Interview with Pastor Tom, South Mountain Community Church

 

Interview with Pastor Tom

South Mountain Community Church

St. George, Utah

 

Interview takes place in Pastor Tom’s office at the church

July 23, 2015

 

Matt: Pastor Tom, South Mountain Community Church.  Tom, I’d love to know your biography.  You can go back pretty far if you want.  How does one become the pastor of a church?  It might go back to your childhood.  What kind of childhood did you have, Tom?

Pastor Tom: I was born in the sixties, ’68.  So I went through the whole divorce craze, the Brady Bunch families of the seventies and eighties.  Kind of grew up really disgruntled with life.  But I’ve always, from the earliest childhood I’ve always had a sensitivity to God, to the idea that there was a God.

M:    Where did you grow up?

PT:   Royal Oak, Michigan.  I was born in the city of Detroit and raised primarily in Royal Oak, Michigan.  All throughout my younger years my parents were not very religious but went to church, my mom did occasionally, my dad did not at all.

M:    What kind of church?

PT:   It was a Presbyterian church.  I don’t remember anything from the church.  My brother and I went because we liked riding the bus.  We found the bus to be an interesting ride.  I don’t remember hardly anything I was taught in the church.  They barely exist today because they haven’t changed with the times.  They’re too traditional and they have, like, probably 70 people left.  When I was there there were several hundred, when I was a kid.

      Anyhow, I always had a sensitivity for God.  A desire to want to connect with God.  Even as a kid I prayed, I talked to God all the time.  It was a natural thing for me.  I know that’s not the case for everybody to the sense it was with me.  But I had a very extreme God consciousness.  But I didn’t know what it meant.

      So I went through life, lots of difficulties.  Parental divorce.  Both my parents got remarried.  My mom moved to Florida.  When I turned 17 and graduated from high school, I was kind of rebellious and the way I showed it was I wouldn’t study in high school.  Some drinking and stuff but wasn’t really into drugs and things like that.  I wasn’t an overt trouble-making, getting arrested, rebel.  But I went through a rebellious phase.

      I joined the military right out of high school, two weeks after I graduated from Dondero.  I had my diploma and I went to the U.S. Navy bootcamp in Great Lakes, Illinois.

M:    Was this something you wanted to do or you didn’t have other choices?

PT:   I wanted to get out from under my dad’s authority, and my stepmother.  My stepmother was a very demeaning woman, henpecker.  She henpecked my dad all the time and I was very much the red-headed stepchild.  She had a way of irritating like a woodpecker, constantly at you.  I think more so her than anything else.  I resented my dad because he let my stepmother do that, he didn’t call her on it unless it got extreme.  I just wanted to get away from her.  My dad had had some health issues.  He had a massive heart attack two months before I went in, he was 43.  He ended up having a heart transplant a couple years later.

      So I went into the boot camp, went into the Navy.  In the Navy, when I was out on my own for the first time, I realize that I was actually smart and I could study, I could ace any test, I had skills.  I rose in rank very quick.  I went from E1 to E5 in three years.

      When I was in the Navy I would go to church, kind of like you said you were doing, I would just go to any church.  I’d visit Presbyterian Church, the Baptist Church, I’d go to the Southern Baptist Church and it scared the hell out of me with the hellfire brimstone preaching and sometimes I’d get up and walk out because I’d be so afraid.

      I always had the sense, in my heart and my experiences I just knew there was a god.  But there was also something through, you know, the human conscience where I always had this sense that if something went wrong and I stood before God, I felt like that’s not going to be a good meeting.  I had this sense of sinfulness about myself.

M:    How did you choose which churches you were going to?

PT:   I don’t remember.  I think just driving around.  Sometimes I would just drive around, I had a car.  It was more after I got my car.  It was the last year I was in the Navy, I had a car and I would drive around and listen to music just to be by myself.

M:    Where was this?

PT:   Charleston, South Carolina.  There’s a church on every corner.  I would just go find a church and attend it.  I’d been to the crazy Pentecostal people speaking in, supposedly, tongues, which is nothing but a human manufactured thing, if you ask me. . .they way they’re doing it.  There’s a biblical tongue.  But when people just start speaking gibberish, that’s not what’s presented in the Bible.  It was an actual known language that had to be learned.  It was a short term miraculous event for the apostles time.  That’s my opinion anyway.  So I wasn’t going to any of the charismatic churches, but I went to mostly, I think, Baptist churches.

M:    What’s charismatic?

PT:   Charismatic is the Pentecostal, the speaking in tongues.  They tend to focus on emotions and experience versus our method, you’ve been here, we focus heavily on the mind, connecting the mind and the heart.

M:    So if it’s not called charismatic, what’s it called?

PT:   We don’t have a term for it.  I guess we don’t label ourselves but we label the charismatics.  They label us as non-charismatic.  It’s a delineation, the charismatic churches are not the predominant side of the church.  A lot of the truths we hold to, they would hold to everything with the exception of, they would believe that certain people can still act as prophets and perform miracles and heal people.  Not that God doesn’t do healing, but when you see faith healers. . . a lot of them are charlatans, like that Benny Hinn or whatever his name is, they’re just getting rich.  It’s all phony, bogus.  Those faith healers on t.v. have been proven false by Barbara Walters.  I never went to any types of churches like that.

      When I was a kid a lady took me to a church cuz my mom told her that we had had a big fight the night before, I was in junior high visiting my mom on one weekend in Rochester, Michigan, and this lady, Pat, well-meaning, she’s really the first person that ever told me about the Gospel, but she was so crazy that it didn’t ever click with me.  I’ll explain what I mean by the Gospel later.  She shared that with me and then took me to church on Sunday morning after I’d had a fight with my mom the night before.  I was like 13, 12, 13, 14, probably more like 12, 13.  She drags. . .takes me to this church.  This was before the Navy.  She would just occasionally take me to a church because I was interested.  I wanted to talk about God even as a teenager.  You know, when the Gideons are out in front of the school, those guys handing out Bibles?  I actually read it.  I’ve been reading the Bible since I was in elementary school, not understanding a word it said but interested none-the-less.

