Book Review: Developing Female Leaders by Kadi Cole
Rating: 3.5 stars of 5
Developing Female Leaders is largely positioned as a resource for male church leaders who want to be able to help women flourish in positions of leadership in their churches. Whether the reader’s own faith community offers women full freedom in all kinds of leadership roles or restricts women to certain types of roles, they will be able to find value and practical information to help them accomplish this goal in ways that align with their values.
There were some things I especially appreciated about the book:
I liked that Kadi shares real statistics and frequently mentions good quality (cited) studies as she presents her information.
She advocates for assigning roles based on individual giftedness, not just gender.
She emphasizes the importance of knowing where your church’s line is and then making it clear through practice and rhetoric so that where you want women to flourish in your community, that can actually happen. (She posits that most people assume the line is lower than it is and feel comfortable leading at a line even lower than that, which can lead to discrepancies between what is actually happening within the community and what leadership wants to facilitate.)
She differentiates between the gift of administration and the ability to complete administrative tasks.
She acknowledges the tension and disempowerment that is created when we relegate women to certain types of ministries and events that may not address their spiritual needs.
She offers practical steps church leaders can take to ensure that they are mentoring women in leadership roles with integrity and intention.
While I think that the book is largely helpful, there were also some things that I took issue with:
She makes some inaccurate statements throughout, usually when she is trying to play both sides of an issue and ends up misrepresenting one or both by doing so.
There are a few statements that feel more like gatekeeping than advocating for the creation of a safe space for women to practice exercising their gifts.
There is a brief, minor instance of problematic language.
There are times when she is trying so hard to stay in the middle of the complementarian vs. egalitarian road and present an unbiased approach to the discussion that it can end up not being very helpful. Because her goal is not to take a theological stance and convince the reader to join her in it but to instead encourage leaders wherever they have landed, I can understand her choice to present the broader spectrum so people can take steps from wherever they are in ways that align with their values. However, there were times when it felt like by doing this, she was empowering people to keep oppressing women who have clear, God-given callings of their own, and that felt frustrating.
Overall, the book does offer value and is worth reading, but if she had just taken it a bit farther and done a bit more research so she could have more accurately represented the different groups she was describing, it would have been a lot better.
You can support this blog by purchasing your own copy of the book on
Amazon, Bookshop, or Christian Book through one of these links.