1: Who is Deeper Walk? (Pilot)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

We are glad you chose to join us for our pilot episode of On the Trail to kick this off. We want to make sure everyone knows who we are as a ministry as a whole. So we’ll be talking about three things. First, who are we, your hosts? Second, who is Deeper Walk? And third, what is this podcast going to look like?

So, on that note, Hello, Father. I’m so happy to be with you today.

[00:44] Marcus: Yes. Hello, daughter. It’s lovely to be with you. Even though I can’t see you.

[00:51] Stephanie: You can hear the smile in my voice.

[00:54] Marcus: Yes, I can. Hopefully you can hear mine, too.

This is kind of fun. We’ve never done anything like this before, so it’ll be a nice conversation and hopefully people can learn. Take something away and learn too.

[01:09] Stephanie: Yeah. So let’s start off with “who are you?” Because we don’t want to just assume everyone knows who Marcus Warner is when they pop into this podcast.

[01:19] Marcus: Yeah, I know, I tell people I’m like a C list celebrity. But no,that is if I’m in a certain group, people know who I am, but most people have no idea.

I’d be happy to tell you a little bit about myself. For the first, you know, 30 years of my life, I was introduced as the son of Dr. Timothy M. Warner. He was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He was the president of Fort Wayne Bible College. He wrote two books on spiritual warfare ministry and was the international director of Freedom in Christ Ministry.

So it’s like my identity. I just grew up in that family and was introduced as well with, “Here’s Dr. Tim’s son.” And so just in the last 15, 20 years or so, as I’ve started writing more books, more and more people know who I am in my own right. So I have really, since 2016, had, I think, seven new books come out in the last seven years.

[02:25] Stephanie: You’re prolific.

[02:26] Marcus: Yeah. It’s kind of amazing how quickly those things come out. If you’d have told me I’d have seven books in seven years, I would have laughed. But that’s what’s happened. And we’ve got a couple more in the hopper ready to come out soon. In the next two years. So that’s essentially who I am. We could go into the academic credentials, which I owe all to my dad. Because my dad was the president of Fort Wayne Bible College, I got my Bachelor of Arts there for free because he was the president, which was nice.

And then I got my first MDiv tuition free because he was a professor at Trinity. And then I went back to work on my PhD in the Old Testament, got partway through that and found out you were on the way. And it changed everything. But mostly God just made it obvious that I wasn’t really called to be a scholar, that I was more involved in the people-helping business.

And so from that day on, really in my early 30s, my focus has been on discipleship and pastoral care. These  have been the two main points of emphasis. And so recently, leadership, pastoral care, discipleship and all that has come to the forefront in what I do.

[03:44] Stephanie: Yeah. So people might know you from your books. Rare Leadership, Understanding the Wounded Heart, What Every Believer Should Know About Spiritual Warfare, Building Bounce, and The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages. All the prolific things.

So that’s you. And I can segue into that to say I’m not only your daughter, but I am the publishing coordinator at Deeper Walk. And so I work both with our in-house publications and then also sometimes I’ll help you with your Moody published ones.

[04:11] Marcus: But yeah, no one has read my books more thoroughly than you, I don’t think.

[04:16] Stephanie: I don’t know. We have some super fans out there.

[04:18] Marcus: But yeah, I’d still put them up to the challenge any day because you’ve had to check for so many punctuation errors as well as just, “Oh my goodness, is this actually theologically sound?” So, yeah, all those things go into it.

[04:35] Stephanie: So I love your books.

[04:37] Marcus: Yeah.

[04:37] Stephanie: And I love you. So that’s who we are.

Why don’t we give a little elevator pitch for who Deeper Walk is? Like, what do we do? Who are we?

[04:47] Marcus: Yeah, I like to say that with Deeper Walk, our name is our mission. Right? We exist to help people have a deeper walk. And we do that by helping people identify and overcome the obstacles that have them stuck.

So all of us have battles that we face. We’ve all got issues we’re trying to get on the other side of, areas we need to grow. We all have these growth edges in our lives. We have obstacles that have to be overcome in order to get there. So that’s kind of what we do. We help people identify what those obstacles are, give them strategies for overcoming those obstacles.

But the ultimate goal here is that we want everyone experiencing that deeper walk with God which is characterized by being able to pour out your heart to him, be able to experience the joy of his smile at you, and just to share life at a deeper level with God.

[05:35] Stephanie: And how do we do that?

[05:37] Marcus: So we do that primarily through training. We are a training and equipping organization. So you can tell by the sheer number of books I’ve written. And we not only have my books, we have a lot of other great resources. We’ve been blessed to have classes and conferences with a lot of different speakers for over 30 years. And so it’s not a brand new organization. It’s one that’s been around for a while. It was actually founded by Mark Bubeck, and there’s a whole group of training that is really focused on spiritual warfare that he helped to give us that focus.

And then more recently, I, through my relationship with Dr. Jim Wilder and our friendship there, we’ve been introducing neuroscience and attachment theory.

