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Leading a Group Through Faithfully Dissident Daughters

Leading a Group Through Faithfully Dissident Daughters
Photo by Sincerely Media / Unsplash

I wrote this book hoping people would read it together. Most of what's in it I worked out in community — around tables, in living rooms, with women who were willing to say the quiet part out loud first.

But I also know, especially if you haven't hosted a book club before, you might want some helpful advice on how to read this book together with people you know well or not so well.

This guide is for you. The sixteen discussion questions in the back of the book and in the official book club guide will carry the conversation. What follows is everything else: how to pace it, how to open the room, what tends to surface where, and what to do when it does.

Choosing your pace

The book is twelve chapters in four parts. Each part is a different movement, and the parts are a more natural unit than the chapters.

Four sessions — one per part. Best for groups that already know each other and read reliably. Fast, but the four-part arc stays intact.

  • Awakening (1–3): the inherited script and the first cracks
  • Breaking (4–6): loss, the feminine divine, the body
  • Liberating (7–9): intuition, spiritual authority, telling the truth
  • Expanding (10–12): practice, and what comes next

Six sessions — two chapters each. My recommendation for most groups. Enough room to slow down without losing momentum, and it splits each part across two conversations rather than cramming one.

Twelve sessions — one chapter a week. For groups that meet weekly and want to go slowly. Pair each chapter with its practice (below) and it becomes something closer to a formation group than a book club.

At the start of the first session

Here are three things worth saying out loud at the start. Adapt them as needed.

Nobody has to share. Some of this book is about reproductive loss, abortion, postpartum depression, and leaving a church. Everyone in the room has a version of something. Make it explicit that passing is a full answer.

What's said here stays here. Standard, but it's important to establish safety. Someone may be about to say something they haven't told anyone else.

You can disagree with the book. Especially important to say in a church group. A reader who finds chapter 4 difficult theologically is still reading in good faith, and a group that can't hold that will go silent rather than honest. The book's argument is for dissent — a group that only agrees with it has slightly missed the point.

One more, for you rather than the group: decide in advance what you'll do if someone discloses something heavy. You are not running a therapy group and you don't have to fix anything. "Thank you for trusting us with that" and a moment of silence is a complete response. Know what local resources you'd point someone toward if they asked afterward.

What each chapter tends to open up

Not summaries — you'll have read it. These are the things that come up in rooms.

1. The Cost of Denying Yourself. People arrive wanting to talk about the church that hurt them. This chapter is actually about fragmentation — the parts of yourself you learned to amputate. Keep the conversation on what did you put away rather than who made you feel like you had to.

2. Roots and Rebellion. This is where the political material sits — the abortion politics history, the church conflict over a presidential vote. In mixed groups it's the first place things can get tense. That's usable if you name it: the chapter is about inherited frameworks, and people discovering theirs differ is the chapter working.

3. Crisis of Theology. Birth trauma, postpartum depression, miscarriage. This chapter and chapter 4 are the heaviest chapters in Part 1. See the notes below.

4. The Divine Feminine and a Mother's Choice. Infertility, abortion, and the decision at the center of the book.

5. Compassion and the Womb of God. Theologically rich — the Hebrew womb-word, God's compassion as a bodily thing. It's also where Rebecca enters: diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer the month before the twins were born, starting chemotherapy the same week they arrived. Her illness and death run from here through chapter 7.

6. Sacred Body, Sacred Emotions. Where groups often come alive. Bodies, emotions, what people were taught to distrust in themselves. Good session for a practice (below) because the chapter argues for exactly that.

7. Trusting Your Heart. Jeremiah 17:9. For a lot of readers this is the verse that did the most damage, and this is the chapter they didn't know they've been waiting for. Expect strong reactions and a lot of "nobody ever told me you could read it that way."

8. Mary the Tower. The most purely interesting chapter — history people didn't know. Lightest session emotionally, which makes it a good one to put after 7 if you're pacing by twos.

9. Stepping into the Light. Secrecy, disclosure, and what five years of silence cost. People may disclose in this session. See below.

10. Practicing Faith in the Body. Turn toward the practical. Breath prayer, baptism, embodied practice. Do a practice in this session rather than only discussing them.

