.
So you grew up in a Christian home, right, Brother Shelley?
Yeah.
I mean, both my parents were Christian.
They actually met in New York.
That's where I was born, and they were actually raised assemblies of God, but I never really
was raised in an assemblies of God church.
When I was pretty young, we moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and they took us to just a really
big non-denominational church, kind of a fun center type of a church.
And the one thing that I can say about that movement that I liked is the preachers were
actually pretty hard in their preaching.
They preached really with a lot of animation, a lot of zeal.
So they weren't really preaching a lot of doctrine, but they would kind of preach hard
against sin sometimes?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah.
We should be sold out for the Lord, and we should get sin out of our lives.
They wouldn't hit on touchy subjects, that's for sure.
But they were definitely preaching feel-good messages and inspiring, uplifting messages.
I would always go to the Sunday school, and in the Sunday school area, they always gave
the invitation to be saved.
They were always preaching, we need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for his death, throne,
and resurrection.
And as a very young age, at five, I came down and I prayed and I accepted Christ as my Savior.
And the interesting thing about that day is that same day when I went back home, I
actually lived adjacent.
The backyard was connected to our neighbors behind us, and so it was just a fence between
us.
And these two twins are about my same age, they live right behind me.
And so we played every single day.
And I was over in their house, and I was jumping on the trampoline, and I was compelled, I
was like, I need to tell these guys about the gospel, I need to get these guys saved.
And so I just started preaching to them, like, hey, you know, we all deserve hell, and we
need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, or we're going to go to hell when we die.
And I ended up getting one of the twins there to, you know, agree he needed to be saved,
and I ended up praying with him.
And the other twin, he didn't really, he was kind of skeptical of what we were saying.
And I don't feel like I was necessarily completely in the spirit there, because then we started
making fun of him, like, hey, you're going to go to hell, we're going to heaven.
But then we ended up actually convincing him that he needed to be saved too.
But that's kind of like the only real step I had into evangelism at that age.
I definitely felt like I had a zeal of God, but not really according to knowledge.
So your next soul winning was not for a long time that you attempted to give someone the gospel.
Not even close.
I don't even know what I said, you know, back then.
I'm sure it was pretty weak.
But I raised, you know, pretty much a normal childhood, raised in a regular home.
We went to church every Sunday morning.
We didn't go to church in the midweek service or in the afternoon.
The churches we went to, they'd have multiple services, but the services were the exact
same sermon.
Right.
So you pick one.
Right.
They'd have thousands of people.
And so it enabled to accommodate them in the building.
You know, they have to have multiple services just to be able to fit everybody in.
Right.
They can't have that one service.
And so I went to public school most of my life.
Basically when we moved from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to the Amarillo area when I was
in the second grade, my parents actually put me in private Christian school.
So we were going to a large non-denominational church there, but they had a private Christian
school.
And I went there for the last part of the second grade.
And you know, I really didn't like it.
It wasn't, I felt from like an education standpoint that I wasn't learning anything.
And I felt like from a Christian perspective that it was just kind of going through the
motions.
It was just like a ritual.
They didn't, nobody really even believed it.
And most of the kids that even went to that private school, I never saw them in church.
I never saw them in the youth group.
And they were kind of like in their own little group.
So I never really fit in.
They didn't really want, you know, outsiders to be part of their group.
So you went back to public school.
Yeah.
I told my parents, like, they gave me the option.
They kind of said, hey, do you like going to this school or do you want to go back to
regular school?
And I was like, yeah, I wholeheartedly want to go back to public school.
You got pretty into sports, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I really liked sports a lot.
I played soccer when I was young for a long period of time.
And then I even got into roller hockey.
So I kind of played roller hockey.
I was on a traveling team and I got to play some of that.
And then by the time I was 14 and going into high school, you kind of had to pick what
sport you were going to play.
And I ended up making the transition to golf.
And my dad through the summer, when he would go to work, he would just take me to the golf
course and drop me off in the morning.
And then he'd pick me up after work.
So like 730 in the morning, I'm dropped off of the golf course by myself.
And then like at 530 after work, you just play golf for like eight hours a day.
Yeah.
Eight or nine hours.
I mean, I'd take like a 30 minute lunch break or something.
That's so I would just practice for a few hours.
I'd play two rounds of golf every single day.
I just I have a hard time just making it through the 18 holes of mini golf like that.
You know, by the by the end of that, I'm ready to go home.
I mean, you're I'm constantly just trying to like make up, you know, all kinds of weird
games to like play, you know, because I was always playing by myself.
And the only people you weren't even playing with other people know, I mean, the only other
people on the golf course are like the 70 and 80 year old retired guys that are just
out there just because they have nothing else to do with their life.
So they're just out there.
I mean, I'm just basically by myself just playing.
You know, luckily, they had a lot of tournaments in the summer.
So that would kind of break up the monotony of just going by myself every day.
So I get to play in a lot of golf tournaments.
But yeah, I've never played real golf before, only mini golf.
Did you meet your wife in high school too, right?
Yeah, kind of in our junior year, she actually started liking me, but she was nervous because
she was taller than me.
So she didn't she wasn't really that she wasn't sure how she felt about her feelings, but
I didn't even know this.
And then we ended up having a bunch of classes together our senior year because I did the
the show choir and the corral and she was always in choir and that type of stuff.
We were both into the high school musical, and she was the female lead.
And I was like the second male lead.
But our characters had this kissing scene that was in the musical.
And we in the practices, finally, our director just says, All right, no more fake kissing,
we have to do the real thing we have to practice for real.
And so it's supposed to be just kind of an innocent, like little peck or something like
that.
But there was a lot of pressure, you know, from all the guys, they're like, Oh, you got
to lay one on her, you know, and in the scene.
My wife's character, she's supposed to be the one that's supposed to be aggressive and
like kind of approaching me.
But I was just kind of nervous about the whole thing.
And so when I came out on stage, I just kind of like went right up to her and I just laid
one right on.
Just go big or go home.
Yeah.
I mean, we weren't even dating or anything.
We didn't even say that we liked each other.
But I just kind of laid one on her and she just like pushed me away and was like, Ew,
gross and like kicked me in the shin with her like boot.
And it was kind of this big deal.
Yeah, that's what everybody said.
They were like, Jonathan kissed her and she liked it.
And she was just she was just putting on a show because she was embarrassed.
Yeah.
Does she admit it now or no?
No, she acts like she didn't like it back then.
I don't know.
A few months later, we started dating.
So yeah, exactly.
You know, our first date, we had a show choir gig, and we actually sang in a Mormon church.
So we had a gig in a Mormon tree was really creepy.
But right after I was like, Hey, you want to go to dinner?
So we went to dinner and then we just started dating.
That was the first date.
Yeah, we went to like Olive Garden.
And she ordered some of the kids menu, but no, we started dating and we were pretty serious.
But I had this idea in my mind, like you don't get married until after college.
So we dated for a very long time.
We dated for like five years.
And then right after we graduated college is when we ended up getting married.
So you graduated from college, you got married.
And what did you study in college and what field did you go into?
Yeah, so it was a big day because I had just gotten married and I started my first job
and I basically quit playing golf.
So I'd studied business management.
And that's a worthless degree.
I don't recommend anybody getting that degree.
It basically gave me no skills.
So you don't think it's gonna help you pastor?
Well, you know, I think all things work together for good, right?
There's a lot of things that you can gain from any experience in college as far as just general education or life lessons.
