Brio: How did you get involved in music?
Warren: My dad’s a pastor, so I grew up in the church. Music was a big part of our life, because my parents were so involved in music. My mom played the piano; my dad was a drummer, and they both sang. So I got involved in music really early. Drums were my first instrument. Then my parents bought me a guitar when I was 8. That was a lot easier to haul around everywhere, so I kept that.

Your song “God Believes in You” talks about chasing a dream that seems impossible. When was a time when you took that step of faith and God proved himself?
Between the ages of 11 to 15 is when God started putting this desire in my heart to do music and tell other people about Him. My confidence was so low I felt like I was completely inadequate, so I didn’t share that desire with anybody. I remember the day I was graduating [high school], all my friends were so excited because they knew what they wanted to do with their lives, and my dream was to travel around telling people about Christ through my music. So instead, I went off to college and felt unsettled there.

When I came home for Christmas break, I asked my parents if I could hit the road for a year. I had all these songs written, and I wanted to travel and tell people my story of how Christ had become so real to me. My parents understood what it meant to do something that makes sense only because God calls you to it, and they allowed me to go.

I called churches, booked the times and went on the road. It was tough; a lot of people told me “You’re a failure,” “You can’t do this.” There’s only one person who has to believe in you for you to succeed: God. If God believes in you, there’s no stopping it. He won’t give up. There are so many stories in the Bible of people who didn’t believe in themselves, but God believed in them, and they were successful. They accomplished what God wanted them to accomplish.

If God has a plan for you and opens a door, no man can shut it. That means even I can’t shut it. He’s committed to accomplish good throughout my life. If He believes in you, nothing can stop it. And that’s where the song came from. I share this with a lot of kids who come to me at my shows. I wrote that song in the hopes that it would take the story to more people than I can personally talk to.

A lot of girls say they feel that God has blessed them with a musical talent. What advice would you give to girls who are interested in music ministry?
I really don’t know how it happened for me. I look back and don’t know how I ended up here, other than the fact that every time I wanted to quit, I didn’t. Seek God with all you have, and then you begin to take what gifts and abilities you have, and you exhaust them for the purpose of Christ. Every time it gets hard, every time the world tells you you’re a loser, every time someone says you’re going to fail and you feel like you want to quit, don’t.

If you don’t quit, what’ll happen is that some day you’ll look back and say, “I’ve done what I set out to do.” And when you leave this world, it’ll be different than it was before you came. And not just different in the sense of more material things or that you took up space on the planet, but people’s lives are changed eternally because you lived. I want eternal things to have happened because I was here. I don’t want to just look back and say it was irrelevant whether I lived or not.

Proverbs 29:18 paraphrased in The Message says, “If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves. But when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed.” This is what I encourage teenagers to do: Seek God in the sense of, “What is He revealing to you?” And follow that—exhaust yourself chasing that. If you don’t have a vision of what God’s doing and who God is, you’ll spend your life just stumbling all over, going from one unfulfilling task to another, one boyfriend to another boyfriend, because none of that fulfills you. But if you really seek God and allow Him to reveal himself to you, then you have a real goal, and you’re not stumbling all over the place. You’re heading toward changing the world.

You mentioned intentional living in regard to your thought process when you wrote the songs on your new album. What does living for a purpose look like? How can we live intentionally?
I think that it’s easy to just get into the routine of life and just skim through the surface of it. In our relationships, we just sit around and talk about other people and the weather, but we don’t get deep in our relationships where we really know people and they really know us.

I think for me, the call to intentional living is to prioritize my life: to cherish my relationships that God has given me. It’s so easy to lose sight of what’s important, and when we do, we’re living in the sense that we’re breathing, but we’re missing out on life. The goal is to believe that He believes in me and that He has plans for my life, that I’m not just here stumbling around like in Proverbs 29:18. My responsibility is to exhaust myself chasing after God. Exhaust myself to love Him back, to honor the plan that He has for me and resist anything that tries to take my energy away from that. That’s worth fighting for.