7: FISH: Heart-Focused Discipleship (Part 1)

[00:07] 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.

Welcome to episode seven. Today we start our second series. We’re talking about the heart-focused discipleship model. FISH – F. I. S. H. Yes, this is one of my father’s acrostics. We like to say FISH and Go FISH. We’ll unpack this more as we continue. Before we dig into the heart-focused discipleship model – Greetings, Father!

[00:42] Marcus: Greetings, Daughter!

[00:43] Stephanie: Congratulations are in order. Do you want to share the very exciting news?

[00:47] Marcus: Well, I am very excited to announce that A Deeper Walk is being released tomorrow, officially. So this broadcast comes out on August 1, the book’s released tomorrow, August 2, and we’re very excited to see it finally hit the market.

[01:02] Stephanie: Huzzah.

[01:03] Marcus: Yay. It is pretty fun. And if you haven’t seen the cover on this thing, the people at Moody did a fantastic job. It’s a beautiful cover that looks like a national park poster, which I think is really cool.

[01:16] Stephanie: They understood the assignment.

[01:18] Marcus: Yes, they did.

[01:20] Stephanie: Dad has been dreaming about a cover that looks like this for a long time, and they nailed it. I think the only change that we had to request was having three people on the cover instead of one.

[01:29] Marcus: Yeah. To show that this is a group journey and not just something you do on your own.

[01:33] Stephanie: Yeah, I know, they nailed it. It looks so beautiful. Do you want to give a quick pitch for what it is?

[01:40] Marcus: So this book is kind of our flagship book at Deeper Walk International. A lot of times people come to our book table and they see 20 to 100 books, depending on the event. They’re like, if I only get one, what should it be? Well, now we have a simple answer, it’s this one. This book has almost every chapter as a summary of a book I’ve already written. This is kind of a summary of everything that we’ve been teaching at Deeper Walk for a long time now.

Obviously, it has some new content in it too, with some things explained and expressed in a little bit different formulas. But some of these things you’ll recognize and there will even be a few stories in here, I think, that you’ve heard before. But overall, this is meant to be something you can hand to somebody else, and it’ll give them an overview of what we teach about discipleship.

[02:30] Stephanie: I adore this book. So we have been talking about the Broken Discipleship Factory in our last series. You talk a little bit about that in this book, and then you start laying out what heart focus discipleship looks like? So do you want to take a moment to kind of explore the core difference between the two? And why is heart focused discipleship so important?

[02:59] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. When I was in seminary, we were taught that if the church was a factory, its product would be disciples. I have a lot of friends who are engineers, and one of the things that they get paid to do is to study products and figure out why they aren’t performing correctly. And so the question was, if you’re going to do an analysis of the “performance” of people who have been disciplined by the modern church, would we give them A pluses? Would we give them C’s? Would we give them D’s or F’s? Well, how is the church actually doing at producing mature disciples?

And I came to the conclusion, based on a lot of Barna research and just a lot of personal experience, that the factory is broken. It is not producing the kind of product on a regular day in, day out basis that we would want, nor that we would expect. So it’s not enough just to say, “Hey, it’s broken, fix it, right?” You’ve got to have an answer. And so what we’ve been doing for a long time here at Deeper Walk, is trying to create a model that churches can use. And not only churches can use, but also that individuals can use on their own journey to go deeper with their walk with God.

And so this model, in keeping with a lot of other things we do, we try to keep it simple. We explain it with the word FISH. Which stands for Freedom, Identity, Spirit, and Heart-Focused community. So those are the four core things that we will unpack throughout this series, where that came from and all the rest of it. But that is the core model, and that’s where it came from in trying to fix this broken discipleship factory.

[04:34] Stephanie: Yeah. Before we continue unpacking, I wonder if you would tell the story of the well. I think it really preaches.

[04:45] Marcus: Several years ago we were taking a family vacation, and mom had brought along cassette tapes. This will date when we were doing this. They were stories from the Jesus film,  where all these miracles were taking place. We also listened to a story from a missionary organization somewhere in our past that went to India. They went to dig wells to bring fresh, healthy, safe water to the rural villages. They got to one particular village, and the well was already there, but it was not functional. In fact, not only was this well not bringing anybody any water, it had turned into the town dump. When they started unpacking what was in there, they actually found broken toilets and just really nasty junk.

But they had a little meeting, and they decided it would be more cost-effective to reclaim this well than to start from scratch and dig a new one. So that’s what they did. As they started pulling all the baggage and garbage out of this well, they got partway down and  found something that really surprised them, and it was a cobra’s nest. So, as you can imagine, they were a little freaked out and immediately went and called for specialists who came in and relocated the cobras. But they continued on down the well  clearing it out and pressure washing it. When they got to the bottom, they found that the foundation stones around the spring had collapsed, and were actually clogging the spring.

And I thought, now, there is a pretty good metaphor. In fact, the whole well is a pretty good metaphor for the Christian life, because Jesus said, “Springs of living water will flow up from within you.” I think all of us have the Holy Spirit in us, so all of us are potential wells. When we are functioning the way we’re meant to be functioning, the Holy Spirit is flowing quite naturally through us.