But as far as having applicable skills to the workforce, I had nothing.
Okay, so I just started working for Wells Fargo Bank.
That was the only thing I could find was working for a bank.
Yeah, I was a personal banker.
So I did like sales and that kind of stuff.
And I hated it.
I mean, that place was one of the most fake places that I've ever worked for.
Because everybody that you walk in, they smile and they're real happy.
But they're constantly judged by all these surveys that are taken by the clients, by the customers.
And if you ever get a non-perfect survey, then you get reprimanded by your manager.
So they have to give you all fives in every single category or you basically lose your job.
So that's why everybody's just like going out of their way to just make it like you're their favorite person and they know everything about you.
Yeah, but you know, some people just give you a four anyway.
Because have you ever seen when you're going on Google and you're looking at the reviews,
you'll see these stupid comments where people are like, this is the best restaurant I've ever had.
I love it so much. Four stars.
And you're just like, what's a five star?
Exactly. This is what I brought to my manager because I got surveyed the most.
I got surveyed like 10 times and I had two surveys that weren't perfect.
And one was like, you know, a four snuck in there.
Yeah, right. And I said, some people just don't want to give five stars.
There are people like that. She was like, it just sounds like you don't want to, you know, learn from your mistakes and you can't admit.
And I was like, no, if I, you know, make mistake, I want to fix it and I want to do better.
And I know I'm not perfect, but I said, it seems like the bar is a little high there.
Yeah, right. But the thing that really turned me off about it is the overdraft fees.
So, oh, man, it's crazy.
The way they did banking there is all of your items that were pending on the weekend.
They charged the highest items first, even though it wasn't in chronological order.
So people would have their mortgage coming in over the weekend and they would charge that first.
And these people are going to like get a dollar coke and two dollar candy bar throughout the weekend.
And they're paying like thirty dollars for each dollar fifty item that they overdrafted.
Yeah. So they reverse the order.
So their mortgage comes through for like a thousand dollars and overdraft their account by like fifty dollars.
And instead of just getting one overdraft fee, because Wells Fargo would say, well, we're going to move that to the first item.
All these one dollar items got a thirty five dollar fee each.
Yeah. So these people are living paycheck to paycheck.
They barely make very much money and they're just getting demolished, like five or six hundred dollars in fees.
Yeah. And we use two systems and the old system allowed the personal bankers to kind of go in and reverse the fees, even though we weren't supposed to.
Right. Exactly. And but you have these customers coming.
They're crying. They don't have any money.
Yeah. So this one guy reversed like half of his fees.
Yeah. And he should have only gotten charged one by the way the system, you know, the chronological order.
And I just felt like a really wicked person, you know, even just charging him half of the fees.
But then we got in trouble with all of our managers because because you did that.
The store has to meet a ninety two percent collection ratio on all overdraft fees for the managers to get their bonus.
So these these managers get these like tens of thousands of dollars of bonuses every quarter based on their overdraft collection rate.
Yeah. And so they don't meet a specific ratio, then they don't get paid out.
I made that mistake one time early in my marriage, there was one time when I overdrew my account.
And it was like that where it was like five transactions or whatever, where they did that, the little moving things around.
So I got hit with like one hundred and seventy five dollars of fees or something.
And it was horrible. And I got him to take half of it off.
You know, I probably got that guy in trouble.
But I got him to take half the fees off.
But ever since then, I've just made it a rule to keep a buffer in my account.
And I and I recommend to people that they should never, ever run their account down below one hundred dollars or two hundred dollars.
Because sometimes you just forget about one or two transactions and you're just not paying attention or whatever.
So from that day on, when I made that mistake, I started just keeping a five hundred dollar buffer, meaning that I considered five hundred dollars the zero.
Exactly. Just never go below.
And then and then, you know, when you get to where you have more kids and you're spending more money, you got to have a thousand dollar buffer, two thousand dollar buffer.
But I mean, when I see people running their checking account down to like eight dollars, fifteen dollars, it's madness because you're going to slip up.
And when you slip up, it's just they're going to come down on you like a ton of breaks and they have no mercy.
Yeah, you write a check and someone takes a week to cash it and you just forget that you wrote about it.
I mean, and the thing is, is even people that were financially responsible or made a lot of money would fall into this trap.
I yeah, I was trying to find all kinds of inventive ways to get people sales and we had to do all these door to door sales.
It's kind of like soul winning, but not like so many.
Yeah, except you're like hurting people.
Right. You're trying to take all their money.
I looked through this report and I tried to find the biggest offenders and overdraft fees.
And there were people that are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in overdraft fees.
And I found this couple. They were both like, like one was a doctor and one was like a lawyer.
So they're bringing in like ten, fifteen thousand dollars.
They didn't think about money. So they're just blowing money.
Exactly. They would spend like six or seven thousand dollars in the negative every single month.
And they would just rack up like thousands of dollars of overdraft fees every month.
I mean, they literally had forty or fifty thousand dollars in overdraft fees in one year that they paid.
And I took it my managers and I was like really proud that I found it because I was thinking like, hey, this is a great person.
We need to call them and tell them, like, hey, you need to figure it out what's going on with your account because you're paying all these fees.
And he's like, no, we love this guy.
Exactly. They said do not call them.
They said if you call them, then we're going to lose your job.
They didn't want you to counsel with that person and help them like not go in the negative because they want you in the negative.
Exactly. That's why I like whenever it's possible with your bank, sometimes you can tell your bank, like if I don't have enough money, don't let the transaction go through.
Because what they would do if they were honest is that if I don't have money in my account and I swipe my card, it should just say declined.
Yeah. Instead of letting me buy that stick of gum and pay thirty five dollars for it.
Right. And you have no idea.
Yeah. It should just tell you declined.
And then it's like, oh, I don't have any money. But they'll just let you just keep on going.
They'll just let you keep on going because they're just like.
Well, and even if they don't collect it from you, they just sell it to a collection agency for fifty cents on the dollar.
Even though it's all just plain.
Well, it's a good lesson for pastoring the church, too, to always keep a buffer of money in the bank because we are faithful word.
And when you're turning over a lot of money, you got to have a big buffer because it's not worth it.
You'd rather just have extra money in the account.
One overdraft fee and it multiplies and compounds.
It's just it's not worth it.
So, you know, I only worked there for a few months.
I really couldn't stand it.
And I ended up working for another bank, which was but I worked in a different department.
I didn't do sales. I did like credit analyst work, but I really wasn't happy.
And I ended up deciding I need to make a career change.
And I don't know exactly why, but I realized that my position had no tangible skills and that if I were ever to move, I'd be like starting over in my career.
And so I thought I need to get a job where no matter where I move or no matter what I do, I could have a good paying job.
There was more skill dependent. So I ended up going back to get a master's degree and I was getting it in finance and economics.
And man, I just did not like economics at all.
It's studying all these failed philosophical, did you read Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith?
Yeah. So you have to read all you read all these Keynesian economic models and all these things.
And they're all failed plans. But I ended up considering computer programming as well.
And we were going to a life group, me and my wife.
And so one of the guys that was there, he said, hey, if you really want to, you can come work for us.
So I had no experience, no ability to do any programming, and they just brought me on and basically taught me how to do.
So that's how you got into computer program. Yeah.
See, I just assume when you said you were a computer programmer that you must have studied that in college.
Nope, didn't study at all. I didn't know anything.
Yeah, because Pastor Dave Burzins, he went to college for computer programming and that's what he did.
