How Coaching Helps Missionaries Thrive on the Field
Missionaries can face discouragement, culture shock, isolation, leadership challenges, and difficult transitions during intercultural service. Coaching Mission International executive director Jon Taylor explains how Christ-centered coaching helps missionaries identify goals, develop solutions, and move forward in life and ministry.
- Coaching uses questions to help clients uncover their own goals, motivations, options, and action steps.
- Coaching Mission International has coached more than 4,100 missionaries in 110 countries over the past two decades.
- CMI is expanding its work by training coaches who can strengthen and encourage missionaries and national leaders around the world.
By James Thompson
A few years into my missionary career, I was struggling.
I was in Thailand serving at a ministry I believed in and working with people I loved. Even so, discouragement and disillusionment found a way in during a tough season and set up camp. Older missionaries have since told me that this is a common experience for intercultural workers. Cultural differences, language challenges, and homesickness all loom larger once the honeymoon phase of life overseas has passed.
While I may have been in good company, I still felt very much alone. I reached out to my sending organization for help, and our Director of Missionary Care and Development connected me with a coaching ministry focused on helping missionaries. I began meeting regularly with Jon Taylor, the executive director of Coaching Mission International (CMI). These sessions helped me recognize the roots of the problems I was facing, develop a plan to get back on track, and put that plan into action.
Today, I’m still on the mission field serving in the same location. Emotionally and spiritually, however, I’m in a much different—and better—place. CMI has coached more than 4,100 missionaries in 110 countries over the past two decades, and they continue to focus on “impact[ing] nations by developing leaders on the frontlines of mission work so they … thrive and flourish in life and ministry.”
This month, CMI is celebrating their 20th anniversary. To mark this milestone, Jon Taylor agreed to let me ask him some questions for a change. Jon’s home church is First Christian Church of Phoenix, Arizona, where he is an elder and served as lead pastor before becoming CMI’s executive director. He continues to coach clients and train new coaches in addition to his leadership responsibilities.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What Is Coaching?
First things first: What is coaching? How is it different from other forms of support like counseling or mentoring?
Coaching is a question-based conversation where the coach helps the client move forward to accomplish whatever the client wants to accomplish. The coach doesn’t tell, or advise, or give direction, but simply asks questions to draw out from the client what is already in them. They know the details of their situation best, so we ask questions that uncover the goal, motivation, options, and action steps that the client feels will best help them accomplish their goal.
One of the ways I describe coaching is to explain the differences between counseling, mentoring, and coaching. These are simplistic definitions, but it helps bring clarity. In counseling, we look to the past in order to bring healing to the hurt. In mentoring, I share with you what God has given me—my wisdom and experience in an area where you want to learn and grow. In coaching, I want to draw out what I believe God has placed in you. You know yourself and your situation best, so I want to help you discover solutions that you are motivated to act on.
How Coaching Mission International Began
How did Coaching Mission International get started?
In 2004, a missions organization in South Asia invited some Christian coaches to work with six of their global workers through professional coaching and coach training. These strategic leaders saw a great impact on their lives and ministry and caught a vision for how it could impact others in their organization. That organization then challenged our founder, Tina Stoltzfus Horst, to make coaching available to all 2,000 of their South Asia field staff. As a result of that challenge, Coaching Mission International was born in the fall of 2006. After a major coaching project which started in the fall of 2007, we saw great results that this model was working—coaching was supporting and developing global workers!
How did you become aware of coaching and get connected to CMI?
I became aware of coaching through some reading I had done, and specifically through Gary Collins’ book, Christian Coaching. I then heard a speaker mention coaching in his presentation and asked him about it. He referred me to Tony Stoltzfus, who has written many books on Christian coaching, and Tony told me about this new organization that was going to offer their first training course. I applied and was accepted to Coaching Mission International’s first training cohort in 2009. I stayed connected to CMI through retreats and further training opportunities, and eventually became a coach and trainer with them as well.
Why Missionaries Need Coaching
Why is CMI’s focus specifically on coaching missionaries?
After that initial request for coaching and training in South Asia, our founder began to look for cross-culturally trained coaches but found a real lack. She had seen the incredible need for Christ-centered, cross-culturally trained coaches but could only find a few, so that’s why the organization was started—to focus on providing that for missionaries. There is a real need for them to have people who come alongside them to help them navigate all of the challenges they face on the field.
Are there any specific challenges that seem to come up a lot when coaching missionaries?
Yes—there are very common challenges that missionaries face, but they show up in their lives in various ways. We coach on everything from making the decision to go on the field, to support raising, to culture shock, to team issues, to leadership issues, to feeling alone, to needing clarity on calling, to transitions—you name it, and we’ve coached a missionary on it!
Is coaching just for people going through a crisis?
No, coaching can be applied to almost any situation as long as the person being coached has a desire to grow or change themselves or their situation. A coach only needs to be the expert on the coaching process, not whatever the person’s situation or context is. The coaching topics vary widely and are not limited to any category or particular situation. I have coached on topics ranging from someone wanting to organize their desk and office to considering leaving an established career to go into ministry.
The Outcomes of a Coaching Relationship
What is the ideal outcome of a coaching/client relationship?
The ideal outcome is that a client is able to accomplish the goal that is before them. When they do that, they can thrive and fulfill the calling God has given them. Some of the ways we phrase the benefits and outcomes are:
- Gain clarity, confirmation of calling, and confidence
- Realize breakthroughs, transformation and forward movement
- Develop solutions, greater capacity, and strategies
- See a different perspective, new ideas and solutions
- Discover purpose, meaning, passions, values, resources, new ways of thinking and doing
- Process issues, challenges, experiences, and transitions
- Experience presence – someone who really listens, who comes alongside, walks with, and partners with the worker.
Developing Effective Coaches
Have some of CMI’s coaching clients gone on to become coaches themselves? What qualities make for a good coach?
Yes, some of the clients we have coached go on to become coaches themselves. After they have experienced the benefits of coaching, they want to serve and help others with those same skills. However, most who come to us for training want to add the coaching skillset to the work they are already doing rather than become a full-time coach.
The qualities of a good coach are those who can learn to listen well, turn off the conversation in their own head, and ask good questions. Most people have to unlearn all of the telling, fixing, and advising skills they’ve developed over the years. When I’m telling, fixing, or advising, I’m trying to solve the problem for you. Before coaching, when I was on staff at a local church, people would come to me with a problem or challenge and I would give them my easy 3-step plan to fix it. They would never do those things because they were my ideas and I never took the time to find out why this was important to them or why they wanted to change. When I learned the coaching skills and applied them to these situations, everything changed for me—and for them! The burden was lifted from me having to “fix them” to helping them come up with their own ideas and then steps they were motivated to take to change their situation. It was better for everyone!
Looking Ahead to CMI’s Next 20 Years
What are you looking forward to in CMI’s next 20 years?
We’re looking forward to God continuing to open doors in different parts of the world where we can train more and more people to come alongside missionaries and national leaders to strengthen, encourage and equip them for greater Kingdom impact. We have a hub in the Asia-Pacific region now with coaches and trainers who serve there, and we just launched training on the continent of Africa, so that will be our next hub. Part of our vision is to also have a hub in Latin America and any other region the Lord calls us to!
CMI held a “20th Anniversary Online Celebration” on Facebook Live on September 15th. The recording of that event can be viewed here.
Author: James Thompson
James Thompson is an international campus minister and a freelance journalist.
