
You’re a person who loves the material that The Disciple-Making Parent produces, but how do you help others catch the vision? What can you do to help others pass the gospel to their children and keep them from becoming spiritual casualties?
In today’s episode, Guy Wilcox, a youth pastor out of Fayetteville, Arkansas, gets very specific about how he used the book, The Disciple-Making Parent to equip the parents in his large church.
—–
We want to help you raise strong disciples of Jesus Christ, who can stand strong in today’s culture, and you can get the audiobook of the Disciple Making Parent absolutely free.
Simply visit: http://www.thedisciplemakingparent.com/freeaudiobook/
Resources From This Podcast
Tabletalk Magazine
True Friendship by Vaughan Roberts
Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
This Changes Everything: How the Gospel Transforms the Teen Years, by Jaquelle Crowe
Core Seminars from Capitol Hill Baptist
Holiness, by J.C. Ryle
The Gospel Project
Episode Transcript
I’m Chap Bettis, and you’re listening to The Disciple-Making Parent, where we seek to equip parents and churches to pass the gospel to their children. You’re a person who loves the material that our ministry produces, but how do you help others catch the vision? What can you do to help others pass the gospel to their children and keep them from becoming spiritual casualties?
Hi, my name is Chap Bettis and I’m the author of The Disciple-Making Parent, and I so appreciate the audience that our ministry has. I often hear, and would love to continue to hear, about how the Lord has used this material to transform your family. And anytime you’re excited about something, you want to pass it on. You want to tell others. You want others to take their divine responsibility seriously. After all, with the antagonism of the culture, we’re in a battle. But maybe you don’t know how to share this with others. Well, then, this podcast is for you. In it Guy Wilcox, a youth pastor out of Fayetteville, Arkansas, gets very specific about how he used the book, The Disciple-Making Parent to equip the parents in his large church.
For example, just one time recently he had three groups with 21 folks going through it, and four leaders. So he knows what he’s talking about. I asked him to share how he helps parents, and we recorded this interview over a Zoom call with family pastors. But I thought the material was so good that I wanted to share it with you all.
Guy is a graduate of Southern Seminary and served as youth and music pastoral assistant at University Baptist Church for many years. He and his wife Carolyn, now live in Joplin, Missouri with their five children.
Well, if you’re a parent or church leader, I think you’re going to be helped by Guy’s encouragement and practical wisdom. But before we start though, I want to remind you that we give away the audiobook of The Disciple-Making Parent absolutely free. We are on a mission to equip parents to pass the gospel to their children. The Disciple-Making Parent is the centerpiece of our ministry, and it’s been endorsed by Al Moeller and Tim Challies, among others. You can have the audiobook for free. Just simply visit thedisciplemakingparent.com/freeaudiobook. But for now, let’s think about how you can use The Disciple-Making Parent to equip parents in your church.
Chap: Guy, let’s start first by just hearing a little bit about your background.
Guy: Yeah. I’m Guy Wilcox. I was born and raised in Joplin, Missouri, which is about an hour and 15 minutes north of here. The story literally was, two kids beat a kid to death with a baseball bat in front of our house when I was two. And my mom said, “I’m not going to raise you in that environment. I’m going to raise you in the church.” And so from then on, we went every Sunday. I mean, she was my Sunday school teacher. She drove the bus. She’s just a rockstar. She’s the 66-year-old lady that every single small church on planet Earth wants to have to help in all the ways that no one else wants to.
Went to a Christian school growing up, blessed by that. Became a believer around seven. Understood that I was a sinner and my only hope was Christ and what he had done on the cross, not what I could do, but really from then on was not discipled by my church or really in family. It was very much that we went on Sundays and we didn’t really talk about it a whole lot during the week.
