Dr. Anessa Westbrook – Reaching & Discipling Women

By Ashanti Poindexter

Dr. Anessa Westbrook recently wrote a book entitled: Reaching & Discipling Women: A Guide to Women’s Ministry in Your Church. You can find this book here at renew.org, where you can sign up and download the FREE ebook.

This book is about the importance of women’s ministry and provides fundamental ideas needed to get one started.

Dr. Westbrook has been working on material regarding this topic for a total of about 7 years, but she was able to write this specific work in the span of a year. She mentioned that this book idea came from a discussion she had with Bobby Harrington while he was at Harding University leading a “Discipleship Making” seminar.

Dr. Westbrook refers to her new book as a prequel to a longer more comprehensive version of the book that she will be writing later. She considers this one a primer on how to start a women’s ministry in local congregations.

Dr. Westbrook is very passionate about this topic. She believes that women’s ministries are often started without a goal in mind—without a purpose.

“Everything has to have a purpose, everything should lead toward spiritual growth. Nothing we do should be pointless.“

Dr. Anessa Westbrook

Her aim has been to develop theory in theology for women’s ministry within the Stone Campbell Movement. Dr. Westbrook says the goal is to create a design that guides women towards spiritual growth that allows them to use their spiritual gifts.

An outline of the book featuring the topics of each chapter is below:

• Chapter 1 features a Q&A about discipleship.
• Chapter 2 answers the important question: Why does ministry matter?
• Chapter 3 lists out helpful tips on creating a women’s ministry, especially designing a women’s ministry with spiritual growth as an end goal.
• Chapter 4 focuses on spiritual gifts. Dr. Westbrook emphasizes the importance of knowing one’s spiritual gifts. She writes that spiritual gifts should be the basis of how different people are assigned to different roles in women’s ministry.
• Chapter 5 is about the importance of mentoring and discipleship.
• Chapter 6 is about the use of programs in a women’s ministry.

Dr. Westbrook is hoping that women walk away from this book with a clear vision of what women’s ministry should be, how it should be set up, what it can accomplish.

If you have any interest in reading the book, you should! It is free and available here.