January 6, 2026 Show with Nick White on “I Married and Unregenerate Woman & Didn’t Know It & Neither Did She”

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Chelsea White’s Salvation Story and the IFB View of Conversion

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this sixth day of January, 2026.

Happy Insurrection Day, everybody. Today, we are going to have or hear, I should say, a fascinating story, and the story is going to be told by Nick White, who is pastor of First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, and he was an independent fundamentalist Baptist who came to embrace the doctrines of sovereign grace, and he's going to be addressing the fact that he married an unregenerate woman and didn't know it, and neither did she, and why he baptized his own wife while he was already a pastor.

This is the Chelsea White story, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Nick White.

Thank you so much for having me again, Chris. It's a privilege to be here.

And if you could, let our listeners know about First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York.

First Baptist is a historic Baptist church in Hamburg, which is one of the south towns in Buffalo, New York, and we are a Bible preaching, sovereign grace preaching Baptist church here, and the Lord is blessing and working here powerfully through the proclamation of his word.

We preach Christ and him crucify, and we seek to advance his kingdom through the means of the proclamation of his good news. So that's about us in a nutshell.

Yes, and if anybody wants to not only know more about First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, which can be found at FBCHamburg .com, FBCHamburg .com, but you can also hear my first interview with Pastor Nick White, in which he gave his personal testimony of one pastor's journey out from independent fundamentalism into the doctrines of sovereign grace.

So just type in Nick White in the search engine at ironsharpensironradio .com, and that program will come up. And it's great to have Nick back on the program. And perhaps it would be good for you to explain to our listeners why your lovely wife, Chelsea, who we are primarily discussing her today, her story of salvation, and her realization that after she had already married a pastor, she did not have confidence she was a truly born-again woman.

Why is she not with us today telling her own story?

Yeah, she has personally requested that she would not have to be the one to go on radio to talk and explain her story, so she volunteered me as her tribute to do that, because she's not much of a public speaker, and she's a lot more comfortable with having me be the one to do all the talking.

It's kind of what she's used to, so that's what we're going to try to do tonight.

You know, as I'm looking at you, and our audience can't see you, but we could see each other because we're using Microsoft Teams, but it just dawned on me that it's a good thing that you have a beard, because if you were to shave off your beard and mustache, I think you would look about 12 years.

Old. Yes, brother, the beard is there for a reason.

Do you actually add gray to the beard and the hair?

No, no, no, that's what children do.

Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Assumptions About Assurance and Regeneration

Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address right away. If you do have a question for my guest today, Pastor Nick White of First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if you are asking a very personal and private question.

Perhaps you are hearing this program today, and you're beginning to realize that perhaps you are not truly born again, or you have some personal question to ask, since we do have a pastor as a guest today.

Well, we will respect your wishes to remain anonymous, but if it's a general question, please give us your first name, at least, city and state and country of residence. So, first of all, let's hear the story of how you and Chelsea met, and if you were dating or courting.

I know that there are differences amongst conservative Christians on the way to romantically approach someone who your heart is telling you, this may be the one that I am going to spend the rest of my life with on this planet, and there are those who believe in the liberty to date, some who exclusively believe in courting, all that.

But just tell us how you met and how the relationship began and then flourished to.

The point you got married. Yeah, we met in Bible college. We both grew up, as I mentioned on the radio show, we both grew up in the independent fundamental Baptist world, and so we met at Independent Fundamental Baptist Bible College, and, yeah, I asked her to go to a banquet that we had.

You could take a date to this banquet that our college would hold every year in the wintertime, and so she agreed. And which college was that? It's called Commonwealth Baptist College. It's Independent Fundamental Baptist College in Lexington, Kentucky.

Yeah, so we met there, and we got to know each other, and, yeah, we fell in love, and I asked her to be my wife after, oh, she's going to kill me if I can't get this right, after about a year. And then shortly after that, I think about seven months later, we were married.

We were married, and immediately after marriage, we moved after our lease was up in our apartment.

To Boston to start a church together. Praise God, and how long after that did you become a pastor?

