The Untapped Power of Women in Leadership—an Interview with Kadi Cole

This episode dives into the untapped resources of women in leadership in a fascinating interview with author and coach Kadi Cole. Kadi was one of the first female leaders to serve in an executive role at a large, multisite church in Florida and is now an international consultant for organizations, a leadership trainer, and LifePlan facilitator. Kadi is a founding member of the Women’s Executive Pastor Network and the founder of MinistryChick.com. She is a best-selling author of three books, the latest being Find Your Leadership Voice in 90 Days. Host Paul Baldwin and Kadi explore the perceptions, biases, and assumptions that churches struggle with in incorporating women in leadership positions. No matter where you stand on the issue, the conversation is thought-provoking, challenging, and gracious. 

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Transcript

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. Designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at ElementalGroup.org for more resources and free downloads. 

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. My name is Paul. I'm your host for today and I am thoroughly elated for our guests today. You guys are in for a real treat. I'm here with Katie Cole. has spent the last 25 years serving in the local church ministry as an executive director at one of America's largest and fastest growing multi-site churches. She is a director at the Leadership Network, has authored three books. I've read them all. I've loved every one of them. The first one was Sticky Note Leadership  (this was her best-selling book), Developing Female Leaders, and Find Your Leadership Voice in 90 Days was her latest book. She speaks at leadership conferences around the world. Katie holds a master's degree in human resources development and is passionate about helping organizations and businesses thrive. She's helping really move the needle forward on diversity and equipping faith-based leaders to fulfill their calling through her business, organization, and church consulting, life plans, leadership coaching. She kind of does it all. So, Katie, welcome to Elemental Leaders Podcast. Really stoked to have you here. How are you? 

Thank you, Paul. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm doing great today and excited for this conversation. 

Yeah, I am too. I've been looking forward to this for some time, and we've known each other for a little bit just with your work, actually, in the church that I led down in Miami. And so, I remember first just listening to you. It was on the heels of reading Sticky Note Leadership, and I just thought, Man, this is awesome, awesome content. It was authentic. It was genuine. Did I get that intro right? Because I ripped it off from the exponential website. Yeah, I figure they usually get things right. Let me do this. Before you were Katie Cole, who was Katie Cole? Tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to this place. Because I'm guessing this wasn't necessarily part of your master plan. 

This was nowhere near my master plan. So as most of us know, the master plan we set out, even if we're planning to do things for God, almost never turns out the way we think. I grew up in the mountains of Montana. I live in South Florida now, but I grew up in a tiny church of about 100 people in the mountains of Montana. No one got paid by the church, including the senior founding pastor. We all just volunteered. And it was a wonderful way to grow up. Really loving church family modeled so many of the one and others so well. Great godly leader, very focused on just teaching God's Word, helping people find Jesus, a real evangelist at heart. He was a full-time electrician, owned his own company, and then did ministry on the side. And I kind of thought that's just how churches worked and how it all happened. I went to college and wanted to serve God. And so I went into nursing because in my world, especially a very conservative space, that was the only thing I saw women who weren't married to pastors do. And I was engaged to a pastor, but I ended up breaking that off. So I thought, well, rather than go that route, I guess I'll go the missionary route. So I thought I'd be a medical missionary, deliver babies, wear a skirt my whole life, live in some third world country. Turns out that's not where God wanted me. Instead, He planted me in Florida, which to be honest, when you're from the mountains of Montana, feels like a different country. Came down to Florida to pay back a scholarship I was on, ended up being a part of a church that was a really fast growing sort of attraction model church, which back then, you know, this was 30 years ago, that was really the new way of doing church. And for me, it was a brand new concept to want to bring my friend to church, or if I had led someone to Christ to actually invite them to church with me on Sunday, you know, in my growing up, that was kind of the worst way to start someone off in the faith. And so I really found my leadership legs in ministry. And so through a variety of events, it ended up getting recruited by my church to come on staff and help organize as we were in a really fast growth spurt. I thought I would do that for a couple of years. I ended up staying on staff for almost 20 years in full-time ministry and kind of grew with the church when I came on staff. We were about 3,000 people, which I was like, "This is a church of biblical proportions. There's no way we'll ever get bigger than this." And when I left, we had over 23,000 on site plus a huge online campus. I helped launch and oversee the nine campuses we had and started our School of Leadership, brought a college to the church. So we really grew and expanded. I got to really work on my leadership development systems, skills, and bring my graduate work into the church space. So out of that, I started consulting churches and ended up writing this book on female leadership because many of the churches I was encountering were really stuck on their mission, reaching their mission, either launching campuses, doing church plans, expanding their ministry, they didn't have enough leaders. And most of that leadership capital was housed in women that did not know how to navigate the leadership systems of their churches. And so I really wanted to help that space between these really great, godly pastors, men who were trying to utilize women in ministry and these women who couldn't somehow break through the glass ceiling. And so that chasm and divide between these two good-hearted groups of people who couldn't find one another just really drove me crazy. And so I did this big research project that ended up becoming a book. And so now that's what I talk about a lot for churches. 