Went to the University of Arkansas, graduated in 2009 with a degree in music in marketing. Immediately church asked me if I would come lead the music for them. So I was part-time at that church as a 22-year-old doing music for three years, and then they brought me on full-time after that. Went from there to First Baptist Church in Bentonville, Arkansas. I did music there for two and a half years, and then I came to University Baptist Church in Fayetteville. So all in the same area. I’ve been here for six and a half years doing student ministry and music.
The first time I ever saw discipling done by a family or especially a father was my in-laws, who did not grow up in Christian homes and had really never seen it done, but decided they were going to raise their family different than how they grew up. And they were believers and they literally used Table Talk magazine at the table, you know, to disciple their kids. Had five kids. First time I ever saw it was when I went home to visit them and to meet them, and my wife has four siblings. And they brought all their kids in and all the whole family knew the same songs. They all sat down and listened to the Bible be read, and they all answered questions from it. And I was just shocked because I’d never seen that. And that was after I’d been on staff at a church for four years already. And so I saw that and I was like, This is what it’s supposed to be. It’s not rigid, it’s not . . . The kids just don’t expect anything else when they get together at Mimi and Pop Pop’s house.
So, praise God my wife’s siblings are believers. Now, that’s not a foolproof formula in that proverb, but it’s a principle. And they lived out the principle, even though they didn’t know what it looked like when they got married and when they became believers. They sought out how are we going to raise our kids in a Christian home, and how are we going to disciple them? And they did it.
Chap: Oh man, Guy, that is so encouraging. Well, let’s start by asking the question, How did you find out about The Disciple-Making Parent, and how are you using it in your church?
Guy: I don’t remember how I found it. Someone said that earlier. I don’t remember how I found it either, but I found the book and I read it, and I was like, This is great because it’s kind of a primer-like holistic approach. If you know what you’re doing, you can read this book and be helped by it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can read this book and be helped by it. And it covers a lot of different things in a practical nature that I think a lot of other parenting books cover one or two kind of topics. Chapters are short, it’s got questions at the end.
And so in particular what I looked for is what was something that is accessible to men. So we started using the book in book studies. So generally we would have two men’s studies and a women’s study. And one would meet in the morning- the men’s study- and one would meet in the evening, a different day, depending on when guys can do it. And then the moms’ was during youth on Wednesday night. So hopefully the dads can watch the younger kids.
But I would specifically ask people from different generations to be a part of the group. So I wanted people who were pregnant, wife was pregnant and had no kids yet, but really were interested in it and wanted to do it right, Parents who had kids in elementary school or preschool, people who had kids in high school, and then people who the kids were already gone.
I would put an invite out to the whole church to take part in these book studies, but I would specifically ask the types of people that I wanted to be in the group to help me lead the group in the questions and the answers. So you want older men to be training younger men. You want those older guys that say, “Don’t do it the way I did it,” or, “Yeah, we did it this way and it really worked” to pour into those younger guys. It develops relationships around things besides sports, besides the NFL. It’s a group of guys who have done this book study together and we know, listen, I know that Matt, he cares about his kids’ discipleship. So I know I can go to him and I can lean on him when things are hard and I can ask him questions and things like that. That’s how I approach the book study.
Chap: Let me just stop you. So just because you went really fast by that. I didn’t know that. So you tell the men/women thing. And then you threw it open to everybody.
Guy: Mm-hmm.
Chap: But then you specifically recruited different ages. Just say that just one more time.
Guy: I’m of the opinion that you don’t want to do these book studies- you can do them as a husband and wife couple. You’re going to get different answers, and you’re going to talk about different tough things. So a man is not going to talk about what’s struggling in the home, typically with his wife there, unless they’re in a private counseling session and things have hit the fan, you know, and this is the last straw. Then maybe they’ll open up and they’ll talk.
But what I’ve found is if you get a group of guys together, they’re willing to talk about the really hard things like, Man, I don’t know what to do. We’ve never even had dinner as a family. We live in a small apartment. We don’t have a table we eat in front of the TV every. And I don’t like it, but I don’t know any different and I don’t know how I’m going to lead us to not do that anymore. You know? Just, you know, struggles they’re having, really problematic children. Older men who feel like they failed and they’re willing now to admit it because they want to help guys not do that anymore. That was one thing that I found about being specific about who I invited to the groups, separating them by moms and dads.
