July 20, 2023 Show with Christopher I. Thoma on “Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor”

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Introduction and Program Theme

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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

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 Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 20th day of July, 2023.

And I have the honor and privilege and joy to have on this program for the very first time Emmy Award-winning actor Steve Carell, who many of you know from the sitcom The Office. I'm just kidding. If you go to Christopher Thoma's website, you'll see a photograph of him, and I think he bears a striking resemblance to Steve Carell, but I don't know if I'm alone in that opinion.

Christopher Thoma is our guest today, who is Senior Pastor of our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church of Heartland, Michigan. He's Director of the annual The Body of Christ in the Public Square Conference.

He is a speaker at various political conferences, Right to Life and Lutherans for Life Assemblies, and Theological Symposia, partner with Tier 1 thinkers, frequently sharing the stage with prominent news makers such as Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Dinesh D'Souza, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, and others.

He is the author of a number of books, which have received notable endorsements from Charlie Kirk, Sheriff David Clark, Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, and others, and recipient of a Distinguished Fellowship Award from Salt and Light Global Wilberforce Academy, an extension of the Great Lakes Justice Center.

Today, we are going to be addressing his book, Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor, and I think that is probably one of the most brilliant titles a book has ever received. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Reverend Christopher I. Thoma.

Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church and Confessional Lutheran Identity

Well, before we have you do something that we always have our first-time guests do, which is give a summary of your salvation testimony, please tell us about Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church of Heartland, Michigan, which is a member of the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod.

Our Savior in Heartland, we are a confessional, conservative Lutheran congregation. We, just in sort of a snapshot, we embrace and hold fast to the historic rites and ceremonies of the church. So, if you walk in, you would notice that right away, that we're very conservative in that way.

We also have, as a primary mission extension of the congregation, a tuition-free preschool through eighth-grade day school, and that's something that we consider, again, a primary mission of the congregation.

It extends out into the community. We serve a variety of communities in this area, several counties. Folks come from various areas to come to our school, come to our congregation. In fact, we have folks who drive every Sunday to be with us, sometimes over an hour.

So, we're glad to be where we are. We're glad to be doing what we're doing and seeking faithfulness to Christ and all of that, and going forth in a world that's becoming less and less, if not completely intolerant, of Christianity as a whole.

But we stand firm in the faith, and we go forward in faithfulness. Amen.

And I had your colleague do this, Jamison Hardy, and I'll have you do the same thing. There is constant confusion by many people, perhaps modern evangelicals predominantly, perhaps even Roman Catholics, who have no understanding about Lutheranism, especially when it comes to the conservative denominations representing Lutheranism.

And I might add, and I think you would probably agree with me, the only authentic Lutheran churches, those that have become very leftist, are, I believe, apostate. Not that every individual who is a part of them is apostate, but there are churches wearing the name Lutheran that I would never trust to do anything of value.

And I would think that you would likely agree with me on that.

Yeah, I would. Yeah, I would agree.

And distinguish between the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, and some other of the conservative Bible-believing confessional Lutheran churches that would be equally repulsed and horrified by things that have come out lately in the news, such as the Sparkle Creed.

Yeah, the Sparkle Creed, the infamous Sparkle Creed. Not all that interesting as a creed in general, somewhat ridiculous, but I won't speak for some of the other denominations. I'll speak as a Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod pastor.

We are a Bible-believing, faithful, conservative synod denomination. We stand firm on the Word of God as the sole source for faith, life, and practice. But I would offer that in contrast to what you've already described.

Unfortunately, when anybody goes out in search of the Lutheran perspective on things, they typically land at the doorstep of the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And unfortunately, they're by no means a Lutheran denomination, except that the name is there.

And perhaps at some point in their forthcoming future, they'll simply remove that because it doesn't fit.

Yeah, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest denomination.

Yeah, it is the largest.

And they are neither evangelical nor Lutheran.

Yeah, exactly. They aren't. And just, you know, shooting straight, the only thing anybody really needs to know about the ELCA essentially is in its principle doctrine is its handling of the Word of God.

So they can do the things that they do and say the things that they say and come up with these ridiculous creeds because of one particular doctrine that they hold. And it's their formal practice that, say, for example, the inspiration of Scripture.

They'll say that, and this is their doctrine, these are their words, not mine, that the Bible contains the Word but is not itself the Word. So now when you do that, you've already ventured into the subjective realm of being able to say, well, you know, whatever I find in the Bible, if I want to, if I can select this part and I can select this part and I can select this part and I can throw out the stuff that I want, which is why you see in the ELCA, again, you see women's ordination, you see homosexuality, abortion, you see all these things being embraced and all of it sort of walking in stride together because everybody's kind of free to do and say and be anything they want according to doctrines like that.

