Pastoral Coaching: The #1 Thing We Can’t Not Do

My husband and I were pastoral coaches before we even knew it was a thing.

It started with dinner. Whenever missionaries visited our church, we’d invite them over for dinner so we could hear about their lives. We wanted to know about the good things and the hard things they experienced. And we wanted to pray with them.

Then came the international visits. We’d use our vacation time to visit workers in their host countries. My husband would tag a trip onto one of his international business trips with his corporate job.

One missionary we met was a young woman serving on a Frontiers team in the Middle East. We invited her to our home when she was visiting the U.S. “If you ever want to come visit me in the Middle East, I would love that,” she said at the end of her visit.

A few months later, we visited her. We met the people she talked about in her newsletters. She hadn’t been in the country long, but she could understand people and they could understand her. She translated for us in conversations with her Muslim friends, and we were so impressed by how much she knew.

We didn’t know we could make that much of a difference in a worker’s life.

She couldn’t see how far along she was in her language. But we kept encouraging her throughout the entire visit, saying, “You’re doing a really great job with the language.”

“Your visit breathed life into me,” she wrote us after we returned home. We were dumbfounded; we didn’t know we could make that much of a difference in a worker’s life. But just going there and being interested in what she was doing—that meant more to her than we realized.

When we started looking at a career change a few years ago, we told a friend about how much we loved spending time with missionaries—listening to them and caring for them.

“That’s called field worker care,” he said.

“That’s a thing?” we asked. “It’s a profession?” He assured us it was. We’d no idea.

Immediately, we started looking for jobs helping field workers and found a Frontiers job listing for a pastoral coach. When my husband and I read it, we both thought it was the most amazing opportunity we’d ever seen.

But becoming Frontiers pastoral coaches meant switching from a corporate salary and raising our own support. It also involved uprooting our family from one part of the country and moving to Arizona.

Keeping our safe, familiar lives would hurt more than going and doing this pastoral coaching thing for workers.

“You’re sacrificing so much to do this,” our friends said. Some people tried to convince us not to go.

But we felt so strongly, so excited about how God was leading us.

“We can’t not do this,” we said. Keeping our safe, familiar lives would hurt more than going and doing this pastoral coaching thing for workers. Our conviction didn’t make leaving our church, friends, home, and a high-paying salary any less painful. But God’s leading felt clear and right.

My husband and I have a role to play in helping reach the nations. God may not have called us to live overseas. But this process has made us much more aware of what overseas workers experience as they go to the places least reached by the Gospel. We feel privileged that by doing our part, we’re helping them thrive as effective witnesses for Jesus Christ.