Interview with Pastor Jonathan, New Beginnings Christian Fellowship

 

Interview with Pastor Jonathan

New Beginnings Christian Fellowship

Washington, Utah

 

Interview takes place in the gathering area of the auditorium at the church

September 18, 2015

 

Matt:       Pastor Jonathan of the New Beginnings Christian Fellowship in Washington, Utah.  So, Pastor, how did you get to be here at the New Beginnings Christian Fellowship in Washington, Utah.  Your biography, where do you come from?

Pastor Jonathan:  My grandfather was a Baptist minister and my dad was going to North Central Bible College in Minneapolis to become a minister.  He graduated and pastured a church in Sauk Centre, Minnesota.  I was born in Minneapolis.  We moved to Ohio.  My dad, what we call “fell away from the Lord.”  He quit having that relationship with God.

M:    After he had graduated?

PJ:   Yea.  And pastured a short time and moved to Ohio.  My parents divorced.  They separated when I was eight.

M:    If you don’t mind, how old are you?

PJ:   I’m 53.  Born up in Minneapolis when my dad was graduating up there.  My parents separated.  My mom always attended church and was very faithful to that.

M:    And you stayed with your mom when your parents separated?

PJ:   I did.  Yes.  My dad just kind of. . . He had different girlfriends and stuff.  It was tumultuous.  The divorce was finalized when I was 11.  He went his own way, got remarried and had a couple other kids.  I lived with my mom.  She was a single parent through my teen years.  She met my stepdad, I call him my dad, he’s a great man and remarried in 1979.

      Being raised in churches, we’d been to some churches that were. . .there was one that was really odd.  The Bible talks about a seven year period called the Tribulation and this church was saving food for that.  The pastor was telling who could get married to who.  We were like, “This is way out of bounds.”

M:    This is Ohio?

PJ:   Yes.

M:    What part?

PJ:   Reynoldsburg.  Just outside of Columbus.  We left that church.

M:    Was that church of a denomination?

PJ:   It was a non-denominational church.  We went back to the Assemblies of God affiliated churches.  That Bible College my dad went to was an Assembly of God. . .

M:    But your grandfather was Baptist.  And that’s not Assemblies of God, right?

PJ:   No.  Just a little bit different in beliefs.  I have a couple of his old books, it’s kind of neat.

      Anyway, right when I was 11 or 12 I had a unique experience in our childrens church.  The leader said, “Anybody who would like to be baptized in the Holy Spirit.”  We believe in baptism in water and being submerged and coming back out.  The same term goes with being enveloped with the power of the Holy Spirit.  I was like, “Not me, man!  That sounds really weird.”  My sister raised her hand and she went forward and they prayed for her.  Suddenly she began to speak in these other languages.  She was probably 13.  All that week she was bouncing off the walls.  She was so happy.  There was a joy and excitement.  She was totally a new person.

      I was like, “I want that.”  The next Sunday they said, “Does anybody want to receive that,” and I raised my hand.  This is kind of odd stuff, but there’s some odd stuff in the Bible.  We can’t fully comprehend all that God is.

      So I went forward and they began to pray for me.  I was 11 years of age.  I tried to open my mouth.  I heard my sister praying in this unknown language and I began to try to repeat what she was saying and nothing came out.  There was no voice.  It was just the mouthing of the words.  Suddenly, it was like I blacked out.  I opened my eyes and I’m in the foyer of the church.  No idea how much time had passed and I’m just weeping and I’m speaking in this other language.  It was an amazing experience.  My mom had to just point me home cuz I was under the influence of the power of God so great.

      Right after that . . .I always wanted to be accepted from peers.  Psychologists will say it goes way back to my dad leaving, being abandoned, the emotional turmoil that we experiences as a family, that I wanted to be a part of something.  That need to belong.  Very important.  So I started doing things that were inappropriate to get friends.  So I started going into drugs and alcohol.  Initially smoking marijuana which led me to other things.  Through my teen years. . .

M:    This is all in Ohio?

PJ:   Yea.  I went to a vocational school my junior year and that was a lot of availability of drugs.

M:    Were you still going to church all this time?

PJ:   Yea.  But I would show up and skip church with my friends and we’d go to the bowling alley, jump the fence and turn up the drive-in speakers and watch movies.  We’d just hang-out in the neighborhood and vandalize things.

      So I was involved in a lot of things.  To support that I began to steal.  I’d steal things out of the church cars, from the parking lot, and sell them.  Watches.  Whatever.  Sell whatever I could for my habit.  Stole from my mom.  I stole what I needed.  Got involved in a lot of bad stuff.  I had a friend that died.  Another friend that overdosed but lived.  I was planning on going to Ohio State University and becoming an engineer.  I was the #1 mechanical drafter at my vocational school.  I represent the class in different high schools.