So the church you grew up in was about 100 people, you said? 

Yes. 

Yeah. Okay. So let me go there. I grew up in a church. It was a fantastic church, just a fantastic experience. Absolutely loved it. It was a very, very special part of my childhood and learned a lot about scripture, learned a lot about leadership as well. It was a church of about 400 over on the beach in California, nothing negative to say at all about it. However, I grew up with this paradigm that men were the leaders. Women had influence, they had position, they were directors, but they they were never really given the position of authority. And I never really thought much of it. It was normal. It was just part of what was. As I grew in ministry and as I experienced a little bit of the world too, I realized, oh, this is not necessarily normal, especially as I had daughters. And the Lord really just kind of convicted me. So speak to some of these churches and leadership. We have a lot of churches that listen, a lot of pastors that listen to this podcast…a lot of leaders of nonprofit organizations. And the idea of women in leadership is different than the idea of men in leadership. Can you talk about the difference between those two ideas? 

In the church space, we do talk about this from a different theological viewpoints. So I always like to remind people when we open up this conversation that this is a secondary theological issue. This is not a primary issue. There's a lot of debate and disagreement on this. you can make a really strong biblical case for women in leadership and against women in leadership, particularly church ministry leadership. So I encourage people to remember, this is not the main thing, this is a second to the main thing. And so great, great, Godly people can disagree about this. I actually make a case in the book that I think our binary view of this topic where you're either for women or against women is really not colorful enough for the context in which we do ministry and in which we live. So I actually make a case that there's seven different perspectives, theologically and in practice that we tend to fall into. And a lot of things influence that. Some of it is theological, but most of it really comes from the place we grew up, either our family of origin, where we grew up in the country or the world and the culture's viewpoint around gender, what our church did. And sometimes we had churches that taught one thing but did something else in both sides of the coin. We either had a theology where women could do anything, but we saw no women lead. Or you perhaps had a church that had some roles that were closed off to women and some structure around what women couldn't do. But at the end of the day, women were making most things happen in the church. And men kind of like were sort of the placeholders of leadership, but we didn't really do the leading themselves. So all of those extremes and anywhere in between is where we tend to find ourselves on this topic. And one of the biggest crimes I think about this is not the disagreement. how much energy and time and relational equity we waste wondering where we all stand on this topic or wondering, "Can I do that? Can I not do that?" or wondering, "Should she do that? Should she not do that?" And if she does do that, does that make the men disappear? And there's all these fear-based conversations around it. I really think there's just a lot more opportunity to move the needle forward on this topic. But part of that is we have to be willing to talk about it. And so We do have viewpoints. There's a lot of different language around it. I kind of go into some of the background of it on the book if you want to learn more about it. But we tend to have sort of these, like you mentioned, these two perspectives of people who welcome women to lead in all levels of the church or people who have limitations. And then, like I said, there's kind of varying degrees of that. What's most important to me is that you define your theology and that you know what you believe, you know what your church or organization believes. And then we spend our effort aligning our culture to our beliefs. It's the disconnect between what we say we believe and what we do in action that causes the most stagnation in our leadership systems and our ability to reach our mission. 

