Rev. Dr. Peter Coutts on Self-Leadership in Ministry
Summary:
Rev. Dr. Peter Coutts brings decades of ministry, academic insight, and coaching experience to a deep and practical conversation about leadership in the church today. The episode explores the concept of “self-leadership”—the intentional practice of self-awareness, reflection, and personal growth—as a vital skill for clergy navigating the complexities of ministry. Drawing from personal stories and professional coaching practices, Peter examines how pastors can grow their leadership capacity in both character and skill. The conversation also addresses broader systemic challenges such as the legacy of Christendom, strategic stagnation, and what it means to steward the church for future generations. This is a thoughtful, hopeful, and grounded look at what leadership could look like in times of transition and uncertainty.
Quotables & Take Aways:
“here's kind of my elevator speech on that the church in North America, especially mainline Church, has been totally discombobulated by the collapse of Christendom, and congregations are looking back with a sense of grief and its losses. It's looking ahead with questions and anxieties and uncertainties about its future. And I think you could say churches, a lot of churches, feel like they're trapped in a no man's land now, and they're not quite sure what to do at all.” - Rev. Dr. Peter Coutts
“Like some person in the pew is concerned about X, so try to help them with that, and try this and that, I learned that what I needed to do was spend a lot more time with the people in the conflict and to really understand their stake in it, why this is so important to them, and for them to appreciate that I've got it, but also in that, for them to really believe that I have their best interests in heart, and I had the church's best interest in heart. And that I'm going to do my best for them, and doesn't always work out for them, but they said, but you know, I know Peter did his best, and I can live with the result. And that has proven to be gold in my pocket all the time as a practice, and I still do it.” - Rev. Dr. Peter Couttsl
“So, what a coach is, is a thought partner. A premise in coaching is we hold the client capable. Now you are able to puzzle this out for yourself. You're able to come up with your own solution, and my job as a coach is just through a series of questions, maybe put you in a place where you're looking at your problem from different angles and thinking maybe more deeply about it than it would be your nature. ” - Rev. Dr. Peter Coutts
“It is my view, generally, that we do not appreciate as clergy how crucially central leadership is in all aspects of our ministry you know?” - Rev. Dr. Peter Coutts
About Rev. Dr. Peter Coutts
Peter has been an ordained minister of The Presbyterian Church in Canada for 34 years. He has served four congregations and in one regional position: in Sidney BC (as a church planter), London ON and Calgary AB. In Calgary Peter was for 13 years the Lead Pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian--a congregation of 800 people. Over the years Peter has also held leadership roles regionally and nationally in his denomination, as well as acting as a consultant in about 50 critical incident or congregational change initiatives.
Peter's passion for organization development was ignited through his D.Min. studies at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, where he went on to be an adjunct professor teaching courses in understanding congregations and leading change in the doctoral program. Since graduation motivation psychology and its application to organizational change has been his ongoing academic pursuit. Peter was privileged to receive a research grant from the Louisville Institute provided to “academic practitioners” to “support the intellectual work of pastoral leaders who have the capacities for research, teaching, and writing that can reach broad audiences.” The grant allowed him to take a sabbatical in 2009 to begin working on Choosing Change.
Peter has been engaged across North America as a speaker and workshop leader. In addition Peter is a Certified Executive Coach of the International Coach Federation, holding an ACC accreditation.
Additional Resources:
Self-Leadership eLearning Course on CHURCHx
Peter’s book : “Choosing Change: How to Motivate Churches to Face the Future”
Loren Mead’s The Once and Future Church
Learn about intergenerational discounting (Kimberly Wade-Benzoni’s research)
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Transcript
[John Borthwick]
Welcome. Welcome to the ministry Forum Podcast coming to you from the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College. Where we connect, encourage and resource ministry leaders all across Canada as they seek to thrive in their passion to share the gospel.
I am your host, the Reverend John Borthwick, Director of the Center and curator of all that is ministryforum.ca. I absolutely love that I get to do what I get to do, and most of all, that I get to share it all with all of you. So, thanks for taking the time out of your day to give us a listen. Whether you're a seasoned ministry leader or just beginning your journey, this podcast is made with you in mind.
Today on the ministry Forum Podcast, we're talking about leadership. But a unique kind of leadership. This one maybe could be described as DIY, “do it yourself,” but I'll leave that to my guest to describe a little more appropriately. And I have the perfect guest to do so, the Reverend Doctor Peter Coutts. He has embodied leadership in every aspect of his life and ministry. He even wrote a book on the topic. I'm looking forward to sharing his wisdom and experience with you all.
Today, we're delighted to share more of Peter through our church X platform. And church X is where ministry forum offers e-learning opportunities. It's an ecumenical learning management system where you'll find lots of different courses to explore. At present, there are just about 400 courses and over 8000 registered users. It's growing more and more each day. And ministry Forum has about 5 e-learning opportunities, two on social media, one dedicated to sharing resources and activities related to books. Lay worship module offered by the Reverend Dr Sarah Travis Knox College's Ewert chair in the practice of ministry and faith formation. And finally, our most recent offering self-leadership, created by the Reverend Dr Peter Coutts, I trust that after listening to today's podcast episode, that you'll want to register for this e-learning opportunity led by Peter. We'll put the link in the show notes, and hopefully you can check it out after you've listened today.
So, let's dive in. Peter, welcome,
[Peter Coutts]
Thanks. I'm glad to be here.
[John Borthwick]
Yeah, I'm glad to have you. Yeah, it's so great to have you here on the ministry Forum Podcast. Maybe let's start a with a little bit more about you. Can you share with our audience your path to congregational leadership? I'm aware that it's maybe a little bit unique. And then where you've served the church, as well as any other experiences you may have had so far, basically, introduce yourself the way you'd love to introduce yourself.