      But then between my junior and senior years of high school I wasn’t around my friends a lot.  I went to church on a Wednesday night.  None of my friends showed up.  We sat in the back.  When the songs started we stepped outside and didn’t come back until church was over.  As I sat there, I didn’t want to run around the neighborhood alone, it wasn’t that good of a neighborhood.  I heard the message again from that pastor, my home pastor.  I felt this longing in my heart.  I was searching for something.  I felt the presence of the Lord, of God, drawing me into. . .

M:    You’re talking about a specific experience?

PJ:   Yea.  On that Wednesday night.  Tears came to my eyes.  I’m wiping away tears.  I left church that night.  The next night at my home, I lived in the basement.  It was great.  I was able to hide drugs all over the basement and my parents would never find them.  I had a bong.  I had all kinds of stuff hidden down there.  I contemplated life.  I made a decision.  Do I turn to this drawing that I felt with God again, with that relationship that I once knew, or do I go my own way?  That night I got on my knees and I prayed.  I said, “God, you know, I’m nobody.  I have nothing to offer.  I’m a horrible person.  I’ve done horrible things.  If you still love me would you come and live in me?”  And I felt, I physically, I haven’t felt that ever since.  I felt a physical feeling come up over me and all of the guilt and the shame and everything just was gone.  The Bible talks about becoming a new person in that we’re transformed in a moment like that.  My goals, my desires, everything was totally changed.

      The next day I went to see my girlfriend.  We drank one more time.  I said, “This isn’t going to work for me cuz I don’t feel this is right.  I don’t want to do this.”  That was the last time I ever drank.  I never did drugs again.  Ever.  From that moment on.  And I was doing drugs every day.  The drug of choice at the time were what were call Quaaludes.  I did Plastidils, horse tranquilizers, heroin.  I did all kinds of things.  Lots and lots of cocaine.  That was very available.  I never did it again.  My goals, everything changed in my life.  It was like a burden was lifted off of me.  I was free.

      I was still planning on going to Ohio State University.  But about four months later I went to Youth Camp and I experience that same experience where I would pray and the Baptism of the Holy Spirit came upon me.  Not as extreme as it did when I was 11.  I was pretty much coherent.  It wasn’t like the power of God taking control over me, it was something within me.  Very soon after that, probably a month after that, I felt the burden and an urgency to share the truth of God’s word with everybody.  That urgency captured. . .I was 17, almost 18, I was turning 18 in December.  I felt the urgency and it was what I felt like I should do.  It was overwhelming to me.  It consumed every thought, every moment.  The idea of going to Ohio State and becoming an engineer was gone.

      That Spring. . . I was really embarrassed after that Thursday night in my room alone asking God to live back in me, I was embarrassed to tell my family cuz they were all Christians, went to church, because I had hurt them so much, and I was embarrassed of who I had been.  So I didn’t tell them for about a week or so.  Then in Youth Group, there’s a verse in the Bible says if we confess our sins. . .With the heart we believe but with the mouth confession is made to receive Christ.  So I walked forward in my Youth Group in front of all of my Youth Group and I went forward to pray and say, “Hey, I giving my life to Christ.”  I was water baptized soon after that.

      Then in that December I felt that urgency.  I talked to my parents.  My mom was married.  My mom got married in January of ’79, this conversion experience happened on July 25, 1979.

M:    Was the man she married a religious man?

PJ:   Yea.  He had never been married before.  Now he’s getting four teenage kids.  The guys is either crazy or just brave.  We really butted heads.  I was like, “I’m not going to church,” and he was like, “Yes you are.”

      “No, I’m not.”  I saw him making a fist and I was like, “Okay, I’m going.”  That was before I went back to Christ.

      That Spring I found out. . .My sister was actually going to Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, for some kind of teaching degree.  So I was familiar with that college.  So my parents and I investigated that.  The college now is been combined with a couple other, a university and a seminary, so it’s all one big group in Springfield, Missouri.

M:    Central Bible College?

PJ:   It was called Central Bible College.

M:    Is it still called that?

PJ:   Yes.. .It’s kind of like one group.  There’s three. . .They just made the change a year or so ago.  It was the Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, and the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary.  Now it’s all under one umbrella and, I think, on one campus.

      So the next step was, I felt that I needed to pursue what I felt was a calling in my life.  So I went to four years of Bible College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Bible.  I started volunteering in churches while I was at school.  My first church was forty-five miles north of the campus.  We slept on wooden pews.  It had an outhouse.  A two-room schoolhouse.  A bunch of chiggers and ticks and a hog farm next door.  It was like way out there.  I didn’t want to be in town where there were 50 other students doing church work.  I wanted to be out there making a difference.

