We’re often asked by pastors and church boards why we think pastors need coaching. After all, they are the spiritual leaders of their congregations. We forget that pastors and their families have all the same struggles that their parishioners do, but typically they don't have a pastor who cares for them. They often are even wary of friendships from within their church. They care for others almost non-stop, but rarely stop to receive care. It is as David lamented in Psalm 142:4—many can say, "no one cares for my soul." 

Pastoral leadership demands a wide range of skills practiced in a complex system. Seminary does a good job of preparing ministers to preach, teach, and offer pastoral counseling, but it does little to prepare them for conflict resolution, leadership and management, and cultural or emotional intelligence. When ministers enter the practice of ministry, it turns out that these areas occupy the great majority of their time and are also the sphere of the greatest heartache and criticism against pastors. And self-care often never happens. Coaching is a powerful way to develop and practice these skills in real time with wise feedback and encouragement. 

Many don't realize it, but church ministry is more complex than running a business.

Management expert, the late Peter Drucker said that pastoral ministry is the most difficult and taxing role of which he was aware. 

Although an impressive body of research exists that establishes the benefits of coaching across multiple domains, the church has been slow to see its benefits. Also, as pastoral leaders, we tend to think we can get what we need out of a book. We preach that people can't grow without a loving, honest, committed community: submitted to one another under God's word and small enough that we can be known. Yet we often don't have it ourselves. We may even avoid it in shame and self-isolation. 

The reality is that we cannot get what we need to grow and thrive out of a book. We learned a key concept in our participation in the Pastors Summit findings, as reported in Resilient Ministry: What Pastors Told Us about Surviving and Thriving, (Burns, Chapman, Guthrie, 2013). Woven throughout that experience is the fact that learning and transformation happened in the midst of, and as a result of, intentional, facilitated engagement in community with another pastor or a cohort and their spouses. Pastors do need a place to hang out and be themselves: to drop the role of pastor, to be real, to laugh, and to be a fellow faith-struggler among those who understand their world. But we also need those stalwart friends to call us to walk on by faith in the practice of leadership.