[Peter Coutts]
That's a lot! Maybe right off, just to talk about my congregational experience in the Presbyterian Church. I graduated from Knox College in 1987 did church planting with Sanch Peninsula, just north of Victoria, and saw them move from small group in a chapel to having a good worshiping population in their own building. And I worked with two larger congregations, Associate Minister at Oak Ridge in London for nine years, and then 13 years as the lead at St Andrews Calgary, again a larger, multi-staff, multi-Minister congregation. From that to half time in general presbytery, Calgary-McLeod, presbytery and two longer interim ministries and now the Pension Board continues to insist that I'm retired.
The bit about leadership journey. When I first went to Sanch Peninsula in 87 walked into worship for the first day and saw, much to my surprise, that the pulpit at the front of the chapel was completely encased with a tartan drape, top to bottom, wrapped all around. Never saw that before in the church. And you know, the first thought going through my mind is as a tiny congregation that wants to grow, maybe not the best symbol for us. And so, in the coming weeks, I learned more about the drape the previous place that they met, they had a piano with an exposed wooden back in the upright piano, and then it was deemed to be, you know, not decorous. And so, someone volunteered to make a covering, and that person has Scottish heritage, and thus a tartan cover. When they moved to the funeral home chapel, they no longer had the problem with an exposed piano back, but they had this habit of putting out the drape. So, they thought, well, let's just put it on the pulpit and continue the habit. And so, the drape got a promotion. So, I started talking to them about, you know, maybe what it would be good to not put this out, and this is these are my reasons why. And they always responded kindly with smile, saying, but we like it. And we were there about three months. We moved to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and as we ported all our stuff over to the Adventist Church. Somehow, mysteriously, the tartan drape was lost, much to the disappointment of the congregation. And for many years, the drape covered the base of my Christmas tree every year. Now, I'm not proud of this story at all, but I share it because it was my first failure as a leader, in my view, in the congregational life. And this is coming from a guy who was eight years in the military before congregational ministry as a naval officer, and after this experience, you realize that I gotta learn more about leadership.
In 1990 I went to Vancouver School of Theology for two weeks of self-directed learning, and my advisor was this Presbyterian minister named Brian Fraser, and he assigned me two books to read, one in cultural anthropology, one in understanding organizations and eye opening, you know. And two years later, I read Jackson Carroll's book on as one with authority reflective leadership in ministry. And by then, I was hooked, and I committed to making leadership my craft and so that launched me into a big process of learning as an academic. I consider myself an academic practitioner, and so what has the studies of sociology, psychology, ecclesiology trying to come to a good understanding, what is the church meant to be, and how can we be that today, leadership is a spiritual practice. And in time, I took a Doctor of Ministry degree at McCormick seminary Presbyterian school in Chicago, in congregational revitalization. The you know, four years after graduating, the school had me back to be an adjunct professor for two years, covering off for teachers who were on sabbatical, and I taught required courses in understanding congregations and a second course in congregational change.
Coming out of my doctoral thesis, I had a strong interest in how motivation psychology is important in understanding how to be a leader. Why do people make the choices they do? How do you help influence like a group of individuals that we can call a church, to in parallel, make a bunch of individual decisions so that they decide to work collaboratively together in pursuing a common goal. And I worked on that post-graduation for about a decade, got a research grant from Louisville Seminary. $12,000 allowed me a three-month sabbatical to write and end up with a book published by Alban Institute. Along the way, as well, realizing that I was—I can say now—leading myself in all this development is being leadership, being my craft, you have to keep doing it. It's like, you know, a carpenter, every time they pick up a hand plane, they're not only doing the job, but they're fine tuning their skill. And so, and along the way, in my leadership studies, realize there's this whole field, a study called self-leadership. It's been in existence for over 40 years, and so diving into that literature, and so I've been working away at essentially two things. As a leader, how do you help motivate and facilitate change in others? and then also as a leader? How do I facilitate change in myself? And so that's where I've landed, and I've come to believe very strongly that having these two aspects in your portfolio as a leader is crucial for the church today.
[John Borthwick]
Wow. What a what a wealth of experience you've had way to way to lead yourself. That's awesome. That's so amazing, and Brian Fraser will be delighted to have the shout out. He's a friend of ministry forum. He's so, so appreciative of that.
You speak about your ministry failure, your leadership failure, I have a story, not of me, but of a congregation I intersected with at one point that told the story about a communion table. It was a more modern church, and, you know, everything was movable. And so, the minister had decided that the communion table should be in a certain place on the stage, as it were, because it was like a stage. And then so the minister would move it, and then somehow, like through the week, would move it, and then somehow it got moved back to a different spot every single Sunday morning. And this went on for a period of a few weeks, until the minister went into the sanctuary one Thursday or Friday or something and discovered that the communion table had been bolted to the floor. Yeah, yeah, clearly, there was something going on between somebody in the church and the minister and neither one met at that part. It was just a fascinating story about how we passive aggressively and all the things we do in leadership.
Yeah. So, before we dive into self-leadership, let's talk a little bit about among clergy in the landscape that is the church today. What's your reflection or perception of leadership in our church? What have you learned? Because I know you're a learning practitioner, learning, man, yeah,
[Peter Coutts]
yeah, here's kind of my elevator speech on that the church in North America, especially mainline Church, has been totally discombobulated by the collapse of Christendom, and congregations are looking back with a sense of grief and its losses. It's looking ahead with questions and anxieties and uncertainties about its future. And I think you could say churches, a lot of churches, feel like they're trapped in a no man's land now, and they're not quite sure what to do at all. So that's our context, right?