      So I left there.  I was required to do an internship, so I took a church in town, I worked with another pastor there.  I really didn’t know what God wanted me to do yet, so I went through the college education.  I always enjoyed working with kids.  Even growing up, if a kid got hurt I’d scoop ‘em up and run ‘em home.  Just kind of supervising, taking care of the neighborhood kids.  I don’t know how that nurturing personality came about, it’s just who I am.

      So for the next 20 years or so my wife and I, I got married in ’84, graduated from college in ’84.

M:    Where did you meet her?

PJ:   At one of the local churches where I was doing my internship.  I invited her brother to come and do a first aid presentation to our boys group, kind of like the Boy Scouts, it was called Royal Rangers.  They’re in 60 countries around the world, a big organization.  He invited his sister to come and that’s all it took.  There she was, man!  A year later I was married.  Three months later we were engaged and nine months after that we were married.  Been married 30 years.

      But after that, for 25 or 26 years we were childrens pastors, I was Christian Education Director of a church organizing classes and teacher training.

M:    In Missouri?

PJ:   Various places.  Right after college I couldn’t get really good jobs, so I went back to Ohio.  I had a really good civil engineering company, I worked as a draftsman.  I ended up doing computer drafting and working in a church.  Then my wife wanted to go back to school, so we went back to CBC, Central Bible College.  I pastured a church there, I was a Senior Pastor for the first time.  I worked at an engineering firm.  From there we ended up going to Wyoming as a Staff Pastor working underneath another pastor.

M:    How did you get to Wyoming?

PJ:   Let me go back just a little bit.  There are three levels in the Assemblies of God, three levels of credentials.  The first one is a Christian Worker, now it’s called Certified Minister.  You need about two years of education for that.  I bypassed that because I had four years and went straight to the next level which is License to Preach.  You take a test, the look at your life, they evaluate you, they interview you.

M:    Who are these people?  Where are they?

PJ:   That was in Springfield, Missouri.

M:    At the bible college?

PJ:   No.  Actually every . . .The Assemblies of God, there are over 65 million adherents.  It’s the largest Pentecostal organization in the world.  When I say Pentecostal I mean that we believe in Acts Chapter 2, what happened there with the speaking in other languages.  Some churches that’s their main emphasis, but there’s a lot of other things that should come with that:  love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, meekness.  All of these other things that a person should exhibit, not just that area.  So you may see, as you look at other churches, some churches, that’s all they focus on, is this Pentecostal experience.  And that’s a very important thing, but there are so many other things.  You can be baptized in the Holy Spirit, but if you’re not showing love, 1 Corinthians 133 says you’re just a bunch of noise.

      So after two years of licensing I was ordained.  I that time we had moved. . .Let me explain.  At that time my wife had done some more schooling.  We left that Senior Pastor and said, “You know, we’re gonna go back into childrens ministry, working with kids.”  We found a position in Casper, Wyoming.  Interviewed over the phone.

M:    Is there a Want Ads?

PJ:   Pretty much.  That’s what I was saying.  In the Assemblies of God, they’ve divided the country into what they call Districts:  Southern Missouri District – it doesn’t have to be a state – Tennessee is just the Tennessee District.  Where we’re at here is Colorado and Utah, it’s the Rocky Mountain District.  So I look and see where I want to serve and I contact the district office and say, “Hey, do you have any open churches?”

      And they said, “Well, send us a Letter of Approval from where you’re at.”  Cuz if you’re causing trouble one place they don’t want you there.

      So I go to the district office.  They gave me a reference letter.  I sent it to the district, they shoot me a list.  Then I send resumes to open churches.

      I found out about a church in Casper, a childrens pastor position.  We served there for two years.  As a Staff Pastor you’re working underneath another individual and sometimes that’s easy, sometimes it’s not.  The average stay for an Associate Pastor, unfortunately, is a year and a half.  Because of either personality conflicts, leadership conflicts, could be anything.  You need to be called to that area of what we call ministry because if you have disagreements rather than stirring up people in the church, you just back off and support the man in authority.  Sometimes you have to, not overlook compromise, I’m not saying that, but just overlook differences.  Differences of opinion.  In the Assemblies of God we have a Statement of Belief, sixteen basic doctrines, which are very typical for the Baptists, Methodists, so forth.  The Pentecostal aspect is a little different from the Baptist and Methodist.. . .I think Methodist. . .I can’t recall.

      So we ended up in Wyoming for a couple years.  We ended up, from there, moving to Tennessee.

