Each month, you’ll hear from one of us on what we’re reading and a little bit about the book. Enjoy!
I’ll never forget my college days as a young believer. I stumbled my way into a college ministry, and given the personal state I was in, I can’t overstate how much I needed that ministry in my life. I wasn’t new to the concepts of the Christian faith, but I was very new to actually implementing them in my daily life.
The good news for me is that God led me to not just any ministry, but a ministry whose forté was discipleship. The focus of everything revolved around two things: one, teaching students how to walk with God themselves, and two, equipping those same students to spiritually develop others around them, reproducing the process. This ministry took Jesus’ command to make disciples seriously, and from my freshman year onward, I learned how to do just that in the college environment. I even came on staff with that ministry in order to invest in women on the college campus—I wanted to give back what had been given to me.
Eventually, God called me out of that ministry and onto a new frontier in life. For me, that looked like working in the marketplace, serving in the local church, becoming a seminary student, getting married, and parenting little ones. And in the busyness of it all, I realized how impossible it was to disciple women the same way I used to on that college campus. After all, college isn’t the “real world,” as they say.
I was in the real world now, and my well-worn discipleship habits just weren’t transferring. The women around me had jobs, commitments, kids, church, friendships, and a million more things to juggle. And the truth is, I did too. The marginal time everyone had in college was now claimed by more important things, and I had no idea how to disciple women in this new phase of life.
We all know we’re supposed to be making disciples, but how? How in the world can we actually implement a plan that works in the lives of real women in the real world? Kandi Gallaty’s book Disciple Her seeks to answer that very question.
Though it certainly has some fun tidbits and laughable moments, the meat of this book is really a manual dedicated to giving women a tried-and-true action plan for discipling others. It belongs in the hands of the woman who’s saying, “Listen, I know this matters and I want to do it. Just show me how. Show me how I can do this in my weekly life.”
The reasons to trust the discipleship game plan in this book? First, it’s biblical, and second, it works. And not just on a theoretical level, but on a real-life church level. Kandi is a pastor’s wife, a mother of two boys, a speaker, and a writer. On top of this, she and her husband, Robby, lead Replicate Ministries, an initiative that educates, equips, and empowers believers to make disciples who make disciples. In other words, she’s a busy woman, too. Yet she commits to discipling others every single year. And more than simply her using this method, she and Robby have implemented the game plan churchwide at Long Hollow Baptist Church, where Robby serves as pastor. All across their church, women are using the method Kandi shares in the book, and it’s bearing incredible fruit.
Among many things, Kandi calls women to use God’s Word (Scripture), God’s Work (the ways he’s moved in your personal life), and God’s Wonder (the Holy Spirit) to disciple the women in their lives. Not only that, she offers a practical guide to help women weave these strategies into their daily lives, making discipleship a lifestyle instead of a program. She offers a Bible reading plan, a guide for how to help women get in the Word for themselves, tips on how and when to hold a discipleship group, how a D-group is different than the typical groups seen in modern churches, ways to implement Scripture memory in your group, ideas for meeting consistently, helpful solutions for difficult issues that come up in discipleship settings, equipping those in your group to eventually lead their own D-groups, and more.
Truth be told, this is the book I wish I had the moment I stepped out of student ministry. And if you’ve ever struggled to implement a discipleship strategy in your own life, it’s for you too.
Ashley Marivittori Gorman serves as the women’s publisher at B&H Publishing Group, an imprint of Lifeway Christian Resources. She is currently completing her MDiv from Southeastern Theological Seminary and has also been trained under The Charles Simeon Trust. Her passions are biblical literacy, discipleship, foster care, theology, and books. Ashley and her husband, Cole, live in Nashville, TN, with their daughter Charlie. You can follow her on Twitter or on Instagram.
