We just renovated the Coaching page on our website! Our goal is to make the process, the purpose, and the pricing more clear. If you can check it out and let us know if there’s anything more we can do to answer your questions up front, that would be a lovely gift to us today!
One of the most important parts of my role as Communications Lead for Ascending Leaders is understanding not only what it is, exactly, that we do as an organization, but also why it’s needed. If I don’t understand the difference we make, then any communication of what we do or how we do it would be an empty vessel, words without meaning. I was drawn to Ascending Leaders because of my own passion for seeing people grow in Christ. In my ongoing quest to assimilate over a decade of work helping churches get more effective at doing just that, I’ve spent the past month researching our relationship with a few specific churches, each chosen to provide an example of churches at different—dare I say—stages of coaching. Here I’ll share the information I found most illuminating, before stating my personal understanding of the “why”.
Madison Church in Grand Rapids, MI, is crafting testimonies around the stages of faith to help people articulate their faith and understand the stages. Would you like to try your hand at it, and see what you might discover about yourself? Visit our blog for a guide on how to do just that.
A video of Mike Johnson’s “Stages of Faith” testimony is available to watch on our website or YouTube channel. Keep an eye out for more testimony videos from Ascending Leaders staff, as we continue to practice what we preach!
Several key words and phrases came up repeatedly the research process: alignment, defining, assessment, measurable, outcomes, focus, perspective. The consistent theme I found was that the framework Ascending Leaders uses to help churches clarify their discipleship process takes “stuff” (and usually good but confusing stuff) and turns it into a well-defined pathway. Vital to this transformation is an outside perspective from a coach with an adaptive spirit, a common vocabulary among leadership, perseverance, a sensitivity to what God is already doing in the church, and a clearly defined and measurable desired outcome. The “why” a church might call us in to help turns out to be surprisingly simple: Do their people know where to grow? If they don’t, then they are STUCK. Coaching for clarity leads to momentum—and that means movement, or becoming unstuck.
Seven years ago, Rachel and Josh Young received a phone call during their honeymoon that would lead them from Hollywood to Houston. As newlyweds and recent graduates of Fuller Seminary, they had been praying for an opportunity to minister in the same church. So when the call turned out to be a job offer for Josh from Clear Lake Presbyterian in Houston, and there was a position open for Rachel as well, it felt like a blessing from God. They both still serve at Clear Lake, though their roles have changed over the years and Rachel has shifted to a part-time position with a focus on adult discipleship in order to spend time with their just-turned-one son, Ezekiel.
Rachel first crossed paths with Ascending Leaders three years ago, during a time of significant burn-out. At work, she was lost in the middle of a visioning process at church that was getting bigger and bigger, to the point where the process became entirely overwhelming. It seemed like they were maintaining a lot of “stuff”, without knowing way. In short, she felt stuck—personally and in leadership. Read More ““You’re Not Alone, Rachel””
