Professional jiu-jitsu fighter. Bouncer. Drug addict. These disparate labels once described Robby Gallaty, but not anymore. Today, he is proud to call himself a disciple maker.
After getting clean and having a radical conversion, Gallaty attended seminary for expository preaching and followed that up with a Ph.D. in preaching. Today he leads Long Hollow Church in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a 2024 Outreach Fastest-Growing church (No. 46). Gallaty is steadfastly committed to discipleship for the simple reason: he is the product of discipleship. And in 2008, he founded Replicate, a ministry dedicated to equipping people to be disciples who make disciples.
Here, Gallaty sits down with Outreach to share where his passion for discipleship began, the amazing way God brought revival to Long Hollow Church, and how the seeds of the gospel once planted, even in the hardest heart, can yield a remarkable crop.
Tell us about growing up in Louisiana and your faith journey.
I was raised right outside New Orleans in a town called Chalmette in a really great family. I was raised Roman Catholic. As a kid, I knew who Jesus was, but for me, God was like this overbearing, domineering father who was out to chastise me every time I got out of line. I never saw him as a God of love or compassion.
I played basketball at an all-boys Catholic high school and got a scholarship to play at a college in North Carolina. But the girl I was dating said she didn’t want me to go so far away, so I just picked William Carey College, now William Carey University, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, out of the phone book. I tried out for their basketball team and got a scholarship.
Two weeks into the semester, the girl breaks up with me, and there I am, stuck at a Southern Baptist college as a Roman Catholic. I became the target of every evangelism class on campus. And even as a lost person, I knew these people were not genuine. I knew I was just a name on a page or a number on a sheet, but [a guy named] Jeremy Brown did something different. He befriended me. We had the same interests. We both played basketball, we both played guitar, we both loved music. And he earned the right to share the gospel with me.
I didn’t accept Christ then, although I did pray a prayer. I wasn’t born again, but Jeremy had sowed the seeds into my heart. I always tell people, don’t underestimate the power of the seeds of the gospel [over] the hardened hearts of men and women, because you never know what God will do in the future. I think we live in a world today where people want to know how much you care about them before they hear what you have to say. And so that’s what made Jeremy’s presentation of the gospel hit home. It was the same message I’d heard before, but he had earned the right to share it, in a way, because I trusted him. So relational evangelism is something I [am] passionate about.
After college, I was in a telecommunications business and thought I was going to be a millionaire. But it turned out the company was a pyramid scheme. It was November of that year that I got a call from the office, and they said, “You’ll no longer get a check. And by the way, you have to call all of your downline and tell them they’re out of business.”
It just wrecked me. It was horrible. I kind of wallowed for a season. Then I started to train [in] Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts fighting. Now this was back in 1997, and a lot of people weren’t making any money back then fighting. I’m 6 foot 6 inches tall, 285 pounds, and I want to be a professional fighter. A guy asked me if I wanted to be the head bouncer at his restaurant, and I said yes.
Why did you want to be a fighter?
Chalmette was pretty rough, a challenging area, and we grew up fighting all the time. It just was part of growing up there. And so being as tall as I was, I would always get taken down to the ground. Somebody suggested I needed to learn Gracie Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which I had never heard about. I went to the gym one day and fell in love with it. I did taekwondo when I was a kid, and I boxed in college, but I got really serious about fighting and did that for about two and a half years until the car accident.
Share a little about the accident and its aftermath.
On Nov. 22, 1999, an 18-wheeler rear-ended me and sandwiched my car in the guardrail. I herniated two discs in my neck and two discs in my back. The doctor sent me home with OxyContin, Valium, Soma and Percocet. I had never taken drugs in my life before. I was 22 and became addicted to pharmaceutical drugs.
Within three months, I couldn’t work. I didn’t want to make money. I just wanted to get high. And so, long story short, I went through a three-year season of drug addiction. I moved from pharmaceutical drugs to street drugs. I started buying heroin, cocaine, GHB, marijuana, you name it.
I was at the lowest point after my second rehab treatment when I remembered what Jeremy had told me about the gospel. I took the little bit of faith I had, and I put it in Jesus. On Nov. 12, 2002, I had a radical, Paul-like conversion. And the day I got saved, I knew I was going into ministry. I told my dad, “God’s called me to preach.”
What was his reaction?
He looked up from the recliner and he’s like, “What are you smoking, son? I thought you went to rehab.” [Laughs.] I didn’t know how to read my Bible. I didn’t know how to pray. I didn’t know how to memorize Scripture. Then eight months later, I’m at Edgewater Baptist Church and a blond-haired, blue-eyed guy who looks like he is 15 walks across the church and says, “Would you be interested in meeting once a week to memorize Scripture, study the Bible and pray?” That guy was David Platt [now lead pastor of McLean Bible Church and founder and chairman of Radical].