It’s also a good way, if you’ve got single moms or single dads, they don’t feel left out or ostracized. And then specifically the times are helpful. So if you’ve got youth group and you’ve got children’s stuff on Wednesday nights, it’s a great time to do this. What I found was there was always conflict with being able to watch the kids. So if I could do these groups at two different times, depending on work schedule, I could get the most out of it.
Chap: You were about to say, so you do it how many weeks?
Guy: Yeah, 10 weeks. So I basically just took the sections that you have. I believe there’s 10. The first time I did it, I did two chapters at a time. That’s too little information and too long of a book study. So that, that worked great in, in putting it together. Yeah, you really do ask for commitment to do it. So yeah, some guys are going to start and they’re not going to finish. But what I did was, having the two different times. Some guys’ work schedule is flexible. So a guy could come on Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM sometimes, and then he could go on Thursday nights at 7:00 PM other days. And so they would just kind of, whatever they could do, they would make one of the studies.
And I didn’t lead all of them. I had an elder lead the evening study for men, and then I would find a lady in the church usually who’s older if we can, as in they’ve got high schoolers or the high schoolers have graduated. And then sometimes I would pair them with a young mom who’s got two-year-olds and is trying to do this. And I would say, “Hey, can you guys co-lead this class together?” Because they both bring, you know, different elements to the, to the study and questions and, and identity of struggles.
And of course the other thing you have that’s challenging is you’ve got parents and different generations dealing with different things in regarding technology. So that was one helpful thing of having different generations in the groups was being able to identify with different struggles and challenges.
Chap: Man, that’s really helpful insight into how you’ve implemented this, and your reasons why. Let’s zoom out just a little bit here. Tell us about your ministry at UBC and any insights you might have for other youth leaders or family pastors.
Guy: The ministry when I came here, like I said, the church had had pretty much convinced the congregation that they, it was their responsibility to disciple their kids. They didn’t really have a lot of tangible ways as to how to help parents do that. I think they had done some parenting conferences in the past and things like that. It was just taking the reins and trying to start something to help them. And you know, I’m not the golden boy or anything like that. So there were plenty of parents who were discipling their kids in the home. But youth ministry for example, I think the Bible was taught. There had been leadership in it. But one thing that I changed was I modeled what we did in student ministry after what we do in a Sunday evening service. Which is we get together, we hang out before, but it starts at six. At 6:10 we’re singing, then we’re hearing the sermon passage of the upcoming week.
And then briefly, just like 10 minutes or 5 minutes, we read through the passage and say, “Hey, what are some observations? What are some questions you have to prime the pump of the sermon coming up?” We would do some prayer requests and I would have specific kids pray for different schools that they were in and pray for their parents. That’s one thing as a student minister that I prioritize as I apply a lot of the message to their relationship with their parents. How they treat them, how they respect them, what it’s like to be a parent, you know, letting them in that we’re not just the boogey man trying to ruin their life.
And then we would have a 25 to 35-minute lesson. And on Wednesday nights we do topical. So we go through different, let’s see, I got a couple of them here. True Friendship by Vaughn Roberts. Things like this. We did Mere Christianity when I first came here. This is a great book by Jaquelle Crow, This Changes Everything. I used a lot of Capitol Hill Baptist Church’s core seminars which are free on their website, capbap.org, that they usually teach to adults. We’ve gone through why the church exists and what we are to do as the church. So that goes through why do we preach? Why do we have deacons? Why do we have elders? Why do we practice the Lord’s Supper? Why do we do baptism? Why do we. . . all these different things.
Because my goal was that when they went from student ministry to the regular adult ministry of the church, it wasn’t that big of a shift. It wasn’t like it was all fun and games and then the game stopped and now life stinks and we’ve got to go sit with the adults.