[07:08] Marcus: But for a lot of us, the foundation has collapsed. And that foundation is our identity in Christ. It’s grace, you might say, the foundation of this whole journey.  Well, why am I not experiencing the life God wanted me to? It’s because the spirit is not flowing, and why is the spirit not flowing? It’s because the foundation has collapsed and as a result of that, my life is collecting garbage, right? It’s like I’m collecting stuff I don’t want to be there. Whether it’s addictions or emotions I can’t handle, or behavioral patterns I can’t seem to break. And in the same way that the well didn’t fix itself, there was a team of people that was involved in this process.

And I think it also reminds us that it takes a community to see the kind of transformation that we want to see. So you can see the whole FISH model in the well story, right. Freedom has to do with getting rid of the garbage and the snakes. The Identity is resetting that foundation. Spirit is the flow of the water from within. And Heart-Focused community is both the community that helped to restore the well and then the community that benefits from this new life-giving well that’s been reclaimed.

[08:18] Stephanie: Hallelujah.

[08:19] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a cool story.

[08:21] Stephanie: It is.

[08:21] Marcus: I’m like, when I first heard it, I’m like, that’ll preach, right? That’s good.

[08:24] Stephanie: Talk about a word picture or a whole story that is a great metaphor. So we love to root things in the scripture, obviously. Do you want to unpack the Romans background and maybe the story of how you developed figuring out the core elements of a heart-focused discipleship?

[08:44] Marcus: The core scripture behind this is Romans 5-8. And I was asked to go do some training for a group of pastors out in Oregon. This is probably ten years ago now. The topic was discipleship. So I started walking them through Romans 5-8 and I started asking them questions like, would you agree, first of all, that Romans 5-8 outlines what it takes to be a successful Christian?

Paul’s point in writing this is that a lot of people are stuck. They’ve put their faith in Christ, but people are concerned that they need law in order to grow. And he is trying to explain to them, no, you don’t need law, you need grace in the Holy Spirit. I said, so let’s look at Romans 5-8 and ask ourselves the question, “What does Paul say is absolutely essential to transformation as a Christian?” And it’s pretty clear that he starts with dying with Christ. Well, dying with Christ, you know, is about surrendering our life to Christ, yes, but a lot of preachers never get past that.

And so every sermon is just surrender again, surrender again, surrender again. I’m like, well, what if there’s more to it than that? Because the idea here is that sin enslaves us and Jesus said also that truth sets us free. Well, if truth sets us free, then the counterpoint to that is that lies enslave us. So we look at sin and lies as the two primary things that enslave us and keep us in bondage, and we died with Christ to be set free. So the first principle of Freedom is anchored in this idea that we died with Christ specifically, so that we could be set free from all that enslaves us.

That means that at conversion, we are given our freedom papers. And now, in discipleship, we are learning how to live that out. We’re learning, how do I actually claim this freedom? How do I fight for this freedom? How do I live out of this freedom? You know, you think a lot about our own American civil war and the release of slaves, that just because they got a piece of paper, didn’t mean that the story was over. In the same way, just because we’ve been granted freedom at our conversion, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a process of growing in our ability to live in that freedom.

[11:04] Marcus: So that’s what discipleship is about, there at the first point. The second one is Identity, and that has to do with the idea that we are raised with Christ. So if we’re raised with Christ, why? So we die with Christ, why? To be free. We’re raised with Christ, why? So that we can live out of a new identity. And this is directly related to the idea of maturity, because maturity can be defined as acting like yourself, while you’re enduring hardship well. And so the more that I can act like myself, act like the person God says that I am, the more mature I am as a Christian.

So we see, once again I’m given a new identity in Christ at my conversion. In discipleship, I am growing my capacity to live like that person in more and more situations, in which it takes more and more to overwhelm me, so that I don’t act like myself. I think Paul put it this way in Ephesians 4:1, he said,” Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, I urge you, brothers, to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” And I think that it’s another way of saying, live your life based on your new identity.

Then the third thing is the Spirit. And again, if you read Romans 8, he goes, from all this hopelessness, and woe is me, to you know, why do I do what I don’t want to do? And then we get to Romans 8, and all of a sudden there’s the law of the Spirit, right. And there’s the Spirit of adoption who is in me. And he cries, Abba, Father. And he’s talking about how the Holy Spirit now enables us to live a different kind of life. And so we put it the same way, at conversion I’m born of the Spirit, and discipleship is about learning how to walk in the Spirit.

And then we go to the last one, and then all of this is done in the community. So Paul is talking not to an individual when he writes Romans, he’s talking to a community. And we need to be in the kind of enriched soil that is promoting growth, freedom, identity and spirit. So when you put all these things together, you see that these pastors all agreed that Romans 5-8 was, in fact, laying out a very clear model. A model of what it takes to live a successful or victorious Christian life, that it involves freedom, identity, spirit and heart-focused community.

So the question then became, so how many of you would say that your church has a very clear process for helping people live with greater freedom?