I remember when you first came, you know, I was part of a church down in Miami, about 4,000 people. We had probably 400 volunteers and about 100 leaders. And you came and you spoke at our leadership conference. And I remember men and women coming up to me afterwards and you were were teaching through some of the principles that you laid out in Sticky Note leadership. Men and women came up and just said, "Pastor Paul, that was fantastic. That was so practical." They had just a hundred little notes that they had written. But I had several women who came up to me and they were so inspired and they were so encouraged. Now, we were a church that had women as pastors in a culture that traditionally doesn't necessarily hold women in that level. And so, but even at that, they came in, they were so inspired and energized in their leadership role. And a couple of them were like, how can I do this? How can I become better? How can I develop more? And it was a great on-ramp to, and of course, we bought sticking out leadership for, for everyone, not just for women. It was for men and women. We, we walk through it, which was great. So speak to and really book number two and book number three kind of cultivate a culture for that. Correct me if I'm wrong. Book number two was really about helping church leaders develop a collective imagination for how they can create pathways in leadership in general, but then especially for women. And then book number three was, it's kind of turning the tables a little bit. Correct me if I'm wrong again, with women to say, say, "Hey, find your leadership voice." Like here is a track that you can run on to help advocate for yourself, to help find those opportunities, to help develop a pathway for leadership. Are you book number two and book number three kind of coming at it from both angles?

Yeah, I didn't intend to do that. I wrote "Developing Female Leaders" because of these churches I was working with and these men who were just feeling stuck in what to do to utilize women and female leaders in their churches. And honestly, they were trying some strategies that were well-meaning, but they really weren't the best ideas. And, you know, it's senior pastors who found a, you know, a younger female leader who was really passionate about ministry, had a lot of leadership capacity. So he would hire her as his assistant so she could learn ministry and sit in these high-end meetings. And that sounds like a really great idea. And I've I sat in enough executive team meetings and worked with enough senior pastors to be like, "I understand why you think that's a great idea." But when it comes to developing a leader, a secretarial position is never a great way to learn that. You might sit in the meetings and take notes. You might be aware or get the chance to meet people, but you aren't viewed as a leader and you're not actually learning leadership. It would be much better to give her three small groups to lead or to bring her on the team and have her run mission trips or to put her in charge of small groups for a whole campus, then it would be to bring her into these executive level meetings without having grown up in the spaces of actual ministry leadership. So we were tackling those kinds of things. And again, well-meaning, godly men who were trying to make a dent in this but didn't know what they didn't know. And so that first book, I really wrote for male leaders, particularly, to be like, "Hey, I get it. I get why you're stuck. I've read all the same books you have. I grew up in the same culture you have. I, in fact, hold the same biases against women that you did. That was one of the biggest aha for me when I started researching this, is how many biases I have against women and I have against myself. And so let's talk about these together. Let's talk about how we make assumptions. Let's talk about how we overlook people when we're hiring for jobs. Let's talk about how the way we advertise for volunteer leadership roles really don't appeal to women the way they appeal to men. Let's talk about how we discriminate or give feedback incorrectly to women. We do all of these things without knowing it. We're unaware of it. In fact, most of these practices and habits were handed down to us. We were modeled in them, we were mentored in them, we were specifically taught to do things this way. So it's not really our fault that we're stuck in this topic, but it is our responsibility. If we are in leadership, it is our responsibility to do better than the generations before us. And so this book was really my attempt, especially as a female who's been in leadership long time to say, I can actually kind of see both sides of this equation. I get where guys are coming from. I understand their logic. I probably would be making the same decisions, except I also am a female leader who understands what it's like to hear certain messages your whole life or to say this phrase, which means this to me, but means that to you. And so let me help connect the dots of when she says, gosh, my plate is too full. She's not saying my kids are too much and I want to be a mom, what she should be asking for is an assistant or a raise so she can hire a house cleaner or have someone manage her calendar. And a guy needs to understand that, that women are not trained to know how to advocate for themselves or they don't know what the options are like guys tend to. So I just wanted to connect the dots and be a little bit of a translator. And that's what developing female leaders book has is eight best practices for churches and leaders who want to do a better job with female leaders. So to answer your question then on the second book, as I started working with churches and coaching a lot of women leaders and coaching a lot of senior and executive pastors on their culture, we started finding, well, first of all, we saw so much movement. It was really remarkable, very encouraging. I just better than I ever imagined. I wasn't really sure what was going to happen, but I didn't expect there to be so much movement and welcome this to the message. But then women were stepping into leadership roles and kind of getting stuck. Like now that I'm at the table, I'm not sure I know what to do or I'm not sure I actually want this job or, "Man, this is harder than I thought." And so the second book was really written for women to be like, "Hey, now that you're here, "here's some new ways of thinking about it. "Here's some ways that you can find your leadership voice. "Here's some habits that you were probably taught "that you need to stop doing "if you're gonna show up at a leadership table." Leadership works different than volunteerism. It works different than support staff. You show up differently. You gotta be prepared in different ways and you gotta have a thicker skin. Here's your way to find those resources and those skill sets that will help you thrive in leadership.