      This lady would take me to church and she took me church, and it was a Pentecostal church, and at the beginning of the service she told the pastor, she said, “This young man has a demon in him and he fought with his mother last night.”  And these crazy, crazy Pentecostal preachers and deacons forced me to the ground and started screaming and shouting and commanding the demon to come out.  They performed and exorcism on me.  It scared the crap out of me.  I was like, “That’s too over the top.”  I never went to that.

      When I was in the Navy, that was during the Iran-Iraq war, 1988.  I went to the Persian Gulf.  We were called up on emergency to go to the Persian Gulf.  We were supposed to go to the Mediterranean but things were heating up in the Gulf.  For a couple years we had been escorting ships in and out of Kuwait, American flagged tankers going into Kuwait.  There had already been some incidents.  The Iraqi’s had already launched the Exocet missles and hit a U.S. ship just a couple years prior to that.  So there had been some circumstances that had went on over there.  It was very much a combat zone.  With things heating up they sent us over there.  We were supposed to go spend six beautiful months in the Mediterranean, instead we spent six months in hell in the middle of the Persian Gulf where it’s 120 degrees and dust completely piles up on the decks of the ship.  You have to constantly paint and chip off dust.  It’s just terrible.

      We were a cruiser.  I worked in the Combat Information Center.  We worked with radars, combat systems, tracking, detecting, destroying, that’s what we did.  We fought the wars from where we were.  The nerve center of the ship.

      One night, April 14. . .We sat in a little box in the middle of the Persian Gulf.  We were in a little half mile by ten mile long box.  That’s all we did is went back and forth, back and forth at about five knots.  Back and forth.  Back and forth.  We were there to provide anti-air warfare coverage cuz we could shoot aircraft down up to a hundred-plus miles away.  There were times where, in the middle of the day, the scouts would report mines.  We had mines, those big old mines just floating by.  They’d break loose from wherever they were laid in the Northern Persian Gulf by either the Iranians or the Iraqis, cuz they both had mine fields.  We had trained on the way over to blow them up.  You can shoot them from a half mile away, between a quarter to a half mile way they can explode them or sink them with a .50 caliber or other weapons.  They practiced doing that, but our job was too important as anti-air warfare coverage because they were every so weeks they would run these what they called Earnest Will, code name Earnest Will 1, Earnest Will 2, Earnest Will 3.  We didn’t participate in those.  I only participated in one.  We just ran cover.  We went in there to shoot down Iraqi, well, basically Iranian aircraft.  From our perspective, and I think history has proven out, we were actually connected to the Iraqis during that war.  We had made our bed with the Iraqis, we pretty much supported them even though officially we were there considering both of them belligerents.  We were there to protect tankers that would fly and American flag.

      On April 14 the Iranians had at some point in time over night, they think within a 24 hour period of time. . .our mine sweepers. . .We had key routes that we never deviate from, we always take the same routes because the mine sweepers go in and sweep for mines.  They make sure that there is no anchored mines, not like floating mines.  We used to joke about the floating mines because, I slept in the bow of the ship, you just never knew, you couldn’t see them or detect them at night, and we just never knew when we were gonna hit a mine in the middle of the night and that’d be it, you’d be dead.  You just live with that.

There is constant fear in a combat zone.  Every several days we’d have Iraqis firing missiles.  Literally their jets flying overhead, the Mirage jets, firing missiles.  Our lookouts are reporting “missiles away.”  We’re watching on radar, watching ships slowly disappear that get sunk.  Big tanker ships getting sunk.  You got the Iranians attacking ships in the Straits of Hormuz, then you’ve got the Iraqis attacking ships.  So if the Iraqis think a ship is going to Iran, they sink it.  If the Iranians think a ship is going to Iraq, they sink it.  You got all these hostilities.  Combatant ships all over the place.  We’re constantly being harassed by Iranian aircraft, F4s, F14s.  You’re in a combat zone.  You’re getting combat pay.  You just live with that combat stress 24/7.  You’re hardly sleeping cuz you’re working constantly, you’re on watch all the time.

April 14, the mines are laid.  Nobody knows it.  The USS Samuel B. Roberts hit a mine.  That’s one of our frigates.  We immediately are notified.  We locked our station to go provide coverage for them, because nobody knows what it means, we just know it hit a mine and that they’re in a minefield.  There were actually multiple mines they noticed just below the water.  That’s how they found it.  The lookout reported a mine.  They came to all-stop and they got a propulsion system that allows them to do that.  They came to all-stop and noticed that there’s mines all around them and they tried to get out of the mine field.  So we show up the next morning and the ship almost sunk.  The damage control from my ship flew out there via helicopter and actually saved the ship.  They stopped it from sinking.

That was when Reagan was in office and it wasn’t four days later that we retaliated.  But my space was immediately turned into a top secret space.  They planned the entire combat engagement on ship, in Combat Information Center.  We knew what was happening, we weren’t allowed to tell anybody that we were going to go into combat operations with the Iranians in retaliation on April 18.

      That morning. . .the reason I bring all that up is because that’s where my God consciousness and my fear of dying and not knowing how that meeting with God would go, that’s where it really grated on me.  I got up that morning and I had one of those little Gideon Bibles, I think it was a King James version, I had one of those.  We knew we were going to General Quarters at 0800, we knew that we were gonna almost immediately engage the Iranians in combat within mere minutes, which turned out to be a couple hours because our captain was gracious and gave the Iranians a chance, cuz we were gonna shell an oil transfer platform that they used as a military base, and they had military armaments and soldiers and whatnot on it.  He gave them an opportunity to abandon before he started shelling, and they had order to abandon.  They had to bring a tugboat out to get as many people as possible on before we started shelling it.

