Customer Reviews

Deepening Your Roots in God's Family: A Course in Personal Discipleship to Strengthen Your Walk with God

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The 2:7 Series is timeless. I was introduced to it as a young Christian over 25 years ago. As an elder of our church responsible for starting a discipleship program, I turned to this book series. Our church is a mainline demonination church but with an evangelical pastor and bent and growing congregation. This series is great for introducing personal habits and spiritual practices, particularly to folks not familiar with some of these tools. It provides a wonderful foundation upon which an entire ministry can be built, and even serves as a way to train, identify, and raise up future leaders.

I try not to embellish too much or get too far ahead or "fill the gaps." The 2:7 series is ingenious in that it takes participants directly into the "doing" - sometimes kicking and screaming (e.g. Scripture memorization), and let's them wrestle with the expectations of being a committed disciple without trying to pander, implore, or plead. What comes out the other side are folks who "get it": Christ-followers who, instead of being fed a fish for a day, have the ability to fish for themselves.

Powerful, powerful, stuff!

This is based on the version of Book 2 that has been published for the last 8-10 years or so. I understand that there is a newer rendition out this year, but have not yet seen it. My wife and I have used this Navigator series for nearly 30 years to help people learn how to follow Christ. The series has been condensed over time from 6 to 3 books, this being the second of the three. I recommend that you start with Book 1, Growing Strong in God's Family. You could go through it by yourself, but a very important part of the series is to have a small (4-10) group to get people sharing with each other what God shows them each week in His word and how He is working in their lives. This is not a bible study per se, although it does require 1 to 2 hours a week to do the bible-oriented homework. It is solid material and helps to solidify the habits that were started in Book 1 such as into God's word and praying daily, fellow-shipping, and putting Christ at the center of your life. Learn all the verses. They will be useful forever.

Navigators, outside of the Bible, may have "written the book" on disciplemaking. That is what Navigators are known for. They have many curricula, and I have not been through all of them to say this is in fact the best.

However, you would be hard put to find a better sequence of materials that, at the end of 9 months, have taken a recent convert to Christ into discipleship as well as the 2:7 Series. This is Book II, and it is valuable, but even much more valuable if the person being discipled has completed Book I first. The "system" works: after finishing Book II the discipler and the discipled need to move on to Book III. Great stuff.

If you were discipled 20 years ago, you might want to get all three books and get re-discipled.

It is interesting that, as of August 14, 2011, there were a dozen or so reviews on Book I, three on Book II and, before I put one in, none on Book III.

Tommy Nelson in Denton, Texas, points out that this is a great curriculum to get in the hands of pastors in foreign lands. I took some of these books in Spanish (available at Amazon) to Nicaragua and I ran out of books far before I ran out of commitments.