If you want to become a good discipler, then you need to learn how to become a spiritual coach. And if you're going to coach someone, that is, to help them become someone different than they are, there's no way around it, you've got to exercise authority, and you've got to be OK with that.

It's true of sports coaches and it's equally true for spiritual coaches. Don't even sign up for the job if the idea of changing people makes you squeamish. You sign up as a spiritual coach because you genuinely want to help others and are willing to set aside any agendas to do so.

Then there are those who have no trouble exercising authority, but struggle to realize that they need to earn the person's trust first. They need to become a student of what God is doing in that person's life.

Too many coaches freely dispense their advice without considering the particular issues confronting the person they are coaching. Telling a person, "you're too sensitive, you need to toughen up," when the person you're coaching has already been feeling depressed about his failures may be exactly the wrong advice to give.

Many of you reading this have got the right motivation, but you're looking for a context, a time and a place where you can coach others. Perhaps you're a businessman who owes his boss eight solid hours of work before commuting home – you could take some of those work hours to practice spiritual coaching, but you know that it would be counter to your boss's wishes.

Or maybe you're a youth pastor trapped by parental and pastoral expectations and a program designed for lowest common denominator students. You'd love to do more spiritual coaching, but then parents and pastors would find fault with your lack of attention to the program.

This issue of time and place to practice coaching is a tricky one. How can we exercise authority in someone's life when we are flouting the wishes of those in authority over us? I don't have any easy answers for you. Perhaps you begin using your commute to schedule regular conversations with the person you're coaching. When I was raising children, I would always try to take them on errands I had to run. I scheduled fun with them on the weekend, but would mix in my coaching along the way.

Assuming you get the context right, you may still be uncertain of the "How To's." Recognizing that spiritual coaching is a subset of coaching, I suggest you find a good coach and learn coaching principles from her. Throw out most of what you've learned about that other loaded term, "discipling" except this – it is the life you model that teaches best.

A good place to start is to begin by breaking the didactic teaching habit. Stop preparing lesson plans and focus more on the example you are imparting. For example, do your disciples learn risk-taking as a means of growing faith by watching your example?