I was a pastor almost immediately after moving to Boston. We started that trip right away. Oh, you planted the church? Yes, yes.

Great, and so how long were you in Boston before your wife came to realize that there was something not quite right with her faith, something radically wrong with her faith, in fact? Was there any signs to you, any evidences, like, wait a minute, there's something not kosher here, for lack of a better term.

Tell us about that. Your whole life as a married couple,.

And, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, we were married two years, really. We were in Boston for about two years before she made known to me her need for Christ, and honestly, there were no signals. I mean, she knew how to walk the walk and talk the talk, and especially with our theology at that time, we did not believe that conversion really held the marks of affections that are directed towards God and Christ.

That was kind of foreign to us. Really, it was just, well, if you pray to prayer, and if you say you believed, surely you're saved. And, I mean, she went to Bible college, for goodness sakes. I mean, why on earth would a lost person go to Bible college?

That's what I thought, and so in both of our minds, she was saved, regenerated. Was she raised in a Christian home? Mm-hmm. She was raised in a very similar background as me, independent, fundamental Baptist, so yeah.

So there weren't any signs at that time, but looking back, I mean, now, yeah, there were definitely signs, and the signs now, looking back, was that there was no fellowship with God whatsoever. There was not a drive for her to know God, to walk with the Lord, no compunction to open the Word of God, to study it, to read it.

There was a lot of carnality and desire, but again, she walked the walk and talked the talk, as far as she didn't have a dirty mouth. She dressed, in fact, very conservatively, dresses only, never any pants.

I mean, very, very conservative in a lot of things. The music we would listen to, very, very starchy, conservative, fundamental music. So you would not know if you were just looking at those things, so it was a shock to me when she.

Came to me and told me that she needed Christ. And this absence of a desire to delve into the Word of God, to get to know Him more deeply and all of that, was that manifest to you when you were trying to encourage her to study with you, or how did.

That manifest itself? Yeah, so I mean, I wasn't really taught, especially in school, how to disciple your wife. And so for me, I just thought, well, that's probably just you asking her, hey, did you read your Bible today?

And that's it, that's me discipling my wife. And so I would ask her that, and she would say no. Most of the time, it would be rare that she was reading the Bible. She would tell you this, I mean, she did not really have any desire whatsoever to read the Word of God or to spend time in prayer.

And when you would talk to her about the things of God, I put it this way, the lights were off, you could tell. She could talk about other things, and she would be very, very excited, very engaged. But then you talk about the things of God and Scripture, and it was as if the lights just turned right off.

She just kind of disengaged, very cold,.

Very short. Now, when was this on the timeline of you becoming a believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace, where you were departing from the mindset, if you will, of independent fundamentalist Baptists?

And in fact, now I have to be very careful here, I have many friends who are independent fundamentalist Baptists, who I consider my dear brethren. I have known some of them for decades, going back to the 90s, when I worked for WMCA Radio, an affiliate of Salem Media, the largest Christian radio network in the world, at least they were at one time.

And I actually helped a number of independent fundamentalist Baptist churches launch their own radio program, which I actually came up for the name for it, the Fundamental Baptist Forum, because of the fact, as an airtime salesman, especially in the New York City area, the vast majority of independent fundamentalist Baptist churches are very small, and they could not afford to sponsor their own program as individual congregations.

So, they pooled resources financially and shared the airtime by taking turned hosting the Fundamentalist Baptist Forum, or should I say, the Fundamental Baptist Forum. And I became very close with these brethren.

They knew that I was a Calvinist, and the ones that I became very close with, they would let me know their disagreements with me, and it varied how forceful and how animated the discussions were, because there were some who seemed to be on the brink of believing in the doctrines of sovereign grace, and some who were adamantly opposed to it.

But anyway, I think I began to learn more and more about the mindset of independent fundamentalist Baptists through this program that I helped them create and through my friendships with them. In fact, I started to regret helping them start the program, not with all of them, but there were some of the brethren who began openly attacking my church, where I was a member, on the air.

