Rev. Kathleen McShane is Director of Leadership Ministry for the Texas Methodist Foundation. Kathi retired in 2022 from active ministry as an ordained Elder in the California-Nevada Conference of The United Methodist Church, where she led four congregations and served for eight years as Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Pacific School of Religion. Before attending seminary and beginning her life in ministry, she was a civil litigator, practicing law in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As she led a large church in Los Altos (Silicon Valley), California, Kathi co-founded the Changemaker Initiative, which is now a small national movement of churches committed to empowering laypeople to become compassion-driven changemakers like Jesus. That work has led her toward multiple projects that are reimagining leadership for the church of the future. She is the coauthor, with Rabbi Elan Babchuck, of Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership after Empire (Fortress Press, January 2024).
Kathi lives on a vineyard on the Central Coast of California.