So you actually just got on the job training.
Yeah, I had this I had a lot of pressure because I felt like I had to make a certain amount of money in order to afford kids.
And we hadn't had any children yet. Right.
And so I knew that we were wanting to have kids and I was like, I need to have a better job.
So that's kind of the motivation to even really look for a different job.
And then we ended up having our first son, Clayton.
You know, we went through the traditional hospital route with Clayton and she ended up getting induced.
And, you know, it was kind of a bad experience because she ended up getting the epidural and since she couldn't feel it,
you know, she ended up going into labor and was actually going to give birth to our first child.
But because the doctor was not there, they made her stop.
And I know that if she hadn't had the epidural at that point that she wouldn't it wouldn't even be possible.
I mean, because I saw all of Clayton's head like he was crowning.
Yeah, that's so weird. And then they're like, we've got to wait for the doctor.
So we wait 30 minutes for the doctor to show up and then she has to go back through it all again.
And she ended up tearing and having, you know, I mean, it was just this horrible experience.
And so we were pretty much convinced that, you know, there was something wrong there.
But we still are going to go through the hospital route with our second child.
But as I was listening to more of your preaching and kind of changing my mind about a lot of different things,
we had already decided we wanted to do a home birth, but we had paid for the doctor.
So we're like, OK, we'll still go to the hospital, but we're going to be I'm going to be on top of this thing.
We're not going to let this happen again.
Well, we go to bed.
I think it was a day before her due date and there was nothing unusual.
I just went to bed at like 11 at one in the morning.
She wakes me up and she comes in.
She's like, I'm having a lot of contractions.
And I was like, OK, well, how far apart are they?
She was like 30 seconds.
And I was like 30 seconds.
That means you're like about to have the baby in my mind.
But, you know, because we've gone through the first route, I didn't have enough experience to really know how everything worked.
And so I was like, surely she's not having contractions.
They're saying so I called the hospital.
They said, you know, put her in a bath, put her in a cold bath or warm bath.
And if it subsides, then just stay there.
And if it increases, then just come right away.
So I make this bath and she's getting in there and I'm kind of running around frantically, just like preparing things,
trying to get ready to go and calling her mother in law.
And she starts screaming and she's just like, no, he's coming.
And I was like, oh, man.
So I was like, I get her clothes and I was like, let's go.
We'll get in the car right now.
We'll get the hospital.
She's like, you don't understand.
He's coming right now.
So I was like, OK.
So she gets on the bed and she just starts, you know, giving birth.
And like, I didn't know what was happening.
She's like, call 911.
And so I was like, OK.
So I just call 911.
I'm like, I'm thinking, what are they going to do?
You know, like, call an ambulance or whatever.
The paramedics trained in that.
I'm calling them and they just put me on hold.
So I'm on hold and my wife is like giving birth to our son,
like our water's breaking and things are happening.
And then I run to get some towels.
And as soon as I come back, he's completely crowned at this point.
And it looked like to me that maybe the cord is kind of like wrapped
around his neck.
So I was thinking, oh, man, we got to go.
Like, I just kind of grab him and like one more big push.
And then he just birthed there in like eight minutes.
She's just saying, like, wakes me up in the middle of the night
and she's like, I'm contracting.
And then before we know it, like now we're giving birth in our room
on our bed, you know, to our second child.
So that was just so the second child was an unassisted home birth.
Yeah. I mean, we were just sitting there.
Not something I really recommend, not something we had planned.
You know, I recommend.
But obviously, you know, it was kind of a crazy experience.
At that point, I said, do we even need to go to the hospital?
But we still went to the hospital.
Yeah, we got treatment and everything like that.
And so that was how we had, you know, our second child.
It's kind of a special story.
You know, my mother-in-law, she walks down the hall
because she was expecting to just wait there at the house
with our first child while we went to the hospital.
And I walked through the hall and she's like, she already had the kid.
And she was like, oh, what?
And then she kind of came in and it was like,
we had three police officers show up.
We had two paramedics show up.
So it's kind of like a madhouse in our house.
And we just took the ambulance, you know, up to the up north to Amarillo
because it was about 20 minutes away.
So my wife was actually raised in a Southern Baptist church.
And I was raised in this non-enominational church.
But I thought it was the best church in the world.
You know, I was convinced that this was, you know,
where I was supposed to be and that it was really great.
And I talked to my wife and I said, you know, if you want to marry me,
you know, you have to come to my church.
You know, wherever I decide that I want to go to church,
you have to go to that church.
And I said, I'm not even interested in moving from this area
because I think this church is, you know, like one of the best churches.
And so she ended up coming with me to my church.
But you know, my church was far from the truth.
I just didn't realize it.
And I always tried to help out.
I actually worked in the church nursery at that church for about four years.
In the nursery?
Yes.
So they put dudes in the nursery?
Well, they had this, they had, it was mostly women that worked in the nursery.
But they allowed a lot of the young teenagers to work in the nursery.
And there was all these young guys I was friends with.
And they just all worked in the nursery, like, it's so cool, man.
Like, you got to work.
Animal crackers, Kool-Aid, that's it.
You know, they have big programs.
So I worked in the four and five year old group with these other teenage guys.
And, you know, we would just do all kinds of stuff.
We'd play baseball in the kids rooms.
And there's just a lot of games, singing and fun.
So for them, it was more fun than sitting in the church service, basically.
Yeah, we would just go and we even got paid.
I got paid to work in the church nursery.
It was a weird experience because other than those guys,
everybody else that worked in the church nursery didn't go to church.
Like, they didn't even go to our church.
They just only came and worked in the nursery?
They only worked in the nursery.
And they would be asking me, like, hey, do you want to get high after the,
you know, after we're done working?
Good night.
I'm like, so it's like, these people are dropping off their four or five year old
with just strange teenage boys that are getting high.
They're not even interested in a church.
They're just there for the money, the crackers and the party.
I mean, it was it was bizarre.
Wow, that's weird.
And even some of the women that worked there, they didn't go to our church.
And this one divorcee, she had like three kids.
She was like on the prowl on all these young guys.
Like, it was weird.
And I'm not joking.
She was like 33, you know, or something like that.
I think her husband was like in jail or something and they'd been divorced.
Well, she was like, who I want to drop my five year old off with.
You end up convincing one of the young guys.
They end up getting married when he turned 18.
No way. Not joking.
Like she was constantly on the prowl and all the guys.
It was such a weird thing.
And you're telling your wife, like, this is a great church.
Yeah, it's another Baptist look a little better. Yeah.
Obviously, that's an issue.
I never blame like the leadership for that.
Well, because when you when that's all, you know,
you probably just thought it was just how things are.
Yeah, I thought they must not be young.
So so after that, you know, I started working in the youth group.
I really liked working with young people.
I felt like they, you know, they had a lot of fun stuff. Right.
But the youth programs were very hot and cold.
They would kind of gear up and a bunch of people would come.
And then all of a sudden they would die down
because the main pastor would be doing something
they shouldn't be doing or something weird.
And I even went to the Sunday morning service
and was helping with the youth group.
And the main guy, he wasn't there a lot of a lot of the weeks.
So the second guy was in charge.
And instead of actually preaching, he would just show videos.
He just so like a YouTube clip or something.
And this one week, he decides to show this YouTube clip.
And I'd never heard this guy.
He shows this YouTube clip of Rob Bell.
And I'd never heard of this guy.
He wrote this book called Love Wins.
Yeah, he's a total fag.