We had a fantastic, long-tenured lady on our staff. She just recently moved off of staff to go be closer to her family. But she was probably one of our more pastoral pastors on staff. But she refused to allow us to call her pastor. And a big part of it was just the way she grew up. And she just respected and honored the culture that she grew up in and the church that she grew up in. And I remember a senior pastor in an executive leadership team, and she was on our executive leadership team, who finally just said, "Listen, if you don't want to be called a pastor, then he was kind of being flippant." He said, "Then stop pastoring, because you are one of our more effective pastors in the entire organization." And that was kind of the light, that, you know, the aha moment for her. And she finally submitted to that and said, "You know what? I'll go ahead and do that. But I want to learn how to do this well." And that put in motion some reading and some, you know, talking about it and just processing through some assumptions and some biases. She read your book. It was just a really beautiful kind of thing. But she had to push through a very natural and uncomfortable, unsettling thought that it just been kind of there and it wasn't a negative one. If you were a coach in that moment, what would you have done?

 Yeah, again, the title pastor is one of those theological boundaries for a lot of people. So let me talk about more the principle of someone stepping into a leadership role, whatever that is. If it's a title, if it's a position, if it's overseeing men and man, women don't do that, whatever the boundary happens to be when your church is giving you an an opportunity to step up and to step into something that fits within their theological framework. But man, I don't feel comfortable or I've never seen this before or I was taught something different. I think one of the most important things for leaders to remember when working with women in their own leadership development is that many of the biases we have or the things that hold us back aren't logical. They don't necessarily make sense. And so it's not a logical conversation. You have to get to the root of where is this really coming from? for most women, especially the kind of women you would want to be calling into leadership in today's day and age. These are seasoned women. They are mature women. This isn't some 19 year old who feels like she's going to take the world by storm. You know, these are women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, even 60s who have proven themselves in leadership and in the faith. And you're looking at them and you're like, you have more to offer the kingdom and our local church or our organization than what you're doing right now. Let me elevate you and she's like, "No, I'm uncomfortable with that." There's something behind that. She grew up in a space, in fact, most, I would say even in more progressive churches, but women who are 45 and older mostly grew up with messages very different than what men grew up with. So most guys, especially if you grew up in church at all, you were talked about as a leader from a very early age. I remember taking my five-year-old to church and the senior pastor stopped, you know, got down on knee, looked looked him in nine and said, young man, you're going to be such an amazing leader in your family and in the kingdom. I just know God's got his hand on you. This is my five year old. He's got a Superman cape on that he wore to church. Like there's no leadership being exuded in this kid other than he was a male. That's the only thing he had that showed any leadership at this point. As women, we are often told as we're growing up, first of all, almost no one looks at us in the eye and calls us a leader, almost no one. Most of the time our leadership, giftings and natural abilities are actually critiqued and criticized and labeled as sin in church, particularly in women's circles. And so women are supposed to have gentle, quiet spirits. What leader do you know with a gentle, quiet spirit at the age of eight? None. Who has a gentle, quiet spirit at 12 when you're a leader? You're the big bossy one, especially as a female. overorganized, lots of ideas moving fast. That's what leaders look like in maturity. But for women, we don't look at women, young women, and say, gosh, she's got so much vigor. She's got so much energy. She's got so much passion. Can't wait to see her really bring that to the kingdom one day. We look at her and say, ooh, that girl's too big for her britches. She's bossy. She needs to know her place. She actually needs to quiet her voice. And so that's why when you hear our culture talking about women finding their voice. We're literally saying we used to tell you to be quiet and now we want you to speak up. That is a big mental shift for women and they need their pastors to help walk them through. Just like you guys did with this woman, let me show you a biblical reason why you should be doing that because we know the Bible has been used to tell you to be quiet. Now I wanna show you how the Bible actually wants you to speak up. You are a leader. These are your spiritual gifts. Let me show you people in the Bible who have the same spiritual gifts you are. you can model your life after them. When I was growing up, the only two sermons I ever heard about women were to be a mom or to be a prostitute. I thought those were the only options and I knew which one was right. So, you know. (laughs) And so most women don't realize how many female leaders are in scripture. You have the chance to connect the dots for her and to help her see herself in scripture, help her understand how God has gifted her and help give her freedom and permission to use her gift the way it was designed to be used.

