The Female Church Leaders Podcast with Kadi Cole offers practical tools and biblical insight for women leading in the local church. Each week, Kadi shares real stories, leadership strategies, and spiritual encouragement to help you grow in confidence, sharpen your skills, and lead with clarity. Whether you’re on staff, volunteering, building a ministry, or stepping into new levels of leadership, you’ll find wisdom, hope, and a community of female church leaders who get it - and are cheering you on!
FCLP 29 | Why People Can Attend for Years and Still Feel Unknown (Spiritual Gifts: Mercy & Shepherding)
•Kadi Cole•Season 1•Episode 29
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In this thoughtful leadership episode of the Female Church Leaders Podcast, Kadi Cole explores two spiritual gifts that quietly shape the health of every ministry: Mercy and Shepherding. While these gifts often work behind the scenes, they play a vital role in helping people feel seen, cared for, connected, and supported over time.
This episode helps female church leaders recognize the difference between caring for tasks and caring for people. You'll learn how to identify these gifts on your team, why they are often undervalued, and how developing them can strengthen discipleship, belonging, and long-term ministry health.
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Tune in and get ready to lead with clarity, strength, and joy. Your calling matters, and we're here to support you every step of the way!
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Welcome to the Female Church Leaders Podcast, a weekly resource for women who love God, love the church, and are called to lead. I'm your host, Katie Cole, Church Leader, Autor, and Executive Coach. After more than 30 years in full-time ministry, Open as the only woman at the table, I understand how meaningful yet challenging your calling can be. That's why I created this podcast to remind you that you're not leading alone. Each week, I'll share practical tools, biblical insights, and honest encouragement for the real challenges female leaders face in ministry. So you can grow your skills, strengthen your faith, and lead with more confidence and joy without burning out or striving to prove yourself. We drop a new episode every Monday because Sunday is coming and you are going to be ready for it.
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One of the easiest ways to tell what a ministry values is to look at what gets noticed, what gets celebrated, what gets measured, what gets resourced. Over time, every ministry develops a culture that reinforces those priorities. And sometimes that culture can accidentally overlook some of the very gifts holding everything together. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome. We're in the middle of a summer series on spiritual gifts, not just understanding the gifts and how they apply to ourselves, but how we as leaders can develop those gifts in the people God has brought to our church and onto our teams. Today we're talking about two gifts that often work quietly in the background, but have enormous influence on the health of a church, a ministry, and a team. One is the gift of mercy, and the second is the gift of pastor or shepherd. One notices pain, the other notices people. One moves towards those who are hurting, the other stays with people over time and helps them grow. And when these gifts are missing, ministries often become busy, productive, and active while people quietly begin to feel unseen and eventually slip away. That we do not want in our ministries. So let's take a closer look at each of these gifts. Let's start with the spiritual gift of mercy. Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone was focused on solving the problem, but one person in the room was focused on the person experiencing the problem? That's often the gift of mercy showing up. People with this gift have a spirit-given sensitivity to emotional and spiritual pain. They often notice hurting people long before anyone else does. Sometimes they can sense that something is wrong before a person has even said it out loud. And when they recognize pain, their instinct is not to move away from it, it's actually to move toward it. One of the reasons I love this gift is that it reflects something we see over and over again in the life and the heart of Jesus. People were constantly bringing him needs, problems, illnesses, questions, and interruptions. And yet again and again, scripture says he was moved with compassion. He noticed people, not just outcomes, not just problems, but people. That's what mercy does. People with this gift help others feel seen, known, cared for, and supported in difficult seasons. They create safe spaces for honesty. They often have a unique ability to sit with someone in pain without immediately trying to fix them. And if we're honest, that's not always easy for those of us who are leaders. Most leaders are wired to solve, to move, to improve, to take action. Mercy reminds us that sometimes people need presence before they need solutions. One of the challenges with this gift is that it can often be easy to underestimate its value because the results aren't always as measurable. A mercy ministry rarely shows up at the top of a ministry dashboard. It's difficult to quantify. You can't always track compassion on a spreadsheet. But in my experience, in working with churches all over the country, ministries shaped by mercy often become the glue that holds a church body together. They are often the people serving Monday through Saturday, following up, checking in, sitting with someone through grief, walking alongside a struggling family, helping people carry burdens during difficult seasons. When mercy is healthy and active in a church, people tend to experience something powerful. They don't feel alone. And that matters more than most leaders realize. In our leadership toolkit, the profile points out that one sign you're missing this gift from your team is when struggling people begin falling through the cracks. Care becomes reactive instead of intentional, and ministry feels efficient, but not necessarily compassionate. That is a leadership insight worth paying attention to because sometimes what looks like a staffing issue is actually a gifting issue. The answer may not be another program or two more staff members. The answer may be identifying and developing the people on your team or in your church who already carry this gift and giving them a way to express it. Of course, mercy has challenges just like every other gift. You have to watch out for it because people with this gift can often carry emotional weight that others never see. They can absorb burdens rather than simply holding space for them. They can overextend themselves or feel responsible for a situation they cannot control. Which is why one of the most important things a leader can provide to someone with this gift is support, clear boundary lines, especially for ministry, and permission to care deeply without caring everything personally. Mercy is not weakness, it's not overreacting, and it's not simply being emotional. It is one of the clearest expressions of God's compassion within the