(…though not yet certified)
When our congregation signed a covenant with Pastor Stacey for her leadership during this transitional period, we celebrated her receipt of a grant through the Lilly Foundation and the efforts of the Southern New England Conference to be trained as a clergy coach. Just before Thanksgiving she completed the first level of her training and next week will finish her Mentor Coaching and will have achieved the status of Associate Coach. She will be moving on to the second level of the training one day/week in the Spring. Pastor Stacey is choosing to seek certification once she has completed the Profession Level Training. By the end of this she will be licensed to coach individuals, organizations, business executives, and more. In order to arrive at the point of certification, Pastor Stacey is required to provide 500 coaching hours in the settings she serves. This allows Pastor Stacey to offer a unique service to the individual members of our congregation and to our congregation as a whole.
Coaching is applicable in all aspects of our lives—grief; vocational changes; moving through conflict with family or friends or community; making significant changes in our lives; finding the strength within to move through difficult moments; seeking to build more joy; finding self-confidence; navigating health concerns—the key is that the coachee is in a position of being ready to engage in the work of an architect, of designing what the future is going to look like. Coaching is not Pastoral Care in the traditional sense. Pastoral Care through the ages is similar to that of a “talk” therapist, taking the participant deeper into the why of the concerns they are presenting with a goal of assisting in the seeing of God and Christ to carry the participant through the hardship/healing/exploration. Coaching recognizes in each individual that there is already incredible resilience, skill, and vision for the present day and future life they will lead. Coaching seeks to tap into the knowledge and already present experience of the coachee to grow themselves. A coach approach to Pastoral Care is one that embraces the participant as whole and fully capable of achieving their dreams and greatest potential. It is a process of listening and asking questions to help the participant or coachee identify for themselves the change they desire, their next steps towards achieving their goals, key self-learnings and takeaways, and to make connections to healing work they’ve already done in their lives.
Our congregation is invited to reach out to Pastor Stacey and explore aspects of our lives that we might address through coaching with her. The number of sessions will vary from person to person and Pastor Stacey will work with you to understand what it might look like to be in a coaching relationship with her. She invites us, any time we approach her for pastoral care, to name what we need most from our time with her. She will be ready to pivot from traditional Pastoral Care into Coaching in any conversation with us. She will also be ready to ask us if we might be open to a coach approach in our conversations when she perceives it might be useful to us. As well, there may be times, when in meetings with her that she announces she is “donning her coach hat” and removing the one she wears as an Interim Minister. We may even find, as she lives into this new aspect of her vocational calling, that her sermons shift in delivery method.