This is a struggle that I think we applied to the human condition, men and women. Right? So, for example, I grew up in a construction family. I kind of stumbled my way into ministry, never received a seminary degree, and for most of my ministry life, always felt like I was less than because I never had that seminary degree. Fast forward several years, and I'm invited down to be an executive pastor of a large church. For most of my tenure there, one of my like shadow struggles that I always submitted to the Lord was, "I'm not really qualified to be here. I shouldn't be here. I don't have the education. I don't have the pedigree. I don't have the fill in the blank." And so there was an insecurity that was there that I continually had to submit to God so that he could stand up in me and help me realize the better and best version of myself as I was created in him. And so these assumptions, these biases are, I think are so common to the human condition. Of course, we're talking about women in leadership, but don't you think that these biases and assumptions can just be applied across the board? I mean, pick your topic.

You know, the big secret about leadership is that every leader is actually super insecure, and everyone struggles with the foster syndrome at some level. I mean, there are probably a small percentage that might have other issues that we would diagnose. But for the most part, everyone's got something. I think the challenge around gender, it's the same challenge around race, is that seminary is one of those things you could actually fix if you wanted to. You could go to school and get that degree. I can't unchange myself to what, well, I guess I could. I guess our society has changed enough. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to trust the Lord gave me the gender I'm supposed to have. And in the cultures we grew up in, it's so pronounced, particularly around gender. And the challenge is in the church, it's the only place that gender is really separated out to the extent that it is still. The marketplace is different. Schools are different. When my mom was growing up, they had women's PE class and men's PE class. There was separation around gender in math classes for her. So her whole world operated this way. Church was just one of them. For most people growing up now, Jen X and younger, that has been fully integrated in all places except the church. And so it's confusing for women who can teach in colleges and run big businesses and oversee men in the workplace. But when they go to church, they have a completely different set of rules. They have to camouflage themselves. They have to show up really differently. They have to hyper live into mommy-hood or being a wife. Single women have it doubly hard because you have a double bias against you in most church spaces. But in other areas, those are actually celebrated and welcomed as ways to have more contribution. So we have a lot of things in churches that sort of keep us stuck a little bit in reaching all people and utilizing all people's gift in this the way God intended them. genders, one of them, but we've got a lot of a lot of spaces where we can really grow in advance in that area.

That's a fantastic point, Katie. I appreciate you highlighting that. So let me tie together. Let's talk about biblical literacy. I know that, you know, in Miami, one of our big, big issues within a rather polarized political climate was the issue of ethnicity and inclusion and multicultural reconciliation, more than just diversity, reconciliation. So we were one of the big "aha" moments that we had during that struggle was, what does the Bible really say about it? And as we were asking that question, we were realizing, "Wow, we're rather biblically illiterate on that particular topic." So let's talk about our literacy when it comes to gender equality in ministry. Because it's a brilliant point. You go to Coca-Cola or you go to Apple, you go to any of these companies and that's just not as much of an issue. I think it's still an issue, but it's just not as much of an issue, but you go into the church and it's just very, very different as you say. So what do you say to those of us who are biblically illiterate leading these churches?