Everything that we pretty much do on a Wednesday night is everything that they do on a Sunday night service here and a lot of what we do on a Sunday morning service. And so there was no. . . I will say this, I think our responsibility in student ministry and children’s ministry is not just that the kids would be saved. That’s what we want. We share the gospel every time we teach. But it’s also to teach them that their life is going to be spent in a local church. And that’s the expectation for everyone who’s a Christian. Not just the Super Christians. So we talk a lot about What’s it gonna be like when you go to college? Well, look for this in a church. You need to always ask, why are we doing what we’re doing? Does it go along with the Bible? And praise God, the fruit of that has been that most of the kids that have graduated from high school in the last six years are members here or are members in a church somewhere.
It’s the opposite of the statistic of 10% or 5% or whatever that terrible statistic is that people always quote off about students when they leave a student mystery and go to college, we’ve found that it’s been the opposite because the expectation from the very beginning is if you’re a believer, you have to be a part of a local church and you cannot do the Christian life alone. And so therefore, if you choose to stay in this church, look around the room. If you choose to stay in this church for the rest of your life, these are the people you’re going to be living life with. And so learn to love one another, and learn how to be friends, and learn why the church exists and don’t just assume anything. Learn why we do what we do. And so therefore, wherever you go, you’re going to ask that same question of the church at Notre Dame that you find, of the church at in Cincinnati that you find: Why are they preaching what they’re preaching? What is the leadership like? How do they stay accountable to the church members in the body?
And so the other principle I have is we never treat student ministry students like they’re saved. So I try to specifically not say “We.” I’ll say “If you’re a believer” or “If you’re a Christian,” or “If you’ve turned from your sin and you’ve trusted in Christ.” I feel like a disservice we’ve done to a lot of student ministries and even children’s ministries is we always say, “Don’t we believe this?” “Oh yes, we do!” from the whole 15 kids in the class, when you know full good and well that half of them at least don’t. So I feel like what we’ve created is a bunch of kids that are really good at lying and have figured out what tag words to say and interests to give to make their parents happy until they’re 18 and can get out of it.
So those are just a couple of things that I’ve seen over the last six years that have by God’s grace. And you know, somebody told me when I first came, “If you do all this teaching and you don’t have a bunch of games and stuff, they’re not going to come there. They’re going to go to this other church in town where they have fun and do giveaways and all this other stuff.” A parent called me on the phone and told me that. No one’s going to come.
Well, it started small. It was 15 kids. By God’s grace, we have like 70 now on Wednesday night, every Wednesday night. And so now they’re inviting their friends because what I found is kids want meat. They want to be taught the truth. They want some structure and they can have games all day, all the whole rest of their life. And we have fun. We go on fall retreats. Our Wednesday night last night was at a church member’s house where we had hamburgers and hot dogs and we ate, and then we did the lesson and we did small groups and then we had games. And so you can do it where you don’t have to sacrifice content for fun.
And so that’s been kind of just a sweet realization that I’ve had over the years of saying, “Yeah, I recognize that kids want to have fun, but I think they need more than that. And they need to know God’s word and they need to be taught. Sunday mornings we teach the Bible systematically. So during their Sunday school class we’re going through books verse by verse. And then on Wednesday nights we specifically use it for topical teaching. On relationships, on the church, on friendship. . . We did Holiness by JC Ryle, where we taught through that. We’ll use a lot of those books kind of like quarterly, each chapter.
The last thing I’ll say is use your student ministry to train up young men for ministry. Give responsibility to guys that want to be pastors. We have a number of them here because we have a residency and we have a 28,000 student division one university literally a block away, the University of Arkansas. So I have a ton of volunteers. We have more volunteers than we need. Praise God. Just because there’s a lot of young people that are really willing and want to serve. I will say this, that you’ve got to guard that door really carefully. So you want to put people in leadership who you want the student to become.