So, what's clergy leadership landscape look within like? What's it look like within that context? It's leaderships hard. It's really hard. Pastors have simply not been equipped to deal with the kind of challenges that we have today. Some ministers reject the very notion that they should be leaders and on principle. So, for example, in the Presbyterian Church, the book of forms basically says the session is the leaders and you as the Minister moderates, a session, which some ministers take as by implication that they don't lead. I disagree with that. Some people, some ministers, have been burned out trying to be leaders and not seeing the fruit from their efforts. And other leaders have been burned by leadership. They've tried something and you know, people bit back and you know, once burned, twice, cautious, right? Some have a lack of courage to kind of step up to do something. Some have lower capability, beliefs that, you know, “I'm not gifted for this,” and then we all suffer from what Stephen Covey calls the tyranny of the urgent, which has us focused more and more just on what's happening now today, rather than thinking about tomorrow. Another trap that is so prevalent in our congregations is congregations are asking the wrong strategic question. In the light of the impact of the secularizing of our society, the question they are asking is, how do we cope. And their focus is on coping. What they're talking about is maintaining as best they can try to maintain what they have been. But our experience has shown over 65 years, our experience has shown that having a priority, priority on maintaining, will not maintain your church. So, leadership landscape today, to be frank, a broad generalization, clergy have to step up their game as leaders.
[John Borthwick]
Yeah, I'm fascinated by the comment of clergy not believing themselves to be leaders. I get the notion of not wanting to be a leader, but even just the notion, from your observation, that clergy don't even see themselves as leaders within a ministry context, within a congregational context.
[Peter Coutts]
having an interesting conversation with Jeffrey Crawford, who's the general presbyter in Waterloo-Wellington presbytery, and he's a trained, certified executive coach, and he's had quite a ministry working with ministers in a program the United States, coaching clergy. And he's the guy that's told me that to him, it's really, really surprising the number of clergy who reject the notion that they should be leaders.
[John Borthwick]
Yeah, I used to whenever I'd hear clergy sort of express that, a sense of the for the variety of reasons you expressed, and I think, in a kind and compassionate way that you know, sometimes we're burned out, sometimes we get burned sometimes, just for self-preservation, we maybe step back from a leadership role. But when, sometimes clergy within the PCC especially speak about this notion of being powerless, that our system makes them powerless in a setting. I often have put out there that, yeah, but you're, you're the ones with the microphone. Every Sunday morning you get the microphone, or, you know, people are kind of “well you're the moderator of a conversation in a room,” there is a sense of a different, perhaps, kind of leadership, but you, but everyone's looking to you to walk them through the flow of a meeting. And you also, again, get to say stuff, in especially in a congregational context, maybe not as much so in a larger court, presbytery, General Assembly, things like that. But you certainly get to say stuff fascinating.
[Peter Coutts]
So, I'm in the business of encouraging and equipping clergy to be leaders, and I know from my experience that this is a hard sell. It is a hard sell to encourage in a way that clergy say, yeah, I really do need to do this. Like the clergy today are working hard to help their congregations maintain themselves. They serve presbyteries our Presbyterian Church. They serve presbyteries that are dealing with a steady parade of challenges, which keeps the, you know, takes so such, so much time and effort out of out of ministers and the ministers in the presbytery which who are more often than not, the interim moderator of another congregation, which is on life support, and they're the Life Support and so they already feel weighed down by a bunch of burdens, right?
And so asking pastors to engage in self-development of as a leader, and even to make leadership their craft that too easily begins to feel like just another burden, even though self-development as a leader can make one's ministry more fruitful—It can certainly make it more meaningful—and it can actually better equip you to deal with the challenges that face you all the time. And to me, this is a great irony, because essentially the thinking for some ministers is, “I already have too many challenges to take time to learn how I can engage those challenges better”
[John Borthwick]
Right, right. Yeah, that's a good that's a really good point. So maybe that brings us to what self-leadership is, sure. What is this notion of self-leadership? What led you to think that this was the way to go? So it's what is self-leadership?
[Peter Coutts]
It's an intentional practice of understanding yourself, your strengths and your weaknesses, and then intentionally planning and working at your areas of growth. And you can use this self-leadership in, you know, every single you can use the self-leadership kind of framework in every single intervention you do in leadership day by day in your church, because you know, there's always opportunities to express leadership but you can also use it as a means to grow your capacity, which is what the online course is about. And I'll be talking through this idea of self-leadership more in terms of as a means of self-development. And so, the end, the basic premise of self-leadership is that if you want to lead others, you first have to lead yourself. Okay, and we do self-leadership all the time, all the time, and viewers of this podcast have done self-leadership before. They've taken a new initiative to session for them to consider. When the Presbytery has asked you to do something, you said no, that that's self-leadership, and you've even expressed that by in it, by signing on to this podcast, right? We do self-leadership all the time, but the dilemma is, we think those things are all decisions. They're just decisions to watch this podcast. But below those decisions are some things that happen. You observe something. You do some sense-making around what you observe, you reflect on that and what should happen, at least the decision making and action, and sometimes that happens consciously, or parts of it happens consciously. But a lot of the time that's subconscious, and so self-leadership is about raising the stuff that we do all the time to make it a more intentional, conscious process.