For the next two and a half years, I met with David. He encouraged me to go to seminary. So, I went to seminary and I became David’s assistant. And from that point on, we met every week, twice a week, for an hour and a half for discipleship. I felt like I was a sponge. We would sit over lunch and I would just write note after note on napkins.
Did he ever tell you what led him to approach you that day?
I jokingly tell David now, “You looked at me like a project. Who wants to take Robby? Nobody? OK, I’ll take the kid.” And David says, “What I noticed about you was that you are always teachable.” And this is what I tell people: The No. 1 attribute of being a disciple is you have to remain teachable. You have got to remain a perpetual beginner in life, in ministry and in your walk with the Lord.
The reason I’m so passionate about making disciples is because I’m the product of discipleship. David took me as a blank canvas, an empty whiteboard of a Christian, and he taught me that a Christian reads and engages the Bible daily. A Christian memorizes the Bible consistently or weekly. A Christian spends time in prayer and meditates with the Lord consistently. And they share their faith openly.
How did this play into starting Replicate Ministries?
I’ve given myself to helping the church return to making disciples, because when I got in the church, I assumed everybody was making disciples. What I learned quickly was we confuse disciple making with making converts or making decisions or making Christians—which is part of it, but not all of it. That’s what led me to start Replicate Ministries as a resource for the church to provide resources and materials. When I started Replicate, I utilized the principles I had and systematized them in a process for the church.
Tell us how implementing this system worked.
When I went to my first church in Morgan City, Louisiana, on the bayou, it had 65 people. I said, “I’m going to preach the word faithfully and I’m going to disciple men intentionally.” I started discipling guys, and Kandi, my wife, started discipling women. And over that two-and-a-half-year period there, we saw more people saved and baptized than were in the entire church when I got there.
I then went to Chattanooga. Same plan. I was going to come in and preach exegetical, biblical, textual messages, and I was going to disciple people. And again, that’s seven years at Brainerd Baptist in Chattanooga. God just blessed the work there.
And then I came to Long Hollow. Again, I’m thinking I’m going to use this same discipleship strategy, but I underestimated a couple of things. First, the church had experienced rapid, miraculous growth over 17 years under the leadership of David Landrith, who passed away from cancer in 2014. I say that to say they didn’t want to lose their pastor. They definitely didn’t want a new pastor.
David was passionate about evangelism and reaching the lost. And I was passionate about discipling those after we reach them. And while we did have similarities in reaching people, we came about it in different ways.
So, on my first Sunday at Long Hollow, I started to preach a series called “The Great Omission” on why we need to make disciples. And it was like I was speaking to glazed over eyes in a worship center of people. They weren’t processing or comprehending what I was saying when I would use the term “discipleship.” What a lot of people heard was Robby doesn’t want to reach lost people. He’s all about sitting in a room with three guys holding hands, singing songs and memorizing Scripture. He doesn’t want to reach the lost—which is the furthest thing from the truth, but that’s what they heard.
The second thing I underestimated was the preaching style of my predecessor. I tell young pastors that. When somebody comes in as different as I was, it’s a jolt. And so, they tolerated me in the beginning. And then they started to push back over time.
The first anonymous email I received read, “My gift from God is constructively criticizing pastors to help them get better.” So, he literally critiqued me for six months. The next week, I got another anonymous email, this one about the service, the music, the style and the presentation.
Then a couple months in, I had a local principal of a school blogging against me. And so all this is culminating in the middle of me trying to onboard this disciple-making strategy to a passionate evangelistic church. To say that those first two years were difficult is an understatement.
How did you get the discipleship program off the ground?
The first year some people did want to be a part of this new program I had brought in. I think we had about 750 people get into groups, which is a great number for a first year. Then we challenged them to replicate. In Year 2, we were over 1,500, and I’m getting pretty jazzed because I know discipleship is not magic—it is math. It’s exponential growth.
But before we went to Year 3, I asked my disciple-making pastor to audit the groups because I wanted to make sure they were actually making disciples. If you just gather, that’s not disciple making. Until the disciple you’ve invested in makes a disciple, you haven’t made disciples. The goal of discipleship is for the mentee to become a mentor or the player to become a coach. If you just invest in someone, that’s a lecturer to a student, that’s not disciple making.
We were in for the shock moment of our lives, which was [the groups] were gathering, but they weren’t investing in each other. They weren’t holding each other accountable. They weren’t reading the Bible. They were watching football, eating pizza and calling it discipleship. So, we had a major problem.