body of Christ. Now, let's talk about the gift of pastor or shepherd. And before we jump in, I want to make one quick distinction. We are talking about the spiritual gift of shepherding, not the church title or the office of pastor. Churches hold different theological views about church leadership roles, especially for women, but this gift profile is focused on the spiritual anointing and capacity to care for, guide, protect, and help people grow spiritually over time. That's a gift we see expressed through many different people across the body of Christ and all throughout scripture. One of the reasons I love the biblical imagery of a shepherd is because it tells us so much about the heart of this gift. A shepherd didn't simply point sheep in the right direction and hope for the best. Shepherds lived among the sheep. They knew them. They noticed when one wandered away, they protected them from danger. They guided them toward what would help them thrive. And when one went missing, they noticed. That's why shepherd imagery appears all throughout scripture. And it's why Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, because shepherding is deeply personal. It's relational, it's attentive, it's committed. People with this gift tend to relate to others with a similar posture. They don't simply care about people in the moment. They stay connected with them personally. They check in, they remember, they follow up. They notice when someone has been missing for three weeks. They remember the difficult conversation from six months ago. They know who is struggling, who is growing, who is discouraged, and who needs a little extra support right now. One of the things leaders often misunderstand about this gift is that they mistake it for simply being relational. That's not this gift. People with the gift of shepherding aren't merely nice people who enjoy relationships and are extroverted. They are exercising a form of spiritual leadership. In fact, one of the primary ways this gift builds up the church is by helping people feel known, loved, cared for, protected, and guided towards spiritual growth over time. Notice that growth is a part of the picture, but it's not the entire picture. Just like a healthy parent wants their child to learn, mature, and develop, they also recognize that sometimes the most important need in a given moment isn't growth. It's care or protection or support or guidance or even a laugh. Shepherds have a remarkable ability to notice what people need most right now while still keeping an eye on who they are becoming in the future. That is a unique leadership gift. And in many churches, it's easy to underestimate because what shepherds do often happens one conversation at a time. One phone call, one coffee meeting, one follow-up text, one difficult season, one relationship. Over time, however, those moments become discipleship. And discipleship is transformative. One sign that you're missing this gift is if people feel disconnected, follow-up becomes inconsistent, discipleship feels shallow, or individuals quietly fall through the cracks over time. You might notice this happening, or you may have someone tell you it's happening, which never feels good. But as a leader, you have to pay attention to it and diagnose the issue correctly. It's probably not simply a communication problem or a systems problem or a vision problem or a volunteer problem. What we're actually missing is enough people who feel genuine ownership for the care and spiritual development of others. One of the reasons this gift matters so much is because healthy ministries need people who are constantly asking who is responsible for caring for these people? Who is helping them grow? Who notices if they disappear? Who follows up when life gets difficult? Who knows their story? Those questions don't always get asked naturally by every leader, but shepherds ask them instinctively. Of course, just like mercy, this gift has growth areas that you have to watch out for. Shepherds also can feel overly responsible for people. They can struggle to release relationships. They may carry burdens that don't actually belong to them or prioritize individual needs in ways that make it harder to keep your eye on the bigger picture. That's why leaders need to help shepherds on their teams develop healthy boundaries and share the responsibility of caring with the rest of the body. Not because we want people to be cared for less, but because we want them to offer care in a way that's sustainable for all of us, including them. Because when this gift is healthy, people feel known, they feel protected, and they feel connected. And they have someone outside of our formal programming helping them move toward Christ over the long haul in a personal, relational way. So here's your action step. This week, think about one person that shows each of these giftings. First, who on your team consistently notices people who are hurting? Who moves toward pain rather than away from it? Who seems to create safety, compassion, and care wherever they serve? How could you create more opportunities for that person to express the gift God has already placed in them? And then take a minute and think about the gift of shepherding. Who notices when people are missing? Who naturally follows up? Who takes responsibility for helping people stay connected and continuing to grow? How could you give them greater ownership for people, not just assign them tasks? The Mercy and Shepherd profiles in our Spiritual Gifts Leadership Toolkit can help you identify the fruits of these gifts more clearly and give you practical ways to develop them in the people you lead. You can find a link in the show notes, or you can download it at www.hadycole.com forward slash spiritual gifts. The people who help hurting people feel seen and the people who quietly care for others over time are often doing some of the most important work in your ministry. Learning to recognize them, learning to develop them can not only make your load easier, but it will strengthen the effectiveness of your ministry to all the people you serve. And remember, we are here cheering you on every step of the way.
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I'm so glad we got to spend this time together on the Female Church Leaders podcast. I hope you're walking away encouraged, equipped, and reminded that your calling truly matters. To keep growing, join us for our next Closing the Leadership Gap cohort at ClosingTheLeadershipGap.com. It's a guided coaching experience, including live QA with me, designed to accelerate your leadership journey. If this podcast has been helpful to you, would you please take a moment to follow, rate, and share it? Your engagement helps the algorithms suggest our resources to female church leaders we haven't had a chance to meet yet. And don't forget to follow at female church leaders on Instagram for encouragement and leadership tools designed just for you. You can also follow my personal feed at Katie Cole spelled K A D I C O L E. Keep leading faithfully, keep growing your leadership gifts, and I'll see you next Monday because Sunday is coming and you are going to be ready for it.
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