Interview with Pastor Tim, Southland Bible Church, October 30, 2015

 

Interview with Pastor Tim

Southland Bible Church

Washington, Utah

 

Interview takes place in Tim’s office at the church

October 30, 2015

 

Matt:       We have Pastor Tim at the Southland Bible Church in Washington, Utah.

Pastor Tim:  Correct

M:    Pastor Tim, please tell me your biography.  Start as early in your life as you can.  How did you end up here at the Southland Bible Church in Washington, Utah?

PT:   Let me just start with. . .I was raised in a home where we were taken to church, where we were taught the Bible from a very young age.  I was taught the Gospel that is in the Bible.

      Briefly, the Gospel is that first of all there’s some bad news for all of us.  God created man.  Man sinned.  That sin became a barrier between a holy god and sinful man.

M:    So you were in Michigan?

PT:   Grand Rapids, Michigan.  That’s where I was born and raised.

      God sent his son, Jesus Christ, to this Earth for the purpose of being our sacrificial lamb.  When John the Baptist saw him he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  But unlike the Old Testament lambs which were a picture of Christ, Christ was a fulfillment of that.  When he went to the cross of Calvary, willingly, knowing what he was doing, he paid for the sins of mankind.  In full.  When He said, “It’s finished,” it wasn’t that his life was finished, he’d finished paying for sin and then it says he gave up his spirit.  He died on the cross for my sins, for your sins, for the sins of all mankind.  He was buried and rose again the third day.  He is seated at the right hand of God today.  Through the Bible, through His word, He has made it known to us that we can be saved from the penalty of our sin.  What is that penalty?  The Bible says the wages of sin is death.  It’s not just talking about physical death, it’s talking about eternal death.  If you go to the book of Revelation it talks about the second death where people who did not put their faith and trust in Christ as their Savior, stand before the Great White Throne of Judgment, God demonstrates to them that they didn’t get saved, and he then gives them their sentence which is the Lake of Fire, eternal separation from God.

I tell you all that to say that I knew all those facts as an 8 year old child but I somehow hadn’t related the fact that this is a personal decision that I had to make.  Even as an 8 year old I knew I was a sinner.

M:    Do you have brothers and sisters?

PT:   Yes.  One sister and 2 brothers.  I was the oldest boy.

M:    So your parents were religious from the beginning from the time that you can remember.

PT:   Yes.

M:    Where they a specific denomination?  Was there a specific church that you went to?

PT:   It was similar to the one I’m in right now, an independent church.  That means that we don’t have a hierarchy.

      My dad was raised in a denomination, the Methodist denomination.  They began changing their belief system when he. . .he became a pastor.  They started getting directives from the Methodist organization:  “We no longer believe in the Virgin birth.  We no longer believe that the Bible is necessarily the word of God.”

M:    This is in your dad’s time?  So that would be, what, the first half of the 20^th Century?

PT:   This would be the 1940s and 50s.

      My dad believed the Bible.  So as these directives came he finally got up in front of his church and said, “I can no longer be a pastor in this church.  These are some of the directives that I’ve been told to teach, and I can’t.  I’m resigning today as your pastor.”

      Well the people of the church, they’ve been taught the word of God and they said, “If you can’t stay, we can’t stay.”

      The Methodist Church owned the building, so they had to vacate the building and they began an independent Bible Church.  The whole purpose in their mind was, “We don’t want ever this to happen to us again where the hierarchy tells us, ‘You’re going to change your belief system.’”  So the independent church movement actually began, this was happening in a number of different denominations all at the same time.

      Then they thought, “Where are we going to get our pastors?”  So they began developing independent Bible institutes:  Moody Bible Institute in Chicago is one of those.  Multnomah in Oregon.  Grand Rapids School of Bible and Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I was from.  Dallas Theological Seminary.

M:    So these are. . .Can you call them Bible Colleges?