Well, I think the great news is you can become biblically illiterate on this. And again, there's, I don't have an agenda in terms of what your theology should be. I just care that you figure out what it is and that it's based on what you believe the Bible says. And so there's a lot of great resources about it. I encourage people to read from all perspectives, especially if you are unsure of it or particularly if you grew up in a really strong camp one way or another. I really encourage you to read some other authors and just at least understand the bigger dialogue before you land on a certain statement so that you're making sure what you believe is really what you believe even you can defend it against all of those other resources. I think the other piece in terms of implementation is part of the reason you have to have a really strong biblical foundation for this belief, not only because it's the right thing to do as a spiritual leader, but there are people in your congregation, particularly women who are going have a hard time with whatever clarity you bring to this topic. Most male pastors are shocked that their biggest resistance to giving more leadership to women is from older women in the church. Most pastors get up and they're like, "We've got great news. We're going to open up small group leadership to women, or we're going to name women pastors, or we're going to hire women on to staff in these kinds of roles." And they're expecting a standing ovation from all the women in the congregation. And instead, they get emails and they get called into coffees and they have a bunch of disgruntled women who are very concerned about this. And it usually throws them unless you stop and think about it for a second. Like these are women who probably have strong leadership gifts, right? Because leaders speak up when they think something is going wrong. And so the women who are speaking up are probably leaders at some level with some combination of leadership-based gifting. And they have been told their entire life that they are not allowed to do what you are just celebrating women are getting to do. And I want to encourage you, if you have people in your church standing up wanting an explanation or throwing caution flags all over, that is a great sign of the spiritual maturity in your church. These are people who know God's Word, who take it seriously, who understand that part of their job in a congregation is to hold their pastoral team accountable to the biblical teachings being taught on the platform. That is a really great sign of committed believership in your church. And that should be fully embraced, not dismissed, not criticized, not made fun about. These are people, particularly women who have been sitting in some women's Bible study in your church for decades. You've been teaching them content that now you're saying is wrong. They deserve an explanation for that. And so I encourage pastors to always lead with Scripture and sit down and say, "Hey, this may be where we were, or this may be where you grow up, or I understand your perspective because people disagree about this. Let me explain to you the process that we've undertaken to relook at this topic. Here are the passages we looked at and here are the books that we read. Here is the conclusion we came to. I'd love for you to take these resources yourself. Think, pray, read steady yourself and I am here to answer any questions. To be honest, it may be that we agree to disagree, but I also want you to know that I love you and that we want more for you and more from you in this church also. You're a part of this. And that conversation changes the dynamic. But these women who have been told they are sinful for being in charge or being on the platform or holding a microphone deserve the respect to understand why you're changing theologies on them and to give them a little time to catch up to it. 

That is so good, Katie. That is so good. I know that as we were addressing, you know, the multicultural inclusion or reconciliation. One of our women pastors, she was African-American too, she said, "Hey, when's the last time you read a book by someone of a different color?" And it was a really interesting conversation because we talk about one thing and we try to introduce one thing, but then we continually hand out resources that are written by white men. Not that those resources are bad. They're fantastic resources. But she just said, "Can we do that plus this?" And so she introduced a couple of authors to us, and we started reading some of those books. Same biblical principles coming at it from a different angle. It was brilliant. And so, of course, our staff had read through Katie Cole's books. And it was just really interesting, like sticky note leadership. Our staff went through and read that book. And there was so much gold with respect to development and just real practical ideas on how to step up your leadership game. It wasn't about women in leadership necessarily for our staff. It wasn't about men in leadership. It wasn't even about the differences between the two. They were just good solid hard core, but simple leadership principles that we could apply immediately this next week to whatever of our ministry context was. And so what that did was it kind of reinforced an idea that we wanted to have reinforced of women in leadership. We didn't even talk necessarily about women in leadership as we were going through that. We just talked through the leadership principles. So that was just a small example of what you were talking about there. Introduce it, broaden people's perspective. And from a biblical literacy too, part of what we would try to do is when we were doing a staff devotion, we would try to introduce topics, scriptural topics, that just highlighted some of these realities that go back to Jesus, go back to the Apostle Paul. These aren't ideas that were introduced in 1970. These are ideas that were introduced in Scripture. And these were God's ideas. These are God's ideas. So I love the way you're connecting dots there. You talk about the beauty of both men and women leading in their personality, in their makeup, in their giftedness together in concert, that you got to have both. This is not just about women and leadership. It's not just about men and leadership. It's about both the way God has designed us. Can you talk a little bit about that concert and how that concert should move forward in ministry?