M:    What was your position?

PJ:   Childrens Pastor.

M:    So you were a Staff. . .

PJ:   Staff Pastor.  Right. 

M:    So this is a larger church?

PJ:   We probably ran about 300, something like that.

M:    Do you have staff pastors here?

PJ:   No.  Not yet.

M:    Does that have to do with the size of the church?

PJ:   And the affordability.  To be able to afford it.  This church had a difficult history.

M:    Well, we’re not here yet?

PJ:   Right.  So you’ll see. . . My history here has been a challenge for my wife and I.  Two years in Wyoming, we ended up going to Tennessee.  We were there almost ten years on staff at a church as a Childrens Pastor.

M:    You said Tennessee is its own district.  I’m assuming the Assemblies of God is very popular in Tennessee.

PJ:   Yeah, I think so.  In the Nashville area there were, like, 30 Assemblies of God churches.  Here in Utah we have one in St. George, one in Washington, one in Cedar City, the next one is Richfield, the next is Salt Lake.

M:    Where is there one in St. George?

PJ:   New Life Christian Center over by Silicon Way, the Tonaquint area, off of Dixie Drive.

      We were in Tennessee for a good long time.  I don’t know how detailed your want this but my wife and I have been through some great challenges.  Six months after we moved to that church my pastor’s wife had this epileptic thing where flashes of light would set it off.  Her daughter broke an arm when she was preparing hot bath water on Sunday morning.  There was lightening, she passed out in the bath tub and drowned, on a Sunday morning.

Marti was in the hospital, that was her name.  It was serious, I rushed to the hospital and there was nobody there I knew.  I said, “This is very odd.”  I asked, and they said, “Who are you?”

I said, “Well, I work at the church.”

And they said, “Well, unfortunately Marti has passed away.”

I was thinking, broken arm, broken leg, something serious.  It just totally floored me.  I went to the church.

M:    Marti was the wife?

PJ:   Yeah.  Marti and Joel were their names.

We had a guest speaker scheduled for that day, which is kind of an odd thing.  His son had drowned in an accident like 12 years to the day.  It was like, “Okay, that’s just way weird.”  He spoke and I went to the house to visit my pastor and the two kids that he had, trying to help any kind of help and council.  A very, very difficult day.

Well, about 8 or 9 years later he ended up having what we call a moral failure with a secretary, an intimate relationship, she was already married.  I found out.  The secretary confessed to me and another pastor.  The Associate Pastor said, “Let me handle it.”  He went to the Senior Pastor and the pastor sought counseling and had a onetime meeting and said, “I’m good now.”   But it really wasn’t good.  And that wasn’t really good enough for us.  We waited to see if things would change, and it was just a mess.  The district came in.  They interviewed him that day and he confessed and they said, “You’re not going back to the church.  Someone else will clean out your desk.”  I had already began to transition.  I had an interview scheduled in Ohio for my home church.  They found out about that; that was a shock to everybody.

So we ended up leaving there and moving to Ohio, my home church.  Had a great couple years there.  But there is a different challenge when you have family attend the same church.  Jesus had the same issue in Nazereth when they said, “You grew up here.  How can you be the Messiah?  We saw you playing.”  It was an interesting challenge to my leadership.  Some of that even came from family members.  But we had a good time.  The minister there was very effective.  The minister. . .Where we’ve been we have seen good things happen.

We actually left there, went back to the same church in Tennessee, different pastor.  The church wanted us back.  We were there a couple years and the personality of that pastor was very, very strong.  I felt that there was some compromise going on.  They had a dinner theater and some of the acts that they displayed I thought were inappropriate.  I wasn’t there, but the deacon said, “Check out the video.  It was VHS back then.”  We were shocked!  There was cross dressing and cigar and alcohol.

I was like, “What is this!”  In staff meeting I share with the staff, I said, “I feel like we. . .”  And I used “we” purposefully, I didn’t want to be pin-pointing, I said “we” as a group, “we have compromised.”  That was the beginning of the end for me there.  We left there on bad terms.  The pastor said some things about my wife and I and rallied the board to believe them and we had great opposition.  Which is unfortunate.  We bowed out and left.  Within a year later it was discovered that that pastor also had a moral failure in that time it was going on.  It’s just very unfortunate.

From there we ended up going to Montana.  Whitefish, Montana.  The most Godliest man. . .And earlier you mentioned about having religion.  There are a lot of religions out there, things that man has created, having the appearance of Godliness.  But our focus isn’t on a religion, an organization, or anything.  It’s on that intimate relationship with God.  Yes, we call ourselves a fellowship more than a denomination or more than an organization.

