How Can Christian Coaching Enhance My Church Planting Ministry?

Everybody seems to be talking about coaching lately, but what is it and more importantly how useful could it be in my ministry? Keith Webb of Creative Results Management defines coaching as, “An ongoing intentional conversation that empowers a person or group to fully live out God’s calling.” The focus of Christian coaching is on the coachee and helping them hear God’s voice in their lives and follow through in obedience. My own coaching journey began when I was coached by a friend and found the process quite helpful in my own life. The ongoing and intentional nature of our coaching relationship was just what I needed to gain clarity and make progress in a key area of my life. As a result, the next time the SEND U edition of the three-day Coaching Workshop was offered, I was one of the first in line to sign up. I too… Read the whole post
Training, Coaching

A Coaching Culture in a Mission Organization?

At the beginning of April Bertha and I, together with Ted Szymczak, traveled to Spain and facilitated another Coaching Workshop. The workshop was full, with 24 participants from six different mission agencies, serving in six different countries.   A large percentage of the coaching workshop is devoted to giving the participants opportunities to practice coaching one another.   And they did so with enthusiasm!   With 12 separate coaching conversations happening at the same time in one room, the noise level regularly reached 90 decibels in our training room.  The aim of the workshop is naturally on practicing skills, not on completing conversations, and so I regularly had to interrupt our eager coaches and ask them to move on to the next learning activity.   At times, I found it very difficult to regain their attention when it was time to switch to another exercise.   At one point, we even tried using a drum… Read the whole post
Church Planting, Coaching

The Importance of Coaching Church Planters

In SEND U, we have been promoting coaching as a means of personal development, and as a help for those in mission leadership.    But coaching is also used extensively in supporting church planters, and this was the context that first sparked my interest in coaching back in 2007. The following article comes from the December 2011 edition of Dr. Bob Vajko’s Help in Planting and Multiplying Churches newsletter.   Dr. Vajko is a church planting consultant with TEAM International, and he and his wife Noreen served as church planters in France for 29 years and then 7 years in Australia.… Read the whole post
Coaching

Training Missionaries to Coach One Another

Coaching in SEND is getting more attention these days.  From December 3-5, Dr. David Wood and I facilitated a coaching workshop for 24 participants in Farmington. The head of our mobilization department had initially requested the training in coaching for all the mobilizers in the US Office since he believes that coaching is one of the key activities for our mobilizers. A number of other members from the US Office and the International Office joined as well, filling our IO training room to capacity.… Read the whole post
Coaching

Coaching is Not Just for Leaders

Although I continue to hear about SEND missionaries who want to be trained in coaching, I have noticed that there has been a recent downturn in the number of total coaching hours that are being logged by our SEND coaches.   This was a surprise as we had been seeing coaching hours continually increasing each quarter for the past couple of years.   It was also a disappointment, as SEND would like to develop what we call a “coaching culture” within our mission, believing that coaching is one of the most effective ways to empower our missionaries to keep growing and developing their ministry skills.    As our SEND U Leadership Team has talked about this recent downturn, we have wondered whether maybe coaching is being perceived within SEND as something designed primarily for mission leaders. It is true that SEND U has been emphasizing the benefits of coaching for mission team leaders,… Read the whole post
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