February 12, 2025 Show with Paul Nelson & Joshua Wallnofer on “The Family of God & Recovering the Church from the Rubble of Culture”

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. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 12th day of February 2025.

Before I introduce my two guests for today and the topic ahead of us, I just want to make sure that you mark down on your calendars a very important program that I am airing tomorrow with my longtime friend Justin Peters of Justin Peters Ministries.

We are going to be addressing for the first time on this program Stephen Lawson, a biblical evaluation of a modern-day Christian hero to many who fell into scandalous sin and remains hidden from public scrutiny.

That's going to be the first hour of the program, and depending upon how things go, we will eventually be addressing in the second hour Paula White, a biblical evaluation of a dangerous heretic who has the ear of the President of the United States.

So mark that down on your calendar for tomorrow, Thursday, February 13th, 4 to 6 p .m. Eastern Time, and I'm sure it will be a time of edification as Justin Peters does an extraordinary job thoroughly researching every issue upon which he speaks publicly.

So I am looking forward to having Justin back on the show. But today we have a program that I'm looking forward to conducting because I happen to not only love First Love Ministries, but am indebted to the founder Joe Jakowicz and the team of First Love Ministries for live-streaming this program, Iron Triple Zion Radio, every day on First Love Radio.

But they're having a conference coming up in Baghdad, Florida, and we have two of the speakers at this conference. We've already had a couple of the speakers on a previous broadcast, but today we have Paul Nelson, who is an author and the president of Grace Bible University, and we also have Joshua Wallnaufer, pastor of Klondike Church of Pensacola, Florida, and we are going to be addressing the family of God and also recovering the church from the rubble of culture.

But first of all, let me welcome back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Paul Nelson. Hello, Paul. It's good to be here.

Thanks for having me on again. Thanks for being on. Looking forward to talking about our.

Conference. Amen. And also, for the very first time, I'd like to introduce to you Pastor Joshua Wallnaufer of Klondike Church of Pensacola, Florida. It's great.

To have you on for the first time, brother. First, it's truly my honor. Thank you so much for being with you and Dr. Nelson tonight. Really a wonderful.

Opportunity. Well, Paul, let me start with you, if you could give us a brief.

Explanation of Grace Bible University. Grace Bible University—it's primarily geared towards third-world countries, and there's, you know, such a dearth of doctrine, and the pastors need a lot of resources, a lot of equipment—I mean, not equipment, equipping them and teaching them sound doctrine.

So Grace Bible University came out of that, and we were teaching separate courses, and then we developed a curriculum. And now we have a full two-year curriculum for an associate degree that we have.

I think we have 100 students in Nepal. We have right now about 35 in the Philippines, and then we're in Nigeria and Nairobi. And so it's getting resources into their hands. We have full courses. Every course has study guides, and sometimes we have to translate the textbooks and the study guides into different languages.

And then we go out and teach the courses, as well as train men to teach the courses as well. So it's starting to really grow and explode right now. It wasn't really such a big operation a few years back, but now.

It's getting bigger and bigger. Well, how do our listeners—we do have a global audience—how do they get more information about Grace Bible University?

I guess the easiest way would be to go to the First Love website, and there's a.

Connection there to Grace Bible University. That's firstloveministries .org? Yes. Yeah. Okay. And now, Pastor Joshua Walnoffer, tell us about Klondike Church of Pensacola, and also explain the very interesting name.

You got it. So we were originally named after the ice cream bar. Not quite. Everyone thinks that. No, our church actually was founded in 1907, and it's not Klondike Alaska. It's not from the Klondike Gold Rush or the ice cream bar.

The community here—actually, it's a very small community, at least when I came 20 years ago—and it is called the Klondike Community, and the road our church is on is Klondike Road. Hence, it predates the ice cream bar, but the church adopted the name geographically.

And this joke I'm about to tell is probably predating you because you look a lot younger than me, but is it true that Klondike Cat always catches his mouse? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

That was a cartoon in the 60s and 70s when I was a little boy that I used to watch, Klondike Cat, and that was the theme. Klondike Cat always catches his mouse. But anyway, tell us about Klondike Church in greater depth, your theological positions,.

And so on. Absolutely. So I've been blessed to be a pastor here for 20 years. The church, when I came, was kind of a replant situation, but that language wasn't really being used at that era. Flash revitalization, kind of a combination of the two.

The church was—unfortunately, just to give you an idea—I was pastor 33, and the church was founded in 1907, so that'll give you an idea of the average tenure of a pastor. And there were many, many interims in between.

Do you have any explanation? Well, it was a hard environment to pastor here. In fact, for so many years, it was a very rural area, and so they were only having services maybe once or twice a month for the first 20 years.

Just out of curiosity, was it ever a primitive Baptist church, because they're known for that.

Sometimes, to have services once a month? It was not. Actually, it was originally founded as Missionary Baptist Church, most interestingly, and then they changed the name to Klondike about 20 years in.

