Developing Female Leaders: Navigate the Minefields and Release the Potential of Women in Your Church by Kadi Cole

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Kadi Cole does what she sets out to do which is to help churches develop female leaders. She writes from an egalitarian perspective but is very respectful of different theological viewpoints. As a result, any church that would like to up its game at helping women exercise their gifts and calling within their church (no matter your theological convictions) will find this book helpful. There are many, many useful insights and plenty of good questions to use.

However, it is clearly written from an American perspective and I don’t think even Mrs Cole is aware of our deeply that has shaped what she has written. It is also probably more useful to churches with larger staffs. Much of what she is writing is primarily aimed at staff teams on churches. It will work for volunteers too but a little extra work in thinking through how that works will be needed.

I’m familiar with the stained glass ceiling but I hadn’t really considered either the ‘glass cliff’ or the ‘sticky floor’ before. There was a good discussion around integrity and the ‘Billy Graham rule’ and thinking how your teams operate so that everyone can join in and that the ‘important’ discussions don’t happen in informal places where one sex or the other can’t participate.

I appreciated her respectful tone, I didn’t end up feeling like the enemy simply because of my convictions or because I’m a man in leadership. That’s definitely not always the case. I found this useful and helpful and I’m looking forward to discussing it with some of the women leaders in our church to hear what they think.



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