FCLP 32 | The 3 Biggest Mistakes Leaders Make with Spiritual Gifts

In this strategic leadership episode of the Female Church Leaders Podcast, Kadi Cole concludes the Spiritual Gifts Summer Series by highlighting three common mistakes that can unintentionally limit both people and ministry. Rather than simply filling roles, this episode reframes leadership as the intentional work of discovering, developing, and stewarding the gifts God has placed within His people.

You'll gain practical insight into how spiritual gifts differ from personality and talent, how to recognize gifts in unexpected people, and how small leadership shifts can create a culture where both people and the Kingdom flourish.

TIMESTAMPS

02:12 - The purpose of ministry: using ministry to build people, not just fill roles

02:35 - Leadership Mistake #1: Prioritizing personality assessments over spiritual gifts

03:56 - Leadership Mistake #2: Confusing natural talents with spiritual gifts

06:14 - Leadership Mistake #3: Overlooking spiritual gifts in unexpected people

09:35 - Practical action steps: discovering and developing spiritual gifts in yourself and your team

Resources mentioned:

The Spiritual Gifts Leadership Toolkit: kadicole.com/spiritualgifts

Next Steps and Resources:

• Take the Quiz: Identify your growth gap with our Sticky Floor Quiz at femalechurchleaders.com.
• Join a Cohort: Be part of our next Closing the Leadership Gap cohort for guided coaching and monthly Q&A with Kadi. Visit closingtheleadershipgap.com to learn more.
• Stay Connected: Follow us on Instagram @femalechurchleaders for daily encouragement and leadership tools.
• Spread the Word: If you found this episode helpful, please follow, rate, and share the podcast to help us reach more female church leaders.

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!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