But we do have a few primitives around here in this community.

That do that very thing. Well, as we have a custom to do on the show, whenever we have a first-time guest, which would include you, not Paul—Paul's been on the program before—but since you are a first-time guest, we would love for you to provide for our listeners a summary of your salvation testimony that would include the religious atmosphere in which you were raised, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in.

Your life that drew you to himself and saved you. I would be honored to share that, for sure. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Not far from where I'm sitting right now. It's only about.

90 minutes, maybe two hours at the most from here. Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that is.

Yes. Of course, that's a tough city. Still is a very tough city, very broken city, and so many of those effects were apparent in my life as well as a child. I was very blessed to have a grandfather and grandmother who loved the Lord and a grandfather who had a heart for evangelism.

So that was a light shining in the darkness in my life, and they definitely invested in my life as a young person. In the same way, though, my family was unfortunately very much in bondage to alcoholism, and there was a lot of drug use and things like that growing up in the immediate family, which was really hard.

I had a mother who knew the Lord and very thankful for her and bringing me to church on her own for many years. But a lot of heartache, and a lot of loss of life, even, of people very close to me, including an uncle, due to these things.

But by God's grace, I was invited and sent to a camp. It was actually kind of a unique situation. It was like a cowboy camp by a Scottish evangelist. You may know the name since you're not too far away.

His name is John Bissett. Peter and John radio fellowshiped in Baltimore, Maryland, many years ago, and heard the gospel of Jesus Christ there, a very.

Clear gospel. Any relation of David Bissett, who is an evangelist and missionary?

Yes, he is related to them. I can't recall exactly how the relation, but we've had contact before. And by God's kindness, not only do I know that I had trusted in Christ and faith, but also determined that—I still recall it—it was a very clear call to the ministry.

And I knew that as a very young man, not only was I trusting in Christ, but that the Lord was calling me to pastoral work, kind of all at once, which I can't really explain other than, you know, but God, kindness, and his calling.

So I was converted then. And as soon as possible, the church I was in was going through a lot of struggles. I was attending and was very hungry to grow and learn. And in fact, we're a Reformed Baptist church at Klondike.

And, you know, we're a creedal confessional church. And those things were pretty much unheard of in that world that I was in. And on top of that, I remember very clearly attending the adult Bible study in the church.

And I had asked the Bible study leader just a question about the word election as a young teenager. And he told me that word ruined churches. You're not going to find it in the Bible. And, you know, don't worry about these things.

And of course, when you tell a teenager that, they're going to plow in. And by God's grace, I was able to start really studying the Bible in God's providence. I love how the Lord works. He had me go to an assembly of God's church for about a year, which was at Sons Seminary as a young teenager, where I had some good and had some loving people there.

And then also had some pretty bad towards the end of it as some of these revivalistic movements were sweeping through the country, and they were trying to bring that in there. And I knew in my spirit, this was not of God.

And so, the Lord, in his kindness, at 17, I was able to leave Baltimore. Very grateful to have that opportunity to get out of that city at that time, because it just wasn't a great situation, really. And I had a great place to be in, and he gave me the opportunity to go to Philadelphia College of the Bible.

Was there, got to meet my wife at that school, again, another kindness of God, and served for two years in South Jersey and passed forward before coming down here to Pensacola, Florida. And just in God's goodness, you know, he's given me an opportunity to do not only serve as a pastor here, but really have a pretty diverse reach in our community, which has been a really beautiful thing with homeless ministries and recovery ministries in our association of churches, and also teaching at a seminary over at Fermato Latino Americano in Columbia, and now all throughout Latin America.

And I'm just very thankful for God's grace. It's hard to believe, come from Baltimore, come from a lot of hurt and heartache, and to see his kindness to us. Now, did you discover the doctrines of.

Sovereign grace at Philadelphia College of the Bible?

So, the church I was at, the first church I mentioned, they actually had a split over this very issue, and you may know the name Jerry Marcelino. Oh, yeah. Auburn Avenue Bible Church. Yeah, he was actually an assistant pastor at the time when that split happened.

And so, I've got to talk to him and connect with him since years later as an adult, and I'm very thankful for him. But when that semi-school teacher had told me, don't worry about it, I had actually went, and the brand new MacArthur Study Bible was out.

And so, I think it had just been published, and I bought one of those things and was warned against it, and just started digging in. And by God's grace, was able to see his sovereignty. I did have some great professors at what was then PCB that were, in fact, like four-point Calvinists, and while they were maybe not so confessional, they were definitely great, faithful brothers, and very helpful in seeing God's sovereign grace.

Well, tell our listeners.

Your website so that they can investigate Klondike Church of Pensacola, Florida, and if indeed they live in that area or are visiting that area, or have family, friends, and loved ones in that area. Absolutely.

So, our website is lovepensacola .org. Love Pensacola, L-O-V-E, Pensacola .org.