Not by name, but they were making it very clear geographically what they were talking about. So, it would probably be a good idea, for those of our listeners who are very ignorant of the independent fundamentalist Baptist experience, who have not heard your testimony, which is on the recording of the first interview we did.

And of course, on top of all that, it is not a monolithic group. There is a spectrum. In fact, I used to attend some of their business meetings for the Fundamental Baptist Forum, and there would be animated disagreements amongst them about many things, about whether or not it would be legitimate to have a pastor of a Bible church participate in the program.

Did you have to be pre-mill and pre-trib? Did you have to believe in only using the King James Bible? There were a number of those things that divided them, because some of them were Bob Jones graduates, which is not a King James-only school.

So, anyway, why don't you tell us something about the mindset of many—we can't say all, but many—in the independent fundamentalist Baptist movement regarding the confidence and the assurance that you are truly born again.

How does one know that as an independent fundamentalist Baptist, and how they would disagree with many in the sovereign grace-believing and Reformed Christian world?

So, we would believe that as long as you prayed a prayer and you were sincere in your prayer to ask Jesus to come into your heart—there's many ways that it's put. You know, you hear A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, accept, believe, call, or accept, believe, confess.

There'd be a written-out prayer, Lord, I know I'm a sinner. I don't want to go to hell. I want to go to heaven. Please, Satan, come into my heart. Forgive me of my sin. I believe Jesus died for me. Please do this, amen.

And if you were talking to somebody and they said, I prayed that prayer, and you asked them, well, did you believe it? Were you sincere when you prayed it? And if they said yes, you would tell that person, you just made the greatest decision in your life.

You are now a born-again Christian. Congratulations. Welcome to the family of God. Break that date in the fly leaf of your Bible. And that's kind of the way we would do the vandalism. And anytime there would be any doubt on conversion, am I truly in Christ?

Am I really saved? It would be, well, don't doubt in the night what God did in the light. Go back to your fly leaf of your Bible where you wrote down that date. Look at it. Ask yourself, did you pray the prayer?

Well, yes. Were you sincere? Well, yes. Okay, well, you're in. There's no reason to doubt that's just the devil talking to you. And that's kind of, that's at least the world that I grew up in. Now, as you said, and I'm thankful you said this, not everyone is like that.

There are men who do faithfully preach the gospel. They faithfully preach regeneration and conversion. But essentially, in the world I was in, which if anyone's familiar with Jack Kyle's Sword of the Lord, that was the circle I was a part of.

And it's very, it's very manufacturism kind of focus. You just throw a sinner on the conveyor belt and you make him a believer by getting him to go through the process of praying the sinner's prayer and doing X, Y, Z.

And so, yeah, that's kind of where we came from. And essentially, it's a denial of regeneration in a practical sense. They would say you need to be born again. They would say they believe that. They would put it on signs.

They would wave those signs in their tent meetings. But being born again didn't actually mean being converted, where there was an actual change of affections in life. And in fact, I even heard it taught, you don't have to love Jesus to be saved, you just have to believe in him.

And that is outrageous. I mean, that's so unbiblical to teach. But at the time, it seemed to make sense. You can know Jesus, doesn't mean you love him necessarily, you just need to be discipled. And so they would separate those two things, that affections for Christ is something that comes after salvation with time.

You just have to be discipled into that, and you have to condition your own heart for that. So that's why I say it's a practical denial of regeneration and conversion. Essentially, conversion did nothing for you except stamped your ticket to heaven.

So that's what we believe. Now, the thing that's.

Interesting about that is we know that that is rampant and very, very typical amongst modern evangelicals. And independent fundamentalist Baptists have a strong dislike, to put it mildly, a revulsion over modern evangelicalism.

They will use that phrase as a demeaning insult to many Christians that they disagree with, even if the description is not accurate. There are, you know, Reformed Christians that are just as much committed to the inerrancy of Scripture and who are conservative, who will be labeled modern evangelicals.

But at the same time, it seems strange that an independent fundamentalist Baptist church who have very strict codes of behavior—I'm not saying that the strict codes of behavior merit salvation in their minds, I'm not saying that—but how does a church function with membership when they are teaching that repentance is not a necessary sign and evidence of a genuinely converted heart?

