Coaching and Community: The Journey Pastoral Coaching Approach
THE COMMUNITY BLUEPRINT
Journey is a coaching community focused on helping young ministers build strong for a lifetime of healthy and effective ministry.
Our focus is not ministry growth but minister growth – as we build the minister, we build the ministry.
Our means are not techniques but relationships – God walks with us and develops us through relationships: our relationships with Him and others.
The basis and model of our ministry is the life and ministry of Jesus. With a world of millions to reach, Jesus focused on developing just 12 individuals and doing so through the tools of mentorship and community building. Both of these tools would continue to be the primary tools of the Twelve after the ascension of Jesus. First, the Twelve continued in peer-to-peer mentorship and community building. Then they invested themselves in leaders like Barnabas, who invested in Paul (among others), who invested in Timothy (among others), who invested in others. From the time of Jesus until this very day, the church has grown primarily through the proclamation of the Gospel by a faith community invested in mentoring and relationships.
At Journey Pastoral Coaching, we call this our “Cross-Coaching Approach.”
The Cross-Coaching Approach is represented by the physical cross of Jesus: a vertical post, a horizontal beam, and a connector.
The vertical post represents walking with a more experienced minister, someone farther down the road in experience and, hopefully, richer in wisdom. With a pastoral call and years of experience, these mentors help us remain grounded and call us to go deep.
The horizontal beam represents walking with peers, ministers of a similar age, and stage in ministry. These peers help us stretch out farther in faith than we might otherwise dare to go.
But like the post and beam of the cross of Jesus, Journey’s “cross” requires a connector or link that holds it together. That link is the Word of God. The Word of God makes pastoral coaching Christian in its worldview and pastoral in its method.
THE COMMUNITY COVENANT
To take full advantage of Journey’s Cross-Coaching, members keep five commitments:
The Coaching Call
Every member has an appointed call time with the Journey Coach. The member calls the Journey office with an agenda (general topic, current issue, or questions) for processing. Ministry life requires flexibility, and so, from time to time, members cannot keep their appointment. Rather than lose the time, they notify the Journey Coach beforehand. Call weeks are full, with little free time for the coach, so in most cases, another member can make a one-time trade of call times that week – Journey members have always been ready and willing to serve each other.
In addition to the regular coaching call, Journey members can schedule a special call with the Journey Coach during our limited-but-always-available special call days.
Emmaus Calls
Every month (9 months per year), each member is assigned a call with another member. The call has a prescribed format focused on challenging and encouraging one another. Calls always conclude with members praying for each other and then continuing to pray especially for that member throughout the month.
To help members “catch up” on the latest in each one’s ministry and life, Journey members complete an Emmaus Road Map (EMR) that we make accessible to other members. This simple tool “introduces” members to each other: where they are serving, education, family situation, and various “fun facts” that help members connect. Rather than spend valuable Emmaus Call time catching up on this information, they can instead find each other’s EMR before the call, so, on the phone, they dive right into encouraging each other.
Members also take the initiative in making calls on their own, reaching out to each other to offer and receive help. The value in wisdom, encouragement, and deepening friendships that these calls have meant to Journey members cannot be overstated.
Insight Question
Every month (9 months per year), each Journey member completes our monthly “Insight Question.” These questions focus on information in which the Journey Coach wants members to “coach” him. Past IQs have looked at subjects like these:
Greatest internal stressors;
Greatest external stressors;
Current church issues;
Challenges facing young ministers;
Counsel they would give those just entering the ministry;
Cross-generational relationships;
Pastoral staff relations;
Stewardship;
Questions ministers don’t ask out loud;
Greatest obstacles to minister health;
Doctrinal challenges facing the church.
The monthly Insight Question is the primary, but not only, “payment” Journey members make to Journey Coach. I’ll share more about this and our “no-cost” coaching approach at the end.
Resource posting
Journey has an incredible resource library, one not only available exclusively to all our members but built by all our members. Every quarter, each member submits the title or name or one resource for our digital shelves. Our library sections include apps, books, blogs, podcasts, conferences, websites, videos and creative ideas. It’s a goldmine of tools our members have found that help ministers build strong for a lifetime of healthy and effective ministry.
A new feature for 2023 is our monthly Resource Review, in which two or more Journey members get together online to produce a conversational video review of a resource they have all shared and found beneficial. This review is then made available on our private platform and the shelves of our digital resource library.