So, in leadership studies over the last 100 years, the two main foci I have been on who a leader is, their character and their nature and also on what a leader does their skills, their experience their knowledge. So, you can use self-leadership to work at both those things. And there's three main elements to this and again, talking through this as a vehicle for self-development. Okay,
1. so the first element is growing in mindfulness and self-awareness. And so, you know, Buddhists have helped us in our society a lot to appreciate this. And Professor in University of Toronto, John Vervecki, he thinks we're at the beginning of a mindfulness revolution in our society. So mindfulness can help us become more self-aware. Now the thing that's important to know that here is that we are not wired for self-awareness. Robert Keegan lifetime career at Harvard as a psychologist, adult development his field, he has shown conclusively that the large majority of us are not self-aware. We may be self-aware about x and y for a period of our lives. We may be self-aware about z, but for the most part, the large majority of us are not self-aware. And so, the practice of self-leadership tries to get past that and to learn some skills in growing and having some more mindfulness in our lives, about you know, what's our feelings really doing? What is our observing our thinking, you know, called metacognition, to really be mindful what's going on around you, scanning as a leader all the time. So, this takes intentional work, like, just ask a Buddhist monk, you know, how long does it take to do this? Or ask a therapist, you know, how long does it take to do this? But if you want to, I think if you want to improve your life, generally and specifically, your leadership practice working on that mindfulness, self-awareness thing, it's the single best thing you can do.
2. The second core Praxis is intentional reflection on your leadership practice. Again, we are not hardwired for reflection. Daniel Kahneman, who just died last year, psychologist at Princeton, got a Nobel Peace Prize for economics. So, he's a credible guy. He talks about two thinking processes that we have, and so as an exercise, imagine that your mind is like a stage, and you're and so you're observing your stage, and so you're talking to an elder, and some idea comes up, and your brain wants to respond. And so, what it does is it uses associative memory, and it goes back into the recesses of your files in your head and tries to find the clearest, best thing that is associated with the idea that just popped up in conversation, and so associative memory throws it onto your stage. Rational thinking is slow and lazy. Takes about a second for rational thinking to start, and so it waddles up towards the stage. It looks at the stage and finds something already there. To do rational thought takes effort, takes, you know, energy and so the brain is more interested in being expedient than being effective. And so rational thought discovers this thing on your stage, and more often than not, just say, well, that works, and then we assume that we've actually thought this through, and that's not happened, and so we're not actually doing real reflection. So, in the process of self-leadership, it's about learning some really excellent practices, to do reflection, to take what you observe and to do some sense-making around it. What's really going on here, and to look at options and decide what kind of options may be best in this situation. And how do I want to say, stretch my leadership capacity—What's my growing edge? What do I need to work on? And what's the best way in?
3. So, reflection, last one is turning your ministry experience into a learning laboratory, almost on a daily basis. Again, leadership development is about what a leader does—you know, skills, knowledge, experience, who a leader is—their nature, their character. A psychologist who studies leadership, really important guy, Bruce Avolio, he's looked at different ways that you can grow as a leader. One of the worst ways is attending a workshop. I've done two hours of workshop on being a leader, and generally speaking, that doesn't do much in moving the meter for you. What is most effective is to be able to reflect on what's happening right now. What's this leadership intervention that I'm called to do here now? How can I utilize that to explore doing leadership in a new way and then running a little experiment to learn from that. So it's about not just doing leadership and being a leadership but as saying, “I'm going to use this as an opportunity to try something a little new and learn from it.” And Avolio asserts from his research that this is the way to accelerate your leadership development the fastest.
So, the practice of self-leadership is about is really about taking those things that we naturally do. We're somewhat self-aware. We kind of do reflection. We think about the next thing that we need to work on in leadership but take that and make it a much more conscious, intentional practice that we utilize all the time in the situations that present themselves in congregational life.
So, what's that look like? Just a quick story on me. 30 years ago, I recognized that I needed to do some work in conflict management, and so I actually took a 36-hour university course on this with assignments and passed. And so, it's great, “I know how conflict management works.” And not long after that, at Oak Ridge church, we had a conflict come up between two committees which had very different views about whatever that is. Was so good, I can practice my learning and get up my notes, and I make my little schedule I have to do six things. And you know, once I've accomplished a, b, c, d, e, f, then the conflict will be resolved. Huzzah! And so I went and actually did this, and yeah, the conflict kind of got resolved, but I had two committees full of grumpy people because they weren't really satisfied with how it turned out. So, I reflected on that—self-leadership practice. So, it didn't work out, right? So why? So, what a leader does—I started with just a little the little things that pop up in congregational life. Like some person in the pew is concerned about X, so try to help them with that, and try this and that, I learned that what I needed to do was spend a lot more time with the people in the conflict and to really understand their stake in it, why this is so important to them, and for them to appreciate that I've got it, but also in that, for them to really believe that I have their best interests in heart, and I had the church's best interest in heart. And that I'm going to do my best for them, and doesn't always work out for them, but they said, but you know, I know Peter did his best, and I can live with the result. And that has proven to be gold in my pocket all the time as a practice, and I still do it.
The other issue is, you know, your character, who a leader is. I thought about that so and as I did something I could identify immediately was, you know, you know, I'm kind of wired to be a conflict avoider, not unusual among clergy. And so, I thought, okay, well, why is that? Why is that? And as I reflected on that, came to an appreciation that I feared jeopardizing my relationships with people and so, and that was more important to me than dealing with the conflict, even though, when you think about it, if you don't deal with the conflict, it could jeopardize your relationship with people. And so, I thought about that observation, and, you know, why is this with me? And I came to appreciate that, you know, this is a belief. This is not a fact. I got no evidence that my involvement in trying to mediate a conflict is going to jeopardize my relationship. So, I started baking this into what I was doing in practice, and at the end of every conversation with someone in a kind of conflicted situation, I started asking this question, “and how are we? Are we okay?” And people started saying, Yeah, of course. And so, I learned that that belief that I had in my head was not true, and that liberated me in a huge way to feel much more comfortable and courageous in wandering into conflicted situations where I'm mediating between parties, where I'm actually part of one party.
