Falling in Love with Love Itself
The Future of Life
Coaching
by Tony Stoltzfus
Life purpose is a rising movement that
has been shaping the church over the last ten years and will be a major
influence for the next generation. Just as the “visionary leadership” concept
has been at the forefront of the way churches are led for the last season, the coming
wave seems to be helping people to discover and fulfill their personal destiny.
I believe God is continuing a move that began with the charismatic renewal two
generations ago—unleashing and fully
activating lay people, so that everyone in his body is a vital contributor to
the Kingdom.
Life coaching, as a major disseminator
of life purpose tools and thinking, is a key part of this new destiny movement.
So let’s all pat ourselves on the back—it
sure is fun and fulfilling to be on the front of the wave as a Christian life
coach, isn’t it?
However, this trend also means that we
as coaches face a sobering challenge: as God shapes and refines this movement
to fulfill his own purposes, he will be shaping and refining us as
carriers of it. What kind of personal refining will we need to embrace as
coaches to make this a true Kingdom movement?
Visionary Leadership and Life Purpose
To get a picture of what the future may
hold for life purpose, it can be instructive to look at the visionary
leadership arena. Over the last generation, we’ve seen some well-known leaders undertake
huge visions and get a lot of extraordinary things done for the Kingdom. But
we’ve also seen some big-name visionaries crash and burn. And many everyday Christians
have experienced the pain of serving under visionary leaders who have made loyalty
to the vision (the leader’s vision, that is) more important than doing the
right thing, loving the people the vision serves, or even loving the King we
are supposed to be doing this all for. A few months ago I was reflecting on
this with a friend, and he mentioned a famous saying about the founder of one
of the world religions:
“He loved
people in general; he just didn’t love any people in particular.”
Doesn’t sound very good, does it? In
other words, to this religious leader the visionary
ideal of loving or serving people
became more important than the people the leader was supposed to be loving or
serving in the first place.
Back when my wife and I ran a mentoring
program for dating couples, we would occasionally run into someone who wanted a
relationship so desperately that it didn’t seem to matter a whole lot who the
other person in the relationship was. We called that “falling in love with love
itself.” The star-struck individual wasn’t really in love with their partner:
they were in love with the idea of being in love. To put it more crassly, what
was driving their behavior was not a desire to lay down their life in true love
for another person, but to get their own emotional needs met. And that in a
nutshell has been the Achilles heel of visionary leadership: leaders too often
begin seeking to accomplish a vision in order to gain personal fulfillment and
fulfill their own destiny instead of as a way to serve. The vision itself
becomes a god.
Life Coaching’s Greatest Challenge
And that is what I believe is the
greatest challenge we face in the life purpose movement: not falling in love
with love itself. Life coaching lays out a very compelling picture of the
future you can have: fulfilling your destiny, living out of your passions,
maximizing your potential, practicing self-care, standing up for yourself. It
has a great vision for us as coaches, too: do fulfilling work at home, be your
own boss, make great money, and make a difference in the world. And yes, God often
does want those things for us. But are we getting people to fall in love with
the right thing?
The challenge is not to confuse the means and the end. A vision is not an end: it is a means to love God, love people
and bring in the Kingdom. When a vision is made into an end in itself, and you begin
ordering all of your life around the accomplishing of that dream, it becomes
your god. A means inappropriately
pursued as an end is an idol.
Life purpose is the same way. Living
your life purpose can be a great life: if it is a means of radically serving and sacrificially loving your Creator. In
laying down your life for someone greater than you, you find true life. In
losing your life, you save it. In devoting yourself to something other than
self, you learn that it really is much more blessed to give than to receive.
Fulfillment comes as a byproduct of seeking something else much greater.
However, life purpose can also be a vehicle
for creating a self-centered, narcissistic, dead-end life if the end you are seeking is living your own
passions. Donald Trump is certainly living in the center of his passion, and
says as much. If Christian life coaching
just ends up creating more Donald Trumps, we won’t have made much of a
contribution to the
Calling Versus Passion
I think some of the problem comes back
to the simple step of biblically defining the terms we are using. Let’s start
with passion. The sense of living passionately in the center of what you were
made to be comes from functioning in ways that fit your identity. When you are in
a role that fits your abilities, your personality type, your values, your
priorities, and that seemingly all your life has prepared you to do, you’ll
have that wonderful sense of destiny. So living your passion is doing something
that fits us, that we were made to do, that brings fulfillment, joy and
productivity. Living your passion is working in a way that calls our full
identity into action.
But I think as Christian coaches we need
to also define the word calling. I
define your calling as “the life of sacrificial service God has uniquely
commissioned you to live that brings your full identity into action.” When you
see children starving on the news and your heart aches to go and feed them, or
you go on a short-term mission and the idea of helping others find Jesus
captures your heart, that’s a call. A call is from outside of you, from God, not
something you manufacture internally (although it fits who you are). And it is always
about someone else, not about you. God has commissioned you to a unique task out
of sacrificial, agape love for him; and the task he calls you to is uniquely
fitted to your abilities in a way that brings all of your being into action. Fulfillment
and a sense of destiny is not the goal: it is the byproduct of living the call.
Here’s why I believe this is important. When
we think about functioning in our life purpose, or putting our own identity
fully into action, we think of words like joy, fulfillment, effectiveness,
productivity, satisfaction, or meaning. That’s a compelling picture. So let’s
apply that to Jesus. His ultimate life purpose, his full identity in action, is
to reign in heaven at God’s right hand. So far so good. Joy, fulfillment and
satisfaction fit right in with that. But Jesus’ calling, his act of sacrificial service, was to lay down his life for
the ransom of many. The moment when Jesus
was fulfilling his call was the day when he was being tortured to death. It
was not a happy moment. And scripture is very clear that the sitting down at
God’s right hand (the life purpose) came only
by going through with dying on the cross (the calling).
That’s probably not the picture of
destiny fulfillment you had in mind when you set out to discover your life
purpose! But if our understanding of destiny is not adequate to fit the life of
our master and example, it’s not very good theology. In the Christian walk, the
end you pursue is the call, the life of sacrificial service you offer to God. Your
own sense of destiny and personal fulfillment are a byproduct of pursuing that
call. To pursue a sense of passion or purpose or destiny as the primary end in itself
is an unbiblical dead end.
Coaching the Call
So what do you do with all this as a
coach? Two things. First, align your own life with a call, not just with your
passions. What is the sacrificial service your King has uniquely commissioned
you for? How are you living a life today that is not all about you? A good way
to check is to look at your current goals and action steps. Do they serve
anyone but you?
A second step is to look at how you
coach others. How are you calling the people you coach to a life of sacrificial
service that results in a sense of destiny as a byproduct, instead of calling
them to pursue their own passions and accomplishments? A good way to check is
to look at the goals and action steps of those you coach: do they serve anyone
except that individual?
In a dating relationship, falling in
love with love itself means being so caught up in pursuing the byproducts of
relationship (joy, fulfillment, a sense of belonging) that we are totally
undiscerning about the object of our affections. In life coaching, we face that
same temptation. So let’s not go falling in love with love itself.
“But whatever gain I had, I counted as
loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the
surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered
the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I my gain
Christ and be found in him…” / Phil. 3:7-9
If this article gets you thinking, I’d enjoy hearing
back from you. E-mail me at tony@coach22.com