Forty-five pastors were there and not a single hand went up. I’m like, well, how many of you would say, my people could articulate their identity in Christ? Let’s not even ask if they’re living out of it. Do they even know what it is? And probably only three of the forty-five pastors raised their hands like, I’m confident my people know their identity in Christ.

And then I said, “How many of your people could, not even asking if they are doing this, but just how many of them could explain the difference between walking in the flesh, and walking in the Spirit?” And again, very few of them felt any confidence that their people in their congregation even knew what the difference was, between walking in the Spirit and walking in the flesh. I said, “If you don’t know the difference, guess which one you’re probably doing?”

[14:08] Marcus: And then you get into a heart-focused community and you realize that all of these pastors were committed to the community. They all had small group programs and they all had Sunday school classes, for that matter. But there was no sense of these people being connected and sharing life at a heart level, and all of these things go together. I look at this, and I’m like, so how did we get here? You know, how did we get to the point where every church I know has a discipleship program, and yet none of them are using the model laid out by the apostle Paul, right? It’s like, how did we get here?

And that’s why we talk about a broken discipleship factory, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It’s pretty clear what needs to be happening. So I look at this in my own life. I need to be working on my freedom. I need to be growing in my capacity to live out of my identity. I need to be constantly overcoming the flesh and walking in the spirit. And I need people around me who are on a similar journey, who are sharing this journey together. And that’s what the FISH model is all about. So that was a nice long explanation there.

[15:07] Stephanie: Oh, I love it. So good. Yeah. I kind of want to circle back around  to the purpose of this book that you’ve written and who’s your target audience? Who are you imagining holding it, you know that everything you’ve just talked about, you can find in this book?

[15:24] Marcus: Target audience… I tell people “jokingly”, the target audience is me. And to a certain extent, it’s like I’m writing the book that I wish I would have had when I was first starting out my journey. I am reminding myself of the foundations of the christian life that I need to keep coming back to in my own life. But in the same way, this is a book for every Christian who is frustrated because they don’t know why, they’re nothing growing. They don’t know what’s missing.

And the idea is, here’s a growth model that can help you do an assessment to see where the holes are that are missing in your journey. And if you are an overseer of a group of people, you can look at the programs you put together and go, where are the holes? Are we actually doing everything we need to be doing to help people live that abundant life in Christ?

[16:14] Stephanie: Excellent. I also want to circle back around to, at the beginning, I said “FISH”. And we’ve touched on FISH, do you want to touch on Go FISH?

[16:23] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of funny. I was talking to a man whose last name was Fish when this came up, and he said, “So it sounds like what I’m hearing is you’re telling people to “fish and go fish”. And it’s exactly right. The last chapter in here is on mission, and we often here at Deeper Walk, talk about kingdom impact. And one of the things having grown up in a missionary family, and a pastor’s family, well, my dad wasn’t ever a pastor. But he was a Bible professor, college president, and missions professor. So having grown up in ministry, let’s put it that way. One of the things that I realized was that there are a lot of people who go into ministry who aren’t free, and it sabotages everything they’re trying to do.

Or they go into ministry trying to create an identity because they’re not actually secure in who they are in Christ. Or they go into ministry in the flesh, trying to do this through their own power and their own strength, and they don’t know how to do ministry in the spirit. Or they go in and they become really isolated. How many people in ministry feel completely isolated, like they’re all alone, and they have to carry all the weight all by themselves, and they don’t have people?

And you look at all this, and say first of all, we see that if you don’t go through the FISH part of it, it’s going to sabotage the success of what you’re trying to do in the mission. That’s part one. Part two is that we can use all of these elements of the FISH model to do outreach. We can recruit people who are looking for more freedom in their lives. We can invite people to understand their identity. We know people are more curious about their identity.

It’s like how many people go and take identity profiles online to find out whether they’re a dwarf or an elf.  I think people are fascinated with this idea of “who am I?” So we have ways of helping them do that. And spirituality versus carnality, how does this work, and what do the two bring together? So we can use these things in the way that we do mission. We can use them as invitations, points of invitation, as well as things that help us be more effective in our own ministries.

[18:28] Stephanie: Fabulous. Well, we are going to be going more into Go FISH and mission in our next episode. So for this episode, do you have any concluding thoughts before we wrap up?

[18:38] Marcus: Well, as we go through this series, I just thought I’d warn people that we’re actually going to walk through this model backwards. And one of the reasons I tend to read books backwards, is because I like to know where the author is taking me. And then I kind of work my way back and understand how we got there. In the same way here, I want to start with mission because I know a lot of people, especially when it comes to discipleship, feel like we tend to swing to one end of the pendulum or the other.

We’re either all evangelism or we’re all emotional healing. So we’re trying to show how all of these things fit together. And since I have a more of an emotional healing reputation, shall we say, I wanted to start with mission. So people could see how what we’re doing does lead to greater evangelism and greater effectiveness in ministry.

[19:23] Stephanie: Thank you, Dad. This is awesome. And 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 more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again, we will see you back next week.