We went to Montana and an incredible ministry there.  This man, I felt such freedom to go to him and share with him my problems.  So many other times as a Staff Pastor you felt you had to protect your family and yourself.  But I had a great relationship with this man.  We were there for three years and God began to do something to my heart, I had no idea what it was, but I went to my pastor and said, “I’m struggling because I feel like God is telling me to leave.  And I’m just loving it here.”  I was what they call a small group coordinator.  I was in charge of the educational aspect of the church, and childrens pasturing.  Very busy.

That’s where David was born.  We had adopted Jeremiah back in Tennessee in 1998 is when we got him.  David was born in 2004 while we were in Montana.  They had to Life Flight him, Life Flight my wife to Missoula.  The doctors didn’t think that my wife of the baby would live.  She had a low amniotic fluid.  Came to find out that her umbilical cord, they have three strands, she only had two.  So David wasn’t growing as rapid as possible.  We had countless ultrasounds thinking that . . .We thought the date of conception was here, but we’re not sure because he’s not growing.  The doctor was very negative.  That night they Life Flighted Lisa to the hospital.  It was a bad storm, snowing, icing.  Higher elevations, rain on the lower elevations.  My pastor drove to Missoula, leading me.  He was going to drop his son off at his parent’s house, cuz he was getting me there quicker.  If he would’ve drove off a cliff, I was right behind him, we would’ve went together.  I get there.  Rush into the operating room and it’s a mess.  But she had a big old smile on her face, little David came out screaming, he was ticked off.  Because of that it helped develop his lungs.  He was three months premature.  That’s when the lungs are developing, a very critical developmental stage, and he came out perfectly healthy.  Seven and eight and the Apgar scale, out of 10.  Full term babies score that, maybe.  He was off of all breathing machines in three days.  Was there 2½ months.  They took my ring off and put his hand through there all the way to his armpit.  I laid a paper next to him and sketched him, 11½ long, just like a GI Joe doll.  His body was improportional or unproportional.  His head was about that big.  His torso seemed long but his legs seemed short.  It was odd.  But what a trooper.  Came home at 4½ pounds.

I struggled because I didn’t want to leave.  I loved the snow.  I was a great place of ministry for us.  I didn’t really understand what was going on at the time.  Now, looking back, I see the overall picture.

We moved to Illinois to a place called Normal.  Just south of Chicago, near State Farm headquarters, Bloomington-Normal.  Three-thousand miles.  Showed up.  Three weeks later that pastor that hired me resigns.  In the church world that I’m affiliated with the pastor hires you and fires you and if he leaves you submit your resignation.  We had just unpacked the last box and three weeks later he resigns.  I’m like, “What’s going on?”  He leaves.  So they’re searching for a new pastor.  We’re just holding the church together.  It was 9 months until they got a new pastor.  When that pastor came in, he has the freedom to hire his own staff, which he wanted to.

So I had interviewed over the phone with a church in Oregon.  It looked really good.  They were flying my wife and I out.  We were one of two candidates that they were going to consider.  We were actually the top candidate.  We get there.  Interview.  The other candidate. . .There were five on the committee, deacons.  Five said “Nope, you’re not the man.”  And out of the other ones, three said “yes,” two said “no” for us.  So we got a slap on the back and they said, “Sorry, you’re out of here.  We wanted a 100% vote.”  Typically how it goes is you take your top candidate, you present it to the people, and the people make that decision.  That’s the way it’s supposed to run.  Because if one guy gets mad at you or if you remind him of somebody, he may not vote for you and it would jeopardize your potential job there at the church.  Not giving everybody a chance to interview you and ask questions.

We left there, no job.  I had quit looking for a job, and I had already resigned from the church in Illinois.  So we had to move out.  I’d we were like, “We’re homeless.”

We moved to Springfield, Missouri.  I had some relatives there, we lived in the basement for three months.  It was a finished basement.  It was really nice.  You could hear everybody upstairs.

M:    And you were a family of four?

PJ:   Yeah.  And one dog.  A beagle.  It was not fun.  We had to be quiet, for three months.  Watch our noise.  It was very difficult, two families living together.

      So we moved out and moved into a motel.  A one room hotel for six months.  Two boys and a dog.  It was interesting because during that time I would go out and pray and I’d seek jobs.  I contacted people.  Networking.  I sent out dozens and dozens of resumes.  It seemed that every door was shut.  Nothing was opening up for us.  Month after month after month.  I’d go out and pray and it was like . . .In prayer I’ve never heard God’s audible voice.  But you’d feel, kind of like your conscience if you know you’re not going to do something right, something tells you it’s not right.  That’s kind of how God speaks to us and through the Bible.  I didn’t feel him talking to me at all.  Month after month after month.  I cried out to Him like, “Where are you?  I’m in this place, not because of anything I’ve done, but because of all of these other situations and men that have forced my family through this difficulty.”  I even became suicidal at that time.  But life insurance doesn’t pay for that.  I was at the bottom of my barrel.  I felt like I was abandoned, rejected.  Everything that I believed in was stripped away.