And so, you know, we can use those self-leadership practices to identify, you know, things like, you know, I need to improve X or Y, get new knowledge, new skills. But to me, the real, the real, dramatic thing that self-leadership practice does is help us deal with our nature and character as leaders, and it can have an impact on so many things that are, I would say, pretty common among clergy. You know how to, you know, realize that you're you struggle with stress and how to manage the way you deal with feeling stressed. Procrastination; an issue to discover and work through inhibitions you have in ministry; strengthening your emotional intelligence, slowing down the thinking process so you can really engage rational thought; developing greater confidence and courage as a leader, developing what Angela Duckworth calls grit, which is, you know, having the passion and perseverance to see yourself through something tough, you know, building your motivation to lead. So that's self-leadership in a nutshell. It's a very big nut, but that's it in a nutshell.
[John Borthwick]
I love that, Peter, yeah, the thing that fascinates me about the description of self-leadership is the two pieces of self-reflection, or self-awareness, and then reflection, and the ways in which, for a lot of us, and you reference tyranny of the urgent, you know you wonder sometimes, where in ministry, because of all the things that are happening and all the things that we're carrying, sometimes we don't feel like I think we have enough space, or we don't give ourselves enough space, or carve out enough space for that what might help to nurture within just the self, a time for mindfulness and self-awareness practices, but also a time for reflection. We're always going to the next thing to the next thing, and when we're when we're finished, whatever we're done, when we're done, we're not spending that time—we're ruminating I would argue about the things that have happened, but we're not doing that with that reflective spirit or that self-awareness engine that would kick in and say, “Why is that coming up for me? What's that all about? Or what happened?” And my rumination might be, those people are the problem, or why can't something be different, as opposed to, what was my part to play, and how would it look different if I tried something different in the future? And yeah, so those, those self-awareness practices and that reflective practice, finding the time and space in ministry to nurture those.
[Peter Coutts]
Yeah, so three quick responses. So, rumination tends to be effective. We don't let that become an effective thing. The yes starting a process of developing self-leadership can feel like it's going to take time, and in the beginning, it does take time, but once you get the practice under your belt, you can do it pretty well. You know, the better your self-awareness is, you know, the quicker you're going to notice in like a conflicted situation. Oh, I'm backing away from this. That's my nature. I don't do that. So the more you practice it, the more it becomes second nature, and something that you can turn on, on the fly in a situation and make it functional and helpful, not only for you as the leader in that situation, but also it has every capacity to help you be the better leader with the people in your church.
[John Borthwick]
Definitely, I'm remembering something around counseling or something around therapy, even something just around having conversations or being in the moment with people where there's this sense of something that you need to put a pin in, or something that you should it's like noting something for yourself in your brain that I'm going to address that later, or want to think more about that later, like, why am I reacting to this person? I'm having feelings. I'm functioning in the moment, but I'm having something. I need to put a pin in that, or note that and think and have some time for reflection of, why, when I was talking to Peter, did that? Was I having these feelings? What's going on there? And that can allow that, can allow that can allow that self-development and self-improvement, for
[Peter Coutts]
sure, especially if, over time, you find yourself putting a pin in that again and again and again, right?
[John Borthwick]
Definitely, definitely. So, when I'm when I'm hearing you talk about self-leadership, it sounds like something you can do it yourself, or, you know, with some companionship and some learning, you can certainly get there. I'm also aware, and you've already referenced folks being trained as executive coaches or that coaching expression. I wonder when I think about people being burned out, or having experiences of being burned or struggling with how one finds courage or finds a way of bringing courage in a situation and moving forward. I know you're a professional coach by background as well. How would you describe the notion of having the idea of having a coach in your life as a way of benefiting one's ministry leadership? Is that a is that something you could speak on share with us?
[Peter Coutts]
self-leadership is actually a means of doing self-coaching, right? You're saying, Do It Yourself coaching, right? And that's what self-leadership is. But having an actual coach does two things, it can actually help you figure out how to do it yourself, because you've had the experience of having someone work with you. So, but coaching, I'm big believer in coaching. If you go back to two things I've already pointed out, we are not wired for self-awareness, and we are not really wired for reflection, and so executive coaching, even life coaching, but my world's, you know, coaching leaders, executive coaching is about developing greater self-awareness, greater reflection.
30 years ago, coaching world was tiny. And if you're in the business world and you had a coach, that's because you really needed to get help. And everybody knew that you really needed to get help. And today, there's a gazillion coaches out there, and it's some people consider it a real badge of honor that, you know, I'm a such a role in our organization that, you know, the company pays to have a coach for me. So, what a coach is, is a thought partner. A premise in coaching is we hold the client capable. Now you are able to puzzle this out for yourself. You're able to come up with your own solution, and my job as a coach is just through a series of questions, maybe put you in a place where you're looking at your problem from different angles and thinking maybe more deeply about it than it would be your nature.
Coaching is not consulting. In a consultant's role, they're a subject matter expert, and the consultant comes in, and I, as a client, says, I need help with this. And a consultant says, well, this is what you do. That's not coaching. It's not therapy. You don't spend a lot of time thinking about deeply about your nature. Coaching is solution focused. It's meant to happen pretty quickly, and it's just to activate how you function and maybe stretch that so that you can come more quickly to figure out what you should be doing.
Typical conversation real quick, starts with, you know, identifying what you want to talk about during the coaching session. Sometimes that can happen in like two minutes. Sometimes can take a whole coaching session for the client, to figure out what's really at issue here for me, and then you explore that issue, and, you know, looking at it from different angles and help the person begin to realize what's really going on here, and to begin to formulate their best response. And the coach typically helps the person you know name accountabilities for themselves when I'm going to do when affirm them what they're doing and look forward to the next session where you get caught up with that and move to the next step.