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. Welcome to the final episode in our spiritual gifts series. When we started this topic, we weren't simply trying to help you discover your spiritual gifts. We were building towards something much bigger. Healthy churches aren't built by finding enough people to fill ministry roles. They're built by developing people into who God created them to become. And that shift changes how we see every conversation, every ministry need, every new believer, and every person who walks through our church doors. If volunteer conversations begin with, where can we use this person? Our natural focus is going to be on immediate needs. We recruit for openings, assign responsibilities, and solve this week's staffing challenges. And those things matter. Church programming has to happen. But our calling as church leaders isn't simply to organize and execute ministry, it's to develop people. As leaders, that perspective changes the questions we ask. So instead of simply asking who's going to cover this role, we begin asking, how is God developing this person? And how can I help them take their next step in that process? When we begin to think about that question, every ministry assignment becomes more than work to accomplish. It becomes an opportunity to help someone discover, develop, and faithfully steward the gifts God has placed within them. See, we don't use people to build ministry. We use ministry to build people. Let me say that again so you get it. We don't use people to build ministry. We use ministry to build people. And now that we have spent the last few weeks understanding the gifts listed in Scripture, I want to help you avoid the three biggest leadership mistakes that I see church leaders making most often. Okay, leadership mistake number one: treating personality assessments as more important than spiritual gifts. Now, don't misunderstand me. I love personality assessments. I like workplace assessments. I use them often because they're incredibly helpful for understanding ourselves, appreciating one another, and building healthier teams. But as followers of Jesus, we need to see ourselves in Scripture before we see ourselves in a personality assessment. Scripture teaches that every believer has received at least one spiritual gift, usually more. The Holy Spirit distributes those gifts according to his wisdom and for the good of the body. Every believer has a gift worth discovering, developing, and faithfully stewarding. Unlike personality or work style assessments that are kind of trendy today or might be helpful for a particular team, your spiritual gifts are part of God's design for your entire life. They go with you in every church, every ministry, every workplace, every relationship, every season. That's the discipleship purpose of spiritual gifts. And that's far more important than your strengths, your profile, your preference, or your quote, genius. As spiritual leaders, it's our job to help people recognize the spiritual gifts God has entrusted to them and then to create opportunities for those gifts to grow. Leadership mistake number two: confusing natural talents with spiritual gifts. I remember one of the first times I stopped taught on spiritual gifts at a church staff retreat. I'd been teaching this material for years as part of our discipleship pathway and to students at the Christian college where I worked, but I had never led pastors through the process before. Everyone took the assessment and then I sent them off for some personal time in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12. And I asked them to come back ready to share what God had shown them about their gifts and how those gifts work together on our team. Now, this was the worship and creative production team, a mix of highly creative people and deeply technical people. So I expected them to come back with some fun insights about what they appreciated about their teammates, mates who were different than them, along with ideas for how they wanted to work together more collaboratively and maybe even grow in their own giftedness. But one comment stopped me in my tracks. Our lead worship pastor, who has since become a really successful global worship leader and recording artist, he's so talented. He shared something God had shown him. He said that for the first time, he realized that music and singing aren't actually listed among the spiritual gifts in these two places in the New Testament. I'm not kidding you, the room grew quiet. He went on to confess that he'd spent years developing his musical talent, but God was reminding him that his greatest impact wouldn't come from his talent alone. It would come through his spiritual gifts. This was huge because our church valued excellence and worship, and rightly so. But musical ability was a wonderful gift from God, just as many other natural talents are. But we have to recognize that talents and spiritual gifts are not the same thing. And we, when we did that, we changed our focus and our attention moving forward. I watched this gifted young leader intentionally develop his spiritual gifts and how to express them through his God-given musical talent in all sorts of ways. And let me tell you, the result was not just excellent worship, it carried an anointing and spiritual impact that God used in powerful ways. It's not that natural abilities don't matter, they absolutely do. But when we intentionally develop our spiritual gifts alongside our talents, we create space for the Holy Spirit to do something supernatural. Okay. Leadership mistake number three: overlooking gifts in surprising packages. James walked into my office one day, looked at me completely bewildered, and said, How did you do it? I mean, I had no idea what he meant. But he said, somehow you've gotten my wife making cold calls, and she's happier and more fulfilled than I've ever seen her. I laughed because if you knew his wife, cold calling would have been the last thing you would expect her to be doing. But when I was leading our connections ministry, uh, she volunteered every other week at the welcome desk. She was quiet, preferred to stay kind of behind the scenes, and spent most of her time raising their two teenagers. Her husband was the well-known leader in the church. He led in men's groups, served as an elder, and naturally was in front. She had quietly assumed that she was just there to support him. But as I got to know her, I noticed something else inside her. She had an incredible heart for people. She loved to pray. She was always telling me about the people on her prayer list. And while it was easy to kind of see her as someone reserved, I felt like God was showing me that he really wanted to use her to care for people in deeply personal ways. Something our church was actually struggling to provide as we grew in size at the time. So at that moment, I was actually trying to build a follow-up ministry for first-time guests. So I asked her if she would come in a couple mornings each week and call new people to pray with them, encourage them, and help them take their next step in the ministry or however we could help them. Now, was this a stretch for her? Absolutely. In fact, it took me a couple of weeks to convince her. But praying with a person over the phone for someone who has a like a developing gift of intercession was a lot more natural step than asking her to stand up on a stage or lead a prayer in front of a bunch of people. And in that one-on-one prayer moments, she flourished. Her husband couldn't believe the transformation. I was thrilled with the results of the number of people who came back because of the ministry she had done on the phone with them. And honestly, that's the point. She began flourishing in her gifts because of what we saw in her, not because we were just trying to check some tasks off the list. So sometimes the package surprises us. Sometimes it even surprises the people who know them best. But our job is to look beyond personalities, your first impression, gender, age, assumptions, and ask how might the Holy Spirit want to work through this person? Because when we learn to recognize gifts in unexpected places, more people flourish and the whole church becomes stronger. So, as we close this series, one of your primary jobs as a leader this season is to help people under your care discover, develop, and faithfully steward the gifts God has entrusted to them. Don't let personality assessments become more important than scripture. Don't mistake talent for spiritual gifting. And don't overlook people because their gifts come in an unexpected person. Then remember that every gift has a shadow side, and you are in the best role possible to help someone see, lovingly see their weaknesses and bring them into submission under Christ. Healthy ministries intentionally create opportunities for people to keep learning, serving, receiving feedback, and to keep growing. That's how leaders build people, and that's how people build the kingdom. So your action step for this week is simple. Choose one intentional step and then schedule it. If you're new to spiritual gifts or just beginning your leadership journey, start with yourself. Become a student of the gifts God has given you. Begin noticing the strengths and weaknesses of your gifting and how you help or hinder other people. If you lead a ministry, choose one way to begin developing the people you already have on your team. Maybe you might have your entire team take the spiritual gifts assessment. You could spend 15 minutes once a month in your staff or volunteer meeting discussing the gifts from the leadership toolkit, or simply start asking one new question. Who could grow through this opportunity instead of just asking who can fill this role? And if you lead at a high level or you're in a role that influences the leadership culture of your church, pick one system to improve in your church body this year. Maybe it's adding spiritual gifts to your volunteer onboarding system. Maybe it's rewriting ministry descriptions around gifts instead of just tasks and responsibilities. Maybe it's creating an annual workshop where people discover and develop their gifts in a deep way. You don't have to change everything this year, but please choose one system that, if you just moved it forward a couple steps, would help your church become more intentional of developing people and experiencing the fruit of people operating in their giftedness. Whatever you choose, don't leave it simply as good intention. Put this goal on your calendar. Schedule the staff meeting, block the workshop date, identify the resource you're going to read about your gift, send the assessment, do the leadership move that moves you forward. Leadership culture doesn't change because we have good ideas, it changes because leaders consistently act on those ideas. Paul reminds us in Ephesians 4 that Christ gave leaders to the church to equip his people for works of service so that the whole body of Christ might be built up. That's the calling we've been talking about through this entire series on spiritual gifts. Now, if you're looking for practical tools to help you implement what we've talked about over the last few weeks, I want to encourage you one last time to download the Spiritual Gifts Leadership Toolkit. It is full of so much great information, uh, gift descriptions, discussion guides, leadership tools, practical resources, things you can use with your actual team. You're welcome to use it however it helps you. I give you full permission to copy it, teach from it, use it, how it will help you and your team faithfully steward the gifts God has brought you. As we wrap up, thank you for joining me throughout this series. It has been so fun to hear from so many of you about how this is helping your leadership and challenging you to grow. Always feel free to shoot me an email or DM and let me know what's been most helpful or what topics you would like to hear about in future episodes. Thank you for continuing to serve on the front line of local church. Please know that I am praying for you as you continue investing in the people God has entrusted to your care. Lead with wisdom, lead with skill, and continue developing the people who will faithfully carry the mission of Christ for generations to come. And remember, we're always here to cheer you on every step of the way. 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.