Already amazing: young clergywomen and pastoral leadership

Last week I had the privilege of facilitating a pastoral leadership workshop at the Young Clergy Women International conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. My goals in that hour and a half were to ask coaching questions that allowed participants to

• name their strengths and consider how to operate out of them,

• articulate how they want to show up in their ministry settings,

• identify the helps for and barriers to showing up in those ways, and

• begin to make a plan for utilizing the resources and maneuvering around the roadblocks.

I want to share the discussion prompts I offered in that sacred space in the hopes that they might be useful to you as well.

Naming and claiming strengths

• What energizes you in ministry?

• When have you felt most like you were living fully into your call? (Responses can include one-off and recurring situations.)

• What do your responses to these two questions tell you about your strengths?

Showing up authentically

• How do you want to show up as a pastoral leader in your ministry setting?

• When have you shown up this way? (If you’re not sure, try to imagine your leadership through the eyes of a congregant, lay leader, or judicatory leader.)

• What has made showing up this way possible?

Utilizing resources and managing barriers 

• What tapped and untapped resources do you have for showing up the way you want?

• How might you best utilize these resources?

• What keeps you from showing up the way you want?

• How do you remove the barriers you can control and maneuver around the barriers you can’t control?

Putting it all together

• Given what you have learned about yourself and your context from your responses to these questions, what is the first step toward living more fully into your pastoral leadership potential? In other words, what is the lowest-hanging fruit for drawing on your strengths, taking into account how you want to show up, maximizing helpful conditions, minimizing obstacles, and putting the tools at your disposal to good use?

While I think these are useful questions, what made them powerful was the workshop participants’ willingness to create spaces for candid conversation. Since there were 25-30 people in the room, I asked them to divide themselves into dyads or triads to respond to the questions. The women shared deeply and offered invaluable observations and encouragement to one another. These questions, then, are good for reflection but much more transformative when used as a discussion guide.