That morning I went into the head, the bathroom, and I’m sitting on the stall, and I had that little Bible, and I’m, “Okay God, I don’t know what to do.”  I’m closing my eyes and flipping through the pages and pointing my finger.  “If you have something to say to me, this is the time.  I’m really open right now.  Cuz we’re going into combat and everybody is scared out of their mind.”  I kept doing that and I came up with no conclusions.  I just went into that day super fearful.  Things heated up real fast.  We got into it with the Iranians.  We blew up that oil transfer platform.  We were shooting from ten miles out cuz we had a bigger gun.  But our other ships are dodging.  They’re being fired at from the platform cuz they were in a little bit closer.  They had a .76 millimeter gun.

After we had destroyed that, we’re heading out, back to our station.  That was going to be it for us.  In the meantime, the Navy is engaging from one end of the Persian Gulf to the other, the Navy, the Marines. .

M:    This is ’88?

PT:   This is ’88.  Look it up.  Operation Praying Mantis.  It’s the largest naval engagement to this day since WWII.  There’s never been a bigger naval engagement.  It was the first time, some of the first naval engagement, major navy ships have seen combat since WWII.  Actual exchange of fire.  Combat.  Some of the units in Vietnam saw combat.  But they didn’t have ships being attacked by the Vietnamese, or the Koreans.

      While we were going back to our station we picked up radar on an Iranian ship.  We didn’t have video on it, but we had the radar, the radio transmission from the radar.  We closed on the Iranians.  As soon as we picked them up we had a helicopter, two Apache helicopters with Marines, flying cover for us.  They identified it, identified the ship.  We knew it was a combat ship.  They started coming right at us.  They’re closing a constant bearing decreasing range.  On radar it looks like you’re coming right at each other.  Our captain kept telling them . . . It wasn’t one of the identified ships to necessarily sink.  They were only going after key ships that day.  And that changed everything.  Once we engaged that it changed everything.  It became a free-for-all from one end of the Gulf to the other.  There were a couple other ships, I think the Sabalan. . . Because they had recently been destroying tankers.

      So my captain, and he’s literally sitting 15 feet from me, he goes over the open radio and says, “Iranian war ship this is U.S. navy warship, abandon your course.”  They would come back and say, “American warship, this is Iranian warship, we are excersizing our rights to freedom of navigation,” which is what we say when people challenge us.  They were just echoing our words back.  He gave them about three or four warnings over five minutes.  You can go. . . there is video footage out there.  You can hear my captain, he says, “Iranian warship this is U.S. Navy warship, abandon your ship, I intend to sink you out.”  As soon as he said that our electronic warfare shack, which is 7 or 8 feet in the other direction from where the captain’s at, a 90 degree angle to the captain, every alarm in there starts going off.  And we’re locked up with fire control radar.  All the bells and whistles are going off, that’s the same piece of equipment that detected the radio to begin with.

      Our captain is like, “Keep an eye on those scopes.”  And no sooner than he said that, OSSN Dunlap said, “I got video separation.”  They fired a missile at us.  We’re sitting there sitting ducks.  You put your nose into the missile, you launch chaff, things like that, but the missile is on radar being tracked, it’s on radar coming at us.  They’re sounding the collision alarm which they sound.  The officer of the deck is out there, “Brace for shock throughout the ship.  This is not a drill.  Brace for shock throughout the ship.”  Everybody is trying to get away from, you know, grab onto something, bend the knees and get away from anything that’s gonna bash your face in if it explodes.  You’re gonna get thrown violently or the ship is gonna be heaved upwards.

      We’re all waiting for it to hit.  Instead of hitting, we get a burst of rf energy, as they detected later the missile passed, it was a Harpoon Cruise Missile, one of our missiles sold to them by Jimmy Carter, thank you Jimmy, it ended up missing us, it missed us by 75 yards.  It was within 75 yards of the ship and you heard it.  We’re in the ship and you hear, whoosh.  The whole ship shook.

      One of our sister ships that wasn’t engaged, she had already hit that ship with a missile.  Then we turned, freed our bow, we can’t shoot a missile off the bow, you can’t shoot off the bow, you have to shoot the sides of the bow, or a 90 degree, but you can’t shoot right off the bow.  The whole ship feels like it’s flipping over cuz they went right full rudder.  As soon as they unmasked our batteries we fired an SM1 missile and we hit it and then the Simpson fired another missile and hit it.  The ship was still out there floating.  We were going to close it.

M:    I don’t mean to cut you off.  These are fabulous stories.  You’re going to tie this in, right?

PT:   This is where it ties in.  By the time the day is over we’re engaged by aircraft, we shoot an aircraft down.  In the week to follow we’re continuously engaged and harassed by the Iranians.  Just super fearful.  A week’s worth of intense fear.  I was expecting to die.  I was tremendously afraid when we went through the Straits of Hormuz.  They get really narrow.  I’m thinking, “This is it.  This is where they’re going to hit us.”  They have all these Silkworm batteries.  Hundreds of them.  They’re going to finish us off right there.  Fortunately they never did.  They never tried.

      That experience, that intense fear.  More so.  “I know there’s a God.  I know that I’m guilty before Him.  I almost died this week.”  That event is so etched into my mind.

      What ended up happening . . .

M:    This is like a week long period?

PT:   It’s a several months long intensity because you’re in a combat zone.  But then you go into combat.  It just does things to you.  That fear.  Your body can only absorb fear for so long until it affects you, everybody’s affected by it. 

      When I got back from the Persian Gulf, when we got back you’re just thankful to be alive, you almost died.  That missile could’ve sunk the ship.  It’s a powerful 250 pounds of hg.  It would’ve devastated that ship.  I was right in the center of it.  You have that intense fear and I think that fear kept working on me.  So I was looking for answers.

      I got out of the Navy.  I probably struggled with some PTSD for about a year.  I had a lot of nightmares, I’d wake up screaming.  No flashbacks or anything like that, just had really bizarre, fearful experiences and anxieties.  Only for about a year.  I got out in ’89, in June of ’89.  Had a rough transition to civilian life, maybe because of PTSD but I had a rough transition.  I had almost a loathsome, “there’s no purpose in this.”  In the military everything had a purpose.  That purpose for me, all that training, even sweeping decks, everything had purpose.  It all came together on April 18 and we lived because of it.  Had we not followed our purpose, our training, we could’ve died.