PT:   They call them Bible Institutes because there purpose was not to give a secular education or a degree.  Their purpose was to train pastors and missionaries in the Bible.  In order to do that they couldn’t be accredited as a school, but they could offer diplomas and that type of thing.  That’s where independent churches began looking for their pastors.

      Coming back to my story.  I was sitting in Sunday School one time as an 8 year old boy and the teacher was teaching about the fact that we’re sinners and that because of that sin we’re separated from God, we’re condemned.  But Christ came to pay for our sin and He’s offering us salvation as a gift.  Salvation from the penalty of our own sin if we will believe He is the son of God come down from heaven.  He did pay for our sins.

      As an 8 year old one thing I understood was I am a sinner.  I knew I’d lied, I knew I’d stolen things.  I could go down the list.  I knew, “Okay, that applies to me.  But I haven’t personally made that decision.”  I felt the weight of my sin.  Nobody told me, “Now Tim, you need to go do this.”  I knew what I needed to do.  So in the privacy of my own heart, nobody there knew what took place that day in me.  But I said, “Lord I know you are the son of God.  I know you came to this earth and you died on the cross.  You paid for my sin.  You offer me heaven as a gift.  I accept you as my savior.”  It wasn’t a big emotional experience, I just felt relief.  That weight of sin I felt was lifted from me.  That decision as an 8 year old boy changed the course of my life.

      There were a lot of new things that were happening in me.  I’d never really cared about knowing God’s word before that.  I began to desire to know His words.  I’d look at it on my own, ask a lot of questions.  I wanted my friends to know about this.  I began sharing with them and I had some bad experiences.

M:    Did you go to public schools?

PT:   I did.

      They were not as excited to hear the things I was sharing as I was when I heard it.  So I experienced that first rejection and even mockery.

      But God continued to bring experiences into my life.  I went to work at a camp when I was 14.  I was supposed to work in the kitchen but when the counselors didn’t show up I ended up counseling.

M:    A Christian-type camp?

PT:   Yes.  Part of our duties as counselors were to teach the Bible, devotions, and answer questions.  I had the privilege of leading some kids to Christ that summer.  That gave me a taste . . “This is the most important thing I’ve done in my 14 years.  Nothing compares to this.”  The difference between heaven and hell is that decision.  I remember at that age saying, “God, I’ll do whatever you want me to do with my life.”  I was very shy.  I thought, “Well, God knows that so he’ll never call me or ask me to do something that would require me to be up in front of people.  But he’s got something for me to do,” I thought, “maybe a camp director.”  I loved camps.

      I eventually went to Bible School.  I got to between my junior and senior year and I still had no idea what I was going to do with my life.

M:    This is the school in Grand Rapids?

PT:   Yes.  The Grand Rapids School of Bible and Music.

M:    Is it still there?

PT:   It has now merged with a Baptist college and is called Cornerstone University.

      So I prayed and was pleading with God, I said, “God, I just want to know what you want me to do.”  I was reading Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 that night and it says “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding.”  That’s the second part of that verse.  And it says, “In all your ways acknowledge Him and He’ll direct your paths.”  I stopped when I read that second part, the part that says, “Lean not to your own understanding.”  I thought, “That’s what I’ve been doing.”  To my understanding God would never call me to do anything that would involve public speaking.  I never was good at it.  It terrified me.  But I remember climbing out of my bed, getting down on my knees, and I said, “God, if you want me to do something that involves speaking.  If you want me to be a pastor, I’ll do anything you want me to do.  I’ll trust You to give me the ability to do whatever that is.”  Then I added this to my prayer.  I said, “In fact, if You give me an opportunity to preach this summer I’ll take it.”

      I was 19 years old.  Nobody had ever asked me to preach in their church.  I thought that was the safest prayer I’d ever made.  My dad actually worked at the Bible School.  He came home three days later and he said. . .People called the school during the summer time and asked faculty members to fill pulpits when the pastor is on vacation.  He said, “All of the teachers are committed in three weeks.  I told them you would come and preach.”  I remembered what I’d promised God.  So I said, “Okay.”