That is not the Missouri Synod. The Missouri Synod doesn't believe that. We believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures. We believe in its inerrancy. We believe in its immutability, that it's unchanging from the time it was given to the time we have it.

So that's a broad distinction between us. Or excuse me, not a broad one, but a very defined distinction between us. And that's really all anybody, I think, really needs to know in that regard. You can do pretty much and be pretty much anything you want.

There's an absolute embracing, I think, of radical individualism as we'd understand it today in that particular denomination. And of course, a world that gravitates toward that, you would see why that might grow, might become a denomination that gets larger because it's really more of a cult in that sense than it is anything else, especially when you're rejecting the Word as it is.

You're rejecting Christ who is the Word made flesh. You can't call yourself a Christian and do that.

In fact, they don't even merely accept things that are an abomination to God. They celebrate them.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which you should expect.

Yes.

It should be expected.

Well, I don't know if it's true with the Elka church that we've been discussing, but many of the liberal mainline churches are actually shrinking to near nonexistence as far as the numbers of congregants that they have.

Because people are realizing, why do I need a church to be involved in things that they are doing here at this mainline leftist church that has become nothing more than a socialist social club? So they find it very easy to do those things and those activities in their own life on their own or in other political activist groups and so on.

I think you're probably right. And if you do any research on the great decline, you dig into Barna's numbers and places like that, I think you're also going to find an interesting trajectory that lines up with these liberal churches, and that's also happening in a lot of the mainstream evangelical churches that are spending more of their time trying to sell the gospel than they are trying to preach it and teach it.

So that's something that's not only happening in the liberal churches, but it's happening worldwide, nationwide here in America. The more folks are trying to align with the world, align with the culture around them so that they're nearly indistinguishable from the world and the culture around them, I think you're seeing a response from not only current generations, but even relatively recent generations as to the, we don't need this.

You know, we need substance. We need something that is actually holy, is actually significant. And so you see major declines. You see giving going down. You see pews empty. I think it's something, if we study it, we can look at it in a lot of different ways and you'd see that.

Church Membership, the English District, and the Role of the Bishop

If anybody lives in Heartland, Michigan, or is traveling through there, or if you have family, friends, and loved ones who live in or near there, and you want to investigate Our Savior Lutheran, Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Heartland, Michigan, go to OurSaviorHeartland .org, Our Savior H-A-R-T-L-A-N-D .org.

And, by the way, I mentioned briefly earlier that I had interviewed already, in fact, on July 14th, not long ago, I interviewed the associate pastor of Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church of Heartland, Michigan, Jameson Hardy, who is not only the associate pastor there, but he's also the 21st president and bishop of the English district of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.

If you want to look up his interview on the Iron Trip and Zion Radio Archive, just type in Hardy, H-A-R-D-Y, and it will come up eventually. My webmaster, unfortunately, due to his responsibilities with his full-time job, has fallen behind a little bit, but hopefully that recording will be archived there very soon.

Now, Jameson Hardy being not only the 21st president and bishop of the English district of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, and also your associate pastor, does that make him both a subordinate and a superior to you at the same time?

It does. It's kind of a strange, paradoxical reality. I can tell him to get my coffee, but if I get brought up on charges, he's the one that's going to handle it. He's a great friend. He's a good friend.

We make a great team. I think we're on the same page on pretty much everything, and I'm glad to have him here with us. He's an asset to this congregation. And again, he's a friend. He's a good guy. He is a pastor's pastor, which is what you want in the seat of a bishop.

It's the kind of guy you want as an ecclesiastical supervisor, somebody who will and actually that's somewhat relative to the book you wanted me to talk about, Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor. It makes a difference to the men in the trenches when they go into conflict, when they go into struggles, to know that their bishop, that their district president is not out to get them, but is actually there to help shepherd them through that and to care for them and have that concern.

When you don't have that, you find yourself in much darker places. And Jameson Hardy is a again, he's a guy who will seek to be faithful to his Lord first, knowing that he can be faithful to you if he's faithful to Christ.

So I appreciate that about him. We make a good team.

Yeah, I bet you do because I really enjoyed interviewing him very much. And let me give a plug to his book, Pastoral Leadership, Shepherding and Caring for God's People, which you can purchase at the Concordia Publishing House website.

That's cph .org, cph .org, and do the same thing in their search engine. Type in H-A-R-D-Y and that will come up. Well, as I hinted at before, we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, any kind of providential circumstances that our sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

And obviously, although there is one gospel, there are many different ways in which our Lord has led people to discover and embrace the gospel. Sometimes they are raised in a Christian home and have been nurtured in the Scriptures and in the Christian faith since infancy, and they perhaps don't have a radical conversion experience that they can recall.

But sometimes, even if they've been raised in the faith, they have a prodigal son and prodigal daughter experiences where they have abandoned the faith of their childhood and so on. But tell us about your story.