M:    Were you playing guitar this whole time?

PJ:   Yeah.  Well I picked it up in college.  I use it as a personal thing between me and God.  Then I got to a church that needed music and I was like, “Well, that’s mine.  That’s between me and God.”  Then I started playing it in churches.  That’s where it has gone to.

      As I look back now I see the bigger picture and I have a greater understanding, maybe not fully, but God was removing everything that I trusted in:  experience, my skills, my network.  Everything that I had relied upon and even trusted in, God just stripped them away.  As I look back, He wanted to know if I was going to totally and wholly trust Him, even when I lost it all.  That was the hardest thing in my life to go through because I saw my family struggling.  I went to get a job as a substitute teacher in the Springfield school system and they weren’t hiring.  So I had to work in a school district that had six schools.  Very few jobs opened up.  I was good at what I did, I’m great with kids, teens.  I have a great rapport with that area of children.  The income was very, very poor.  My parents helped subsidize our hotel stay.  I got a job at McDonalds.  That’s all part, what I see now is God saying, “Do you really believe me?  Do you really trust me?  Even when I take everything away from you, will you trust me?”  There’s a story in the Bible about Job, a worse case than me.  All of his kids died and all of his land was taken and all of his livestock and servants were gone.  He had sores all over his body.  Fortunately God didn’t take me that direction.

      Then I had an interview for a job in Farmington, Virginia.  Was it Farmington?  No no no.  Farmville.  Nearing the end they just felt like it wasn’t right.  It was just a couple weeks away from being a personal interview.

We just continued to search.  We ended up going to a church in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.  When I showed up it was a non-denominational church, new to the Assemblies of God.  They had a very nice facility.  Fifteen acres of land.  The pastor had left because of a moral failure.

By the way, that Illinois pastor, we found out a year later, he had gone to Springfield, Missouri and found out it was a moral failure as well.  That’s why he was asked to leave.  I’m like, “Where is the integrity?”  Very frustrating.

This church in Cape Girardeau, its pastor left with a moral failure.  The church split.  We get there and there are 15 people.  We were there 2 years, the church grew to be 60.  But they were very contrary to leadership and authority.  I said, “We need to do background checks on those that work with our kids.”

The board was like, “No.  We don’t need to do that.  We’re a small church.  We don’t want to have social security numbers in the facility.  Someone could access them.”

I said, “I’m sorry.  We’re gonna do it.  Because if a kid gets molested I go to jail.”

M:    Are you the senior pastor there?

PJ:   Yes.  Oh oh!  Yeah!  All of this difficulty and that inclination in Wyoming, or Montana when I felt God was leading me someplace.  He brought me through that horrible journey, through over a year in Illinois and this difficulty.  About two years of time struggling.  I realized that God was waking me up.  He was transitioning me out of childrens ministry into adult ministry.  I see that.  He made my life uncomfortable.  Next time I’ll just listen.  It’s much easier.

      We went into . . .  Nobody would hire me as a Senior Pastor because I had 25 years of childrens ministry.  It was chancy to hire someone.  Plus, two years in Wyoming and two years in whatever.

      PJ TAKES A PHONE CALL.  I STOP THE RECORDING, AND START UP AGAIN.

PJ:   So I realize now as I look back that God was forcing his hand.  It was difficult.  The church that we were hired into had a difficult past with the moral failure split.  They went to the Assembly of God which came up on my radar.  I ended up there.  But it worked out.  But we had a difference in vision, where we wanted to take the church.  They voted on us.  For a church to vote out a pastor, cuz they didn’t really want to follow my lead anymore, it requires a 2/3 majority vote.  They didn’t get that.  So we were able to stay.  But some of my board members and a host of other people left the church, took their giving with them, so the church was going to crumble and go under.  So my wife and I went ahead and resigned.  And as soon as we did they did what is called “disaffiliated,” disaffiliated with the Assemblies of God, said, “We no longer want to be.”  In the Assemblies of God, they would step in and take the property and all the assets and sell them or start a new church.  And they just said, “It’s all yours.  Take it and go.”  I communicated with the district and local churches and friends of mine, other pastors, kind of let them know what was happening for their networking support.  We weren’t doing anything wrong.  It’s just that they didn’t want. . .they wanted to leave the way it was supposed to go.  Anything with two heads is a freak, you know what I mean?  It just doesn’t operate that well.