The scripture I like to talk about when I think of how this could be or should be is John 17 where Jesus is at the end of his life. He's gone, you know, his whole ministry, he's done the upper room, he's gone through the Garden of Gethsemane, and now he's about to be taken away by the Roman soldiers. And the very last thing he does with his disciples is he prays out loud, and he prays for them, and he prays for the world, and then he prays for the disciples yet to come, and that's us. And, you know, I'm a church strategist. I, if I were Jesus looking into the future and seeing us and our culture and where the church was at and all that's happening. I could think of a lot of things to pray for. I'd pray for people of faith. I'd pray for resources. I'd pray for evangelists. I'd pray for renewal and revival. I mean, I would pray for a lot of things and Jesus doesn't pray for any of that. He prays for unity. He prays that we would be one as He and the Father are one. And He actually says that is how a lost world will know that He loves them and came to die for them is our oneness. And I think part of the challenge that we have found ourselves in is that our tendency to segregate from each other based on all sorts of different reasons. Gender and race and age, by the way, tend to be the three most popular, particularly in the church. And Jesus is saying, actually, we want you to come together and lead together. So I always remind people, like, I'm not interested in feminism. Like, I walk into Target Store and there's like a shirt that says the future is female. That is not the truth. First of all, that's not what Jesus tells us is going to happen. And matriarchy is just as bad as patriarchy. So either extreme is not what God calls us for. He really wants us to walk down that center middle where we lead together, where men and women lead together, where old and young lead together, and rich and poor lead together, and married and single lead together. It’s the unity, it's the togetherness that he vision casts and that he prays for for us. And if we look around at our world, it is actually the thing no one else is able to do without the power of the Holy Spirit. They keep talking about unity, but they're not unified either. But if we as the church could actually figure out how to do this, and I think women are the gateway opportunity, if we can't figure out as leaders how to expand our leadership practices and build cultures in our churches where men and women, women who are by the way the majority of the population of the church, 61% of the church are women, we know them, we love them, most of you are married to them, many of us are raising young women who are leaders. If we can't figure out how to expand our leadership spaces and tables to include women that we know and love and trust who we've known for decades, we are never going to be able to actually expand our leadership to include people of different races, different economic levels, different countries, different languages, which is the unity that Jesus really sees for us. And so that's why I think it's important that we get good at the gender issue because it's the gateway opportunity that opens the door to actual diversity and inclusion that our church has for hundreds of years not been good at.

What are you most excited about when it comes to women and leadership with respect to the future? 

I'm most excited about the movement I see from really stuck churches and organizations around this topic. But I think the real power is going to be in this next wave of not just young women, but also young men. I think the pendulum is swinging significantly as we move from this current generation to the up and coming generation of leaders. I'm actually refocusing my work on how to reach young men in leadership because I think your son actually needs to hear that message way more than your daughters do because there has been so much rally around young women from my generation. The generation that did get overlooked that have tried to find our voice and we know how hard it's been. And as we raise our daughters, we are gung-ho on that. There are so many organizations and leadership opportunities for young women right now, but young men are really getting left behind. And so I'm excited for young women who are growing up with brothers in the Lord and in their families for us to have a first generation of fully educated men and women leading together. That's our opportunity as long as we don't take it to the other extreme and exclude young men from the table, which I see happening. Most nonprofits are led exclusively by women. Most children's ministry and now youth ministries are led most exclusively by women. We have more women graduating from seminary and college than we do men. That goal is not for women to lead. The goal is for men and women to lead together. So it's our job as leaders right now to make sure we keep everything balanced. And we're putting people into leadership roles based on their gifting and their calling, not on their gender one way or another. 

That's really good. And then there might be another book idea there for you too. 

I'm working on it!

Men find your voice too. Haiti, how can people find you best? What's the best way to find you? 

I'm easy to find online. My website is my name. It's spelled K-A-D-I-C-O-L-E dot com, kadicole.com. All my books are on Amazon. You can find me on socials at kadicole. Send me an email, fill out something on the website. I'd love to connect and see if there's a way I can help you. 

Yeah, I'll also push her Instagram as well. I love your Instagram and some of the links. If you go to the bio, some of the links, there's just a whole host of resources that you can tap into as well. Katie, this thought just came to me. You are an advocate for the kingdom community advancing forward the way God has designed it. And I just love that about you. And so thanks for being on this particular podcast. We're humbled by that. And for the rest of you who are listening, thank you so much for joining us for this very special interview. But for now, from Katie and from myself, we'll say thanks so much. Keep doing what you're doing. See you next time.

You've been listening to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. Visit us at ElementalGroup.org for more great resources.