Cultivating a Life for God: Multiplying Disciples Through Life Transformation Groups is by Neil Cole. It runs around 125 pages and has been in print through more than one publisher, so you may find it under two different ISBNs.
What a Life Transformation Group actually is
This is the part the book is really about, and it is concrete enough to decide on before you buy. A Life Transformation Group is two or three people, same sex, meeting weekly. Three rules govern it:
- Read a lot of Scripture. Cole’s standard is 25 to 30 chapters a week, repeated by the whole group, and if one person does not finish, everyone reads the same passage again the next week.
- Confess sin to each other, using a fixed list of accountability questions.
- Pray for specific unbelieving friends by name, week after week.
When a group reaches four people it splits into two. That splitting is the multiplication in the title, and it is the whole point: no leader needs training, no curriculum is purchased, so the thing can spread without a church programme behind it.
Be honest about the reading load
Twenty-five to thirty chapters a week is roughly an hour a day, every day. That is the single thing that determines whether this works for you. Cole is deliberate about it, because the volume is meant to soak you in Scripture rather than have you study a passage closely, and the shared re-reading is what creates the accountability.
Some men will find that liberating. Others will quit in week three. It is better to know the number before you start than to discover it after you have talked two friends into joining.
The wider argument
Cole’s complaint is that churches measure attendance and call it growth. Adding people to a service, he argues, is addition; disciples who make disciples is multiplication, and only the second one compounds. He is writing out of church-planting experience rather than theory, and the book is short because the system is simple by design.
Readability
Brief, practical, occasionally repetitive. Cole is making a small number of points and wants them to stick. You can read it in two evenings and start a group the following week, which is clearly the intent.
Who it suits
Best for a man who wants accountability with one or two others and does not want to wait for his church to organise something. Also useful for anyone frustrated that small groups in his church are mostly social.
Skip it if you want a study curriculum, or if you are looking for teaching content rather than a structure. There is very little theological instruction here. It is a method.
Bottom line
A short, unusually practical book describing a simple accountability structure that needs no budget and no trained leader. Whether it works for you comes down almost entirely to whether you will read thirty chapters a week.
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