M:    So you got out.  Did you move back to Michigan?

PT:   I moved back to Michigan.  Moved in with my brother in East Detroit, now Eastpointe.  I started feeling like, “There’s got to be a purpose out there.”  I was looking to date, interested in dating.  I just couldn’t find the right girl.  I always was attracted to these really beautiful blondes.  They just didn’t want to have anything to do with me.  One girl told me one day, she said, “It sound to me like the girl you’re looking for is in church.”

      Then I thought, “Maybe I ought to try to reconnect with church.  Maybe I’ll find some purpose there.”

M:    On the ship there’s a chaplain, right?

PT:   I never did anything on the ship.  We only had a Catholic chaplain.  We didn’t have a Protestant chaplain.  I had friends that would talk to me about going to church and things all the time.  I just wanted everything to be on my terms.

      So that’s what ended up happening.  I got to the end of myself and on November 4 of 1989 picked a church.  The company I worked at, I was a driver, I’d pick up parts, drop off parts, pull parts.  I did a lot of driving so I was very familiar, extremely familiar, after a couple of years, with the Detroit area.  There was a church that always drew my attention.  It was two miles away from where I worked.  I started calling churches, looking for a place to go to church.

M:    Just calling them on the phone, asking them questions?

PT:   Calling them on the phone.  Most of the churches didn’t even have an answering machine, no one even ever answered the phone.  This church, First Baptist Church of Sterling Heights, Michigan, they at least had a phone answering machine.  I listened to the message and I thought, “If these people are smart enough to at least have an answering machine, maybe they want people.”  I didn’t know if I’d be wanted.

      So I went to that church.  For me, I had heard the Gospel.  We believe in the Gospel.  We believe the Gospel is really simple.  We are born into this world. .

M:    When you say “we” what do you mean?

PT:   Christianity.  Orthodox Christianity.  Some of your mainline churches have broken from orthodoxy.  Orthodoxy is just another way of saying the fundamentals.  Orthodox, or Christianity, or Evangelical Christianity is really simple.  We born in this world separated from God and there is nothing humanly possible that we can do to fix it.  We cannot will ourself to be accepted by God, we can’t be good enough to be accepted by God, we can’t obey enough laws – get baptized, go to church – we can’t. . .It’s a doctrine we call “Total Depravity,” and what it means echoes back to the Calvin days and earlier.  But Total Depravity is, every single human is totally depraved.  It doesn’t mean they are as bad as they could possibly be, but they are less than the perfect thing that God created us to be.  In every sphere, in every area of our existence – mind, body, soul, and spirit – we are less than perfect and we fall short of God’s glory.

      So we would say Adam was our Federal Head of the human race and he failed.  Because he failed, the fruits of his failure have been meted out to every human to descent from him.  We’re all born cursed.  But Christ came as the second Adam, the Bible calls him as the Son of God the second Adam, God of human flesh, he came and did what Adam failed to do.  He perfectly obeyed God.  Not just the one commandment of “don’t eat the fruit from this tree,” but all of the commandments.  He satisfied the Father’s requirements for justice on the cross, when he died.  He satisfied righteousness and justice.  So when a person puts their trust in Jesus Christ as the “one who lived the life they can now live and then died the death they deserved to die to pay for their sins,” that’s faith.  And by putting your trust in God and making a commitment to follow Jesus Christ, God eternally forgives you of all your sins, He basically takes what Jesus paid, you know, He paid the penalty, and God takes that payment and applies it to your account.  That’s why the last words Jesus spoke on the cross were the words “tetelestai" which, translated in most of our translations, “it is finished.”  He said, “It is finished.”  He bowed his head and gave up the ghost.  That word, “It is finished,” is tetelestai in the Greek market place in Jesus’ day.  When you paid a debt, when you finished paying a debt at the market place, to the merchant, he would write the world “tetelestai,” which means “paid in full.”

      It’s the debt is paid in full.  That’s what we believe the Gospel is.  That’s what distinguishes us from many other churches.  We don’t believe you can do anything to save yourself.  You have to rest in what Jesus did.  “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”  It’s faith.  Or by grace.  You’re saved through faith, not of yourselves, not of works, it’s the gift of God.  “Lest any man should boast.”  That’s what we believe.

      I had heard that I don’t know how many times.  We used to have those little Gospel tracts on the ship, just a little pamphlet that has all the verses on how to become a Christian in it.  They were right next to the Bibles.  I would constantly go down and pull one of those off and read it when I was in the Navy to try to figure out, “What do I do.?”  I really wanted to know.  “God, I want to know what you want me to do.”  It was called “God’s Simple Plan of Salvation.”  It was anything but simple.  The tract was very detailed.  It always had “The Sinner’s Prayer” on the back and I’d always pray it, but I didn’t really know what I believed at that time.  I wasn’t willing to really submit to God.  I wanted to come to God on my own terms.

      For me, that day, November 4 of 1989, when I was traveling to that church, I went to an evening service, I was just driving, you know, it’s November, it’s dark, darker, I was just talking to God.  Praying, cuz I prayed all the time, read the Bible all the time.  I said, “You know, God, I’m going to this church, but from here on out you have all of me.”  I really felt like God was telling me to go to this church.  Like I was being pulled in that direction, more pulled, not told.  I knew that I needed to go there.

I went to that church totally dressed wrong, for a more traditional Baptist church.  I was wearing a Polo shirt, khakis, no socks, deck shoes.  Deck shoes are coming back by the way.  I’m happy about that.  I miss Deck shoes from the 80s.

I went to that church.  Sat in the front row.  I just felt at home.  I don't remember what the Pastor preached, but I literally was like in the very front row, right in front of the pew.  I was like, “If this guy has anything from God, then give it to me.”