How does somebody who claims to have come to Christ in an altar call but continues in their life as a homosexual or a fornicator or—we could go on and on and on with sins in the lives of false converts—how does a fundamental Baptist church function by, number one, saying repentance is not necessary for salvation, and, number two, having very strict codes of morality and ethics?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's exactly what you see in the Gospels when you see the Pharisees and the scribes and this outward, external righteousness, but inward wickedness. It's whitewashed, tomb-branded Christianity.

Maybe this will help shed some light on it. So, the pastor—that was my pastor when I was in the IFB and the Bible college I went to—I worked on staff at that church and for that Bible college that I went to where I met my wife.

And they were also—that church there that hosted our Bible college was my sending church to go start the church in Boston. My pastor, during Trump's first presidency, got to ride in the beast, the limousine with President Trump.

And he had recently made a video because everybody was talking about Trump. Trump in the saying that he knows he's not getting to heaven, he doesn't have a chance to, you know, he sees his way of getting to heaven as doing XYZ works, whatever, ending wars that'll get him in.

So, that was a big, big conversation. So, recently, the person who was my pastor, that man had a podcast where he talked about his own personal discussion with President Trump about whether or not he was truly a Christian.

And his words were that they were riding in the limousine together and that he asked him if he knew he was going to heaven when he died. And President Trump said, yes, because when I was a little boy, I prayed the sinner's prayer and asked Jesus into my heart.

That's what this pastor is saying Trump told him. Now, that's interesting because that.

Doesn't seem like it's a part of his own theological history. He was raised in the heretical church pastored by Norman Vincent Peale. That was his pastor. And I wouldn't think that Peale would be having invitations like that, but maybe I'm wrong.

I thought that he was all about avoiding discussion of sin and condemning sinners. It was all about the power of positive thinking, but I'm not an expert on what Peale did in his church.

Yeah. Well, what's telling about all that is that pastor, he went on and he knew the question is this. Well, if Trump said that he's saved and he prayed the sinner's prayer, well, then why is he going around telling people that he's not going to heaven?

Why is he going around talking as if he's got to work his way into heaven? And his answer, this is the pastor's answer. Well, because on Sunday he's golfing rather than in Sunday school, which is to say, well, he's just not a disciple.

He's saved. He's just not been discipled enough. That's their understanding of conversion and Christianity. And even though he said that he can't even think of one thing that he needs to repent over. Right.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. So it's this kind of idea that you could be an out and out, like you said, a homosexual, you could be a murderer. But as long as you once prayed the sinner's prayer, you will still go to heaven when you die because you did what you were supposed to do.

Now, you can't be a member of the church though, can you? You can't. You're kidding. You can't. Well, it depends on the situation. I don't want to say if you're like an out and out murderer, you're just going to be.

Accepted. No, but if you are a known unrepentant homosexual, you can remain in membership.

Yeah. So that's tricky. And I don't want to broad brush there, but there are some churches that all you need to be a member is just to say that you believe and that you get baptized. And if you do those things, you'll come into the church and they'll talk to you.

I mean, if there's open sin, they'll talk to you about it. But church discipline is a very rare thing in the kind of churches that I grew up in. I'm not saying it's not a sin. My friend Keith Foskey,.

I don't know if you're familiar with him, on his Your Calvinist podcast, I saw an episode where he was interviewing, I believe, three independent fundamentalist Baptists. Now, like I said in the beginning, I know that this is not a monolithic group, but these three men pretty much seem to be in lockstep with each other, not Keith being a Sovereign Grace believing Baptist.

But when he asked them about repentance, they were all saying that to teach that repentance from sin is a required element of salvation, that's heresy and damning teaching. And the irony of that is that must mean they want me to repent of believing that.

Isn't that ironic? I mean, what else can you conclude? You mean I have to repent of believing that? I have to repent of believing that I have to repent? But when it came to homosexuality, all three of these guys, when Keith said, well, what about homosexuals, unrepentant homosexuals who may come to your church?