Two real fast stories of my experience in coaching. The first one is about what a leader does. I had a client. He was a career filmmaker, and he made documentary movies, and he just got into a new role in a new company. He was a large nonprofit organization. He got hired on, and he was in charge of fundraising. The first task he had was to create a fundraising gala. And so, the presenting issue, we got together for lunch and at a restaurant, and the presenting issue was, I have no idea how to make a fundraising gala. And so, as problems like a chunk of coal, I'm from Alberta, it's like a chunk of coal, and it's kind of the shapeless, you know, opaque, you know, black thing, and he's just looking at it, and he's stuck, right? And so, we start the coaching conversation. And at one point I asked, I asked him, well, what would you do if you were to make a documentary about a guy who is creating a gala as a fundraiser? And he sat there for 15 or 20 seconds, didn't say a thing, and his face just got so neutral, he's staring off into the distance. And then all of a sudden, he leapt up out of his chair. The chair flew back, fell on the floor, and he shouted out, I know how to do this! Conversation in the restaurant stopped and he ran out of the restaurant. Now, why did that happen? It never occurred to him in his self-awareness, it never occurred to him that he had a truckload of experience organizing things like, if you're making a documentary, you've got to have cameramen and sound people, you have to have schedules, you have to have locations, you have to have that or blah, blah, blah, and it just never occurred to him that he actually had a truckload of skills to do the job.
So, second one who a leader is your nature and character. I was hired by an organization to be a coach to you know a higher up person in the organization. Eight sessions to help this person with procrastination. So, the people in the organization identify pretty easily that this guy was a procrastinator, and it was making him so ineffective in what he did, and he had to break that habit. And so, I start working with him. Discovered pretty quick that this guy believed that he was not a procrastinator. He understood that the organization thought he was, he thought they were wrong, but he was going through this eight weeks because, you know, he was told he had to do it. And every session we would explore how he was a procrastinator, and I assigned him little tasks that, you know, experiment in small ways in your life and learn from it. And every time we came to a new session, he's always said, “well, I never got around to the experiment.” You know, this came up, and I had to do this. And blah, blah, blah, and so he never actually did any of the exercises. And in the middle of the fourth session. The fourth session, he had an epiphany, I'm a procrastinator. Like, just think, like all this stuff, or last four weeks is just proven in spades that I'm a procrastinator. And then with that self-awareness now he said, Jeepers, I gotta fix this. And then the next four weeks were much more progress productive.
But again, you know having that coaches can help you grow to have a greater self-awareness and by and then also to help you reflect more deeply and to figure out what you're going to do. So, you know coaches for clergy then, just to wrap this up, there are specialists who coach clergy. In any simple Google search, you will find them. The rates for coaching for clergy is much more affordable than in the business world. Currently in Calgary, if you're in the business world, a coach is going to cost you $300 up to $700 an hour for a coach, what I personally do charge is more in the realm of what is the going rate among coaches for clergy, that's $150 an hour, but it represents three hours work. I have to do some prep work for the conversation. The conversation often goes longer than an hour, and then I type up notes for my conversation and send them to the client to help reinforce their learning and help them be accountable to what they say they're going to do before the next session.
So, you can use your study leave money for coaching, because it is personal development, and I think any congregation learning it. You're going to work on this aspect of your life. We'll see that as a value. And I know one church that actually built into the annual budget a line item for coaching for their minister. So, you've got some options to be able to pay for it, too. So. You know, that's what coaching is about. I'm the big believer.
[John Borthwick]
Mm, hmm, yeah, I knew you were Peter and yeah, that's amazing. When I hear stories of congregations investing in their leaders, I think that's a great, a great gift to the leader, but also maybe they know that, or maybe they don't, but it's a great gift to the congregation as well. The better the leader, the more healthier the leader, the better the congregational system, for sure. Well, Peter, you'd said the Pension Board has told you that you're retired, but I sense you're busy in all the various ways that you are. You can’t help yourself. It's just who you are.
A common theme on the ministry Forum Podcast, not surprisingly, is the reality and the future of the Presbyterian Church in Canada and just the Christian church in general in Canada, the groundhogs were prognosticating recently. Any observations from your experience or where you sit on the reality that you see ministry leaders and congregations facing today, anything specific you'd want to delve into
[Peter Coutts]
We’ve kind of covered that a bit, but there's one thing, though, if I had to lift up one thing, there's a guy, an Episcopal Anglican priest, Lauren Mead, who, 50 years ago, started the Albin Institute, which became a consulting firm to churches and ministers across North America, and they published lots of books, including mine. 30 years ago, Lauren wrote an incredibly insightful and wise book called “The Once and Future church” and in it, he prognosticated that the church is now in in the midst of the greatest time of change that the Christian church has ever known in its history. He said this time of change will likely make the Reformation look like a ripple on a pond. His words, he says, you know, we don't know what the future church is going to look like. It is going to take generations for that to evolve. But even though it's going to take that much time, we have to begin now in exploring what faith communities need to look like in the future. This was a lightning bolt of a message to the church and in North America, and lots of people read the book. Presbyterian Church in Canada, we had a conference 1995 brought Lauren Mead up, and we all met at Knox church Spadina in Toronto. Lots of people there, wildly popular thing. But like with a lot of wildly popular stuff that goes through the church, it just, you know, it had its time, and it faded, and we moved on to the next cool thing. So even though it was a lightning bolt of the message, it did not light a fire under us.
[John Borthwick]
I think I was at the I was at, not when I was a student Knox College, and I think I was Lauren Mead, came to the college and did a whole presentation once a future church, yeah, yeah. A long time ago.
[Peter Coutts]
That was a long time ago, and the future is here it is. If so, if I have one thing about what's what we are facing in the church that leaders need to be addressing, it's what is called intergenerational discounting. And so, this comes out of the work psychologist Kimberly Wade Benzoni, intergenerational discounting is a mindset that is pernicious and runs wild in our society, all over.