Salvation Testimony and Call to the Pastoral Ministry

Well, I am a product, and any Lutheran out there listening should expect me to say this, and I believe it wholeheartedly. I'm a product of the Lord's mandate in Matthew's gospel as to how Christians are made.

I was baptized and raised in the faith, as you were describing that, being raised in the faith, that twofold mandate to baptize and to teach them all things that I've commanded you. I was baptized as a child, and I think the better blessing that I could probably share in this story is that the raising in the Christian faith was something that happened to me in a Lutheran day school, in a Lutheran school.

I had a wonderful Christian education from the time I entered school and from the time I left it, and the pastors that I was involved with there, the teachers that I had, showed great care for me, great interest in me, and I had a little bit of a unique experience as a child, not that much more different than a lot of other people I won't necessarily go into, but I was able to have that interest from those around me who invested theologically in me, perhaps seeing that one day down the line, even though I had no intention of ever becoming a pastor necessarily, one day down the line that was a possibility.

And so, here I am doing what it is that I'm doing, and I give thanks to the Lord every day for his blessings to me, to my family, and now the congregation in school in which I serve.

And how did you realize that God had placed a call upon your life to the pastoral ministry?

Well, you know, I don't know. I mean, a lot of folks have that, I don't know, that moment when they know that. I honestly, Chris, I don't really even remember. I mean, I remember I went into college to become a teacher, and I graduated as an elementary school teacher, essentially, elementary education degree.

I ended up getting a Director of Christian Education certification and degree because, and I don't mean this to be offensive to anyone, but because it was easy. I was so invested in my own education, and I thought, well, I'm going to go ahead and get this.

Well, I ended up, my first call out of college was to be a DCE, a Director of Christian Education for a congregation. And so I moved to Michigan. I grew up in Illinois. I went to a university in Illinois, a university in Illinois.

I went to Concordia University in River Forest. And my first call, again, was to my wife here. It was a wonderful call to the congregation. I served alongside John Veeker, Reverend Dr. John Veeker, who went on to become the assistant to our Synod's president, and is now teaching at the St. Louis Seminary.

I was with him for many years, and then ended up for a short time in Pennsylvania, and then here, back in Michigan again, where I am now. When I got back here to Michigan, I served as that education director for about four or five years in this congregation, right here where I am still.

And then I, you know, remember one day walking into the office of the senior pastor at the seminary. I mean, that's literally how it happened. I think I'm going to go to the seminary. And he said, well, great.

And the next thing you know, I was testing out of the languages in the summer, and then I started up at the seminary that very next fall. I don't remember really anything from the time I said, hey, I'm going to go, to the time I got there.

And I think that's probably a good thing, because had I had more time to think about it, I might have decided to, I don't know, go into politics. My original love was to go to the Air Force Academy. That's where I was originally heading off to, because I wanted to fly fighter jets.

But I am where I am, and the Lord has placed me here, and I can't see myself anywhere else.

Praise God. Now, how did you get involved in the political arena, and even to the point where you have shared the stage with such prominent newsmakers as Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Dinesh D'Souza, Candace Owens, and Charlie Kirk, and others?

That's another situation where it's completely divine. I was pestered for a while by someone I know to get more engaged. And again, I don't know if they saw something in me. I guess maybe they did, that perhaps I could do something out there like that.

But I was pestered for a while to join a group of pastors in Washington, D .C., for various debriefing kind of situations and, you know, things like that, and I eventually agreed to go. To make a long story short, I don't like to, I'm not a, I'm a homebody.

I like being home, although I should say I did spend some time, some summers, teaching, doing things in Russia, places like that. But I don't, I like being home. So anyway, I went to this thing in Washington, D .C., traveling along with a group of pastors, and I was walking in front of the Supreme Court building, and I was just coming up to the light to cross the street.

Everybody who knows me knows this story, because this is kind of where it started for me. I was coming up to the light to cross, and as I'm walking up to this light, to the stoplight, there are a few gentlemen there who are standing, and they're just kind of looking at me.

And I'm the only guy wearing a clerical collar. All the other pastors with me are wearing ties and suits. And so I'm the only one they can identify as a representative of the church, which, by the way, Chris, I would encourage others to pay attention to that.

You know, you can have these conversations when people can identify you. So, but anyway, the one, the guy just kind of said out of the blue, you're what's wrong with America. I mean, that's how he started the conversation.

I was just totally blown away by that. I've never had somebody, you know, just more or less verbally attack me like that. So I spent about 20 minutes right there at the corner by that stoplight, right in front of the Supreme Court, talking to this person, talking to both of them.

Turns out they're both lobbyists. And it was a good opportunity to have dialogue. I explained to them what I was doing there. They explained to me why they had a position on absolute separationism in church and state.