That very day I showed up and this beautiful blonde-haired woman, very petite, that looked like an angel and sand like an angel, got up and sang a song.  That’s one of the moments, I have very few times in my life where I feel like God said something.  There’s a lot of debate over god even prompting people or saying something, but I felt like God just said in that moment, “That’s going to be your wife.  You’re going to marry that girl.”

I was like, “Where did that come from?”

That’s the day I mark, that’s the day I became a Christian.  I never prayed another “Sinner’s Prayer.”  I already believed in Jesus.  I didn’t quite understand the Gospel and how we can really truly rest in what Jesus did and not have to try to earn his love or acceptance.  On that day I fell in love with the church and Christ.  I committed my life and my life changed overnight.  I went to work the next day not quite understanding everything that had taken place the night before, but I went to work and I walked in the door, and my boss asked me something and I lied.  Did it a million times.  People lie, right?  And then I suddenly felt horrified that I lied.  “C’mon, Tom, you shouldn’t be telling lies.”  Something within me is talking to me in a non-verbal way, “You can’t lie.  We’re not doing this lying thing.”  And I thought, “That’s really weird.”  Then, an hour later, I swore.  I dropped the f-bomb and again I had this horrifying sensation come over me.  I thought, “Okay, this is getting weird.”  Because I always swore and I never cared.

This kept happening all week long.  That was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.  On Thursday I literally thought I was losing my mind.  So I called up the Assistant Pastor of that church, cuz he had given me his number that Sunday night, he came up . . .I mean, like, I was walking out of that building and I felt like something had happened that never happened to me before.  I felt a connection on that Sunday night.  I just prayed.  I said, “God, if you are real, if this is really happening, if you’re real, if you’re really trying to connect with me, then I can’t have this night end.”  And no sooner than I said this prayer, Dave Dersch came up, put his arm around me, and said, “Hey. . .”  He asked me who I was.  I said, “Tom.”

He said, “I’m Dave Dersch.  I’m the Assistant Pastor here and I work with the youth and the college age students.  You look like you’re a college age student.”

I said, “Yeah.  I just got out of the Navy.”

He said, “We’re having a get together tonight and we’d love to have you come.”  I saw that as an instant answer to prayer that made all the difference in the world.

      Then later that night. . . I just couldn’t keep my eyes off this beautiful blonde girl.  I was just captivated by her.  But I felt like I can’t even talk to her.  She’s like an angel.  I don’t even deserve to look at her.  That night when I was leaving, I prayed again.  I’m like, “God, please.”  She’s walking the opposite direction and I’m like, “Have her say something.  I can’t talk to her.  Have her say something to me.”  And, literally, like right after I prayed, from like two or three hundred feet across the parking lot at this apartment complex where we had all gathered, I hear, “Yoo whoo.  Tom.  Thanks for coming.”

I was like, “Wow!”

So I began pursuing her, pursuing God.  That was November of 1989.  I got baptized in December.  No sooner than I got baptized I started sensing that God wanted me to be a pastor.  Immediately.  I wanted to be an electrical engineer.  I was taking classes at the community college.  I was working on a two-year degree that would set me up to go into electrical engineering at one of the bigger universities; the programs are all joined together.

So I wanted to be an electrical engineer.  I just, all of a sudden, in December, I felt like I got a call.  For me, I call it a call.  Some people disagree with it.  It’s never been a verbal voice.  It’s almost like a thought in the back of your head that you’re going to be a pastor.  No matter how hard I fought it or tried to get around it, it was like a roadblock.  I just couldn’t get over the sense that as long as I’m unwilling to do this I’m not doing what God wants me to do.  Not that he doesn’t love me or I’m not longer saved, but “this is what you’re going to do.”

I fought that for nine months and then finally said, “Ok, God.  I’ll go.”  I changed my major.  I shifted over to a Bible College, a Christian college.

M:    What college is that?

PT:   Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan.

So I started training for the ministry, theological training.  Transferred all my credits from Macomb and credits I had from the Navy and started my training.  Anita and I, the young woman, our relationship grew, we got married and then I started school.  We got married in ’91 and then I started school at Midwestern in ’91, as well.  Had my daughter in ’92.

M:    Are you still married to her?

PT:   No.  She passed away.

So I had my daughter in ’92 and then my son was born in ’94, but after my daughter was born my wife had . . .she had always had like a little peanut-shaped lesion, flat but as black as this, right, you know, where the sun don’t shine, and after my daughter was born she noticed that there was a raised bump in the center of it.  She went and had it removed.  It turned out to be melanoma, they said “don’t worry about it, we caught it early.”  A year and a half later, when she was pregnant with my son it just came back with a vengeance.  They had to deliver my son 6/7 weeks premature.  He ended up in the NICU for 10 days at a hospital in Pontiac, Michigan.  Then my wife as immediately transferred over, they took the baby early, they did petosin, it wasn’t c-section.  She went to University of Michigan Medical Center where they did a radical mole dissection, removed a whole bunch of lymph nodes.  But the cancer had spread and she passed away.  That was September, she had surgery in September of ’94 and she passed away in January of ’95.

I ended up a junior in college with two kids, no wife.  I had to take time off from school.  Fortunately my boss gave me all the time in the world I needed off, paid.  He would’ve let me take a whole year off paid.  It was a really good work place situation.

Eventually I met Amy.  This is Amy.  We got married.  She became the mother of my children.

M:    In Michigan?

PT:   Yea.  At the same church.  My wife was a school teacher at a Christian elementary school, and Amy was the school teacher in the high school at the same place.  But they were in different areas.  They knew each other, but they didn’t, like, interact in the same department.  We started dating, we got married.  I reengaged in school.

M:    At the same place?  Midwestern?

PT:   No.  That time I went to Bob Jones University.  Both my wives had graduated from Bob Jones, and getting married and having that big shadow of the past experiences we felt it would be best to get a fresh start.

M:    Where is Bob Jones located?

PT:   Greeneville, South Carolina.

