What a Real Women's Discipleship Program Looks Like When It Actually Works
If you've run the programs and still feel like something's missing — this is for you.
Most churches are not short on ministry. They have small groups, women's events, Bible studies, Sunday programming. What they're often missing — and what few people will say out loud — is actual discipleship. Not the word. The thing.
I know because I was the one not saying it.
I was in seminary pursuing a Master of Divinity in Christian apologetics when one of my courses stopped me cold. It was dedicated entirely to discipleship — the books, the theology, the history, the practice. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I had to be honest with myself about the church I was going back to. A church I love. A church with real community, genuine worship, strong programming. And a discipleship piece that wasn't there.
We had ministry. We didn't have multiplication.
When Programs Run Out of Road
We tried. Our ministry leaders got into groups and worked through a program specifically designed to help churches become disciple-making communities. We were serious about it. We gave it real time and real energy. When it was over, nothing had shifted. No one caught fire. No one started a new group. It felt like we had added another good thing to our list of good things — and the needle didn't move.
So I tried it myself. I put together a group of women and started meeting. We had good conversation, good intentions, good everything. And a few months in, it died. Not dramatically — just quietly, the way most things die when they're not rooted in something deeper than enthusiasm. I remember sitting with the Lord after one of those flat sessions and saying, Something is still not coming together.
That prayer was the honest one. The one that led somewhere.
I started asking God specifically for a tool — not a better curriculum, not a smarter system, but something that could work as a way of life. That search led me to Ordinary Movement.
What "Prepared to Lead" Actually Looks Like
When I found the Ordinary Movement website, I realized they had a full year of women's discipleship curriculum built specifically for women — and a separate track for men. I ordered the Ordinary Women's manual from Amazon before I committed to anything. I'm a researcher. I wanted to hold it in my hands.
Flipping through the pages, I knew. The material had weight. The flow was right. And the companion books it pointed to — Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life, The Spiritual Man — were not casual additions. They were core to what the process was trying to do.
Here is what I didn't fully understand going in: leading this group is work. Real work.
This is not a plug-and-play lesson where you show up, read the questions, and call it discipleship. You prepare. You sit in the content before you bring it to anyone else. You ask your own questions — hard ones — before you walk in the room. If you saw my manual today, you'd see pages covered in notes, underlines, margin scribbles. Not because the material requires that, but because leading people through formation requires that you've been formed first.
That shift — from facilitator to someone who actually shows up transformed by what you've been in — changes everything about how a group runs.
The Moment the Group Came Alive
One of the things we learned and practiced was something called "Pursuing the Heart." It's a life-on-life approach rooted in actual seeing — not just asking the right questions, but being present enough to notice what someone isn't saying. That practice changed how we talked to each other. It moved us from running through material together to genuinely knowing each other.
And then something unexpected happened. The women started leading the sessions themselves.
They would turn to me mid-discussion and say, "So, Pastor Chinyere — what are you feeling about what you just read?" That question, asked by someone you're supposed to be leading, is either uncomfortable or it's the whole point. It became the whole point. A group where the leader is also being formed by the people she leads — that is a healthy discipleship group. That is the thing we were missing.
Spirit, Soul, and Body: Why It Landed So Hard
Ask the women in my group which part of the journey meant the most to them, and they will all say the same thing: Spirit, Soul, and Body.
Most of us have spent years in church without ever being taught how we're actually made. How the spirit interacts with God. How the soul processes emotion, will, and thought. How the body carries all of it out. We know the words. We don't always understand the structure — and because we don't understand it, we can't see where we're being hindered.
This teaching gave us that. It wasn't head knowledge about anthropology. It was self-discovery with a purpose — understanding our own design so we could better cooperate with what God was doing in us.
We also worked through the assessments available on the Ordinary Movement platform: personality, skills, and spiritual gifts. I had everyone take them. We didn't just receive the results and file them away — we sat in them together. We had honest conversations about what we found, what surprised us, what we had been either overusing or ignoring. Having all of that in one place, built into the same process we were already in, made those conversations natural instead of tacked on.
I started telling other groups in our church what they were missing. One of the men in our congregation doesn't miss a single podcast episode. He gets Jeremy's text messages and comes to me lit up: "Oh yeah, I heard from Jeremy again." That kind of connection to something larger — the sense that you're part of a family running in the same direction — is not incidental. It's what keeps people going when the work gets hard.
The Session I Didn't Lead
There is one session I keep coming back to.
We were working through sanctification. The women were wrestling — genuinely wrestling — with the gap between what Scripture clearly says and what their actual lives looked like. They were asking the question most Christians quietly carry and rarely say out loud: If the Word is this clear, why don't we just do it?
Every time I moved to offer something, they stopped me. "Pastor, don't say anything. We want to deal with this ourselves."
So I sat back. And I watched.
I watched them go to the text. I watched them bring themselves — not their best answers, but their real lives — to the question. I watched them arrive at their own conclusions about why holiness matters and what had been keeping them from making the moves they knew they needed to make. No one told them what to believe. They found it. And what you find yourself, you keep.
That is where real transformation happens. Not when a leader gives you the answer, but when you and the Holy Spirit work it out in the quiet of your own heart. My job was to hold the space and get out of the way.
These women went from minimal Bible engagement to being students of the Word who ask searching questions every week. The character change is real. The change in their homes is real.
You Don't Have to Qualify
Here is what I want you to hear before anything else: you do not have to qualify for this.
Not a Master's degree. Not a title. Not years in ministry. Not a track record of leading anything. Ordinary Movement's discipleship training is built for ordinary people who are willing to show up. The entire premise is that life change happens when ordinary people are open with themselves and allow the Word of God to do the work of transformation in them.
One of the first topics in the curriculum is called "No Excuses." It holds up person after person in Scripture who had every reason to disqualify themselves — and were chosen anyway. Moses and his speech. Gideon and his fear. The disciples and their complete lack of credentials. God didn't wait for them to be ready. He called them as they were.
That is the pattern. It has always been the pattern.
"When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus." — Acts 4:13
Being with Jesus is the qualification. That's it.
My hope for everyone who picks up this manual is simple: that they see themselves in that verse. That they stop waiting for someone to hand them permission. You don't need a platform. You need to step in.
But the journey doesn't end with your own growth — and Ordinary Movement is built around that reality. The Scripture is clear: what was given to you, you give to someone else. The 2 Timothy 2:2 pattern. Anyone can lead a small group discipleship process. That is why it's called ordinary. Regular people. Fellowship. Real formation. Then turn around and do it again for someone else.
My name is Chinyere Olujide. I am an ordinary woman. I hold an M.Div., I serve as a pastor, and I have run programs that went nowhere. I have also watched a group of women wrestle with the Word until it changed them. I know the difference.
I will never go back to the way things were.
Chinyere Olujide is a pastor and disciple-maker at https://jesushousedc.org. She holds a Master of Divinity with a focus in Christian apologetics and leads an Ordinary Women's discipleship group through her local church. Her group has seen women go from minimal Bible engagement to consistent Scripture study, character transformation, and changed homes.