And I communicated to them how I'm more of an accommodationist, which is what I would say the founding fathers were. And from then on out, you know, when I went home, I realized I got to get in the game.

I have got to get in the game, and I need to start teaching and talking and engaging in ways. And so from then, the Lord opened up doors in a lot of ways. I found myself in visiting with guys like Dinesh D'Souza and Dennis Prager and people like that.

And over the course of the last probably eight years, these relationships have blossomed into the ability to do this conference that I do, that I orchestrate, which is very soon. We just became a 501C3, which is very soon going to start sort of franchising it, planting it across the United States.

But I've been able to speak with and sort of partner with various Tier 1 speakers, people who are influences in that way. And not because there's sort of a vanity thing there, but because they've embraced what it is that we're about in our efforts, and they want to help us move the ball down the field, which essentially the ball is religious liberty.

We want to preserve the opportunity for churches to preach and teach the gospel in America unhindered and without fear. So that's what we do. That's what we're all about. And these guys get on board. They help us with it.

Wouldn't it be a joy to see Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager come to Christ?

It would be. And I have to say, and maybe Ben will comment on this at some point if he's listening. We sat in my office and we talked about the Logos before he came in to speak. And he has a completely different understanding of that text from John chapter 1.

However, we were able to talk just a little bit about Christ as the Word made flesh, what that text from John 1 is talking about and what it's pointing toward. And, you know, Paul talks about seasoning your speech with the salt of the gospel.

Every opportunity to give that gospel is an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to work to change hearts. And so any chance I get to have those kinds of conversations, I do.

The Catalyst for Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor

Praise God. We're going to our first commercial break. And if anybody would like to join the discussion, you have a question for Christopher Itoma, senior pastor of our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church in Heartland, Michigan.

Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

And since our conversation is focusing upon Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor, the book written by my guest, obviously if you have a situation, a negative experience as a pastor or even as a congregant, and you don't want to draw attention to your identity, we will respect your request to remain anonymous.

But if you're just asking a general question, we ask of you to please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Don't go away. We are going to be right back with Christopher Itoma after these messages from our sponsors.

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Always mention that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Reverend Christopher I. Thoma, senior pastor of our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregation in Heartland, Michigan.

And we are discussing his book, Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor. I love the title of that book. It is definitely Martin Luther-esque, and Martin Luther's way of phrasing things with an earthiness and humor that may even have some shock value to it, one of the things I love about Luther.

What was the primary catalyst in your mind where you said to yourself, I've got to write this book on how to prevent congregations from killing their pastors? Obviously, we're not talking about an actual murder plot here.

We're talking about ways that congregations of churches can either innocently and unconsciously or purposely drive their pastors into a state of harm and uselessness. So why don't you tell us what was the catalyst behind this?

Well, the catalyst was personal experiences, things that I went through as a pastor in the first few years of my ministry here at our Savior. And so that's really it. I mean, that was a catalyst. Each one of the stories that I tell in this book, there's a total of 10 chapters, not including the four-word intro and sort of an afterword, a closing.

But each one of the stories is something that I have familiarity with, some sort of a personal experience in. And I start off the book actually saying, essentially, that I don't remember ever wanting or ever expecting to write a book like this.

I don't think any pastor who comes out of the seminary, because, again, I was relatively new into the ministry, I don't think any pastor coming out of the seminary expects to experience the kinds of things that maybe are described in this book.

And yet, while some of the things I did experience personally were over-the-top crazy in a lot of ways, the things that I write about and I do it in a narrative form are things that I think every pastor will experience at one point or another.

Now, I experienced a massive amount of these things, but I think every pastor will get to know each one of these chapters in one way, shape, or form in their ministry. And so, it's good, I think, to see it unfold in almost a real-time kind of a way, which is one reason why I write it that way.

I write it as a narrative, as a story. I mean, you're reading a story, and you're putting yourself into the shoes of something that might seem a little familiar, and then when you get to its climactic point, you realize, you know, I have experienced this, or this is something I need to keep an eye out for in my own life.

The Pastor's Wife and Ministry Expectations

Well, you start off at a place where I have very rarely seen books that involve the duties and responsibilities and qualifications of pastors start, or even sometimes include with much depth, other than perhaps a cursory inclusion of 1 Timothy 3, 4 to 5, where Paul, the Apostle Paul, says that an elder must be one who manages his own household while keeping his children under control with all dignity.

But there isn't a lot that many people who write on this issue discuss when it comes to the wife of the pastor. Tell us about why you started off there.

Well, again, because I think pastors can easily overlook sort of the celebritist nature of the office. Now, I don't mean in any way, shape, or form that pastors are celebrities. Any pastor trying to be a celebrity, I think, has already excluded himself from being of much use to the church in a lot of ways.