      In ’93, I was already training for the ministry, I was in school for about a year and a half, and we had a Missions Conference at my church where we just talked about missions work.  We’d do it once a year and missionaries would come in, wherever they’re going – New Guinea, Brazil, Germany, whatever – they would talk about their work.  We’d have different missionaries every single night for a week.  Every night you’re in church:  Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, everything but Saturday.  They’d stay there until Friday.  That year we did an emphasis on church planting in the United States of America.  I was intrigued, I was already a Bible college student.  I thought, “Well, this is interesting.”

M:    We’re in Michigan right now?

PT:   Yeah, we’re in Michigan, Sterling Heights, Michigan.

      There was a guy who came out and talked about Utah and Mormonism and making a difference in Utah, reaching Mormons because obviously it’s a big sticking point with Mormons, but Evangelical Christians don’t consider Mormons Christians cuz of the differences.  It drives Mormons crazy, “But we even have the name Jesus Christ in the church.  How can you not be Christian when we have the name Jesus Christ?”  There’s reasons why.  We won’t be getting into those deep waters, but there are reasons why we disagree.

      So we came out here to reach people.  At the end of that week, after all these preachers talking about planting churches in the States and one guy talking about churches in Utah, I really believed that that’s what I needed to do.  I needed to go.  I believe God wanted me to come here and start this church.  So that’s what we did.

M:    Wait.  You went from Michigan to South Carolina then to here.

PT:   Then to here, yeah.  Well, we went back to Michigan and then to here.

      In ’93, when my wife got sick and then died, and then I got remarried.  I always thought about commitment to come out to Utah.  I told God, “I will go to Utah.  I believe that’s what you want me to do.”

M:    And you hadn’t been here yet.

PT:   Never been here.

      And that was ’93.  A long time went by.  When I got married and I’m in Bible College I felt a little beat up by circumstances when you go through something like I went through.  I used to sit there and think, “Man, is that really what God wants me to do?  Was it indigestion?  I made a commitment.  I want to follow through on my commitments.”  I committed to God in prayer but it seems like so much water under the bridge.  One day, in ’97, one of the chapel services a guy preached a sermon based on an Old Testament text where Elijah. . .

M:    At the same church?

PT:   This was at Bob Jones University.  So 8,000 students in the chapel service.  And this guy said, he preached a sermon on an Old Testament text where the prophet, the students of the prophet’s school, I believe it was Elijah, were gonna build a new dormitory.  A new dormitory means new students, because the prophets would have students and they would teach them theology, almost like a seminary.  The larger the facility, the more people they can house, the more people they can teach, the more of an impact they can make by sending out preachers into Israel.

      So the guy’s preaching the sermon, and while they’re getting ready to build they borrow an axe head which is made of bronze which is extremely costly, and they lose it in the Jordan River, cuz they’re cutting brush along the side of the Jordan River, they’re cutting trees down and they lose it.  And that is a deal killer because they don’t have the axe head, they don’t have the resource to pay it back.  The preacher is going on and on and on.  He said but then Elijah comes and they’re like, “What do we do?  Help us.”  He prays and throws a stick in the water and it causes the axe head to float.

      So the axe head floats.  It isn’t an axe head like we think of an axe head, but similar.  They probably beat on it with something.  It wasn’t attached to wood.

      So he said, his application was really simple.  God gives you a vision, a prophet school, God kills the vision, the loss of the axe head, God resurrects the vision so that what you accomplish is in the power and strength of the Lord, according to His will, not according to the strength and will of man.

      I just sat there dumbfounded.  I didn’t leave for 10-15 minutes.  I just sat in that seat in an empty auditorium just thinking, “Was that about going to Utah and planting a church?”  I prayed about it all week.  Later that week, the next week, a guy came in, talking in the preacher boy class, and he said, “We need preachers in the Southwestern United States.  Utah needs preachers.”

      And I’m like, “Okay. You have my attention.”  I called my wife on a pay phone.  I told her the whole quick story, “1993, never told you this.  Missions conference.  Made a commitment to go plant.  Never told you.  A lot of water under the bridge.  What would you think about going to Utah and planting a church?”

      She said, “I don’t know.  I’ll have to think about it.”  That was the end of the conversation cuz I’m in seminary now, I had to get to class.

      Long story short:  I came home and there’s hundreds of books all over my house.  She went to the, she took my two kids, they went to the library and cleaned-out every book on Southwestern states.  They got them all out of the retirement section.  And she’s pouring through, she’s got post-it notes everywhere.

      So in no time at all we made a trip to Utah and we just believed that this is where we need to come.  That was 1998.  Somewhere in the middle of the state of Texas as we were driving back, to avoid the snow, we came in on the northern route around Christmas time and we went back in January through the Southern route.

M:    You came directly to St. George?

PT:   Yeah.

M:    How did you choose St. George?

PT:   Because we knew someone here.  We knew a pastor here.

      So that’s what happened.  We had to raise support so we went back, put our house up for sale in South Carolina, moved to Michigan, spent a year and a half, almost two years raising support to come out here, and we arrived here in 1999, did a two-year internship to get our feet wet with ministry styles here in Utah.

M:    What’s an internship?

PT:   Like an adjunct professor. . .not even that. . . Like a graduate assistant student.  I was getting additional training working for a guy for free, cuz we had our resources coming to us, we had our pay coming through our missions work.  So we worked with this guy on the other side of town, the Westside Baptist Church.  In October of 2001, the first Sunday in October, 2001, we started this church.  It slowly took off.

M:    I know there are, like, four campuses of this church in Utah.

PT:   Yeah.  But we started out as Desert Springs Baptist Church, cuz I started what I knew.  But the Baptists are really good theologically, we believe probably all the same things, I never changed my theological beliefs.  But we really felt, like, methodology, I really felt like God wasn’t offended by music that’s contemporary, whereas they only did hymns.  Their music was fifty to one-hundred years old.  So we wanted to go a different direction.  Once we got the church up and running we broke from the mission board and we went completely independent.  We dropped the name “Baptist” because people actually would not come to this church because of the name Baptist.  “Ah, your Holy Rollers.  Hellfire and brimstone.”  You’ve been here.  We don’t use hellfire.  We don’t use guilt.  We don’t believe in guilting people.  That’s not my job, to guilt people.