He promotes this like video about how, you know, you've heard
that it's been said that you have to believe in Jesus or go to hell.
But if that's true, then God's not really loving.
And obviously that's not the God of the Bible.
And they play this in your church.
Yeah, they didn't preach.
They're just playing this video.
That's what he's famous for is like saying that everybody's saved
and there's nobody's going to have love wins and all.
So I'm sitting here blown away because I'm like highly offended.
I was just like, what?
This is like contrary to everything about the Bible.
I was offended even if it was good video.
Like I already didn't like it.
And so I was kind of getting frustrated with the youth group.
But then they just shut it down and they just like, well,
this guy is going to move or something worked out.
So they just had no youth group.
Then they had another guy come in and I started getting involved again.
And they did life groups for the kids.
And so I was like, well, I'll just, you know, do a life group.
So I ended up having what they did, a basketball group,
because all the life groups, you had to have this like edgy, like a cool topic.
Yeah. So we went to they had a big gym and we would just play basketball.
And I did like a 20 minute sermon,
you know, maybe in the middle of the group or something like that.
And in this process, you know, kind of through this process,
I was really becoming more and more zealous
and more wanting to study the Bible and actually know what I believed.
And so I was kind of researching a lot of different things.
I ended up finding online a debate
between Ken Ham and Ken or Ken Ham and Bill Nye.
And I'd kind of like made it up my mind, like this is going to be a big debate.
Like everybody's going to watch this just happened just a few years ago.
It happened in 2014, February of 2014.
But they had been announcing it for like a year.
Like they put out their first billboards and all these things.
I actually watched it. Oh, really? OK.
So like in 2013, I was like studying.
I was like, who's this Ken Ham guy? I've never heard of him.
I was like, I hope he's good because I started realizing
a lot of these Christian apologists and evangelists.
They don't actually preach the Bible there.
Yeah, they're heretics.
And so I started looking into his ministry
and I'd never heard of young earth
creationism in my life.
And it really blew me away because I thought there's so much of the Bible
speaks about this topic.
Like, how have I never even heard of it?
And even though Ken Ham is really liberal
and I don't actually agree with his ministry or anything at the time,
just the fact that the Bible actually spoke about these topics
and the truth from the Bible is blowing me away.
And I saw a comment on YouTube.
It said, hey, you need to check out Kent Hovind because he's way better.
So I started really getting Ken Hovind.
He was way better, you know, only as the King James Bible.
I was a much more intelligent person.
I end up watching like every single one of his videos.
And that's where I really made the transition,
where I changed a lot of my my viewpoints on doctrine.
I became King James only through this time
because I've been using an ESV Bible for that Bible study group
that I was doing with the kids.
And I had written this sermon and I'd made this really good point.
And as I was using like some other version to prepare my sermon.
But then when we were in the group and we're using the ESV,
it said something completely different was gone.
Like the whole point I was trying to make didn't even exist in that version.
And so it kind of blew me away.
I was thinking like, what's wrong with this ESV Bible?
So different.
So I was pretty, you know, open to the idea of like what's going on
with these Bibles.
And as soon as I saw like Kent Hovind say, I don't use the King James Bible
because the other ones have errors.
I mean, I immediately was like, yeah, it's obviously the King James Bible
because these other Bibles are saying like Elhanan,
the son of Jehorigim slew Goliath.
And they're saying they have all these contradictions within themselves.
And I just was like immediate King James only.
So from that point, I started researching just the King James only position,
because the thing that surprised me is whenever I would approach family members
or friends about that viewpoint, that they just didn't even care
or they just thought it didn't even matter.
And it really kind of blew me away their apathy.
So I was trying to figure out, like, what's the best way to explain it?
And like, what's all the arguments?
And I started listening to a lot of Sam Gipp and James White
because they kind of seem to be the only two people online
that I could find that were really like diametrically opposed,
you know, really researching the topic.
And, you know, I don't agree with Sam Gipp.
He's obviously a devil.
You know, our movie came out in 2014.
Yeah. The New World Order Bible versions.
You didn't find it.
I hadn't found it. I couldn't find it.
So how did you find our stuff?
Well, it was through James White because he had made a response video
to Sam Gipp like saying the King James Bibles archaic
and, you know, there's all these words that we don't know.
Like he would say a dough, right?
It's a choler. Exactly.
So I found a video by this guy saying response to James White's
responses to Sam Gipp or whatever. And it was you.
And you like were pointing out how he's just mispronouncing
all these common words.
And then he was attacking the fact that he's saying the King James Bible
was like Middle English or something. Yeah.
And so you quote like Beowulf for old English. Yeah.
For old English because Chaucer is is Middle English and right.
Wolf is old English.
And he was saying like it's old English or Middle English.
And I was explaining how the King James is actually modern English.
Exactly. Yeah.
So it really blew me away that you had like quoted this like old,
you know, passage from Beowulf.
So I just started listening to some of your sermons.
And I mean, it really blew me away because I'd never heard anybody
preach so much Bible.
And that was what I was seeking for so much.
Me and my wife, we were trying to get involved in life groups
for several years, and we'd always go to these groups,
but they never opened the Bible.
I mean, they're just they're using other books that were about the Bible
or just things about topics like marriage or raising a family
would be the group's focus was never opening the Bible.
And I kept saying, like, we would try group after group after group.
Some groups, they would just watch a video.
Some groups were hungry for the word of God.
Yeah. So I was like, I'm going to find the most hardcore
like Bible study group.
And they had the like second main pastor of this like 10,000 person church
had a men of the word group.
So I'm going to and they would do line by line,
supposedly through the Bible. That sounded great.
Yeah, but they would use everybody used every other version.
So somebody's using the NSB, somebody's using the ESV,
somebody's using the amplified.
So it was like this mad gab that we would go through.
And I wasn't learning anything.
It was really frustrating still.
And I approached the guy and I said, hey,
what do you think about the King James only position?
You know, the fact that the King James is the only Bible.
He's like, I've never heard of that.
And I was like, it already was really frustrating me because I thought
you've committed your whole life to serving God and like studying the Bible.
And you're not even aware that people have different viewpoints
on the different versions that really kind of like,
I thought I would have more respect for a guy that at least had a viewpoint
towards the King James position rather than just being ignorant of the position.
And so I kind of explained the King James position to this guy.
And he says, that's the most ignorant and foolish thing that I've ever heard.
Wow. And at that point, our conversation just kind of was like,
you know, I don't know what to say to this guy.
You know, I was giving him a ride to lunch and I was just like, all right, get out.
And I never went back.
And so I was just trying to, you know, find truth,
just trying to seek more things.
And I changed my viewpoint on a lot of doctrines at that point.
And I kind of been convinced that my church was right on the gospel
because they gave lip service to it.
They would say, you know, it's just by faith.
It's a one time event.
You can't lose your salvation.
But at the same time, they would say, well, if you're practicing sin, though,
did you really believe? Right.
And so they had all these caveats for lordship,
salvation, all those type of things.
But I think it's still possible for people to get saved
in these liberal churches, but just not through the leadership.
Yeah, just through the right worker, because, you know,
even in a super liberal church, the pastor might not even be saved.
Some of the members could be saved.
Because I know like when we were independent,
fundamental Baptists, when our church went bad, when I was a kid,
it was like everybody went over to the fund center church.
So they were from an independent,
fundamental Baptist church.
But when that church fell apart,
a lot of them just ended up going to the liberal church.