Concurrently, what was happening with the church at large was people were pushing back. They were criticizing. And the church was declining year over year. It was the first time I was pastoring a declining church. And that really affects your psyche. I’m a people pleaser. I didn’t realize how much I fished in the pond of approval of other people at that point, but I needed that affirmation, and it was difficult for me to weather that season. Going into 2020, the church had gone from about 6,700 to about 3,400.
I was burning out. I had had a meeting the year before with two of my elders on the heels of a conference that was a flop. One guy said, “We’re hanging on by a thread. You need to know you’re about to lose the church.”
I was in disbelief. This rocked me. I then asked them to give me the names of 25 men in the church that I could go learn from. I took a notebook and for two months, every breakfast and lunch that I had available, I met with these men and said: “I have no agenda other than I’m here to learn. Apparently, I have a blind spot in my life and I’m not seeing certain things. Would you help me?”
And it was brutal. They would pull up things that I had once said in a sermon. “Well, when you promoted such-and-such, I thought you were arrogant.” Some criticisms were valid, some were unfair. I was in my fifth year here at Long Hollow. You would have thought I finally would have had my hand on the [helm] of this ship. Then it was 2020. I went into it totally unprepared for COVID-19. I was unprepared for the bifurcation of my congregation. If you had a platform of any kind in 2020, anything you said was hated by half and loved by the other.
All of this culminated to a season of where I’m done. And I got real with the Lord and said, Lord, if this is ministry, I’m done with this. I’m tired of pleasing people and keeping people happy.
How did you come back from this?
A guy in my church suggested I slow down and learn how to be silent and still before the Lord. I had to go back to studying early church practices to learn some ways to be silent and to hear the voice of God and to be still. My mind’s always racing. I’m always thinking. So, if I am able to do it, anybody can do it. But I did develop a practice, and the practice started with just 15 minutes.
Now, when I say silence and solitude, I’m not talking about mental passivity. I’m talking about mental activity where I’m focusing on a phrase from the Scripture or a name of God. And as my mind wanders, I come back and center myself in the presence of God. And what I learned about silence and solitude was profound. I had to learn that I was not out there trying to get something from God—I was out there to be with God. I wanted God, just wanted to be in his presence.
I started sitting on my porch with the Lord that summer leading into the fall, and I started to be pretty vocal. After the racial unrest and the political landscape we were in, I started to list all the problems God should fix. The Lord then spoke to my heart: Robby, the [obstacle] to transformation and revival coming is you.
The Holy Spirit has this amazing way of putting his finger on the pulse of the problem if you ask him. He began to show me my arrogance and pride. And my jealousy. If you can’t pray for the church down the street to be blessed, then I’m never blessing your church because this is not your ministry. This is my ministry. And that was the turning point of my life.
How did this lead to revival at Long Hollow?
On Dec. 15, [2020] I heard clearly two words in my mind: spontaneous baptism. Now being raised Catholic, I had never experienced anything like that. And even as a Baptist preacher, I’ve never really seen spontaneous baptism. I’ve even heard of abuses of it where people prime the pump with people to get others baptized. But I knew there was a biblical precedence for it.
I told my team about it on that Thursday or Friday. On that Saturday night, the Lord gave me a number: 100. I then recorded a video to the staff saying, “Tomorrow is going to be a big day. I’m believing God that we’re going to see 100 people baptized.”
That Sunday was one of the lowest-attended services ever. But I was obedient and said, “Hey, you’re not prepared to be baptized today. But we are.” And I invited whoever wanted to be baptized to meet me at the tank. And at the end of the service, we saw 25 people baptized. It was mind-blowing to me.
I went to the back room between services to eat breakfast when there was a knock at the door. A girl who had watched the first service from Joelton, Tennessee, had driven here and wanted to be baptized. Then a guy drove up on his Harley and wanted to be baptized. I thought, Something’s going on. We saw 99 people baptized. It was different than any other service I’d ever been in.
I went out on the porch and just wept before the Lord. And he gave me this vision of heavy raindrops before a torrential downpour. He was basically saying, This is just the beginning.
When I told the church about the 99 who were baptized, somebody stopped me and said, “You know why you baptized 99 and not 100? Because the Lord was letting you know there was still one more to go for.”
One lost sheep.
The one lost sheep, exactly. Is that not cool?
Over the next eight months, we saw 1,600 people baptized. They drove in from all over. Maine. Oregon. California.
[This past February] the Holy Spirit spoke to me [on a] Saturday night: You need to do spontaneous baptism again. Now, spontaneous baptism is not common, and it’s hard to pull off because people are walking into the service dressed for Sunday, not prepared to go into the tank immediately.
So this is Saturday night of Super Bowl weekend. And I’m like, Lord, I’m not doing that to my team. And the Holy Spirit’s like, No, we’re going to do it. So I texted my team. What church with an 8 p.m. word from their pastor can pull off what God did that Sunday? From 9:30 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. we baptized 116 people spontaneously. I’m just bragging on the Lord. That’s what’s still happening, this wave of God.