M:    Was it always in this building?

PT:   Yeah.  We started in Sandstone Elementary school, behind Deseret Industries thrift store.  We started in Sandstone in 2001.  We were there 2001-2003.  Our first service we had 15 people.  There were some Sundays in the first year where we had 7, and 5 of them were my family.  But we slowly took off.  Every year, you know, we doubled in size.  It was really slow for the first several years.  We took over this building, only that portion, not this.  Just one little 2500 sq. ft. space.  We eventually outgrew that so we expanded into that space over there.  That’s our childrens ministry, coffee lobby, nursery, all that, junior high.  Then we expanded into this.  We have about 10,000 sq. ft. space total between the three and the dual floors.

M:    How many years before you officially broke off from the Baptists?

Pt:   We broke in 2005.  We dropped the name when we were still associated with the Baptists, we dropped the name, which irritated some people.  We were making small changes, only small changes, but the mission board would be, like, “Hey, we think that’s going to be offensive to some of the churches that have supported you.”

      Finally we just said, “You know, we can’t sit here and worry about offending everybody that assisted us.  We’re here to reach people.”  So we orchestrated an exit.  I said, “Let’s just call it what it is.  We’re the one’s changing, not you.”  And we weren’t even doing anything crazy.  I think it was November, 2004, we told them we were gonna end our deal with them at the last day of December.  Which we did.  We went fully independent.

Then we went through several name changes.  We went to “Desert Springs Church,” but I thought the word “Desert” was more of a negative than a positive.  We then dropped the word “Desert” and we just went to “Spring Church,” which we very successfully branded over the period of years.  We’re still known to this day as The Springs Church.  It’s on the building, which doesn’t help.  We’re actually taking it off tomorrow.  We’re like, “We gotta just drop that thing.”

In 2009, January 1, we merged with South Mountain Community Church.

M:    How did that happen?  They were already in existence up north?

PT:   Yeah.  They were already in existence.  I was introduced to them from some people that knew Paul Robie, who’s the pastor up there.  We got to be friends.  He gave us resources like crazy.  He just believed in what we were doing.  He wanted us to be successful with no strings attached.  They paid for that space.  They were paying $2,000 a month to rent that space.  We couldn’t afford it.

M:    The auditorium?

PT:   Not the auditorium.  The one where our childrens space and the lobby and all that is.  They were paying for that.  They were giving us equipment.  Anything we needed, they provided it.  I would constantly go up there.  Paul just has . . .I was attracted to their style of ministry because we wanted to reach people.  We didn’t want to be a church that reached Christians who were already reached.  We wanted to reach people, we wanted to build a church.

      Obviously when Christians come here we accept them, but don’t want them. . .we want them to  adapt our mission and vision, we don’t want to adapt their mission and vision.  When people come here we’re very specific about how we go about things.  It’s just easier to reach someone that’s never been part of a church.  And Paul was doing that.  He was reaching LDS people like crazy.

      Just our church last year, we baptized 52 people and only a couple of them were not LDS.

      So we merged in 2008.  I was sitting in Paul’s living room, cuz I would go up there all the time, and he said, “You know, Tom, everything you guys are doing you’ve borrowed from us.  I don’t have a spare piece of equipment up here that you haven’t taken down there.  It’s like your DNA is South Mountain Community Church.  What would you think. . .”  He wanted a campus, he wanted to have more churches.  That’s our vision.  That’s how we want to spread.  Whether it’s through starting campuses or assuming existing churches that are going through difficult times.  We had gone through difficult times but we were fine, we didn’t need to merge with him.  But he said, “What would you think about you guys becoming a part of our church family.”  And I was honored by it because of what they were doing up there and that he thought that we would be a fit.

      So we did.  We sort of disbanded and joined with South Mountain Community Church.  Hard start in Fall 2008 with a full-on legal merger in January, 2009.  So, since January 1, 2009, we’ve been the St. George Campus of South Mountain Community Church.

M:    Were your congregants okay with that?

PT:   Yeah.  Yeah.  They loved it.  We immediately . . .We went from around 116 attendance to 220 in, literally, 5 months time.  We’re one of the fastest. . .we’ve had a couple. . .you always have hiccups in churches.  People leave.  Sometimes they leave en masse.  We had to fire a guy who wasn’t popular and he and his wife went and shot their mouth off all around town, made all sorts of crazy lies, not even true, accusations, especially about my assistant, Jake VandeBrake, he said things that are just absolutely atrocious and not true.

      So we had a little bit of an exodus.  But we grow.  We’re back into a growth phase.  We had to reclaim some people that we lost last year.  But this Fall, we’ll be kicking off September with probably 550-575 people.

M:    Over the two services on Sunday?

PT:   Yeah.  The two services.  And there are some double counts in there, but it’s easier to leave the double counts in, create a new baseline.

M:    People come to both?

PT:   Yeah.  We tell them, attend a service and serve a service.  We got people that attend the first service, serve in the second, or vice versa.

M:    Serve meaning. . .

PT:   In the ministry.  Like the childrens ministry, nursery, or music.  We probably have. . .it takes 30-40 people to make everything happen on Sundays.  We have dedicated people.  They believe in reaching people with what we’re doing, they want to be a part of it.

      That’s kind of how we got to where we are now.

M:    What kind of church are you?  You’re a Christian church.