But it’s a great way to see guys that were terrible at teaching that first time they taught, and I give them feedback. And I would give them another opportunity in another two weeks, and they use that feedback and they grow. If you can teach a fifth grader these things, then you can teach an adult these things. In fact, you’re probably going to be a way better preacher if you’ve learned to teach a fifth grader or sixth grader these deep truths as you grow up. But I do put pretty high standards on them. So for example, if a guy has been looking at pornography for the last six months, I’ll just say, “You’ve got to have at least moments of freedom from it. And I’m not going to put you in a leadership position if that’s a regular occurrence in your life.” And so you ask them hard questions. And we ask the female volunteers the same thing in an interview. I’ll have another female leader with me in those so it’s not just her and I. But you’ve got to guard that door really strictly and tightly to protect the kids anyway, and you want leaders that you want them to become. So those are just some highlights.
Chap: Well, let’s go back and talk about the book study. Can you share some of the positive fruit that you saw from doing this study with both the men and the women?
Guy: It’s gonna be really hard for your dads and moms that have high schoolers that feel like they’re not doing it. That being said, it’s still worth than doing it. Because even if your kid’s 18 and you feel like you. . . you’ve got the rest of their life to take steps as best as you can to be biblically faithful in your parenting. You don’t die when they leave the house to go to college or whatever, they move out. So therefore, okay, what can we do? Let’s talk about that. How can you have conversations with them? Purposeful conversations, even at the dinner table when they come back home. It is hard for them.
So, you know, I do student ministry, which is 5th through 12th grade at UBC. What I found was that student ministry is not just ministry to students. It’s ministry to parents and it’s ministry to parents of kids who are going to be in the student ministry. So a lot of times we think, Oh, the student minister is just supposed to deal with families from fifth up. Well, what I found was student ministry is the long game. Or if you want to call it family ministry. Many of you guys do family ministry if you’re handling the whole gamut.
Start when they’re pregnant. Get them into a book study and say, let’s start talking about this now, because by the time that kid gets to fifth grade, a lot of principles and habits have been set. And so what I tell guys is if you start reading the Bible to your kid before they’re born and you did that every night when they’re going to sleep, by the time they’re four, they’ll be upset when you don’t do it. So my kids, it’s almost like punishment when we take the word from them, which it should be.
They’re upset when they get out of their rhythm, whatever it might be. And your child is generally going to sit through the service better, they’re going to listen. They’re going to know how to listen to the word read. They’re going to listen to their devos. They’re going to know how to sit still, not always. But if you’ve set those that track up well, then by the time they’re in high school, it’s a total game changer on what they know. You can hope, prayerfully, that they would be saved by then. But at least there’s no question of what we’re going to do as a family, and what we really prioritize has been laid out and they’ve seen it their whole life, not just, you know, trying to pull it together at the end. So that’s some of the fruit I’ve seen in the young guys that have really stepped it up and said, “Listen, I didn’t have a dad who did this. I’ve never seen it.”
That’s most of us. We’ve come from a generation that basically said it was fine. You know, bring ’em to the church every time the doors are open and we’ll pop out these widgets that are great, and it just statistically didn’t happen. Well, I could go into a big history lesson as to why. This is from the industrial revolution. When people moved to town and they moved off the farm and dad wasn’t with the kids as much. He went off to work and he came home and he was tired and he didn’t want to deal with it, versus working side by side with him and being with him all day. There’s a whole list, a history of the lesson we could do with this. The bottom line is, is it the parent’s responsibility? And therefore, if it is, and not just a responsibility, it’s sinful to not teach your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Then what do I do about it?
Hey guys, we’re all imperfect. I didn’t grow up with this. I know I’m leading this group, but I haven’t figured it out. My kids are young still. I don’t have high schoolers, but we can all study what the word says. How we’re supposed to do it encourage one another to do it. Even say you have a grandparent that’s bringing their grandkids to church. That’s quite a few in our congregation. Parents don’t go, or sadly, one of their children died and they’re raising their grandkids or their kids are in jail and they’re raising their grandkids. This is, that’s a lot of people these days that can be helped by something like this. So it is a multi-generational opportunity for sure.