      So we left there.  We ended up in Tennessee.  Before, I was a childrens pastor south of Nashville in Murfreesboro.  Now we took a senior pasturing in Ashland City, just out of Northwest Nashville.  The pastor had been there 20 years.  He became the leader of the whole district, Superintendent we call it.  Well known, well liked.  Established ministry there.  It’s difficult to follow somebody in that capacity.

      So I came in as a new pastor and I’m unpacking boxes.. . something’s gonna happen. . .Four weeks after we got there Nashville had a flood, in 2010.  We had 5 feet of water in our building.  We lost all of our computers, data bases, records.  I lost 5,000 plus dollars of my personal stuff.  My guitar was in a hard case on a credenza, it floated across my office, landed, and the hard case had cracks in it.  Water had got in around the Styrofoam but my guitar, which is about a $1,000 guitar, is totally dry after days and days of full of water, waiting for it to recede.  Over 20 people died in that flood.  Over 12 inches of rain in a short amount of time.  Wolf Creek Dam in Kentucky, 2 reservoirs in Nashville were already full and they said, “We have to let the water go.”  They just dumped it, middle of the night.  No warning.  Just horrible.

      I went to church on that Sunday morning, the water had come up to the building.  I did a phone tree.  I said, “Don’t come to church.  There are flash flood warnings.  It’s too dangerous.  The water is out of the building.  We’re okay.”  I went home.  Two hours later I get a call and they said, “It’s knee deep in the church.  The police are here throwing us out.  We have put computers on the desks trying to salvage things.  Don’t come.”

Well, I came anyway.  I said, “I’ve got to go.”  They had a rope tied from our mailbox to a pole and we were able to get it, but the Cumberland River backed up and was flowing.  Nothing we could do.

Several days later. . .We got in on Wednesday as the water was slowly receding. Knee deep still.  It was Class 3 water.  It had sewage in it, very toxic.  We went in with five feet of water it didn’t help putting the computers on the desks.  They were all shot.  I went into my office, it was devastating.  New pastor.  Didn’t know what to do.  I secured an old grocery store.  We were going to meet there temporarily.  The city took it over.  They took it from us and said, “We’re using it as a distribution for blankets and food.”

I said, “You know what, that’s okay, take it.”

A Nazarene Church called us and said, “You can meet in our church as often as you want for free for as long as you want.”  They didn’t charge us a dime.  We met there for 7 months.  I secured a small business loan through the government for $300,000.  It wasn’t enough to replace everything that we lost, but it was enough to get us in.  To save money, because of my previous skill, I was a general contractor, I collected bids and through our group we determined who was going to do the work.  A lot of volunteer work.  We have a ministry in the Assembly of God called MAPS, MAPS workers.  They are retired laborers who have skills and they travel about the country in their RVs and help churches.  We had a finish carpenter come in and we stripped out all of the cabinetry in the kitchen.  He built cabinets for us for free, we just provided the materials.  We had a drywall guy come in.  We were being asked for bids up to $50 to $90,000 to dry out the building.  That didn’t even fix it, dry it out, which was key.  I was coordinating the fans and dehumidifiers from all over the state to bring them on site.  Servicemaster, all these guys were coming in with $100,000 bids and I was like, “You know, I don’t have a dime.”  Off they’d go.

This other company, from Virginia drove in.  I told him, “We’re not accepting anymore bids.”

He said, “Can we just take a look around?”

I said, “Yeah, but I’m sorry, I don’t even have time to give you a tour.  I’m coordinating a hundred volunteers.  The National Guard is on site.  It’s a big disaster.”

So they looked around and came back and said, “I think we can help you.”

I was like, “Yeah.  How much is your bid?”  I actually said, “Here come some vultures,” when I saw them driving in, to a friend.  Later I had to repent for that because he walked up and said, “We want to dry out your building for free.”

I was like, “What?!’  I said, “Don’t move!”  And I ran and got a deacon and I came back out.  They were there for months to dry out the building.  It was a concrete block structure, metal frame.  We had beaded insulation, very hard to dry.  They brought in a furnace on wheels that pumped 230 degree temperature for 3 or 4 days into the building.  They taped off plastic to focus the heat on the concrete to dry out this beaded insulation.  They could test it to see if there was moisture.  They spent well over half a million dollars to dry out the building.  They left giant dehumidifiers, four of them, there for months.  They had a staff there on-site.  They helped us gut the place.

M:    We only have a few minutes left.  How did you get here?

