You check your email this morning, and you have been asked to coach the most unique individual in the world—she is smart, powerful, attractive, and compassionate, but also disjointed, confused, difficult, and shy. She has the most potential of any client you’ve ever coached, but she is incredibly complex. When you see forward movement in one area, you see backward movement in another—or maybe more.

How would you coach someone like that?

Now consider this: that “client” sounds a lot like a church.

We know you can coach a person. You can coach a team. You can coach a group. But can you coach a church? Or is that too mechanical, too corporate, too reductionistic for something that is meant to be spiritual and alive?

What if, instead of breaking the church down into parts—the pastor, the staff, the leadership team—we tried to see it as a whole? Not just as individuals to be developed, but as a body to be formed.

Maybe that’s not just a thought experiment. Maybe it’s actually how Scripture invites us to think.

A Body That Can Be Built

The Apostle Paul describes the church as one.

“You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly… Everything you are and think and do is permeated with Oneness.” – Ephesians 4:4–6 (The Message)

The church is unified, but it is not uniform. It is one body, but it is made up of many parts—each with a role to play in its growth and maturity.

“He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christ’s followers… until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other… fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.” – Ephesians 4:11–13 (The Message)

That language is striking. Moving rhythmically. Efficient and graceful. Fully alive.

That doesn’t sound static. That sounds like something that can be developed.

Coaching, at its best, is not about control—it’s about helping something function as it was designed. And if the church is a body designed to grow into maturity, then coaching may not be foreign to it at all. It may be a way of cooperating with how God already intends it to work.

So if we were to coach a church, where would we start?

Who Are We Missing?

If you play the card game Solitaire, you can be assured that the card you are missing is there somewhere. You can’t win at Solitaire if you don’t have a full deck.

The same is true for the church.

It changes our mindset about evangelism if, instead of looking for anybody, we’re looking for somebody. That doesn’t mean we ignore anybody. It means we begin to ask a more specific question: Who are we missing?

Paul makes it clear that the church requires a diversity of gifts to reach maturity. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers—each contributes something essential. When one is missing, the body compensates. And usually, it doesn’t compensate well.

This is where tools like CliftonStrengths or the Working Genius model can be helpful—not as labels, but as lenses.

In the Working Genius model, every person brings two areas of natural contribution out of six. To function well as a team, you need coverage across all six. If even one is missing, the system strains.

When I look at churches through that lens, I tend to analyze two things.

First, how many responsive geniuses do we have versus disruptive geniuses? Ideally, there’s a balance. But most churches lean heavily toward the responsive side. They love to help. They don’t love to change.

Second, how many people see the church from a big-picture perspective versus a ground-level perspective? Again, balance is ideal. But most churches are ground-level. They work hard to keep things moving, but they don’t always know where they are moving to.

When you begin to see those patterns, something shifts. You’re no longer vaguely hoping for growth—you’re gaining a description of what’s needed.

And it’s very difficult to find what is lost if you have no idea what you’re looking for.

What if the people your church needs are not absent, but simply hidden? Like a card in Solitaire, they are already in the deck. They just haven’t been revealed, recognized, or released.

Where Is the Soreness?

Paul continues the metaphor:

“From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” – Ephesians 4:16 (NIV)

It’s fascinating that Paul uses such a medically precise word—ligament. These are the connective tissues that hold everything together. Without them, the body falls apart.

But ligaments can also get sore.

And the same is true in the church.

Every church has “pain points”—places where something isn’t quite right. It might show up as conflict, fatigue, stalled ministries, or relational tension. These are not just inconveniences. They are signals.

Pain is information.

But many pastors are understandably hesitant to engage those areas. People tend to get defensive when you touch something sore. There is a real risk of becoming collateral damage. And often, leaders assume the soreness must be their fault.

I remember thinking I was about to punch an optometrist in the face when I was 16. He was coming at my eye with a miniature suction cup to remove a stuck contact lens. It hurt, and my instinct was to resist—even though he was trying to help.

That’s what it can feel like to address pain in a church.

But what if the soreness is not a sign of failure? What if it’s simply revealing where attention is needed?

A coaching mindset is uniquely suited for these moments because it begins with curiosity, not correction.

What’s rubbing?
What’s strained?
What’s not working as it should?

Instead of avoiding the pain, coaching helps us move toward it—with care, with patience, and with a desire to understand before we act.

What Is Trying to Grow?

There’s one more question worth asking.

Not just who are we missing, and not just where does it hurt—but what is trying to grow?

Paul’s vision is not just the absence of dysfunction, but the presence of maturity:

“…until we all reach unity… and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” – Ephesians 4:13 (NIV)

Growth is already trying to happen in the body.

You can often see it in small ways—new leaders stepping forward, energy building around a ministry, recurring needs that won’t go away. These are not interruptions. They are indicators.

A coach approach doesn’t just fix what’s broken. It also fuels what’s alive.

Because sometimes the most important thing happening in your church isn’t where things are weak—it’s where something new is emerging.

A Better Question

So, can you coach a church?

Maybe that’s not the best question.

If the church is a body—designed by God, gifted with diversity, held together in love, and meant to grow into maturity—then perhaps the better question is:

How could we not?

Coaching doesn’t replace the work of the Spirit. It simply helps us pay attention—to who is missing, to where it hurts, and to what is growing.

And those questions might be exactly what your church needs right now.

Which of the three questions would be most helpful to ask your church at the moment?