Two examples, our governments are always running deficit budgets and running up a bigger and bigger debt in the bank, because our current generation is living beyond its means, and we expect the next generation to pay for it. Intergenerational discounting, we discount the importance of them in the future.
Climate change, another great example. We know there's an urgency to act. We're acting slowly today because, frankly, we don't want to change our ways and give up what we enjoy and push comes to shove, we know that the more we drag our feet now, the harder it's going to be for those who follow us, intergenerational discounting. And so, to me, the part of the problem in the church is that we don't understand the stewardship of the future. So, a touchstone passage for me is the parable of the talents. I call it the parable of the stewards. And two things about that. One, the master and trusts all capital letters underline all his wealth to the stewards. And in our case, you know, what does that include? Well, our appreciation of the benevolent grace of God, the gospel is entrusted to us. The life of our congregations is entrusted to us, the mission of God that we're called to be participants in is entrusted to us. The work of the Holy Spirit is entrusted to us, and then we're supposed to do something with it.
And in the parable, two of the stewards do. But, in the parable, you know, the stewards take this from the master, and then they give it back directly to the master themselves, where, in reality, that's not how it works. In reality, we pass the treasures on intergenerationally, and we have them for 2000 years. We need to think about that. How we need to think about, how do we take these treasures of the Masters, you know, and work on them, utilize them, even to increase the wealth, if you will, pass it on to the next generation.
Kimberly, Wade Benzoni, one article has the title of about applying the golden rule over time, and so the idea “do unto others as you would have them do to you.” And her point is as when it comes to the others, we need to think about those who follow us. And because churches are so caught in the strategic question, how do we cope? They were thinking, how do we get through this year? You know, how do we shrink the budget and still do what we want to do within that budget? How do we do what we want to do when an 80 something year old volunteer can't do it anymore? And so that's what captures our imagination, rather than say this, you know, we think it's hard now, how hard is it going to be for the faith community that follows us? And what can we do now to set them up as best we can so they can have their best shot at being a faith community in the future. And so, we are so caught by intergenerational discounting that we are harming the next generation of faith. You know, in a Christendom culture, it was pretty easy to keep churches going generation after generation, and that's just not the case anymore. And so, you know, who follows us has to be a thing. To me it's it is simply a justice concern, the people of the future do not have a voice. They do not sit on the Pew next to us and we do not know their concerns, and so we don't think about justice. A justice perspective would say, you know, we want to give voice to the voiceless. You know, we want to help those who are powerless, who, you know, the future generations, not here. They got no power. So, so, yeah, to me, this is really, really, like a key leverage point that we can do.
[John Borthwick]
I I've never heard this concept before, so I'll put it in the show notes for folks to go deeper on this, this concept.
I think it's sounds like something really interesting to reflect on when I hear you articulating it. What I'm wondering is, what are some of the telling signs of that? And I'll share this, a congregation I serve for a good season, I knew where their mindset was, based on board meetings, based on what kind of roof we were going to replace our almost 200 year old slate roof with and when I first arrived, and so I was there for two decades. When I first arrived, there was no one ever who was going to argue with the notion that when we finally replace the slate roof, it will be with another slate roof that will last us another 200 years just, and the cost be the cost be damned, you know, that kind of notion. And then over time, it evolved down to, well, maybe, you know, maybe this kind of roof, like kind of quasi slate. And then, you know, there was talk of a steel roof. There was even talk of shingles at one point, and it was all around the guarantee, the warranty, and the guarantee. And so, like, it was like, you know, we got it down at some point. I think it got down to about 25 years, if this, if this roof, will last us 25 years, then that's all that matters to us. And so I'm wondering if what it looks like for some churches, is the notion of this I need to make sure this church survives so that I can have my funeral here. Oh, yeah, and, and is that what I think you're gleaning from that Justice kind of issue, because that's not considering anybody beyond yourself, right?
[Peter Coutts]
So yes, but there's another problem is what our functional ecclesiology is as congregation, and which is what you're leaning into now. The functional ecclesiology as I see it—and I'm sorry, some people think this is too harsh, but this is my thought—the functional ecclesiology of a number of our churches is that a faith community is a fellowship that occasionally worships together in their own building with their pastor. And so, as decline happens, they say, how do we cope? Well, you know, the pastor goes from full time to part time, and then then we have no pastor, and then we have an interim moderator keeping us on life support. And then we keep the declining, we have less financial resources. And now we can't maintain the building and, and if we can't even maintain the building, then that means, by definition that we can't possibly be a church. We can't be a faith community because we no longer have a pastor, and we no longer have a building. And at that point, the congregation either amalgamates or disappears. Rather than say, you know, God is on God's mission in the world, we participate in that mission. We the Church is one of God's strategies in trying to affect God's will in the world. And there's been a long history of those you know, God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden to smarten them up, we have the flood, you know. And humanity, version 2.0 looked exactly like humanity version 1.0. So okay, let's get one great guy, Abraham, let's have a nation to show the world how God wants us all to live. And that had a rocky history, and God had to, every so often, send a prophet to say, “come on, sharpen up, you know, this is your job.” And eventually God got to the point where it says, Man, I'm going to have to send my son to help them do this, and then I'm going to send this Holy Spirit to energize doing this. And, and so these are strategies. We are a strategy. And in our ecclesiology, we don't think of ourselves at that and if, if we think of ourselves as a strategy, then what happens is we go, “we're not being very effective as a strategy, how do we improve what we do as a strategy so we can truly help God attain what God's goals are for the world.” And so that's really, really different idea of church compared to, you know, church is a fellowship that occasionally worships in a building with a pastor.
