Why Am I Alive? How One Man’s Question Led to a Lifetime of Discipleship

By every medical standard, Marc Wallace should not be alive.

After high school, Marc joined the U.S. Marine Corps, expecting to be deployed to Vietnam. Instead, he contracted meningococcal meningitis. Ninety percent of those who fell ill didn’t survive. Marc was unconscious for days, his temperature dangerously high. Doctors told his parents that his brain and organs were “burned up” and urged them to sign release forms to discontinue life support and allow him to pass, expecting his body to be sent home in a matter of days.

“They were at my bedside saying their goodbyes,” Marc recalls. “And then, unexpectedly, I woke up.”

During his recovery, hospital staff didn’t call him by name — they just referred to him as the “miracle patient.” Marc’s experience left him with an unsettling question: “Why am I alive when I should have died?”

That question followed him into college — until one morning before his lifeguard shift at a local pool, when a friend shared what Christ had done in her life and the forgiveness she had received. Marc listened for two hours, and then accepted Christ. The change was immediate and visible. Even the children he taught as a lifeguard later that day noticed something was different.

While attending college in 1975, Marc’s roommate invited him to a small group Bible study with The Navigators. That invitation became foundational to the growth of his faith and the base for what God had planned for him to accomplish in the future. Discipled by two men — one a Navigator and the other from Christian Business Men’s Association — Marc learned what it looked like to study and live out Scripture in his day-to-day life.

“What struck me was the personal commitment these men showed me, helping me realize that God’s Word is more profound than simply reading,” Marc remembers. “The personal interactions I had with them, they helped me to see that I could really dig into God’s Word.”

At one point, Marc was struggling with a crisis in the middle of the night when he remembered that one of his mentors said that he could reach out to him anytime, no matter the time or day. At 10 p.m., Marc called him, desperate.

“He told me to come over, and when I got there, his wife was already making tea for me,” Marc says. “We sat there for two hours, and he helped me look at God’s Word. And I thought, this is what discipleship is all about, the commitment to come alongside someone.”

These two elements that Marc learned early in his faith journey — intentionally studying God’s Word and being in a Life-to-Life^® discipleship relationship — were not only pivotal to his young adult years, but to future decades of ministry that would impact hundreds more for Christ.

Learning to Walk Alongside

When Marc thinks of discipleship, he thinks back to his high school metal shop class. One day, he was trying to weld two pieces of metal together. After trying over and over and over again, Marc was so frustrated that he was about to walk out of the class altogether. However, at that moment his teacher came to him and started walking Marc through the project step by step. “He grabbed a hold of my hand, and he guided me,” Marc remembers. “When he released his hand, I got it. That’s a picture of discipleship.”

In the years after college, Marc began to ask himself how he could serve God with his life. What was it that God wanted him to do? He soon saw an opportunity: to walk alongside men, discipling them and helping them dive deeper into Scripture through inductive Bible studies.

“I thought back to The Navigators resources I learned, how they taught me that God’s Word is more profound than casual reading,” Marc explains. “This is what God’s Word is. We are to be tactile, conversing, encouraging one another and digging into the Bible.”

At his church in Chico, California, Marc started to notice some men who seemed stuck — they would attend church, but that was the extent of their involvement. So Marc started discipling the young men around him, taking them through The Navigators resources he had once been taught, and witnessing the transforming work of Christ in their lives.

Teaching People How to Fish in Venezuela

That foundation would prove essential when God later called Marc and his family to Venezuela as missionary church planters.

The challenge was immediate. He was encouraged to start churches — but there were no leaders available from the seminary to lead them. Marc was assigned to start a new church in the community of Charallave. Returning to what he knew and was taught, Marc gathered 11 committed believers to work with him in this church and began translating Navigator materials into Spanish. They met weekly for two to three hours, learning not just Scripture, but how to study Scripture, with the goal of showing them tools they could use to equip others for ministry.

In Charallave, the feeling of being totally overwhelmed encompassed Marc. The question he faced was how he would be able to turn over the leadership of this new church to a national leader if none were available. God then brought this question to mind: If the apostle Paul were here, what would he do?

“The Scriptures are clear: the apostle Paul would concentrate on making disciples, faithful men who were able to teach others, as Paul encouraged Timothy to do in 2 Timothy 2:2,” Marc says. “Isn’t this what Dawson Trotman taught and believed, training and equipping men for the work of service?”

That group grew into a church of more than 250 people, with leadership developed entirely from within and a foundation built on discipleship and meeting in small groups. Two additional churches were planted in surrounding communities, including Las Brisas, a low-income area of 80,000 people.

“I truly believe the work I was able to do was because of the foundations The Navigators built in me, with a focus on the Bible’s sufficiency,” Marc says. “We used these inductive Bible studies as the core of our teaching, and everyone that went through was taught to disciple others. This is what allowed our church to grow in such a short time.”

When Marc first arrived in Las Brisas to pray about the possibility of starting a church there, he found 25 men and women gathered and waiting for him. All these men and women had walked at least a mile to be there, having heard that Marc was a man of God and would teach them. No one had a Bible; three of them could not read or write. However, as they started a Bible study, each week more and more people would show up. Soon they had more than 50 people coming to study God’s Word.

“What was the effectiveness of using Navigators Bible studies in Las Brisas?” Marc says. “Lives were changed — Felix could not read or write, but he taught himself to read and write because he wanted to read and understand God’s Word for himself. He became an evangelist, sharing the gospel with those he worked with, and he began traveling to different communities to share the Good News.”

Working in Las Brisas had its unique challenges. Because 80 percent of the population was unemployed and living on the margins of society, health was a major concern for many people. In response to these conditions, Marc’s ministry decided to host a free medical clinic — something that was unheard of in Venezuela at the time. The outreach drew more than 200 families and treated 80 children. Local officials were stunned. One governor returned the following month with two others to see what God was doing, and they asked Marc to start Bible studies in their states. When Marc asked why, the answer was simple.

“‘When you come, the bad people leave,’ she told me,” Marc recalls. “Isn’t that what God told us? We are to be a light that offsets the darkness.”

The Thread of Discipleship

After his time in Venezuela, Marc returned to the U.S. to serve as a mission consultant. In the years following, Marc’s last full-time ministry project was to establish a new church in Denison, Iowa, from the ashes of a church that had dissolved. The community’s demographics had changed, and the proposed goal was to establish a multiethnic church where people of all ethnicities could come together to worship the Lord.

In 2018, Marc officially retired, and he and his wife Angie moved to Muscatine, Iowa. Discipleship is still central to who they are.

“Because of the foundation I had with The Navigators and adopting the concept of teaching people how to fish, I witnessed God transform the lives of men and women to become strong leaders and disciplemakers, investing their lives in others,” Marc says.

For Marc, discipleship is not a class — it’s the act of walking alongside someone and watching as the gospel transforms their life. From a college campus to church discipleship to building ministries in Venezuela, Marc has seen the impact of not only studying God’s Word deeply, but living it and passing it on from one generation to the next.

Has your faith been impacted by The Navigators? We would love to hear your story!

Discipleship Tip:

Marc’s ministry efforts were centered around teaching others to dig into God’s Word for themselves, and then live out what they learned. Effective discipleship goes beyond simply teaching people what to believe about the Bible: It teaches people how to study Scripture and apply it to their daily lives. Invite others into Scripture in a hands-on, relational way. When they learn to hear from God’s Word themselves, the impact extends far beyond you.