Trust and Follow Jesus: Conversations to Fuel Discipleship

An Interview with the Williamsons concerning their new book.

Written By: Ashanti Poindexter

“Trust and Follow Jesus: Conversations To Fuel Discipleship” written by Bobby Harrington with Carl and Alicia Williamson. 

As Christians, discipleship is immeasurably important. We must always be ready to have those conversations that may bring others to Christ. Carl and Alicia Williamson and their co-author, Bobby Harrington, have written a book to fuel discipleship. This book is entitled, Trust and Follow Jesus: Conversations to Fuel Discipleship, and it is the first book that both of the Williamsons have ever co-authored. 

When asking the Williamsons what the book is about, Dr. Carl Williamson made it clear, “It is first and foremost a training manual on how to meet with 3 other people, so a total of 4 people in a disciple making relationship,” and then followed his thoughts by adding:

What we’ve found is that this training manual helps people create a rhythm where they study the Bible together and live life together. We encourage people to do 4 different things. One, you learn together, which is the Bible study, but then two you serve together, you eat together, and you rest together. And so, we think in terms of the rhythms of Jesus. Jesus ate with people, he served with his disciples, he rested with them, and, yes, he did share about the Father with them.

Adding to what Carl said, Alicia follows by saying,

And I would add that it kind of covers foundational components of faith, so it talks through love, understanding who Jesus is, understanding the Bible and its truth and importance, understanding the spirit… so it has very foundational aspects that really are great for any walk of faith. Even the people who have been leaders for many years, there is still a lot to gain from it. That’s one of the things that I really enjoy about it. It is set up like a workbook where you actually answer questions as you go. 

From the synopsis of the book alone, the book seems to be planned with purpose and mapped intentionally. This idea led to the next question, that is, what inspired the Williamsons to write this book. That question was met with the following response:

We met Bobby Harrington who is the other coauthor on the book and he is trying to produce disciple making materials that churches and church leaders and regular christians can use, and that’s also what my job is here at Harding. It is to train students to be disciple makers. I often find that when you give people too many models, they don’t do anything so we worked together trying to figure out a particular model that we could utilize, so that is why we put this together.

Knowing that the Williamsons are new authors, I wanted to know what part of the book they deemed the hardest to write and why. So I asked them and they responded by saying the following:

This was distinct because Bobby Harrington had already done a lot of the writing of the book, so most of what we wrote was the training part of the book, so the whole introduction of the book and how to use the studies is the part that we really spent a lot of time on. Then we mostly edited and changed the study format. I think the most difficult part of writing this manual is trying to write in a way that is simple, and short, and something that people are actually going to use. That is what we have really worked hard on. It is not a long manual, and it is not intended to be long. It is intended to be so simple that you could go and get this book on Amazon, you could go and train your local church on how to use it, and then people in your church could start making disciple-makers. That was the difficult part of it. Trying not to make it too wordy, trying to make it simple, but clear what you’re supposed to do. It is often like going to a seminar where you finish the seminar and you say, “I think that is exactly right!” Now what do I do? This manual is written for the, what do you do? Sometimes it is hard to define the next step, and this manual does that. 

From the sounds of it, this book should be added to every reading list; so where can you find it?

The book is available on Amazon , Barnes and Noble, and on the sites of many other book sellers. 

If you get the opportunity, congratulate the Williamsons on their first book and maybe consider  keeping a copy of this book on your shelf!