11. Practicing Faith with a Feminine Lens. The liturgical calendar, the lectionary, whose voices got left out. Practical and generative — groups often start planning things here.

12. Taking Your Place at the Table. Worth pairing with the Manifesto and food, if you can.

These discussions need care

What they hold: traumatic birth, postpartum depression, miscarriage, infertility, abortion, cancer diagnosis, and death.

A note on the grief thread specifically. If anyone in your group is in active grief — a recent death, an ongoing illness in the family, a caregiving season — say so to them privately before those sessions rather than letting it arrive unannounced.

How to handle it, practically:

Say what's coming, one session ahead. People can then decide how to show up.

Start gently. Instead of going straight to a question you could ask everyone to say one word for how the chapter left them.

Don't let the group turn into a debate. If it starts, redirect: the book doesn't require agreement. We can be a model for healthy, safe disagreement without losing belonging.

Expect disclosure, and don't chase it. Chapter 9 is about the cost of keeping a secret. Reliably, someone in the room may decide they're ready to share theirs. The right response is to receive it and not to make the rest of the session about it. You can follow up later if that feels appropriate.

Embodied practice for each session

The book argues that the body is a site of spiritual knowing. A discussion group about that book that only ever talks is a missed opportunity.

So: one practice per part, done together in the room, plus one to bring with you into the week. All of these come from chapters 10 and 11. Where I've made a resource, I've linked it.

Part 1 · Awakening (chapters 1–3)

In the room — breath prayer. The oldest and simplest one in the book. Inhale on Be still, exhale on and know. Six or seven rounds in silence.

Start here as an easy entry point. Nobody has to speak, and it introduces the idea that a spiritual practice can happen in a body without becoming a performance.

Between sessions — ora et labora. Pray with your hands. One ordinary chore this week — dishes, laundry, a commute — done without a podcast or music in your ears. Just the sensation, the thoughts, the task. Notice what shows up when you stop filling the space.

It pairs with Part 1's question: what did you put away in order to be acceptable? That answer tends to surface in silence rather than in conversation.

Part 2 · Breaking (chapters 4–6)

In the room — a Caim, or circling prayer. The Celtic practice of drawing a circle around yourself as you pray: sanctuary, protection, the encompassing love of God. Here's one on my website you can read for the group.

This is the right practice for these chapters specifically. Part 2 holds the reproductive loss and Rebecca's diagnosis, and a Caim is a practice about being held.

Between sessions — Lament through music. Listen to one song this week that lets you feel it, rather than one that fixes it. No words required, nothing to perform, nobody else involved.

Part 3 · Liberating (chapters 7–9)

In the room — imaginative lectio divina. Read a short passage. Pick one person in it. Read it again imagining their body — what they smell, what their hands are doing, who they can see. Then sit with what came alive.

Chapter 8 is Mary the Tower, and my guided meditation "A Journey of Faithfulness with Mary Magdalene" uses exactly this technique and you can play it for the group.

Between sessions — say it out loud to one person. From the practice of reconciliation: words have power, and something shifts when a secret is spoken rather than held. One true thing, to one trusted person — a friend, a therapist, a spouse.

This is chapter 9's entire argument, moved out of the book and into the week. It's also the most demanding thing in this guide, so offer it rather than assigning it.

Part 4 · Expanding (chapters 10–12)

In the room — the lorica. The embodied blessing at the end of the book. Arms around yourself, hands to the ground, arms open wide, turn in a circle. Standing, together, out loud.

Eat together. Chapter 12 is called "Taking Your Place at the Table." The earliest Christians took communion in homes around tables, and if your last session can be a meal rather than a meeting, make it one. Bread on the table while you talk about the Manifesto is the whole book in a gathering.

Going forward — Grace Stories. The practice my faith community uses: each person brings one moment from the past week where they noticed God. Simple, repeatable, and it's what a lot of groups end up continuing with after the book is done.

Other things on my site, if your group wants them

If you want me there

I join book club conversations when I can, just send me an email and let's see if we can work out the details! I'd love to join you if I'm available.