NADEI : What is Christian Coaching?

What is Coaching?
Coaching is a biblical approach to empowering others.

Coaching is not about telling others what to do, but helping them discover for themselves what God is calling them to do. It is the process of coming alongside a person or team to help them discover God’s agenda for their life and ministry, and then cooperating with the Holy Spirit to see that agenda become a reality.

What is the Goal of Christian Coaching?
It is to help someone succeed.

What is success? It is finding out what God wants you to do and then doing it. Each person needs to discover for themselves what it is that God wants them to do. Coaches aid in that process, but they don’t direct it. Coaching is not about telling others what to do; it’s about helping them discover it for themselves.

Coaching is in wide use in corporate America because of the successes it facilitates. In recent years, churches are beginning to experience the value of coaching for the same reason. Coaches help people develop their God-given potential so that they grow individually and make a valuable contribution to the advancement of the Kingdom of God. Excellent coaches endeavor to behave in a way that is consistent, inspiring and flexible by modeling skills and values and discipling others.

	"Coaching is fundamental to everything that we do in ministry, from discipling new believers to developing new leaders. Dynamic churches and ministries have coaching woven into their genetic code. The basic skills are so easy that people can get started right where they are and continue to progress."
	Robert E. Logan, Church Planter and Founder of CoachNet International

What is the Biblical Basis for Coaching?
Coaches come alongside to help – like Barnabas (Acts 4:36).

By encouraging and challenging others, Barnabas empowered them for ministry. He may not have been in a starring role, but without him many others would not have been able to accomplish the great things for God that they did. Without Barnabas, Paul would not have accomplished all he did, and the New Testament would’ve been several books shorter than it is.

There are other examples of coaches in the Bible, too, but Jesus is our very best example. We just need to look at how Jesus related to people to see how a coach functions. As Christians, Jesus commanded us to follow His example.

How many times did He answer a question with a question, knowing that the person He was talking with knew the answer to the question he’d just asked of Jesus, and let the person figure out the answer to his own question himself?

How many times did Jesus challenge people to do what they knew was the right thing to do, rather than telling them what they should do?

	“One of the reasons that coaching is showing such phenomenal returns on investment is the simple dynamic of having another person believing in you and moving alongside you with that belief.”
	Jesus Life Coach, by Laurie Beth Jones, p 264

In Ecclesiastes 4:9, 10, & 12 (The New Living Translation) we are told:

“Two people can accomplish more than twice as much as one; they get a better return for their labor. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But people who are alone when they fall are in real trouble. . . A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated,but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.”

God is waiting to be invited into every coaching relationship, because He works through those relationships. The coach acts as a conduit to help the PBC (person being coached) define exactly what God is leading him/her to accomplish, and through the coach, God is able to help the PBC fulfill his/her God-given purpose.

What makes coaching powerful?
To have a partner whose only interest is your success

Coaching is a biblical approach to empowering others. People are at least twice as fruitful when in coaching relationships. Good coaching empowers people to discern God’s will and take the appropriate next steps for their personal and ministry development.
Some of the benefits of coaching are:

Providing encouragement for the (Christian) journey
Cultivating wisdom and strategic insights
Discovering breakthrough opportunities
Maintaining focus on the truly important
Transforming vision into reality

Some of the potential applications are:

Discipleship of new Christians
Personal and ministry development of emerging leaders
Pastoral and leader development
Follow-up after evangelistic efforts or training seminars
Cultivating church health (e.g. Natural Church Development)

A coach is flexible enough to be helpful in a variety of ways, depending on the needs of the people involved. The following are several different ways that coaching can be structured:

Personal (one-to-one)
Triads (possibly “peer” coaches coaching each other)
Clusters (or networks, or ministry teams)

Coaching is central to how we resource people for biblical mission. Along the journey, you’re helping people committed to some aspect of biblical mission. Coaching is a way to walk alongside them on their path and help them stay on track.

10 Reasons Why You Need to Add a Coach to Your Team(s)

To include someone on your team who has an objective perspective
To help you clarify God’s vision
To help you clarify what you can’t, won’t, or don’t see
To have a compassionate, secure, and confidential outlet to vent problems and frustrations
To conduct reality checks as the vision progresses
To walk with you/your team through conflict when it arises
To help you implement the master plan in proper sequence
To ask the questions that no one else is asking
To help you balance the demands and stress of leadership while maintaining a healthy family life
To have a partner whose only interest is your success

Why develop coaches?
Coaching is a paradigm that is useful in every area of ministry within our churches, whether it’s one-to-one coaching between a conference ministerial director and the pastor, the pastor and elder, or the elder and the ministry leader, or an “established” church member and a “baby” Christian. Dynamic churches and ministries have coaching woven into their genetic code. Imagine the strength of the church that has coaches available at every level of the church structure, so everyone at every level is getting the help, connection, and resourcing, support and encouragement that they need.

How do you develop the heart of a coach?

“Upgrading your listening skills won’t make you into a coach. Neither will learning how to ask incisive questions,or how to hold someone accountable, or any of the other coaching skills. To truly tap into the power of coaching,you have to go beyond skills alone to grasp what makes those techniques important and why you are employing them. Great coaching starts with heart. . .

“How do you cultivate a coach’s heart for people? The place in our own experience that most exemplifies the heart of a coach is our relationship with God. Powerful coaching comes from studying, internalizing, and imitating the Father’s heart toward us.

“Jesus sees us with an unconditional love as well as an unconditional believe in our destiny (what we can become through our relationship with Him). The freedom we gain from that unconditional relationship empowers us to change from the inside out, because we want to, instead of trying to adjust how we look on the outside so we’ll be accepted.the relationship comes first, then the change.

“The gift of relationship is the linchpin of God’s strategy for transforming people. Therefore, if we’re working at change, it would make a lot of sense for us to imitate God’s approach. Coaching does exactly that. The key to the heart of coaching is learning to see people as God sees them.”

Leadership Coaching by Tony Stoltzfus, pp. 47, 48, & 51

What does coaching accomplish?
Quality coaching is about much more than individual skills – it’s about using those skills together to accomplish a process. The coaching process taught by NADEI is the CoachNet process, and can be summed up in the 5 Rs:

Relate: establish coaching relationship and agenda
Reflect: discover and explore key issues
Refocus: determine priorities and action steps
Resource: provide support and encouragement
Review: evaluate, celebrate, and revise plans

By taking someone through this coaching process, a coach can help that person accomplish his or her goals. Skills are needed to achieve that process, but must be used with this bigger picture in mind to achieve the desired results.