Journey’s Private Platform
Members commit to being active on Journey’s private online community platform. Using theme-based channels and direct messaging, Journey members commit to investing in each other by posting and responding to other members’ posts. Channels include ones you might expect, such as announcements, the monthly Insight Question, Emmaus Calls, and the calendar. Other less evident channels also populate our platform. Here are several examples:
Prayer Requests Channel;
Praise Reports Channel;
The Barnabas Channel – daily encouraging quotes from Christian leaders;
The Wisdom of the Ages Channel – daily challenges from church leaders of the past;
Health Care Options Channel;
General Channel – General information and conversations of all kinds;
Fun and Connections Channel – the photos and fun that help us smile and connect;
Retreat Channel – information on each year’s retreats.
In these five ways, Journey members commit to being a “mutual investment ministry” and actually investing. The returns on their mutual care and carrying will only be made clear in eternity.
ADDITIONAL COMMUNITY LIFE
The life of Journey’s coaching community is further strengthened by the following:
Special calls with the Journey Coach. Members are not limited by our set call calendar, but during special needs or stress, they can arrange special calls with the Journey Coach.
Special Emmaus Calls Journey members make to each other to give and receive: to give encouragement and insight or to ask for it. Always bathed in prayers.
Journey’s annual retreats. Every January, Journey members fly and drive in from all over the country for one of our two retreat weeks in Orlando. Many members describe these small-group retreats as the highlight of their year in Christ. These weeks do not feature a special speaker. Instead, every attendee – members and spouses – comes prepared to go deep in our directed group conversations. Emphasis is given to prayer, time around the table, and, yes, plenty of laughter (and tears). We strive to make these retreats as cost-free as possible for our attendees. If you would like to help scholarship an attendee’s travel, meals, or resources or help with general retreat expenses, please email us at journeypastoralcoaching@gmail.com.
Regional get-togethers. Journey members organize meet-ups for lunch, dinner, or evenings all across the country throughout the year. These are times when relationships go deep and deeper, not only for members but their spouses and even their children sometimes. #community
“NO COST” COACHING
A thought for you. See if you don’t agree. The “richest” people in Jesus that you and I know – those who super-abound in grace, mercy, wisdom, love, joy, peace, etc. – are the biggest givers of these same Jesus virtues. Those who give the most, then receive the most, and so, have the most then to give.
This principle is foundational in Journey Pastoral Coaching. Let me share how this is so.
Possibly the most unique feature of Journey Pastoral Coaching is our “no-cost” membership: members don’t pay for coaching with cash or credit card but by investing themselves in the coaching community as described above.
This feature is so unique that those who hear of it sometimes object, calling it ministry “welfare,” an approach that creates a sense of entitlement. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As you saw above, Journey members “pay” in substantive ways for the coaching they receive. They keep commitments that pay huge dividends in their lives and the lives of their fellow members.
As Journey members keep their commitments, they act on the active Jesus’ promise found in Luke 6.38:
“Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you in return.”
Be it mercy and forgiveness, as in this text, or even comfort and encouragement, God has promised that the giver will be rewarded with a community – a “they” – of givers in our life. Stated another way, one who invests in others shall find them investing back into their life, using the same measure.
And II Corinthians 9.6:
“Now I say this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows generously will also reap generously. Each one must do just as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace overflow to you, so that, always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed; . . .”
Not only will a community of “giver-investors” pour back into the one who gives to them as we saw above, but God Himself will give grace in abundance to the cheerful and generous sower, seeing to it that they reap – receives from God – with that same sufficiency and even abundance.
This “mutual investment ministry” approach is what I like to call the “secret sauce” at Journey. Our members are a “company” of investors, each one investing in everyone. Together, we are learning that God’s “good measure” promises and “sufficiency and abundance” provisions are true. Together, investing in one another, we are striving to follow in the footsteps – and heartbeats – of Jesus in life and ministry as we seek to grow in His character and then, in the flow of this character, minister to each other, the church, and the world.
This is Journey Pastoral Coaching. To the glory of the One who has not only redeemed us from our sins but who daily gives us all spiritual blessing in Christ – directly by His own hand and indirectly through His servants.
NOTE: We are able to provide “no cost” coaching through the generous support of our ministry partners. We invite you to read the brief word below and click on the button to become a monthly or one-time Journey partner. Thank you.
Saddled with large student debt, just beginning to set up homes and start families, and serving in low paying first and second positions, Millennials are those who most desire but can least afford to pay for pastoral coaching.
We are able to do so thanks to the faithful and generous support of individuals and churches like yours who want to see young leaders not only enter the ministry, but remain in the ministry.
Now, more than ever, we need your help.
If you or your church would like to help Millennial ministers across the US and overseas build strong for a lifetime in ministry, please click here to support Journey monthly or with your one-time gift. Thank you.
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