      I had three weeks to prepare.  I was terrified.  But when I went and preached that Sunday at that church. . .

M:    A non-denominational church?

PT:   It was a little Baptist Church.

      I remember getting up there and suddenly the fear was gone and I was far more interested in people understanding God’s word than I was what they thought of me.  I felt an ability that I had never felt before.  In the process of preaching that Sunday I knew that “This is was God wants me to do for the rest of my life.”  From that point forward God threw open doors to me.  I had opportunities to preach in churches.  One of the churches that I preached at actually called me to be their pastor when I graduated.  I graduated from school the last of May and started pasturing the first of June as a single pastor, 23 years of age.

M:    A single pastor?

PT:   I wasn’t married.  Which is unusual.  I met my wife six years into my ministry there.

M:    In Grand Rapids?

PT:   This was between Jackson and Ann Arbor, Michigan; a little town called Manchester.  Faith Community Church.

      We were married six years into that ministry.

M:    So you were a head pastor?

PT:   Yea.  The preaching pastor.

M:    That wasn’t specifically a Baptist Church?

PT:   No.  That was an independent church.

      That’s 42 ½ years ago.  I’ve only been a pastor of two different churches.  That one for 12 years and this one for 30.  So we were married.  She was there 6 years and then we felt led to come to St. George, Utah, to start a church.  We did that 30 years ago.

M:    So, you can’t speak for Joy, but does she have a similar religious background as you?

PT:   Her family were missionaries in Chili and Argentina, church planting missionaries.  She was raised in South America, she speaks Spanish as well as she does English.  In fact, she’s a Spanish interpreter here in St. George.  So she grew up in that.  She came to the same Bible School that I came to a few years after I was there.  But my home is in Grand Rapids and I often went back and was around the school.  So we met there.

M:    So, this is my ignorance, traditionally women aren’t pastors.

PT:   Correct.

M:    So when they go to a Bible School what was she studying?

PT:   A lot of people went to the Bible School just to get a Bible education.  It’s our belief that if you get a good strong Bible education it’ll stand you in good stead whatever you do in your life.  It’ll stand you in good stead as a husband or a wife, or a Sunday School teacher at a church, whatever, even an occupation that you choose.  The school is actually set up with the Freshman year what they call the Basic Christian Training Year and a lot of kids came to get the Bible teaching and then they would go on to a secular university to get trained in whatever career they were headed for.  There were those who felt called to remain there and prepare for ministry.  The girls that were there were not there necessarily to prepare for pastoral ministry.  There are areas of missionary work that women are involved with, and a lot of different types of ministry.  For example, Hope Pregnancy Care Center, here in town, was started by a lady from our church and it’s run mostly by women, but it’s an outreach to girls who are in a crisis pregnancy; seeking to help them and reach them.  There’s lots of different types of ministries that gals can be involved with.

M:    How did you come up with St. George?  You didn’t throw a dart at a map.  How did this come about?

PT:   We loved the church we were in.  I had no intention of ever leaving there.  A friend of mine that I met when I was 14 years old at that camp, the first time we met, he told me, “I feel God wants me to be a church planter in Utah some day.”

M:    That’s a common term?  A “planter”?

PT:   Yea.  It means starting from scratch.

      That never changed in him.  We were the same age.  We went to Bible School together.  We roomed together.  When I took the pastor at Michigan, he came out and started a church in Kaysville, which is Kaysville Bible Church.

M:    Any idea of why he thought of Utah?

PT:   Yes.  That goes back to a man who came to visit him who has become a good friend of his and mine.  His name is Dick Manion.  Dick was a church planter in Idaho, from Michigan.  He shared in that church and Ron felt like this guy, “This is what God wants me to do.”  He walked up to him and told him after the service.  Dick has later said, “I saw this young kid come up, he was 11 years old, and told me, ‘I’m gonna be a church planter some day with you.’”  And he said, “Oh, okay.”