Oh, no, that's a horse of a different color, that's a totally different story, that's a sign that they're unregenerate. So they were putting that sin in a unique category that was beyond anything else.

Yeah.

So I'm assuming then there are different ways this will be handled, depending upon the schooling and experience and the mindset of the individual Independent Fundamentals Baptist and so on.

Yeah, to speak fairly for them, it would absolutely be addressed if it was an issue of homosexuality. However, other issues—gossip, slander, divisiveness, other things, lying, fearfulness—they do not get any kind of church disciplinary treatment in many churches.

Again, not all. There are some churches that are faithful in this, but my experience to the majority is that a lot of open sinfulness is oftentimes not handled in a biblical way. And if it was, sometimes it was just by getting blasted from the pulpit and somebody calling something out from the pulpit, and it makes for a good sermon.

But overall, there was not a whole lot of church discipline that happened in the churches that I've been a part of.

The Black Friday Conviction That Led Chelsea to Christ

Okay, we're going to go to our first commercial break, and when we get back, I want you to recap some of what you've already said and remind me of where on the timeline it was when your wife Chelsea came to the realization that she was not born again.

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Regeneration, the New Heart, and the Moment of Conversion

Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today on Iron Trip and Zion Radio is Nick White, pastor of First Baptist Church of Hamburg, New York, an independent fundamentalist Baptist who came to embrace the doctrines of God's sovereign grace.

And we are addressing the fact that he married an unregenerate woman and didn't know it, and neither did she, and why he eventually baptized his own wife while he was already a pastor. This is the Chelsea White story.

And once again, if you have a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. So, if you could recap, you have already said that your wife, just as you were, was raised in an independent fundamentalist Baptist home and seemed to be committed to that worldview and mindset and went to an independent fundamentalist Baptist college where she met you.

You two fell in love, and I believe you said you popped the question a year after meeting her and beginning to form a relationship with her, and then seven months after that, you got married. And there was a point while you were pastoring in Massachusetts where your wife began to realize that she was not born again.

Now, this is an interesting question regarding that. Oh, and if you could please fill in any of the missing points that I may have overlooked in that. Was that sufficient as a summary? Oh, I'm sorry, I have you on mute still.

Did I adequately summarize that? Yes, yes. Here is the interesting part of this. Do you believe that your wife, because she finally did receive a new heart from Christ, was that the point where she realized that there was something greatly wrong with her life prior to that?

Or was she still in her mind and yours unregenerate when she came to admit that? It's a kind of a tricky thing, because these are invisible things going on in the hearts and minds of people. Sometimes a person doesn't realize how wicked they are until they're saved.

In fact, that's probably the way that God usually works in someone's life. But anyway, go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know that for certain. I mean, we know that regeneration obviously precedes faith. And so somewhere along those lines, or she put her faith in Christ, obviously she got a new heart.

I think it's very possible that she received a new heart when she was made aware of her need for Christ. But yeah, it's hard to know exactly. So here's what happened. She was Black Friday shopping. She was not sitting in a church service when this happened.

She was driving in the car, and she was just overcome with conviction, with guilt. She had been battling with that for some time. It was also kind of recent that we had lost a child. We had lost a baby, and she had to go through that without knowing Christ.

And it was very difficult for her. And yeah, somewhere along the way, as she was out Black Friday shopping, I guess all of that came to a head. And she stopped what she was doing. She came home in tears.

She said, I need to talk to you. And she just unleashed it all on me. I have not known Christ. I've not been saved this whole time. I need to be saved. I need to know Him. And so she prayed. She called on the name of the Lord.

I don't think that her prayer saved her. I don't think the prayer really had much to do with anything that saved her. I believe it was just her faith in Christ that saved her. But we were doing all we knew to do.

I didn't know all about conversion and regeneration and the order of salvation, how God works in all of that. All I knew was, well, if you're not saved, then put your faith in Christ. And shortly after that, yeah, I baptized her.

That was the tipping point. That was the catalyst that began to take me out of the theology that we held to, because I had so many unanswered questions after.