And so we have this unique model at Deeper Walk that combines the Bible and spiritual warfare and the Holy Spirit and brain science. And so it’s really unique. It’s hard to find an organization that will bring all of these things together. But that’s what we try to do, create a holistic model to help people identify those obstacles and overcome them.

[06:43] Stephanie: Yeah, I think what we do is pretty epic. I enjoy being part of it.

[06:50] Marcus: Yeah, it is an epic thing. We get to hang out with a lot of epic people, as you know.

The one thing you never run out of is people who are looking for answers for the issues that they face. And I tell people all the time that most of the books that I’ve written started because I was looking for answers for myself, right? I had issues I couldn’t get on the other side of. I had struggles. And I’m like, well, what’s the best stuff out here? Where do I need to look for answers for my own journey?

And then as you’re trying to help, whether it’s pastoring a church or whether it’s meeting one on one with somebody who’s looking for help, you’re just looking for the best answers you can find, the best solutions that are available. That led me into a lot of different directions that led to the brain science, to spiritual warfare, to the Bible, to spiritual disciplines, to all of these things. What role do they all play? And how do we bring them all together to help people get exactly what it is that they need?

[07:51] Stephanie: Yeah. I like when you were praying about starting Deeper Walk and you were wrestling with “am I the one to do this? And God, are you really calling me to this?” “There’s a lot I still don’t know.” And what did he tell you?

[08:08] Marcus: He said, “You don’t have to be perfect,” which is something he tells me a lot. He’s like, “You don’t have to be perfect. Just invite people to join you on the journey.”

[08:19] Stephanie: Exactly.

[08:19] Marcus: And I was like, I can do that. And that’s kind of what inspired the On the Trail theme for this podcast. We’re just inviting people to join us on this journey that we’re on. We don’t claim to have all the answers, don’t claim to be perfect at it. You know, we’re not trying to say that it’s all come together here, but we’ve learned a lot of things. And because we’ve learned so many things through the years, we want to share those with other people because there’s so many helpful tools out there, so many helpful concepts, and we want to get them out to as many people as possible.

[08:53] Stephanie: Indeed, that’s a great segue into “what is this podcast going to look like?”

[08:59] Marcus: So, you know, On the Trail podcast is designed to help people stay on that journey toward a deeper walk with God. And so the model that we use, we talked about this holistic model. We call it heart-focused discipleship. And that stands in contrast to traditional discipleship.

And the idea of this podcast is explaining, you know, why doesn’t traditional discipleship always get the results we want? And what is heart-focused discipleship? How does it work? What does this journey look like?

So that’s what we’re going to be focusing on, is just all kinds of tools and models and principles and practices that we’ve discovered through the years that have helped people in one way or another to go deeper in their walk with God and stay on that trail to a deeper walk.

[09:51] Stephanie: Yay. I’m excited to do it with you.

[09:55] Marcus: This is gonna be fun. I know. It’s like, I,what dad doesn’t want to, you know, share an adventure like this with their daughter? So this is really cool. And I want to point out, too, I’m not sure if you told people that you’re a student at Asbury Theological Seminary. So you’re getting your master’s degree in Biblical Studies, and are not just another pretty face. You’ve not only know my books and studied those, and not only have you edited other people’s materials, but you’ve been a serious student of the Bible in your own right. So I want to make sure people know who they’re listening to.

[10:33] Stephanie: Yeah, I have one year left – Lord willing – and am really enjoying that.

[10:39] Marcus: Yeah. Pocketbook willing, right?

[10:42] Stephanie: Yes. I’m loving studying Greek and Hebrew and I get to study with a lot of cool people, so maybe some of that will bleed through. I’m a nerd and it will come out, I’m sure.

[10:57] Marcus: Well, it’s probably inevitable that we will quote lines from movies too, because that’s just kind of what we do when we talk. So we’ll try to make sure we don’t have too many insider jokes going on as we go through this.

[11:08] Stephanie: But, yeah, we might get too comfortable.

[11:10] Marcus: But you never know.

[11:13] Stephanie: Oh, that’s so good. Well, do you have any final thoughts for this pilot episode?

[11:19] Marcus: You know, we’re hoping that this will be something that you tune into on a regular basis. To remain on the journey. We all need encouragement to stay on the road, and it can be helpful to have a little 15, 20 minute thing now and then that keeps you going. Just what I needed for the week.That’s what we’re hoping to provide.

And we’re going to start by taking a look at the topic of the Broken Discipleship Factory. And I think that’ll be our first official podcast. Where’s the church struggling on making disciples and what do we need to do to fix this thing? So we’re going to take a deep dive on the topic of voluntarism. Because somebody said, “If you want to know if people really care about what you’re saying, start by teaching on voluntarism.” And they’re going, what? You’re teaching about what?

[12:07] Stephanie: So, yeah, we’re gonna just throw people straight into the deep end.

[12:11] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. Let’s just go with an obscure philosophical movement and start there. So that’s what we’re doing next week.

[12:19] Stephanie: Excellent. I look forward to it.

So thank you for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends.

You can find out more at our website, deeperwalk.com. Thanks again and we’ll see you back next week.