Coach?

Coach?

Have you ever had a coach?  Maybe you were on a little league baseball team once and someone coached the team.  All coaches, whether trained or not have the same desire.  They want to win and they want you to help the team win.  Coaches will do or say almost anything to make winning possible.  The older you get and the higher the stakes are the more important it is to win.  After all hardly anyone remembers who won the little league championship in 1982.  But some might remember who won the World Series then.

I remember every coach I ever had in grade school and high school.  Some of them I liked a lot and wanted to do good for them, some of them I didn’t like very well and I still wanted to do good, because I too wanted to win whatever game we were playing.

Now as an adult (mostly) and a minister of a church and wanting to lead people to a winning relationship with Jesus, I’m beginning to think the church should be full of spiritual coaches.  People who would say and do almost anything to make winners (spiritual winners) of us.  We live in a world of defeat, and many people get defeated at church too.  People are defeated by sins of all kinds.  I wonder where are the coaches who shout from the sidelines “you can do better than that” or “you shouldn’t do that” or “get up and try again.”  It seems to me we don’t have many people like that around us.  We live in a world where we are coached to lose.  Shouts from the sideline encourage us to sin; thus to lose.  Yeah, I just convinced myself we need more coaches in the church.