So there are saved people in these fund centers,
because when you go soul winning,
you'll run into people who go to these fund centers.
They give all the right answers on the gospel.
But then when you talk to them, usually they're like,
oh, I used to be Baptist or I was at a Baptist summer camp,
or they'll quote you the verses from the King James of how they got saved.
But then now they're at some super liberal fund center.
So, yeah, you can get saved if you have the right person dealing with you,
if you have the right Sunday school teacher, altar worker or whatever.
Right? Exactly.
I mean, it really kind of in hindsight, things just, you know,
I kept opening my eyes as like the scales are falling from my eyes,
as it were, about a lot of things that I was raised.
And my family really didn't agree.
My family, you know, wholeheartedly thought I was,
you know, going off the deep end and kind of apostatizing, as it were.
I'm the apostate of the family, as it were.
Do they still kind of feel that way?
Yeah. I mean, my whole family, you know, when I talk to them, they're like, hey,
you realize you're starting a cult.
You realize that you're in a cult.
That's what they said about the church is starting in Houston. Exactly.
I even told my dad, I said, you know, when I was talking to my sister,
you know, this week, she was like,
you realize that the whole family thinks you're in a cult, John.
And I said, you know, and she says, I'm starting a cult.
And my dad's like, so what's the name of it?
I was like, he's trying to be all friendly about it.
Yeah. So so what's the name of the cult you're starting, Jonathan? Yeah.
You know, they have this viewpoint that their viewpoint is like the world opinion.
They don't even realize that even though a lot of their opinions
are minor opinions or not even what main Christianity even believes,
but because they go to this big church, they're convinced that
that's what everybody that's how everybody feels. Exactly.
Even though in that church, there's no unity.
Now, is this that same church where they were playing Rob Bell videos
in the youth group back in the day?
Yeah. I mean, even in the main sanctuary, this is crazy.
In the summer that they would have like a mass exodus.
Nobody's coming to church.
So in order to try and bring people in,
they started doing Hollywood movies for the services. Wow.
Like at first I thought they were doing Christian movies.
Like what were some of the movies that they played?
They did Iron Man, Despicable Me, Captain Phillips.
And, you know, they would run it because they wouldn't even just show the movie.
They would just show like clips.
And then they would try to do like a little bit of a Bible lesson
from the movie in the middle.
So they just ruined it for everybody.
Like the people that want to learn the Bible,
they have to go to this Hollywood movie.
And the people who want to see the movie have to get the Bible.
They have to get all this commentary and stuff.
They'd have popcorn.
They had these movie posters with all the celebrities and you put your head,
you know, like and take pictures and do all this stuff.
I was against it.
Like, even though I went to this liberal church, I thought it was wicked.
And I like was condemned by my whole family because I was like,
I'm not going to go.
And what they're doing is wrong.
And I said, if they want to have movies at church,
you know, a Christian movie on like Friday, whatever.
But to replace the preaching, to replace the sermon with a movie
with just a secular and like a secular Hollywood movie.
I mean, some of these Hollywood actors are known sodomites and just like,
you know, some of the worst filth people and they're liking them under Christ.
You know, they're they're Playboy, Iron Man or whatever.
This guy's like a womanizer.
I never seen it.
So it was just a weird experience to try and,
you know, go through this and realize that everything I was raised was wrong.
So once you got online and you you started learning more,
you're King James only, you're listening to a lot of hard preaching.
So you ended up switching to a Baptist church in your area, right?
Yeah. So once I kind of realized that my church,
I didn't agree with my church on anything anymore.
We just stopped going.
And, you know, I was listening to pretty much only your sermons
and some other things online.
And I knew I needed to get in a good church.
My wife, since she was raised Southern Baptist,
that was kind of where we were defaulting.
Like maybe we should go to a Southern Baptist church. Right.
And for about six months or so, we were kind of just church hopping.
And after listening more of your preaching, I was realizing
there was a difference between a Southern Baptist church
and independent Baptist church.
So I was wanting to try the independent Baptist churches in our area.
So we tried this one independent Baptist church.
My wife was like, let's go, let's try it.
So I called the pastor.
We spoke on the phone. It sounded good.
You know, he's like, they said they did soul winning.
They were King James only.
And we show up in like everybody.
The church knows us by name.
When we walk in, it was kind of like awkward.
Like we walk in like I never introduced myself.
I walk in there like you must be Jonathan and Carrie Shelly because you called.
Yeah. So they were just so excited.
Like somebody somebody's interested.
Yeah, that's funny.
And it was like it really, you know, was off putting to my wife.
She's like, how do these people know our name?
And like, it was super weird.
Know who your kids are.
Yeah. And the choir, they had they had all the programs,
even though the church only had like 20 people.
So like whenever they had choir, everybody's in the choir
and they're just like singing to us.
And it was super awkward.
We had a Sunday school and it was just like three or four.
Hey, some people might actually love all that attention.
Yeah, I don't know.
If somebody is really lonely, you should give them the name of that church.
It'll be like so and so.
We've been waiting for you.
Well, and I thought the guy was right on salvation.
I don't really question him on it.
But we get up in the sermon.
It was pre trip and then he just rips on repent of your sins.
And I was just like, this is not, you know.
Yeah, my wife was like so relieved because she was just like she didn't really.
Yeah, she hated it.
So we started going to this like big Southern Baptist church, too.
We were kind of trying a lot of different churches
and they're real traditional, at least.
So it wasn't like a fun center necessarily, but they're very liberal.
It was a more conservative of the spectrum of Southern Baptists. Right.
And the church was weird.
They this one thing they did baby dedications and the main pastor,
he would take the baby from the parents and then he would hold the baby up
like, you know, Lion King or something.
And then they would twirl around the baby as they sung to this baby
for the baby dedication in the world.
And it just freaked me out.
I was thinking because we we were just starting to have kids.
And I was like, there is no way that that guy is going to lift up my baby
and do this like twirling thing.
And so we were just at a loss.
I felt like there was just no good church in our area.
I think a lot of I mean, you're in Amarillo.
It's kind of a small town, right?
There was like seven independent Baptist churches there.
How many people live in Amarillo?
It's about 200,000 people.
Yeah, it's a pretty small town.
It's not like a major city or anything.
I mean, to me, to someone like me, I've only lived in big cities my whole lives.
Right. So I mean, it's not like Dallas or it's not like Phoenix
or anything like that.
But that's seven independent Baptist churches.
But there was lots of them.
I wouldn't even try.
Like one was like a total ruck when I church.
Yeah. A lot of things I didn't want to go to in the one church that I considered
on their doctrinal statement, they sounded really Calvinist
because they're using like perseverance of the saints
and total depravity in their doctrinal statement.
So I just wrote them off.
I didn't even call them or try to visit their church.
But the Southern Baptist guy, the pastor, I was trying to talk to him
about the King James only position.
He's like, you should just try this King James only church.
And I said, well, aren't they Calvinist?
And he's like, I don't think so.
So I ended up calling them.
I spoke to the youth pastor at that time.
And I just I pretty much got on the phone.
I just said, what do you think about Calvinism?
And the guy was like, I don't think very much at all.
And I was like, so do you believe in the five,
you know, points of Tulip or whatever?
And he was like, no.
And he's like, are you just like trolling us?
And I was like, no, I read your doctrinal statement.
I was just kind of testing it out.
I was interested in visiting your church.
And so I ended up going in and becoming pretty good friends with the guy.
And it ended up being a really good blessing
just to find a church that was at least King James only.
