What Is Coaching?
Simply put, coaching guides another person to develop a plan. It helps people find out what God wants them to do and then do it! It answers questions such as:
- How do you define leadership?
- How is God challenging you?
- What major things are happening in your life?
- What do you value most?
- How would knowing your calling and having a plan to reach it change your life?
These are the kinds of questions that assist women in leadership who have a sense of Kingdom potential and goals but need help to discover next steps.
Coaching church leadership may be a new concept, but Jesus often used such techniques. With a thought-provoking and creative process, Jesus led disciples, responded to opponents’ negative inquiries, and used parables. Coaching provides decision-making skills. The old adage, “You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day or teach him to fish and feed him for a lifetime” is a good example of coaching.
Coaching and Women’s Ministry
Coaching is foundational for leadership development. Here are some practical benefits of Christian life coaching for women’s ministry leaders.
- Understand your life purpose. Produces a sense of significance, provides a foundation for making decisions, and offers direction for how to live a purposeful life.
- Align with core values. Increases life satisfaction and reduces stress and frustration as you do what is important instead of what is expected or what life thrusts upon you.
- Eliminate tolerations. Frees energy to pursue important goals in life, while increasing your joy on the journey.
- Identify and overcome internal obstacles. Gets you unstuck and moving forward and provides the freedom from nagging fears and self-doubt.
- Create life purpose and action plans. Creates real movement toward life purpose, with the sense that your life has direction and meaning.
- Clarity of God’s call. Inspires greater obedience to the Lord, intimacy in your relationship with Him, and kingdom impact. Success in God’s eyes is more about choosing to align our lives with His purpose
- God’s guiding hand in your life revealed. Discover that your Creator God has designed you, orchestrated life experiences, deposited innate passions, and has a specific calling and life mission for you to fulfill.
- Brings focus and centering. Helps women discover their primary purpose is not to do something for the world but to be Christ to the world through what they do. God’s desire for all His children is that we maximize our kingdom potential and become more like Christ.
Coaching for Real Success
As with any leadership development plan, leaders who coach must make difficult priority decisions to carve out adequate time to invest in others. Philip Yancey wrote, “The giants of the faith all had one thing in common: neither victory nor success, but passion.” Greatness in the kingdom of heaven isn’t about doing more than someone else; it’s about making the most of what you’ve been given. Who are the women God has placed around you who have yet to discover their potential for ultimate greatness in the kingdom of God? Do you have the passion and dedication to impact their lives?
This article, written by Becky Badry, is adapted from Transformed Lives: Taking Women’s Ministry to the Next Level, compiled by Chris Adams.
Becky Badry is Director of Women’s Resources and Missions Mobilization, Colorado Baptist Convention. A minister’s wife for over 30 years, she is the founder and director of Women in Leadership Coaching.