When the Rev. Dr. Dawn Alitz was a new parish pastor, she remembers meeting with a young mom to ask her to consider becoming a Sunday School teacher. They sat down over coffee, but before Dawn could even make her pitch, the mom stopped her.
“I know what you’re going to ask,” the mom said, “but my heart just isn’t in teaching Sunday School.”
Rather than trying to persuade her, Dawn decided to take a coaching approach. “Tell me more about what is on your heart,” she said. To her surprise, the mom shared a deep passion for supporting people going through medical crises—helping them navigate paperwork and being a companion during tough diagnoses and treatments.
Instead of shoehorning her into a role she didn’t want, Dawn encouraged her to pursue her calling. The mom eventually went back to school to become a medical social worker, coming alongside patients and families in an incredibly meaningful way.
This experience revealed to Dawn the power of coaching to unlock people’s gifts and authentically empower the priesthood of all believers. As she shared on our recent Pivot Podcast episode, coaching flips the traditional “clergy-led, lay-supported” model of church on its head.
Coaching as a Faithful Model of Church Leadership
Dawn, Associate Certified Coach, International Coaching Federation (or ICF ACC), defines coaching as “the practices of listening, helping people name their core challenges, discover solutions to those challenges, and implement specific practices and action steps to move forward.”
It’s a shift from the expert-led model that many pastors were trained in. In a coaching model, Dawn continues, “[Everyone] comes to the table as experts.” This “invites a shift to a ‘lay-led, clergy-supported’ approach. Rather than having all the answers as the leader, you use coaching to ask powerful questions that help congregants discover and live into their own callings.”
Listening, Interpreting, and Discerning
A key skill for pastors to develop, then, is listening—to God, to their congregation, and to the needs of the wider community. Then, based on what they hear, they can begin to cast a vision.
Most pastors have had the experience of people enthusiastically sharing their personal ideas for “vision” in a way that feels disparate and chaotic. Coaching can help the pastor get curious, ask questions, and separate the whispers of God’s Spirit from mere human preferences. It allows for a truer, more unified sense of call to crystallize over time.
“Leaders can use coaching skills to interpret, harvest, and articulate the shared vision that emerges from the community through deep listening and faithful dialogue,” Dawn says.
Coaching For the Pastor
Of course, shifting toward a coaching approach to leadership doesn’t happen overnight. It takes practice, training, and a willingness to de-center oneself as the leader who needs to have all the answers. That’s why Dawn also emphasizes how beneficial coaching can be specifically for pastors themselves.
“We’re in so much trouble because we only get partially trained in being a pastor,” Alitz says. “There’s a part of us that wants to please and adapt ourselves as leaders to the expectations that we take upon ourselves. The problem is not all congregations are healthy, and not all know how they should be led.”
Coaching can help pastors begin to make these shifts, first by seeing it first-hand in a coaching relationship, and then by modeling for their congregations a new way forward.
“Coaching allows you to differentiate your role while collaborating with the congregation,” she says. “You don’t have to be completely shaped by (potentially unhealthy) congregational expectations. There’s space for healthy co-development of the community’s path forward.”
In a rapidly changing ministry landscape, where few leaders would say the old models are working as well as they used to, coaching offers a path toward empowering the priesthood of all believers as never before. When we get out of the way, ask good questions, and listen closely, we may be amazed by the gifts, callings, and visions that can be unleashed in our congregations.
