Consulting is group oriented and Coaching is individual oriented. Consulting relationships are with churches or church sub-groups (leadership groups, task specific teams, informal opinion leaders, marginalized but motivated members, etc.).  Coaching is one on one. In all our connections, we seek to develop eternal friendships. 

Church Consulting

Consulting projects can involve workshops, assessment tools, or problem solving on particular challenges. However, in ALL our work we seek to deepen and expand the capacities of the church, address church ownership, and foster Christian maturity that is biblically grounded, spiritually healthy, and eternally meaningful.  

Previous projects have successfully managed various kinds of conflicts, minister transition work between ministers, connecting ministers looking for churches and churches looking for ministers, congregational assessment, leadership upgrades, solutions to communication difficulties, seeking and surfacing God's vision for churches, elder selection processes, termination negotiations when a minister is fired, and "go or grow" projects that involve interventions of care for struggling care-givers. 

Personal Coaching

Coaching relationships are focused on spiritual growth toward healthy maturity for individuals. The coaching, however, may focus family, work, or church contexts even though the emphasis is on the individual becoming more effective within those contexts. Some coaching relationships assist business people or athletic coaches. We provide training for coaches and wrestlers to use wrestling as a vehicle for life goals. Click here to learn more about our annual wrestling clinic featuring world class competitors. 

Previous coaching relationships have positively altered marital and / or family dynamics, and have included focuses such as coaching teachers (including university faculty), problem solving and generating creative options, placement for new jobs or ministry roles, coaching preparation for interviews, leaders exiting leadership, new leaders entering leadership, chairpersons of task specific teams, care giving for grief work and coaching for caregivers on difficult funerals, growth covenants for missionaries and other Christian servants, coaching individuals entering new ministries to help them lay a foundations for deepened ministry, advising opinion leaders who do not serve in formal roles of leadership, and assisting terminated ministers.  

Outcomes

A minister moved from a frustrating and escalating relationship with other church leaders to a congregation of members and leaders that adore him, and express that appreciation in multiple tangible ways. His family, ministry, and possibilities for the future went from stressed to a shared ministry of gratitude.  

A mid-sized but rapidly growing church struggled to understand leadership in a new way. They develop a more biblical approach to church leadership that seeks creative ways to ensure Christ as the only Head of the church, improves the communication of the entire congregation, empowers wide spread involvement, and becomes  a model for how "professional" ministry staffs and the "lay leadership" of elders can effectively partner. 

Many ministers effectively recovered from being fired to lead meaningful and productive ministries, transferred from poor ministry matches to more compatible ministry matches, changed ministry roles to more effective areas of service, successfully navigated double-bind ministry dilemmas, and escaped no-win situations. 

An elder admitted an affair, returned to a repaired marriage, and gave up ministry to receive a new ministry in a different way. He took responsibility, was healed by God's loving grace, and restored relations with his family and friends. 

A congregation in a large city wanted to reach out to people around them but was stuck in conflict over the firing of the minister. The church was split 50/50 down the middle with half the church demanding the preacher leave and half the church demanding the elders resign. After receiving a 90% chance of not surviving the division they made courageous choices of integrity and blessed each other as they went different directions. The minister still serves in ministry and all but one of the elders received over 90% affirmation from the congregation. 
 
The marriage of two involved church members restored one day before the divorce was legally final. All hope was gone but God gave life to this dead marriage filled with destructive conflict and turned it into a new beginning with a bright future. They developed the skill of growing through conflict rather than protecting themselves from each other when they most deeply wanted togetherness. 

A transient church of 40 to 60% turnover needed vision beyond their demographic. In a tug of war among smart and gifted people, they gave up control of the outcome and received an outcome providing direction and shared vision beyond themselves. They engaged each other to the point of a shared sense of God's presence by the Spirit leading to a sense of God's vision. They reached beyond consensus to what my friend, Jim Rough, calls "co-senses."

A minister was burned out and ready to quit. He was as evangelistic as the church that hired him hoped he would be. However, evangelism resulted in more work and more discipleship than what he could manage. A power shift occurred in the church as he became more influential than the current leadership. The current leadership's feeling of loosing control expressed itself in concern about the minister. The more he tried to do well the more he threatened those feeling a loss of power.  His efforts to help were making things worse. The more he tried the better he did and the more tension he experienced. He gained an understanding of how his phase of life in the early 30's and an elder's phase of life in later years with inoperable cancer were clashing with disastrous results for the church.  He developed skills that made the difference and kept him in ministry where he could fully serve. 

A more progressive minister and a more conservative elder locked in conflict at a church that was the most progressive church in town but in a very conservative part of the country. The congregation was not progressive according to standards across the country but was progressive in their own context. Elders were leaving the eldership because of weariness over the conflict as the eldership declined to one third of its previous size in a few weeks. At one point, the church had a number of former elders who refused to serve. Eight times the number of elders currently serving is the number of former elders unwilling to step back into service. They expanded their leadership to untapped mature people in the church to take responsibility for seeking solutions. They now have a new eldership of three times more elders than when they began addressing the challenges. 

A new church developed initial decision making processes that ensured they would rise above the petty issues that often hi-jack a church and reduce effective outreach to the community. Broad spread involvement, high morale, and genuine outreach to the people around them has produced a church that is steadily growing in both numbers and genuine discipleship.