      Ron went to Bible School.  Ron kept in contact with Dick.  He eventually came out and worked summers with him in Idaho.  Then he felt burdened to go to Kaysville, Utah.  So that’s where he went.  That church is still in existence, still flourishing.  He planted three churches in Utah.  Now he’s the head of a church planting mission.

      Anyway, Ron was one of the missionaries from our church in Michigan.  He came to Michigan and said, “I’d like . . .”  They had just moved to Cedar City and were planting Valley Bible Church which is still there.  He said, “I’d like you to pray two other Bible Churches get started in Southern Utah in the next five years.  One in St. George and one in Richfield.  Would you as a church pray for that?”  We took that on as a prayer project, and our family did as well.  We had family devotions where we read the Bible and prayed together.  We started praying that God would send someone to start these churches.  I was preaching through the Book of Acts, and if you’re familiar with Acts, it’s the story of Paul, who was a church planter.  He went from city to city sharing the Gospel, planting churches.  So I’m praying for someone to go to St. George, I’m preaching, and it’s like the messages I’m preaching to the congregation are hitting me more.  I started thinking, “Maybe God wants me to be an answer to one of those prayers.”  Eventually I thought, “I got to tell my wife what I’m thinking.”  I came home one day and we were eating Sunday dinner and I said, “Joy, I think God may call someone from our church to missions work.”

      She said, “Who?”

      I said, “I think it might be us.”

      I knew she loved the church there and I thought, “She’s gonna say ‘No way.’”  But she said, “Maybe it is us.”  She’d been thinking along those lines.

      Eventually we came out . . .Ron had asked us to come out for a week of meetings in Cedar City.  We came out and came down and saw St. George for the first time.  We put an ad in the paper that just said, “Anyone interested in a Bible Church in St. George call this number.”  The day we were going to leave we got a call from a guy and he said, “What is this church going to be like, that you’re talking about?”  So I did.  And he said, “I’m a new Christian.  I accepted Christ a couple years ago.  I’ve been praying for that kind of church to come.”

M:    What year are we talking about here?

PT:   We’re talking 1984.

      By the time we’d got done talking he said, “I’ll be a part of this church if you come.”

      We kept contact with him.  I went back and started pasturing again, but I’d be sitting there preparing messages but I’d be thinking about planting a church in St. George.  Eventually I had the assurance that this is what God wanted for me.  So we announced to our church, “We’re going to be leaving in 6 months.  While we’re here we’d like to go out and share this with other churches every other week and then you can have pastoral candidates in in the meantime.”

M:    Why are you sharing it with other churches?

PT:   To raise. . .

M:    So you’re officially coming out as a missionary?  In an independent church.  So this isn’t like the Baptists who have these organizations. . .

PT:   Exactly.  Each church makes their own decision whether. . .

M:    So you, as individuals, just kind of put yourself out there and say, “This is what we’re doing, can you help us out?”

PT:   Exactly.

      When we left Michigan there was $400 committed to our support, per month.  That’s what we knew we were going to have, but we felt God wanted us here at a certain time and I knew I was going to have to get a job and work.  So we arrived.  In the three days it took us to get here that support, once people heard we were on our way, went up to about $900.  That’s where it stayed during the time that I received support.  I worked part-time doing different jobs here in town and starting the church.

      That went on for 7 years, but the church grew in that period of time that in seven years they were able to take on our full support.  So I could stop the part-time work and devote myself to this completely.

M:    Were you at this location?

PT:   We started out in the conference room in what was the Four Seasons Convention Center, which is now a youth, for troubled teens.  Right on St. George Boulevard.

M:    Red Rock.

PT:   Yeah.

      That’s a whole story in itself, how that happened.  Ron Thompson in Cedar City, he knew one guy in St. George and he said, “Just stop in, I’ll tell him you’re coming.  Ask him any questions you want about the city.”  So we did.  After we were done talking with him we thanked him and got up to leave, he was the manager of the Four Seasons, he said, “Do you guys have a place to meet yet?”

      We said, “No.”