PT:   We are a non-denominational church.  We are what we call an Evangelical Christian Church.  That word, “evangelical,” it comes from a Greek word euangelizo (note:  this is not the exact word PT used, but it’s close) which means “to proclaim Christ.”  A proclaimer, a heralder.  That’s what the word means.  Evangelion is another term for it.  There is a herald.  So we herald the truth.  An evangelical church is a truth heralding church.  The truth is the gospel.  Churches that are very centered in telling people how to become a follower of Jesus Christ and how to live their life for Christ, they’re called evangelical Christian churches.  And even some of your Pentecostal churches would be evangelical.  It’s in juxtaposition to the Protestants because the whole Catholic-Protestant, you know, Reformation is kind of a thing of the past.  We would technically fall on the Protestant side of things.  But the mainline churches in America have deviated from what we would call the fundamentals.  They’ve gone extremely liberal theologically.  It’s no big secret that churches tend to be conservative on issues of sexuality and marriage and all of those other factors.  The mainline denominations just kind of lost their heart and from our beliefs they kind of lost their soul, too, because they kind of sold their soul, they sold out their doctrines and beliefs in order to be accepted.  They want to be accepted.  They want the community at large to look at them and say, “Oh, you’re just like us.”  But Christ says, “No.”  They communities at-large are not supposed to look at the church and say, “The church is just like us.”  They’re supposed to see. . . We’re supposed to be the city on a hill, a shining light, the candle that’s not put under the bed, but put on a lamp stand.  We’re supposed to be the salt of the earth.  That doesn’t mean we’re supposed to be combative.  You know, some churches are in your face or mean.  I just had a guy yesterday, he’s LDS, and he put a picture of one of the temples where people are holding signs saying “You’re gonna go to Hell.”  That’s just not . . .that’s not the shining light on the hill.  There’s better ways to dialogue with people and win people.

While many churches do a terrible job at it, the Protestants pretty much gave it all away.  Not all of them, but most of them.  So the Protestant churches have just died.  The Episcopalian churches have died.  The Methodist churches have died.  The Lutheran churches have just died on the vine all across the country.  In a place like Utah, like St. George, they do well because you have a lot of retirees moving here.  And you have a lot of, like, the Lutheran, the Methodist, the Presbyterian, they’re all old.  They’re like 60, 70, 80 year old congregants.  Those churches are going to die.  Within twenty years those churches won’t exist because they’re not reaching younger people.

M:    And you think it’s because. . . why?

PT:   They don’t stick to the truth.  All of them.  It doesn’t mean they don’t have any truth, but they kind of compromised on what the truth is.  They don’t stick to what we used to call the fundamentals of the faith.  Nowadays that’s a terrible word.  Especially in Utah.  Fundamentalists, you know.  The Baptists call themselves, some of them call themselves the Fundamentalist Baptists.  They don’t mean . . .all it means is that there’s key teachings of the Church.  They basically have thrown those things aside and a lot of the mainline Protestant churches went back to the Roman Catholic Church.  The Lutheran churches have become very much more so like the Catholic Church.  Not to poo poo the Catholics, but there’s a reason you had a reformation.  Some of them even celebrated the “REformation.”  So the principles for which the reformation were fought in the Church have kind of been lost on those churches.

M:    So the Protestant churches, they seem to be, and this is my own thought process, more interested in tradition and making sure the service goes a certain way rather than focusing on what you see as the truth.

PT:   Right.  Right.  They follow, you know, they have their liturgy, they got their formalism.  When I was in the navy I did join for a period of time a Presbyterian Church because as a kid I went to a Presbyterian church.  They never preached the Gospel.  I never heard a sermon on how I could become a follower of Jesus Christ.  Your takeaway from these churches often times is, “Just be a good person.  Join the Church.  Be baptized in the church.  Be a good person, obey the Golden Rule and earn your way into God’s Grace.”  Martin Luther, he’s one of the founders, he’s often times called the founder, but there was already a reformation movement underway, Luther just happened to nail his 96 theses on the door there in Wittenburg at just the right time.  The fighting words of the Reformation were sole fide, which if Latin for “faith only.”  Only by faith.  That’s what distinguishes today many of the Protestant churches from the Evangelical churches.  Evangelical churches outnumber, I believe, the Protestant, per se.  Southern Baptists, which number in the millions upon millions in this country, they’re the largest Christian organization.  Most of them would fall under the Evangelical Christian category.

      Evangelicals . . . probably the largest blocks, you’ve got Catholics and then you’ve got Evangelicals.  Those would be the two largest blocks today.  But the Evangelicals have broken from the Protestants and they’ve gone about to do their own methods of ministry, trying to embrace people where they are.  They’ve removed the formalism, the structure.  They’re just trying to make it easy for people to come to God, remove the hindrances.

M:    Not just remove, but it seems like churches like your and others, in my mind I call the Bible Churches, you’re more willing to morph into a more contemporary kind of thing.  Even your page says that you’re a contemporary church.  You have more contemporary music.  Your cross in neon.

PT:   It’s glowing!  And you got the screens.  And when we build our building, the building that we’re gonna build is phenomenal, the technology that’s going into that thing.  But where are people?  Where do you see people today?  They’re on their phones.  That’s why we have a web app.  You can look at my notes on your phone while you’re in church.  You can fill notes out on your Ipad.

M:    And the Catholics or the Episcopalians haven’t, even the screens, they’re not interested.

PT:   It’s funny because now that they’re dying, and the word sounds harsh, but that’s what’s happening. .  . Like my aunt, that church in Michigan, Star Presbyterian where I went as a kid, my aunt’s an elder in that church and she comes out here and she’s like, “Can you talk to my pastor” because she feels like maybe we could keep more of the kids if we started putting some screens or tvs in the auditorium.

      And I’m like. . . there’s no technique that you do.  It’s not like you’re gonna add a tv and you’re gonna keep people.  It’s your entire mindset, you have to have a growth mindset, not a closed mindset.  When you have a church that says there are zero sacred cows in this church, there is nothing in this church, except for the scriptures themselves, there is nothing sacred to us.  God and scriptures.  Come hell or high water everything else we do is subject to change in a moment’s notice if it keeps us relavent with the culture.  Where we draw the line, though, and where the next big battle’s coming, is most churches still draw the line at gay marriages.  That’s not gonna change.  That’s just gonna be a big old fight that’s gonna destroy this nation.  I think it’s gonna divide us like we’ve never been divided and it’s already happening.

      I wish we could all just learn to get along and respect one another and love one another and let God be the judge on that, but that’s not the way it’s going.