So they weren't Calvinist at all.
They just had kind of a weird thing in their doctrinal statement
that made it sound that way.
I even asked the pastor about it because you had to do a class
to join the church.
And he said, well, we don't want to let people reinterpret Bible words.
But I was like, well, the gravity is not even in the Bible.
And, you know, it doesn't use the word perseverance to describe anything.
About salvation.
So he was obviously just copying and pasting from someone
who was more Calvinist than him.
Right, exactly.
So, I mean, the guy was you know, he was a good preacher.
I liked him, but he ended up retiring.
And I had approached him saying, you know, I'm considering,
you know, wanting to go into the ministry, wanting to be a pastor.
Would you consider training me?
And he's like, you know, I honestly, if it was like a year ago,
you'd approach me with this.
I would say wholeheartedly, yes, but I'm going to retire.
So you need to ask the next guy.
So the next I came in pretty quickly and
I ended up approaching him
with the same thing a few weeks after he'd been there.
I said, hey, you know, I go soul winning on Saturdays.
I'd like to start a soul winning, you know, movement in the church.
And I'd even like to be a pastor one day.
Would you consider training me?
And he said, you know, I really encourage people to go to Bible college.
That's where they're going to get a lot of hands on training and experience.
I'm kind of a hands off type of guy.
But he's like, at least I'm really good at preaching.
He was saying the one thing I've got is I can really put together a sermon.
So that's kind of isn't that kind of a prideful thing to say, though?
Yeah, I was a little it was a little weird, but so he agreed, though.
And I feared he might, because in his testimony, he said that his dad
was a layman who got saved through door to door soul winning,
end up getting into the church, was trained at that church
and was sent out to be a pastor.
So I thought with this guy's history, maybe be sympathetic to
training a guy through the local church.
Well, it ended up he agreed, but nothing happened. Right.
Never talked to me every time I'd come in to him and say, hey, you know,
do you need me to help with anything? Yeah.
You know, I'll go soloing on Saturdays.
Can we get a soloing program through the church?
He'd say, well, we don't want to just start a soloing program
and then like quit in the winter.
People don't like to go to, you know, go soloing after where it gets dark.
So he was just making excuses. Lots of excuses that, you know, it's kind of like
when I approached my pastor in California about getting trained, he said, oh, yeah,
I'm going to train you for the ministry.
And he told me all these things that we're going to do.
And this is how I'm going to train you.
But then it just never happened.
You know, years went by.
I've got two kids and I keep asking him and nothing was happening.
So finally I just bit the bullet and went to Bible college
because it was like I could just tell nothing was going to happen.
So that's is that you wanted him to train you.
He said he's going to do it, but it just the training never materialized.
Yeah, I mean, he never asked me to do anything.
The only thing I decided to start preparing sermons
just to be prepared if I ever got an opportunity. Right.
And I'd actually been blessed enough.
One of the guys I knew at my old church, he would volunteer
for a recovery and addiction center, and they just did preaching every single day.
They had like two sermons every single day.
They'd have to preach to the people where they could eat.
So all these people would show up just because they wanted the food,
but they had to endure like a 30 or 40 minute sermon.
And I was able to preach like every week almost at this chapel service.
So I had got a lot of experience preaching already.
And I just prepared a sermon like if I ever get an opportunity
to preach in my church, you know, to be ready.
And one Sunday morning, right after the sermon, the pastor gets up
and he goes, all right, for the Sunday evening service,
we're going to have a we're going to have a sermon from Jonathan Shelley.
And I was just like, OK.
And he's like, but five minutes.
And it was kind of weird.
I was like, OK.
And he picked like two other people.
So like he had three of us just give like a five minute sermon on Sunday night.
So I just kind of like repurposed my longer sermon into something.
Five minute version. Yeah, five minute version.
And it was a great blessing to be able to get to preach.
You know, there's hundreds of people that went to that church.
And but after that, still nothing, just nothing was happening.
Nothing was happening.
And I kind of already said in my heart that even though I was going to go
through the training there, I wanted to come to Faith Board Baptist Church
to kind of finish off my training, because I knew
I was already like minded with Faith Board Baptist Church
or Verity Baptist Church.
And I knew that if I went out to go start a church in the future,
that I was going to get disowned.
You know, I'd heard your stories about how Regency Baptist Church,
after hearing about the pre-trib departure,
that they were pretty much not going to have anything to do with you.
And so I wanted to at least have some fellowship with people
that are like minded, you know, and train from somebody
that actually did some hard preaching.
You know, the preaching at these churches was just never really on
sin. It was just evangelistic type sermons. Right.
And they started a sermon series in January, brand new sermon series
on the pre-trib rapture.
Oh, man. And, you know, I was I had a purpose in my heart,
like I'll endure pre-trib sermons.
I'll just be a blessing to this church. It's been great.
But he did it, you know, starting January 1st, every single week,
just another pre-trib sermon, pre-trib sermon.
And we would always read Matthew 24.
It was like we couldn't not open to Matthew 24,
but we never read verse 29. Never. Not one. Wow.
And so they would just kind of read like the whole, you know, beginning of woe.
It's like, hey, let's jump down to verse 36. Exactly.
Yeah. Every single time, like clockwork. And
then we rolled into February and he's like, well,
we're going to continue our pre-trib series.
I just feel like this is really important.
And then we roll into March and it's like, yeah, we're going to continue
our pre-trib series.
And I think at this point, I mean, it was just wearing my wife down.
To like this, this every degree.
And she ended up just saying to me, like, what if we just move early?
I mean, it was just like a fresh of breath air to me.
I just said, let's do it.
So we ended up, you know, deciding, like, let's just put it in action.
Let's figure out how we can get the Faith Ward Baptist Church,
you know, as soon as possible.
And so I ended up, you know, we had to sell our house.
You know, I approached my job.
Now, didn't you tell me that another factor was that the pastor
whose greatest strength was preaching
that he actually just started reading his sermons from a paper?
Yes. You tell me that.
So we ended up going to the steadfast one year anniversary service.
And that was the first time I actually ended up getting to meet you there.
And that weekend that we left this, the pastor got up in the pulpit
and he addressed the church and he said, you know, I'm really struggling
and I feel like I can't preach right now.
So I'm just going to read my sermons.
And he's like, but I hope that y'all can be praying for me
and like encourage me through this, you know, transition
and I'll get to where I, you know, the better.
So we show back up and we don't even know anything.
And all of a sudden, the 30 minute sermon turned into a 15 minute sermon,
just read from a page, just read from a paper.
And it basically sounded like he took like four or five commentaries
and just kind of mixed them together and was just reading that to us.
And it was so precise that there was a hearing impaired couple
that sat pretty close to us.
And one of the service weeks we were sitting just like right next to them.
And he had this paper and it was different than the bulletin.
And so I looked at it and it was exactly the sermon from the pastor.
And I watched as this guy is following line by line
exactly what he was the guy was just reading.
He was literally reading a sermon in the most literal way
that you could possibly say just a 15 minute sermon.
And we would be done like with service just so quick
that they had to start pumping up the special music.
And how many people went to this church?
I mean, on a Sunday morning, you might have four or five hundred people.
So you have four or five hundred people showing up.
And this guy just reads a 15 minute sermon off a paper.
I mean, it blew me away.
And, you know, the church attendance didn't even suffer
because the main pastor, you know, he just put so much
honor onto this guy before he left over.
He did a really good transition.