      He said, “Let me show you something.”  He took us down and he opened the door and turned on a light and here’s this long conference room with chairs set up and a pulpit up in front.  He said, “Will this work for you?”

      And I said, “Yeah it would, but what would this cost to rent?”

      He said, “For you guys, nothing.”

      So God just dropped in our lap a place to meet.  He did something else, he offered the people who worked for him, if they wanted to go to church on Sunday, they could go that hour and he’d pay them for that hour.  So some of the first people coming to the church were people who actually worked at the Four Seasons.  The first people who got saved were some of those people.

      That was our beginning.  Three years later we were able to purchase land and build the church.  The first church.  It’s that little. . .It’s actually our nursery now.  It sat 70 people.

M:    Were there houses here?

PT:   No.  There’s to twin homes over here.  That was all that was here.  In fact the street ended there.  We had to put a street in, in front of the church and run the utilities out.  We built that first little building in 1987, no, ’88.  Three years after we were here.  We met in that conference room for 3 years.

M:    How many congregants did you have at that point?

PT:   We had, when we started the building project, we only had about 30 people.  By the time we were done we had 45.  Two years later we had 90, which required us to build the second phase of the church.  This is the fifth stage of this church that has been added on.

M:    Does that all represent growth in membership?

PT:   Yea.  We only added on out of necessity, when we outgrew what we were meeting in.

M:    With Utah being 70% or so LDS, were there any particular challenges or advantages to church planting here?

PT:   We never faced any outward animosity from any people.  Our neighbors were very kind to us.  In fact we had, and still have good friendships with, we don’t live in the same neighborhood anymore, but we still have good friendships with those people, and they’re LDS.  The only thing we ever really faced was when we were looking for property.  People would find out what it was for and then say, “We’re going to take our property off the market.

      How this first building came into being, we finally found a piece in Bloomington Ranches that a guy was willing to sell us and he was willing to carry the contract on it.  I went to the head of the architectural control board and I said, “We need to know what you require in a building and he said, “What kind of church is it?”

      I knew what he was asking but I said, “It’s going to be a white colonial-style church.”

      He said, “This isn’t an LDS church?”

      I said, “No.”

      He said, “We don’t want you here and I’ll do everything I can to keep you from being here.”

      The planning commission passed us.  The City Council, when we got to that meeting, he was there.  He’d obviously talked to some of the council members and they turned us down and had really no reason.  I remember the city manager stood up in the meeting and said, “This makes no sense to me.  This is how we’re going to get sued as a city if you guys make decisions like this.”  This was the city council of St. George.

      There was a newspaper man there and he wrote the article about it, and he wrote everything down.  I cut the article out and made copies and sent it out to the people who were on our prayer list and one man that I’d never met before came across that.  He happened to be a Christian lawyer and he called and said, “I’d be willing to come to St. George to take this to court and we’ll keep appealing it until we get it out of Utah.  I’ll do this pro bono.  I’ll get the city to pay for your church.”

      We prayed about that and thought, “That’s gonna send a really wrong message cuz people aren’t gonna know all the circumstances.  They’re just going to know this little church is suing the city.”  We thanked him and we said, “No thanks.  We don’t feel that’s the way we want to go.”

      He said, “I tell you what.  When you find property, I’ll be your bank.  I’ll loan you the money to buy the property.”

      When we found this property we called him, I said, “I don’t know if you still mean that but, if you mean it, we’d be happy to.  You just tell us what our payments are going to be, what the interest rate is going to be.”

      He said, “I’ve been thinking about that, praying about that, and I don’t think God wants me to loan you that money, I think He wants me to give it to you.  But I’ll loan you the money to build the church.”

      So we immediately made plans to build a church.  Had a builder from Michigan come out and help us.  I said, “We’ll stop at this guy’s house, cuz he doesn’t live anywhere near here and pick-up the check and ask him what our payments are and what the interests it.”

M:    Did he live in Utah?

PT:   No.  He lived in Colorado.