The groups have been super encouraging, the amount of growth. What I found from our church, and this church had a history of emphasizing the role of parents in discipling their kids in the home. Deuteronomy 6 is literally written on the wall in the children’s wing. When you walk off the elevator, it’s the first thing you see. But what we have, and I feel like this is the evangelical culture today, we have people that want to do it. They feel like they should do it. They feel like God tells them to do it. They don’t know how to do it, and they’re kind of afraid of it. They’re afraid of messing it up. They’re afraid of messing their children up. They’re afraid of confusing their children. They’re afraid that they’re going to be bad at it or whatever. And so just giving them some tangible things in baby steps, and that process has been really helpful and that’s what the book was so helpful in doing.
Chap: Well, thanks. That’s very encouraging. It sounds like you want to split the men and women up for this study, but what if we want couples to be able to talk about this together? Would you address that question?
Guy: I ask couples to do it together at the same. So I’ll ask the man and the woman. I’ll say, “Hey, can, can Jennifer do it with you? I want Jennifer to do it at the same time as you do this book study. What can we do to free her up to be able to do it on Wednesday night?” So if it’s finding a babysitter and you guys are new to the church and you don’t know anybody, I’ll help you find one. That’s how committed I am to getting both of you to do this study at the same time. You can do this as a Sunday school- that’d be great too, as a Sunday school lesson. You can just go through the chapters one week at a time and you can teach through the principles of it.
When I use these books, like I said, I make sure to tell the people what I’m doing. That this isn’t my content, but I’m using it as a kind of a quarterly or Gospel Project or whatever you will, to help with the content. And then I’ll write my own manuscripts using some of the points and I’ll put in my own content and my own examples, things like that. But yes, the goal is to get them to do it together.
If you have one parent, especially if you have a mom and the dad won’t do it, it is so hard. But the goal is to get them both to do it. I will say this, you do have a better chance of implementing it if you can only get the dad to do it for some reason, if he’s convinced of it. So what we’ve had before is we’ve had the dad do it one semester and he said, “Man, honey, I know you couldn’t do it this semester, but you’ve got to do it next semester.” So if you offer this as we’re going have this every semester at the beginning of the semester. We’re going to offer it on Tuesday mornings, Wednesday nights, Thursday nights, and it’s the regular rhythm of the church, it’s just going to happen for 10 weeks at the beginning. If you can’t do it, well, I know they’re going to do another one. I’ll get that one.
The key to getting people to do this is you personally asking them, you calling them on the phone, you going through your church directory. If you have one and you’re looking through it and you say, “Who do I think needs this?” Like, I’ve seen what goes on in the pew. That’s not a- we have terrible weeks in the pew too, you know, but I’ve just noticed things. I know Dave just looks beat to death all the time, and I’m going to reach out to him and say, “Hey man, how’s life going? How’s family going? How’s discipling your kids?” Making that question a regular part of pastoral accountability. How is discipling going in the home? Not just that, I mean, how’s sexual purity? How’s lust? That is great. And you should ask that. And if they’re married and they’ve got kids, you need to start adding that question in.
Chap: Well, that is a really good insight. How’s family discipleship going? Do you find it harder to get men or women involved in the study?
Guy: One thing that I’ve found is if you’re not doing the book study yet, prime the pump by taking one guy through it, and you’ve got to dig a little on him. I grew up on a ranch in Oklahoma and Missouri and in a poultry farm working in chicken houses, the nastiest job on planet Earth. And so I can kind of relate to some of those types of guys. But you just have to ask him the question. “Bill, do you think it’s your responsibility to teach your kids about the Lord? Or is it Sherry’s responsibility? Whose responsibility is it, do you think?” You know, just straight up. You’ve got to get to know them. You’ve got to be friends with them. You don’t have to be best friends with them, but there has to be some trust between you two.