It made me think of my new guy.
So how long has he been pastoring?
Uh, he had pastored a church in Lobe.
No, no, no. I mean, how long have you been pastoring the new church?
Um, probably five months.
So you'd only been there for five months
and then he announces how he's going to transition to just reading.
Exactly. Five months into his job.
And he's already just panicking.
I mean, I don't know what happened.
That's bizarre.
And you know, the people that church.
Is he still there? Yeah.
And he's still reading his sermon.
No way. Because all over once in a while, just go back and look.
And we even visited when we went back home.
We just went to the service.
And yeah, I mean, he looks up a little bit more.
But, you know, like that he's just reading.
It's mainly being read.
Yeah. And at most it's like a 20 minute sermon. Unbelievable.
You know, and they the thing about those churches,
they support one hundred and fifty or one hundred and seventy five missionaries.
So they're constantly having people visit because of deputation.
Oh, so they'll put those people behind the pulpit every single time they show up.
Yeah. Some pastors are like that.
Just they'll just bring in any missionary because they just
it's just an excuse not to preach.
Just put somebody else in the pulpit.
I mean, you preach only maybe once a week and it'd be that 15.
So we had constant evangelists and missionaries and just
his friends would come and preach for him
because they're really plugged into this Bible college,
Heartland Baptist Bible College.
So they're really pushing the Bible cause they constantly had groups
come singing for our church.
We gave them thousands of dollars every year.
But, you know, I mean, the church, it was a blessing because we had no church.
Right. And at least they were right on the gospel.
At least I could. Yeah, I was like it was somewhere that you could go,
go soul winning, go to church. A lot of good people in the church.
Or did you say was there soul winning?
Well, they had members that would go soul winning.
Oh, OK. But they didn't have an official program.
They had had some in the past.
And when I talked to the older pastor, the person that had been there before,
he said, yeah, we have soul winning programs.
And they usually just kind of die in the winter.
And then we just kind of pick them back up again.
And so but he's like, but eventually got to the point where it was just me going.
And so, you know, we just kind of stopped.
He's like, every once in a while I get convicted enough
to just go out there and preach the gospel to somebody.
But, you know, you could tell it's from the pulpit
because they would preach these pretty good sermons
that would lead up to like a plug for the soul winning time.
But since they had no program, you know, it was kind of like no application.
Yeah, there was no call to action.
So you ended up moving to Faithful Word.
Yeah, I ended up
in the end of May.
We ended up moving here 2016.
So a little over two years ago, we made the trek.
And, you know, we bought a house online.
I'd never visited Phoenix in any time of my life before.
I never spoken to you except for just that that one time in the old past.
Wasn't it like at a park that I met you is like it was like after
after soul winning, all the soul winners met at a park to like,
I don't know if it was like to eat lunch or something.
Didn't we have lunch at a park like Panda Express, Panda Express?
Isn't that where I met you?
Yeah. So we I met you that one time at Donnie Romero's opening service.
But then I also went to Old Pass First Church.
Oh, maybe that's what I'm thinking of.
And so after the first push for soul winning, we went to some park
and we had lunch. Oh, OK.
And so I ended up getting to talk to you.
And I told you, like, hey,
I'm planning on moving to Faithful Word Baptist Church, going to Phoenix.
And you're just kind of like, cool.
Well, because I hear that.
I hear that all the time.
It's just kind of like you're pretty nonchalant about it.
And I was like, he must get like people say this all the time or so.
It wasn't like somebody calls our church one time and it's like,
you must be Jonathan. Right. Yeah.
Well, every time I called, I only got to speak to Tyler Baker, you know.
And he told me, you know, he told me all kinds of weird stuff.
I asked him, like, hey, I'm trying to buy this house.
You know, is there a good area or a bad area to buy in?
He's like, every area is the same.
You know, there's no bad area in Phoenix.
It's all exactly the same.
And I was just kind of like, how in a city of four million people
is like every neighborhood the exact same and just like all.
I mean, it really kind of blew me away.
So I but I bought this house and I was like, we're just going to make it work.
And so we ended up moving out here.
And I mean, everything was great.
Everything worked out.
You know, it was kind of like it just felt like God's hand was on it
because, you know, we sold our house without even showing it.
I was kind of nervous because I tore out the entire bathroom of our house.
It was just gutted and I was going to redo it.
And I told somebody I was moving and he's like, I know a guy
that wants to buy your house.
And I said, OK.
And so I just called the guy up.
He's like, yeah, he comes over.
He looked at the house and I kind of gave him a price.
And he was like, let's do it.
And he's like, and don't finish the bathroom.
I want to do it. Wow. That's great.
I mean, no inspection. It was a cash deal.
He said God was just blessing you.
I was just like, he just said, set the date.
And I was like, OK, so we just set the date.
We moved. It was like the smoothest transition.
And we came out here and really it was just a great blessing.
I approached you like I think either the first weekend or second weekend.
And I said that I want to train to be a pastor.
And you said, what's your timeline?
And I said, two years.
And you're like, if you, you know, prepare yourself
and you meet all the qualifications, I'll send you out in two years.
And so, you know, and there's there's so much opportunity
at Faith Word Baptist Church that anybody that just wants to.
I mean, they're going to be able to serve the Lord in a lot of great ways.
Yeah, you got a lot of training in two years.
Yeah. I mean, there was more stuff I could have done
if I had, you know, had more time or more ability or energy.
And so, you know, it's been a great blessing to be here.
I changed my whole life, really.
And, you know, it gave me a lot of perspective because my wife,
she was kind of more of a godly person than I was growing up.
She was a good example to me in a lot of things.
But as I was kind of going through this transition,
I kind of got to turn the tables on her just a little bit
to where I was trying to, you know, seek the Lord and do these things.
And we were kind of edifying one another.
You kind of came into your role as a spiritual leader.
I feel like she saved me, you know, from just drive driving off the cliff.
Yeah. And then I was, you know, able to kind of bolster
both of us on taking her to the next level.
Yeah. You know, we kind of edify one another.
And so that's kind of like the opposite with me and my wife, because like,
you know, she was obviously unsaved. I won her to Christ.
But then she's actually shown me some things over the years
and taught me some things over the years, you know.
But now we get the opportunity to go to Houston.
I'm really excited about this opportunity.
I visited Houston a few different times.
And so I really like the area.
My wife, she had told me when we were raised,
she was like, I'll never leave Texas.
She said, I will never move away from Texas.
So just even getting her to the Phoenix, Arizona.
Yeah. Was, you know, a task in and of itself.
Well, I guess that makes sense why when I was kind of suggesting
to maybe think about other places than Houston,
she was just kind of like really dead set on Houston.
Remember, I was kind of bringing up places in California
and I could just tell by her face, she's just like, no way.
In her mind, there was no option.
She was like, her heart was in Houston.
People who are from Texas, because you're from Texas, too.
People who are from Texas,
they just have this thing about just Texas.
Oh, yeah. Right.
It's like a lot of Texas pride.
Yeah. Oh, man.
They think Texas is the greatest place on the planet.
Like, Texas is its own country, as it were.
You know, I don't know what all the hype's about.
But yeah, people who live in Texas are pretty into it, though.
I would say that I had a little bit of that in me.
Yeah, but she had even more.
Yeah, but even moving to Arizona,
you know, there's a lot of things I like about Arizona better than Texas.
Yeah. You know, the constitutional carry.
And I love the weather here.
I think the weather is great.
So I've really enjoyed being in Phoenix.
