If you gather a group of local church women’s ministry leaders and ask them to identify an ongoing ministry challenge, the majority will most likely say discipling women. Making disciples is part of Jesus’s Great Commission (Mt 28:19-20) and the apostle Paul noted the need for spiritually mature women to disciple less spiritually mature women to have a healthy church (Titus 1-2). The two-fold goal of discipleship is to help women grow in their walk with the Lord while transformation into Christlikeness occurs. What steps can ministry leaders take to disciple women well?
Pray
Seeking the Lord’s face for His direction and purposes is crucial for ministry leaders. Pray and ask the Lord to show you the women in your church who have a healthy and consistent walk with Jesus. As He reveals the names of those ladies, pray for and with them as you ask if they would be willing to disciple a younger woman.
Plan
Spend time prayerfully planning what women’s discipleship will look like in your church. How does women’s discipleship fit in the overall mission, vision, and purpose of the church? Will women meet one-on-one, in trios, or in larger groups? Will a curriculum be used alongside the Bible? How long will formal discipleship groups last? When and where will the groups meet? Are there expectations? How will women connect? How will the groups multiply for continuous discipleship? These are some of the details to determine in the planning process. Planning a strategy helps everyone know the expectations for the short-term and the long-range hopes moving forward.
Prepare
Equip the women in your church with the tools to disciple another woman. Often women do not know where to begin when they are asked to disciple someone else. Providing training for what a time of Bible study and prayer might look like is helpful for those who do not know where to begin. Framing a structure for how to study Scripture together, questions to ask, and assurances they do not have to know it all are important areas for equipping.
Pull off
After praying, planning, and preparing, you are now at the stage where discipleship groups begin to meet. Ministry leaders should check in with those who are discipling to see how things are progressing and ask how the discipler is growing in her own walk with the Lord. As women engage in discipling another woman, they are not only fulfilling Jesus’s last command to His church to go and make disciples, but also actively engaged in taking the things entrusted to them and investing them in the next generation for lasting Kingdom impact (2 Tim. 2:2).
