Last week, Linda Stanley, Dave Travis and I hosted 60 leaders from churches that have been participants in either the Next Generation Leadership Community or the Multi-site Churches Leadership Community. The participants were Executive Pastors, the Small Groups Pastors and Worship/Arts Pastors. I hung out with the Small Groups Pastors.
As you can imagine the conversations were broad, relevant and in some cases a little heated - love that part! Over the next few days, I will be posting a series of comments derived from those conversations and will welcome your feedback.
Today's thoughts are about coaching and leadership development. Most of the churches present either had a coaching structure in place or wanted to have one that would effectively develop leaders for their small group ministries. There was one dissenter ... to go unnamed :-) ... who said that coaching was a waste of time. His perspective was that all the time spent in developing and managing the coaching structure was better spent launching new groups. After the air came back into the room, others began to ask about accountability, doctrinal purity, development and the other things that typically go with coaching. His response - when issues of lack of accountability or doctrinal challenges surface, we deal with them - quickly and with grace. With regard to development of leaders, he quizzed the rest of the group asking how they measured development and in particular, development that was a result of the coaching structures they had in place. There were some sheepish looks and admission of lack of measurement. And then a healthy discussion began that talked about if the traditional coaching model (modeled after middle management) went away, what might a new model look like that served the leaders, helped to accomplish the purpose, and didn't slow down the growth of the small group ministry.
What do you think? What should coaching look like for small group leaders?
I'll tell you what I think if you'll tell me who the disenter was? (Or at least what church he was from) :-)
Posted by: Geoff | July 03, 2007 at 09:41 PM