PJ:   After that, we got the building dried out, we got it reconstructed in 7 months.  It was an amazing construction project.  We had a grand reopening.  We had a country artist there, I can’t remember her name.  It was an amazing time, because some of them live right there in Nashville.

      I had a great challenge with some of my deacons through this.  I’m still not at liberty to share some of those details, but I went to the district, I went to my pastoral friends and I shared with them, I said, “How do I handle this situation?”  I’d been senior pasturing now for just a few years.

      They said, “You know what, you can stay at the church.  You have every right to stay, but if you stay it will probably cause a split in the church and it would hurt your credibility in the community.”

      I was like, “Man!”  Here I am dragging my family around the country, very difficult.  And we’ve hit some difficult things.  Instead of making waves, instead of staying and being right, I took their council and we bowed out and left.

      We sent resumes from Maryland to Washington State.  During that time, this church opened up.  I found out about their financial mess, about their moral failure from their previous pastor, the church split, no pastor for a year and I was like, “Forget it.  Sounds like the Cape Girardeau church.  We don’t want it.”

      A couple weeks later they said, “Would you reconsider?”

      I said, “Let me pray and fast,” go without food, and praying at the time for a decision.  After three days I felt comfortable and I said, “Yeah, consider my name.”

      They said, “Good, cuz we never took your name off the list.”

      So we ended up coming here.  A unanimous vote to have us staff here.  They didn’t promise us a great salary package, but when we got here they were able to pay us $2,300 a month that I didn’t expect.  I substitute teach off and on through the week to subsidize. . .My wife works to subsidize.  We’ve seen the church grow up to. . .They had about 50 people.  It grew up to about 140.  There were some great challenges being non-denominational.  A lot of different beliefs that we didn’t really believe in.  I had to address those people and people would get offended and leave and the church started trickling.  It got to about 100 and then we had a conflict last year and a key couple in our church left, our Worship Leader.  But I did it correctly as far as leadership goes, keeping open communication, getting great council, and together making a decision.  A lot of times you can make a decision and it burns you and you can’t recoup those damages.

But in the short amount of time I’ve been a pastor I’ve been learning, and with great council, I’ve made the right decisions and to be able to survive those challenges.  Our congregation went back down to about 60-65 in attendance with that hit we took in late November.  It was a church-wide thing.  We were able to survive it.  Basically, there was an adult that verbally and almost physically attacked one of our youth members, it happened to be my son, my older son, they got into a verbal altercation, but the adult was out of control, threatened to call the police because they were not helping at a yard sale like they should have.  Teens are teens.  They work a little bit and goof off.  I had to handle that in a very neutral aspect, keep very calm about it and have a good result.  I was able to lead the people through that and for six or seven months later, going through all of these situations keep coming up, people coming and going and leaving.  We dwindled down to about 60ish, 65ish.  Now we’re back up to averaging, we had 87 last Sunday.  Growing again.

This morning we met at another facility.  We’re contemplating moving by the end of the year to another facility.

M:    I was here when this was a restaurant.

PJ:   What happened was a couple that wanted to help the church, the pastor, the first pastor said, “This would make a great church.”  They went out and cashed-in their retirement and bought the building and said, “Now the church can buy it from us.”  And through the difficulties, they’ve never been able to.  And they really want to retire.  They said, “You guys make a decision.”  In May our church people voted not to buy the building.  We couldn’t afford it.  With the price of the building.  We had a $650,000 loan to refurbish it, and it’s not done yet.  We have another $400,000 to finish it.  We’re going to spend $1.7 million on a building that’s market valued at $1.1.  I sought lots of council, provided for the people, and was neutral, let them make the decision.  They decided not to purchase the building.  The couple that own the building attend here.  Trying to gently work through these challenges, and it’s been going well.

      It’s been a difficult past for my wife and I.

M:    It seems to be a common pattern.  Some pastors, like the guy at the Baptist Church, he’s been there forever.  The Grace Baptist Church in Washington.  He’s been here for 30 years.  Tom has been there 15 or 20 years.  Then other places. . .it seems like you guys do a lot of moving around in this profession.  If it is a profession.  Maybe you call it a calling or something.  It very much looks like a profession.

PJ:   It’s a job.  I work on Sundays.  But I tell you what, in conclusion, my life was totally changed in 1979.  I was filled with fear and anger and hatred.  I was a horrible individual.  I had no hope.  All of that changed in a moment.  There’s great evidence, nothing I can put on the table here, but there’s no evidence of the wind, either.  But you can feel it and you can see its effects.  To me, that’s enough evidence to prove there’s wind.  What I have seen.  What I have been through.  It’s amazing.  It’s been incredible.  It’s what brought me here.  Praise God.