I would think that if you weren't here,
it would be one of my top areas to go and start a church
so I can see why you really like this area.
Yeah. And I mean, it's obviously an under-reached area.
So what's your what's your vision for Houston?
You know, what's your biggest goal or what do you kind of
I'm sure you kind of think about what you'd like to see happen, right?
I think just the immediate goal is to just make a plan
to actually reach the entire city with the gospel.
One of the reasons why I picked that area is I'd taken
a lot of the church information I could find online
about what independent Baptist churches were in that area, and I put them on a map.
And then I kind of just was looking for areas that were underserved.
And that was just even looking for churches that were doing so
and I couldn't find any.
And, you know, hopefully, you know, in the next decade or so,
a lot of more churches will get on fire.
But in my opinion, every independent Baptist church should be trying
to reach their entire city with the gospel every year.
And so entire county.
Yeah. I mean, why not?
And so my vision is going to be, you know, the primary vision
is getting Houston the gospel.
So you got to get some soul winners in your church, get them trained,
get the soul anytime set up, get the maps going, get the manpower,
because, I mean, a city like Houston with millions and millions of people
are going to need a huge army of soul winners.
You're going to need hundreds of soul winners to get it done. Exactly.
I mean, the the key to getting everything done is having the manpower,
is having the soul winners.
You can't do it by yourself. No way.
You can't reach that many.
It's like a drop of water on a hot stove. Exactly.
It's not it's not as important for me to, you know, so when with all my time,
rather than to try and get people's elves for the Lord, you got to have a team.
Exactly. So I think, you know, hopefully it's
important as a pastor to get out there and do a lot of soul winning,
because that's what's going to inspire other people.
You got to model the way. Exactly.
Lead the way by showing the soul winning, being a good example.
And I'm hoping that if we can train a soul winning army for Houston,
then we can kind of, you know, be a mobile unit.
Then we can start reaching other areas, reaching other countries,
reaching these other places.
And so, you know, my vision is just to try and reach our immediate area
and try to bring in as many soul winners and try to train people to be
to do the soul. Yeah.
And then start reaching other areas.
There's a and the thing about Houston
that's very interesting is a highly segregated city. Really.
So there's just these pockets of people
that are demographically completely different.
And there's one area of Houston that's like only Spanish speaking.
So there's just this huge area where it's only span.
Every sign's in Spanish.
So it's like a little Mexico to reach right there. Exactly.
You know, my goal would be if I end up having the right guy
or have people that are real zealous that want to reach that community.
Just plan a church like the faithful word north.
I think it's been a good example of starting a church like that
or a ministry like that.
And so having a guy over there and just have a Spanish service
like it's Spanish service all three week. Yeah.
You know, and so I don't think there's very many zealous
independent Baptist churches that are having Spanish services only in America.
And there's, I think, two million people in the Houston metro
that are Spanish speaking. Wow.
So that's a really underserviced area that's not getting good.
Now, you just started learning Spanish, what, about nine months ago or something?
Yeah, I mean, I've taken Spanish classes in high school.
You got serious about it about nine months ago, right?
Yeah, I could say, oh, law and things like that.
No, but I mean, you picked it up pretty fast, though. Yeah.
Because I think you told me you spent about six months studying
and then you came with us on the Mexico mission strip
where we don't allow any English.
So even at the restaurant, right, all the fellowship was in Spanish
on the drive.
So you were basically just immersed in Spanish for three days.
And I think you were probably the most beginner on the whole trip
as far as your Spanish was the most rudimentary.
But you were able to hang with us for three days.
And didn't you win somebody the Lord?
Yeah, I ended up being able to actually win four people to the Lord down in Mexico.
Yes, sir. It was the first people I'd ever won to the Lord.
And those people down there don't speak English at all.
So it was all Spanish. It was totally Spanish.
I mean, I might have actually slipped an English word.
So how did you how did you learn Spanish so well, so fast?
Because it was about six months of intensive study.
What did you do?
Well, I mean, you really inspired me with the Duolingo stuff.
So was Duolingo your main thing?
Yeah, I would say that was probably the main thing.
Well, it shows that Duolingo works.
Yeah, I mean, it's really diverse as far as all the different aspects
that it kind of reaches you in all the different categories.
It covers a lot of grammar, covers a lot of subject matter. Exactly.
So and then I was also just studying the how to present the gospel.
So I was reading the reign of Aragomas 10, and I kind of put together a vocabulary list.
And I was just doing study, you know,
You probably listened to Brother Jimenez's gospel presentation in Spanish.
I even found a couple of other guys that were giving gospel presentation.
I just kind of listened to it or I listened to stuff while I was working.
And so I think just the the key to learning foreign language
is just keeping momentum, because it seems like when you're learning,
you just keep making, you know, new
going to the next level, just constantly motivated, steadfast.
Yeah. And just trying to talk to people.
Did you talk to people at Faithful Word to practice as well?
Yeah. Every service there is there's people in our church that speak fluently.
And so I would just try to go up to them.
And I have the same conversation with every single person,
but at least it was kind of you're practicing what framework.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I think the key is just to do it every single day
if you're really serious about it and just forcing yourself to have conversation.
Right. Because that's where it really, you know, imprints into your mind.
Yeah. And kind of, you know, get certain phrases and certain things
and conversational pieces, and you'll start remembering things
that you didn't even know that you had that.
Yeah, because the Duolingo is great, but you have to then transfer the theory
and into the practical of actually using what you've learned.
So I think that's the two pronged approach.
You do the Duolingo every day and then you talk to the natives
with whatever you know, even if it's just the same conversation with five people.
It really helps. Exactly.
And, you know, one of the things I even did that they don't necessarily say,
but every single phrase that came on the Duolingo app, I would just say out loud.
So even though it might not be the one of the questions is one
where I have to speak into it. Right.
I was just saying it with them.
That's so whether that was the activity or not, you would just do it out loud.
Yeah, that's like when I read the Bible in Spanish, I read it out loud
because it's just something about the words coming off your tongue.
It really helps. Exactly.
Well, that's going to help out a lot in Houston.
You need to keep that going.
Yeah, that was really my primary motivation is I just knew there was so many Spanish.
Wait, so it wasn't the tacos.
I thought your primary motivation was to come on my trip and eat tacos.
Yeah, I kind of like Tex-Mex, but, you know,
no, the tacos were really good.
And those onions, the suboyas, they were really good.
So those are good.
I really enjoyed that trip. I want to go back.
So, you know, well, we're going back in November.
I know I might have to make a trip with heal yourself away from Houston.
Yeah. Invite some of the guys there that speak Spanish to come with me.
So I'm really excited about the opportunity there.
That was my main motivation to trying to relearn Spanish
was just the fact that Houston had so many Spanish speakers.
And when you announced that that trip was going to happen in January,
I said, you know, I need to go on that trip because if I don't go on that trip,
you know, I'm going to waste the opportunity to really immerse myself
and make a really big gain.
Yeah, I don't know how long it would take me to actually win somebody in the Lord
if I had never gone on that trip. Right.
And so well, but mainly what the trip provides is like a motivation, too,
because it's like a deadline.
Yeah, like I got to turn my tree gold by that time. Right.
Well, it's great talking to you, brother Shelly.
And I'm looking forward to seeing what God does in Houston.
Yeah, I really appreciate the conversation and everything that you've done for me.
So I feel like it's just been a great blessing
and I'm really excited about the opportunity that I have before me.