The Founder’s Story
I Had Information.
What I Needed Was Formation.
Terrance Botts — Founder & President, Discipling Unfolded
Baptized at Twelve. Still Empty.
I was baptized at twelve years old. I grew up in church. I knew the songs, the verses, the right answers to give in Sunday school. By every outward measure, I had what I needed to walk with God.
But information was never the same thing as formation. Nobody sat me down and showed me how to actually walk with Christ day to day — how to take what I knew in my head and let it shape the decisions I made when nobody was watching. I had the facts of the faith without the practice of it.
That gap — between what I knew and how I lived — is what eventually cost me everything.
Eight Years.
I served eight years in prison. I won’t dress that up or explain it away — it happened because of choices I made, consequences I earned, and a life that was never truly surrendered to Christ no matter what I professed with my mouth.
Incarceration has a way of stripping everything down to what’s actually true about a person. There’s no performing your way through it. Eight years gave me a lot of time to sit with the gap between the information I’d been given as a kid and the formation I’d never actually received.
I didn’t know it yet, but that season was the wrench time. The pressure that would eventually shape something real.
Scott and Marcy Nary.
After my release in 2017, I connected with Scott and Marcy Nary and 420 Fire Ministries. Scott became my pastor, my discipler, and my brother in ministry. Marcy walked alongside in the same intentional way.
What they gave me wasn’t another program or another sermon series. It was presence. Real, ongoing, relational discipleship — someone willing to walk beside me long enough to watch the formation actually happen, not just hand me information and move on.
That’s when everything started to change. Not because I suddenly knew more, but because for the first time, someone was helping me practice what I already knew. By 2018 I was leading the 420 Fire Columbus, Ohio hub myself — the very thing that had been done for me, now being done through me.
Trust the Process.
A mentor named Rod Houghton gave me a phrase that’s anchored everything since: trust the process. Not trust the outcome, not trust your feelings about the process — trust the process itself, because God forms people through it, not around it.
That phrase became the foundation of my first book, Don’t Rush the Wrench Time, and it became the foundation of everything Discipling Unfolded does. I spent years building toward this — ordained as a minister, trained as a biblical counselor, working as a paralegal, pursuing a degree in biblical counseling — not because I had a five-year plan, but because each step was part of the same process I was learning to trust.
In 2026, Discipling Unfolded became a formal nonprofit ministry in West Virginia, operating under the covering of 420 Fire Ministries — the same ministry that first walked with me.
Why Discipling Unfolded Exists.
I didn’t need another conference. I didn’t need another book full of information I could already recite. I needed someone to walk with me long enough for the truth to become practice. Scott and Marcy gave me that. Discipling Unfolded exists to give it to others.
We work primarily with men — many coming through jail and reentry ministry, walking the same road I walked. I’ve personally discipled a man for eighteen months who is now carrying ministry work I had to step back from, a living demonstration of 2 Timothy 2:2: what I received, I entrusted to him, so he could entrust it to others.
“When people learn to follow Jesus faithfully, lives change. When lives change, families change. When families change, communities change.”
We Are Not Creating a New Model.
We Are Restoring Jesus’ Model.
If someone once walked with you the way Scott and Marcy walked with me — you already know what this is. If no one has, this is where it can start.