[John Borthwick]
Yeah, I think there's almost some elements of self-leadership that that the church as it is today needs to go through to begin to have that sign of self-awareness, of who are we, what are we here for? What are we? What's our purpose? And that sort of reflection piece, this isn't working. We don't have this. We don't have that. Well, what's, what's the next thing, what's the new iterations? And what does that look like? For sure, yeah, and I think the definition for many churches, as I observe it, we haven't yet come to, you're using the big word, the ecclesiology, we haven't yet come to a clear definition for a lot of folks of what church is. What I see in presbyteries is often a tension point between, sometimes between clergy, sometimes between members of churches and clergy and all that kind of thing around what a true church is. So, for some it might be a church is a only exists if it's in a building with a fixed pastor and all those kind of things. And so, if you don't have those things, then I guess you're done. For others, it would be churches—a group of people, and if they can, if they can continue to worship and be on the mission of God, then we don't need buildings and we don't need clergy. I don't know those kinds of things. So that I'm seeing these tension points quite a bit, and how we even within our polity, how we make decisions. So, it's like, well, if you're if we define the church as having a session and having a minister and having a building. Then if you start to lose some of those things, then the next step is amalgamation, dissolution, or whatever,
[Peter Coutts]
And which is often really about, you know, how do we cope? Right?
[John Borthwick]
yeah, it circles back to your original part of like, all we're thinking about is how we cope and not we're not asking the right strategic questions around our future. Yeah, did you want to say, I think we've done a pretty good job talking about the Presbyterian Church and the Church as a whole, for sure. Maybe, as a final thought, we have this e learning opportunity that was created on church X, self-leadership led by yourself. Anything you'd want to plug a little bit just to give people a little more of a taste of it. And we'll certainly encourage folks as a part of the release of this podcast episode to check it out and get to know more about self-leadership for themselves.
[Peter Coutts]
So, what are you going to experience in this? It's a roughly a six-hour program, a little just a little over two hours of video driven teaching, and then somewhere around three, four hours of personal work. And there's a quite a good workbook that walks you through that personal work. You will do three, and you have the option to do a fourth self-assessment of your leadership practice, which will feed into your sense of self-awareness. And the first video covers two things. Why is leadership development so important for today, for clergy dealing with today's realities in congregational life? And then the second part of that video is introducing the idea of self-leadership and what it's about. Second video walks you through a model for doing self-leadership. And even though it the model at first glance can look a little complicated and may feel a little intimidating, it's really about those three things you know, helping you grow in your self-awareness, helping you to reflect, and then how to plan for and run these little experiments in your life for quick learning as a leader.
And then after that video, you do deep dive into the workbook. And it just it walks you through the model again, and it that encourages you to take some aspect of your ministry life and use the model to unpack it. And so, one of the one of the first people who took the course, at the beginning, she posted that her herself issue was, you know, our congregation just has so much trouble talking about the having hard conversations and talking about the future, they don't want to do that. And by the time she worked through the process, the thing she wanted to work on is, you know, I need to become more courageous in starting these conversations. And so, you see, there's been a shift in her thinking and realizing that she's contributing to what she identifies as the big problem. So her self-assessed task is to, you know, use little moments to encourage those kinds of conversations about the future, so it helps you do those kind of thing. And again, the leadership psychologist Bruce Avolio says running those little experiments intentionally is the fastest way DIY to learn how to do leadership.
[John Borthwick]
Yeah, it sounds fascinating and interesting. I hope folks will definitely check it out and learn from a person like yourself, Peter, who has devoted yourself to the practice of leadership in all the different spaces you've occupied. For sure, is there anything I haven't asked today that you were hoping I would ask?
[Peter Coutts]
Yeah, well, it's just one kind of wrap up summary. It is my view, generally, that we do not appreciate as clergy how crucially central leadership is in all aspects of our ministry you know? So, clergy would love our preaching to be inspiring we would we want to have our Faith development work to guide people into a deeper relationship with God and a more fulsome expression of Christianity in their life, pastoral care; we want to help people through the transitions and the challenges of their life. You know, in our ever-evolving nature of what church is like today we find ourselves regularly needing to help something improve in congregational life help something adjust in congregational life. And when you think of those verbs, “we want to inspire, we want to guide, we want to help through, we want to improve.” These are verbs associated with leadership, and it's been as someone who's committed to making leadership you know, my craft. I have found that developing my understanding and my practice of leadership has helped, has helped me as a preacher has helped me faith formation, you know, pastoral care, administration and so I think that if you work at this, every aspect of what you do in ministry can become more effective, and ministry overall, will become more meaningful to you,
[John Borthwick]
Spoken like the guru you are, sir. Thank you so much. Peter, I just want to thank you so much for the ways in which you've turned up in leadership for let's just say specifically to the PCC. I think you turn up in a variety of spaces and places throughout your life. But anytime I mentioned that I saw Peter Coutts, or I'm going to be talking to Peter Coutts, I often hear maybe this is surprise to you, but really positive feedback. No, people really appreciate you. I was talking to somebody just the other day, and they said they knew you when, way back when, apparently you were hanging out at maybe, was it camp Iona? Way long ago, and they so appreciated you way back then, and they've continued to watch the ways in which you've turned up and supported the PCC in a wider sense, certainly you've had an impact in the churches that you've served, and definitely within the presbytery of Calgary Macleod, but even within the denomination as a whole. So I'm so grateful for you, and I really appreciate sharing you with the Ministry forum audience. Thank you so much for everything you do.. Appreciate
[Peter Coutts]
No problem, this has been fun. Thank you!
[John Borthwick]
Thanks for joining us today on the ministry Forum Podcast. We hope today's episode resonated with you and sparked your curiosity. Remember, you're not alone in your ministry journey.
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