      When the builder got here he said, “This isn’t a loan.  This is a gift.”  So our first building was debt free.  Since then the church has been able to . . .It comes from the congregation, nobody outside.  We’ve been able to build and we’ve built with cash all the time.  The people give what they want to give.  There’s no pressure.  We’ve been able to remain debt free.

      One of the things I said to our congregation when we got into the first building was, “We’re not in debt, but we really are.  Someday if we can do this for another church, we need to do this.”  And Mountain View Bible Church in La Verkin, a few years later, we’d outgrown this building.  We had about forty people coming from the La Verkin/Hurricane area.  We felt like it was time to repay that debt.  We found land and the church bought it.  This church built Mountain View Church.

      I spoke at their dedication service.  I said, “You’re not in debt but you are in debt.  Someday, if you can do this for another church, you need to do this.”

      That’s how things started.  We just saw God’s hand.  We came into this town with nothing.  He provided me jobs and a place to live.  It’s been a neat ride.  We don’t take any credit.  We’re just thankful we were able to watch it.

M:    Over 30 years.

PT:   Yeah.  Thirty years last June, when we arrived.

M:    How many people attend a typical Sunday service?

PT:   In the winter time, that’s our big time of the year.  We have Snowbirds that come in, we run about 375.  In the summer time, about 325 on a Sunday morning.

M:    That’s pretty good size for this town and not being LDS.

PT:   Yeah.  We’re very thankful.

M:    So you, this being your job, the pastor of the church, it’s your job to find money as cheaply as possible to build new buildings. . .

PT:   People can’t believe how we do this.  As you’ve been here you haven’t heard me mention money once.

M:    You did once in saying that “We don’t ask for a tithing, you give what you want.”

PT:   I preach through books of the Bible.  There are passages that talk about giving.  When I get to those passages I preach them.  But the New Testament does not teach tithing.  It teaches that each man gives as he feels led of God to give what he feels he should.  There’s a couple principles that God gives in his word.  One is, instead of waiting to the end of the week after you’ve spent everything on your pay check, you pray about it up front and you set that money aside, then you give it on the first day of the week, which is Sunday.  I have no idea what people give.  We have a treasurer and they have to take the offering and count it up.  No one ever tells me what people gave, who gave, and that is totally up to them.  I tell that to people and they say, “That can’t work.”

      I say, “It’s worked for thirty years.”  My belief is this, if the church is being led of God to do what it does, and people are being led of God to give what God wants them to give, then it will always be enough.  I’ve seen churches that I felt like ran ahead of God and got themselves in trouble.  I’ve seen churches where there’s a high pressured plea for money every week.  It seems the more you do that the less people want to give.  Giving ought to be something that we’re excited about, that because we’re giving to God’s work and God is using it to change lives of people, that’s a great investment, so it’s something we’re excited about doing.  But, no, we don’t fundraise, we don’t beg the people to give.  They give what they want to give and, as I said, for 30, well for 42 years because that’s the way it was in our first church I pastured, we’ve seen God balance it out. 

M:    So you make some kind of paycheck from pasturing, right?

PT:   Absolutely.  The congregation determines what that is.

M:    They have a board?

PT:   We have a board.  We have congregational meetings.  One of the things that they vote on is our salaries.  They are aware of what we make.  I can tell you there have been a lot of times when the whole pastoral staff has said, “We don’t want any more.  We have enough.”  During building programs, and those types of things, there have been, I think, seven years where none of us took any pay increase whatsoever.

M:    It happens at Dixie too.

PT:   Our desire is to see what’s best for the church.  If our families’ needs are met. . .We’re not looking to get rich and we certainly are not.  On the other hand I’m thankful that we usually have to slow them down in their desire of what they want to do.  We have said, “No.  We’d rather see it go other places.”

M:    How many people are on the staff?

PT:   We have three pastors.  Myself and Dan and . . .

M:    Dan spoke the other night?

PT:   Yes.  He is the Assistant Pastor.  Jason is our Youth Pastor.  Those are the only paid people on staff.

M:    The Treasurer is not paid?