But I was talking to a guy in a blue collar setting here, east of town the other day about it. That’s the same thing. We’ve got guys that are really good with their hands. They’ll do a construction project in a heartbeat. They’ll build a ramp for an elderly woman who needs a wheelchair ramp tomorrow, but they just don’t talk to other guys about the Bible.
Well, they’re intimidated by it, number one, because behind that big, hard dude is a softie on the inside probably that is just scared and has never seen it done and their dad didn’t do it with them. So if you can take them one-on-one, a couple of them, and just ask them the hard questions. And if they say, “Yeah, I know I’m supposed to do it, but man, I just either don’t have time, or. . .” I just ask them, “Well, what’s the real issue? If God tells you that you’re responsible to teach your kids the Bible and about who he is and to share the gospel with them, what in life is worth not doing? What is worth compromising? Is a tree stand more important than that? Is Friday night football more important than that? Are your own hobbies more important than that?” Well, if they say, “Yeah, I know, I know I need to do it.” Generally, I’ve found that they do that and I say, “Okay, let’s do this together. We can meet for a couple of weeks and I’m going to invite Sam to come to law to do this with us.” And what you’ve done is, you’ve lit a spark under two guys or three guys or one guy.
And then once they see, you know what, I can do this. I don’t have to have an MDiv to teach him about the Lord. I can take my kid to the tree stand and we can talk about Jesus out there. I can meet with the crew before at 6:00 AM before we head out for the day, I own this company and we’re just going to read the passage and we’re going to briefly discuss it, and that’s it. There are little baby steps that you can do, I feel like you can try to help them see that it’s not that intimidating. And yeah, I think that’s what I’ve seen in the past. I’ve had some guys that really didn’t want to do it, and I just basically begged them and told them they needed to do it and they’ve come along and done it. And some of them, it was a success and others of them just didn’t change at all, and they went back to whatever. But I feel like God, and I tell parents this all the time, God will reward you for your faithfulness, not the results. That’s what he asks you to do, is to be faithful. And the results are up to him.
And so it’s the same way in leading in this ministry. Same way in teaching students on Wednesday nights. Sometimes it feels like you’re banging your head on the wall and nobody’s listening. But what I found is there’s one or two in that room that were listening and they’ll thank you years later for that faithfulness.
So it is true, it’s harder to get guys than it is women. That’s why I have two of them for men. I don’t want to put a quota on the women’s study, but I know I could fill that thing up if I had that three days a week. But I specifically ask men, intentionally, one on one, call them up and say, “Hey, would you be willing to be a part of this?”
Chap: That’s great, that’s great. We also give away the audio book pretty freely. I know the book size
Guy: I’ll send guys the link to that when they start the group. So I buy the book for them. I have a bunch of copies of it in my office all the time. In fact, when I find out somebody’s pregnant and they come tell me, “Hey, we we’re pregnant,” I gave them a book. I’m like, “But listen, read this book now.” Now, I’ve had guys come to the group who wives weren’t. But even the one who want to have kids one day. I’ve had uncles come to the group who have never been married, but they’ve got some nieces and nephews they hang out with all the time and they feel ill-equipped to be able to, they want to share Jesus with them. And they’ve come to the group too. So it’s interesting, you kind of think outside the box of who has influence in these kids’ lives. And it’s not just always their biological mother and father.
Chap: Well, Guy, this time together has been so encouraging and I know it’s going to encourage others as well as to how to help others pass the gospel to their children. So thank you so much for your time.
Well, it’s been a joy to listen to Guy’s wisdom. I hope you benefited as much as I have. If you’ve led a study with The Disciple-Making Parent in a different way, let us know. We’d love to hear from you. Just use the contact form on our website.
You’ve been listening to The Disciple-Making Parent Podcast. For more information about the book, The Disciple-Making Parent, visit www.thedisciplemakingparent.com