God may not lead you to do spontaneous baptism. You might not even believe in that. But you need to be open to hear the voice of God, and you need to do whatever God tells you to do.
Is that the advice you would offer pastors who feel discouraged?
Yes, totally. The one thing pastors, ministers, Christians long for is to hear a word from God. Period. Because if you hear a word from God, you don’t fear man. When you hear a word from God, you don’t get caught up in sidebar conversations and frivolous activities. You stay focused.
God speaks through his Word. God also speaks through leading and nudging and checks in your spirit and circumstances and people and situations. God is always speaking. The challenge for most pastors is they don’t book a time to hear from God.
And the thing about God I’ve learned is that he doesn’t speak with a megaphone. God spoke to Elijah through a still, small voice. But we’re not listening because we’re not still enough and quiet enough to hear.
I would say to those who are discouraged right now and disillusioned in the ministry, it may be because you haven’t really heard from God in a long time.
For churches struggling with their discipleship efforts, what steps can they take to improve?
I would say don’t look at disciple making or even the disciple-making ministry. Start with what you can control, and that is you personally discipling a group of men. Every pastor needs to have a group of men in their life that they’re personally discipling. Every woman on staff needs to have a group of women in their life that they’re investing in. Do this not just to raise up leaders and leave a legacy, but to keep you accountable.
A high percentage of pastors don’t read their Bible every day. I’d say most of them don’t memorize Scripture consistently. Why? Because they don’t have someone holding them accountable to do so. If you find a pastor who is not in discipleship, I would assume with a high probability they’re not consistently reading the Bible.
There are six guys in my group. When we meet, I hold them accountable for reading the Bible, memorizing the Word, loving their wife and mentoring their kids, and they ask me the exact same questions. And I need that. That’s the safeguard to help me finish well in the ministry and not shipwreck.
Long Hollow also has a robust outreach to prisoners. Have you set up a way to disciple them?
Man, I’m glad you asked that. I am more excited about this than anything right now. Through the years, I’ve gotten letters from prisoners who have heard my story. Well, I got back from my sabbatical a year and a half ago, and on my chair was a letter from an inmate at Walker State Prison in Georgia. The letter explained that somebody from our church had been bringing my sermons in for about 75 men to watch and discuss. The letter writer then asked me to come preach there.
“I know this is asking a lot,” he said. “Pick any date or time you want. After all, we’re not going anywhere.” I thought that was hilarious.
At the end of that letter, he had signed his name, and on the back of the letter were 75 other names. The Holy Spirit spoke to my heart: Robby, the only difference between your name on that page and not is the grace from me in your life. There is a guy just like you in this prison who has the same passion, the same desire, is just as teachable. But he doesn’t have the ability to learn and develop, and he’s not discipled. And you need to do something about it.
I started praying about what it would look like to plant churches in prisons around the country, like literally have people from the free world bring in Zip drives or CDs or whatever into the prison to show the service of Long Hollow to prisoners, and then not just worship together, but form life groups in the prison where these guys are journeying together through the Word and discipleship.
It was a big dream. I didn’t know what it would look like. We prayed about it for about it for six months, a year. We now have three prisons that are Long Hollow campuses where people bring in the service, the prisoners gather and they worship with Long Hollow. We also have our local jail, where we show the service to the women’s pod and the men’s pod.
Then we got on the Pando app, which is [on] a tablet in the prisons right now. Long Hollow is in 500 prisons every week. Every sermon I preach, every podcast I record, they get uploaded to this app. In addition to that, we have disciple-making materials for free. We give them a reading plan that they can read through along with the church, and then we encourage them to get into discipleship relationships in the pod. And we have a training system on the app. We want to move them through a discipling relationship because they’re starving for someone to invest in them.
We meet people every week who are connected to prisoners from around the country. Last Sunday, when we were greeting guests in line, a lady said her daughter, who is in a prison in Arizona and watches me, told her to come and meet me. We even have people in prison that are now tithing to the church. There’s a girl in Florida who has sent a $40 check from her commissary account to the church for four months in a row. She will probably never step foot on a Long Hollow campus. And yet, she says she wants to give back to the church that is enriching her soul.
I see this as a ministry that a lot of churches could participate in, in their own backyard.
That’s really touching about the 75 signatures on that letter. Did you ever preach at that prison in Georgia?
Yes, I preached there last year. Over 400 men. They packed out the gym. We brought in a steak dinner for them. I preached, and when I tell you these people came unglued, I mean, it was the greatest environment ever.
And I stood in line at the end and hugged every one of those men.
Lora Schrock is co-editor of Outreach.