PT:   No.  Everything else is volunteer.

M:    How do you find other pastors?  How did you find Dan and Jason?

PT:   Dan came to this church. . .He wasn’t a believer.  In fact, neither he nor his wife were believers.  They were from two different religions and when they moved to St. George they thought, “This is a compromise.  It’s a Bible Church, it’s not a organized religion.”  So they started coming.  Both of them accepted Christ as their savior and then Dan grew by leaps and bounds as a Christian.  He devoured the Word of God.  He, voluntarily, was doing all kinds of things around the church.  When we needed an Assistant Pastor I said, “We actually already have one.  We’ve got a guy who knows the Word of God, who is involved with so much here.”  So we recommended to the church, the board did, the church voted unanimously to have him.

M:    So he didn’t go to a Bible. . .

PT:   He has no formal Bible training, but I would put his knowledge of God’s Word up against Seminary graduates.  He is that conscientious about studying and knowing the Word of God.

      Jason went to Liberty College where Jerry Falwell . . .

M:    Where is that?

PT:   That is in Lynchburg, Virginia.

      He came out here on some mission trips.  He had a friend that lived in Utah.  They came out to do different things, like Vacation Bible Schools, pass-out literature for churches, that kind of thing.  He knew he wanted to be a Youth Pastor and he had a desire to come to Utah.  When we were looking for a Youth Pastor, he was just graduating.  We’d met him and knew him and he was highly recommended.  We had him come here as an intern first, to just, you know, get their feet wet.  If it doesn’t turn into something more, then you thank them for their internship.  But it became clear to us that this is a great Youth Pastor and we hired him after that internship.

M:    What kind of church are you?  How do you, in the great tree of Christian churches. . .and you’ve mentioned a number of other churches that have “Bible” in their name, is that a type of church that has “Bible” in its name?  Because there are other churches that, say, might call themselves “Baptist” and still say that the Bible is the Word.

PT:   For example, there are some Baptist Churches here in town that, if you were to compare our Docrinal Statements, they’re identical.  We look at them as brothers and sisters in Christ and we have a good relationship with them.  Calvary Chapel.  They don’t necessarily have a hierarchy, but they do have. . .Each Calvary Chapel, they call themself the Calvary Chapel, they have a school out in California and they have a guy that kind of started Calvary Chapels, but we recognize them as brothers and sisters in Christ, that they are here for the same purpose as we are.  The Springs, the same thing.

      There are some churches that there are significant doctrinal differences in beliefs that we don’t work together with.  We don’t fight them, but we know that we don’t see eye-to-eye as far as what we believe.  They’re not someone that we necessarily endorse or try to do things with.

M:    Practically speaking, then, what are Bible Churches?

PT:   Good questions.  I tell this to people and I really mean it:  A Bible Church believes the Bible is the Word of God.  That’s what we teach.  If you come to any of our services it’s going to be Bible related, everything that’s being taught.  Most of the time, what I preach and what Dan preaches, we take them through a book.  We start at the beginning and preach all the way through it.  We believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, it’s God’s message to man.  There is nothing more important that we can teach.  We don’t claim to be the only ones who do that, there are a lot of great Baptist churches and there are a lot of great Calvary Chapels.  We like the word “Bible” in our name because that is all about who we are.  This is our final authority, not me.  I tell our people all the time, “I do my very best to preach what is in the Bible, but if you see that I am departing from what the Bible is teaching, you stick with the Bible and you reject what I’m saying.”  There are times when I’ll give my opinion on a passage and I’ll say, “This is my opinion, take it for what it’s worth.”  Most of the time the Bible is really clear in what it’s saying.

M:    As far as your actual services go, there a division in my mind, there are more contemporary-type services which I place you in.  They usually have a band as opposed to traditional hymns.  You have the screens as opposed to everybody reading.  Have you always been doing it that way?  This had to be a conscious decision.

PT:   When we started we sang out of hymn books.  We had piano and organ and one man up there leading the singing.

M:    Baptist hymn books?

PT:   There’s just good hymn books out there that Baptist Churches use, different Christian Churches use them.

      Sometimes you change because you see something better.  Our song service, to me, was getting very liturgical, very staid.  I visited a church and they were using the screen, which got people’s heads up out of the books, looking up toward the front.  They didn’t have a full band, but they had people up there singing different parts and they did have some guitars and drums and things.  But it isn’t that, necessarily, it is the words of the music.  That’s what I talk with our guys that lead, I said, “To me the message has got to be clear and good.”  We started trying a few different things and our singing improved 1,000% and people were much more involved.  Sometimes you just see, “This works better for us.”  I don’t have a problem with anybody still using piano and organ and a song leader if that’s what they feel is best for them.  We try to include one or two hymns because we don’t want people to lose touch with the hymns because they have a powerful message to them but a lot of the new songs have a powerful message to them.

M:    Part of the challenge is to try and get younger people to come, right?

PT:   Sure.

M:    I’ve been to a few churches where, I’m 50 years old, and I’m the youngest guy in the room.  Fifteen years from now they might not exist anymore.  But they’re strict, “We’re gonna stick with the piano, organ, hymns.  And I suppose as it’s preaching God’s word, you don’t want to talk just to old people, you want to talk to everybody.

PT:   Absolutely.  And I’ve noticed this, this is just a fact of life, as I’ve come up through the ministry from a 23 year old pastor to a 65 year old pastor, the bulk of your congregation tends to be the age that you are.  I don’t know why that is, but it tends to be that way.  When we were young we were praying for older people to come into the church cuz we had all young people and we wanted that balance.  In the last few years we’ve started turning that corner and we’re praying for more young families to come into the church.  We try to do some things to reach out to them and meet their needs specifically, as well as the older people.  It’s one of the challenges.

M:    Anything I haven’t asked you that you want to talk about?

PT:   You’ve hit exactly what I’d hoped to talk about.

M:    Like I told you, I don’t even know what I’m asking at this point. I don’t know this world that well.  These are surface questions.

PT:   Probably on Wednesday night you picked up that our world views are always based on what we believe.  Creation vs. evolution.  That has so many ramifications to where our thinking is and where we stand and what we believe, which often means we stand against where the culture is going and what’s politically correct.  We believe the Bible is unchanging and therefore our beliefs are going to be unchanging regardless of where the culture goes.  That’s not always an easy place to be.  But we believe that’s what God put us here for.  For us the biggest, most important thing of all is that people know what Christ did for them and that they know that that offer of salvation is extended to them no matter where they’ve been and what they’ve done.

      I run into two types of people.  There’s the people that think, “I could never be saved because of the life I’ve lived.”  I talk to them about the apostle Paul.  The apostle Paul, before he became a Christian was a Pharisee and it was his job to eliminate Christians.  He was traveling around arresting, imprisoning, and consenting to their death.  Then he met Christ and then Christ used him.  That’s why I always use him as an example to anyone who says, “I could never be saved.”

      I say, “Have you killed people?  Innocent people?  Have you killed people who didn’t believe like you believed?  If God can save Paul, He can save you.”

      Then you have the opposite, the people who believe they are so good, they’ve been such a good person that they don’t need Christ.  That’s where you have to go to the other, “All who’ve sinned come short of the glory of God.”  Romans 3:23.  We all need a savior.  That’s why He came.  That’s why he loved us.  That message, that Christ can save you, He can change your life, He can give you a brand new beginning if you need a brand new beginning.  The Bible says that if any man be in Christ, he’s a new creature.  Old things are passed away.  All things are become new.  He’s here to give you a fresh start in life and a purpose.  That’s why we’re here, that’s what we’re seeking, that’s the message we’re seeking to get out.  The joy for me is actually seeing lives totally transformed by that message.  I think that you’ve seen that in your brother.  This isn’t just platitudes and words, this is God doing the work in the hearts of people.  That’s what’s exciting to me.  After 42 years I still get up excited about going to work and preparing.