Yeah, we chose that just to be a very evangelistic website and an easy open door, because looking up Klondike Church, you can actually type klondikechurch .com, but yeah, that's a little confusing sometimes to people who are not on this end of town.

Great. Well, now, Paul, if you could give a brief description of the upcoming conference in Baghdad, Florida, where you and Joshua are going to be featured as speakers, along with other speakers.

Yeah, the theme of the conference is the Church, and we're going to be covering various aspects of the Church. I don't have the brochure with me or in front of me, but there's going to be, I think, six plenary messages, then we're going to have breakout sessions, so it's going to be pretty thorough on the various aspects of the Church and its ministry and its connection to the.

World. Great, and that is going to be held February 20th through the 22nd in Baghdad, Florida, and to register, go to firstloveministries .org, firstloveministries .org, and when you scroll down, it's right there at the top of the page, all the details that you need on the conference and how to register and so on.

And so we hope as many of you as possible in the Iron Shepherds, Iron Radio listening audience will attend this conference. I love the First Love Ministries and the men associated with it, and know that nothing but the best in theology and doctrine and application comes from these fine folks.

That's firstloveministries .org, and you will have all of those details. Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address.

I think I kind of shorted the promotion of the conference, but I could say a little bit more about it. That's okay, brother? Sure. Yeah, so the actual title of the conference is called Recovering the Identity of the Church, and so we're going to have—let's see, we have the Temple of the Lord, the people—these are the titles of some of the messages—the people of the scriptures, the family of God, the city on the hill, of recovering the church, the head of the church, and the breakouts are biblical shepherds, confessions, church membership, church and state, church-driven missions, and the enemy of the church.

And we'll have Dr. Delcor, we'll have Pastor Joe Jackowitz, I think will be the first message. And by the way, if you could pray for him, he's having some health difficulties. Yes, sir. He may not be able to make it, but we're hoping he is, and he's told us today that he'll be able to make it.

So anyway, that's just everything in a nutshell. Just thought I'd give the subjects and the titles of the messages here.

Okay, great. Well, we are going to our first commercial break. If you have a question for either of our guests, I'm going to allow you to ask any question on the scriptures and theology and church history and so on.

And 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, city and state of residence, and country of residence, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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Go to royaldiadem .com, royaldiadem .com, and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Paul Nelson and Pastor Joshua Wolnoffer. By the way, have I been pronouncing your name correctly, Pastor Joshua?

You got it right. Oh, great. And by the way, Pastor Joshua warmed the cockles of my heart before the program and told me that he has been a longtime admirer of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. So that blesses me enormously, and I'm so glad to hear it, and also has benefited from the debates that I have arranged and emceed predominantly with James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

So I'm thrilled to hear that news. But we're going to start the program with one of the themes of the conference, and this is actually going to be the theme of a message by Joshua Wolnoffer, The Family of God.

Can you explain something about the significance of that very title?

Absolutely. I think that we as a modern church have really lost some of the things that make up the heart of true Christianity. And one of the categories that is so integral to this conference, of course, is the church as a family.

And we want to address that, and we want to recover this. And I think a lot of this maybe unintentionally goes back to some of the definitions we have of a true church. I mean, if you think like in the Reformation era, like Naughtsburg Confession, for instance, and this has been repeated by most of the Reformation tradition, the church is defined as anywhere there's an assembly of believers where the gospel is truly preached, the sacraments, the ordinances are purely observed.

But if you take that very literal definition at face value, you could basically walk into a church single file, stare at the back of the head, take the Lord's Supper, observe baptism, hear sermons, walk out single file.

No, absolutely nobody. I know the Reformers can't say everything in every document, and a document like that is not entitled—it's not trying to say everything about the church. But I think that idea is often a idea that we still hold to today that is woefully short of the many blessings God has for the local church as a family.

We're so much Lone Ranger, isolationist Christianity, all I need is me and my ESV attitude amongst many in our tribe in the Reformed world sometimes. And the church really has been so consumeristic, we have lost the privilege of having brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in the church.

And we're trying to build crowds unintentionally, consumers unintentionally, instead of really trying to mold people into Christ followers who are real disciples who really love one another. So I hope that this particular talk is really going to be a wake-up call and just a call for renewal and a reminder of the preciousness of a local church that does take this idea and the New Testament of the household of God, the family, as an integral part of a healthy body.

Yes, and Pastor Nelson, the people have tragically, in not only our modern day, but it obviously goes back to the biblical era, because there's a warning in the New Testament to not forsake the assembling of the brethren, as some have been in the habit of doing.

So it's been going on for a long time, but I think it's probably even more dramatically dominant today that people have a detached relationship with the church and don't really.

View it as a family, do they? You ask me? Yes. Yeah, I think there's a lot of contributing factors to that. I think one is this technology. Everything is online, it kind of works against gathering together and assembling together.

You can just download a sermon, listen to it all by yourself, and you lose all that glorious benefit of gathering together and worshiping together. I was going to say the other thing about the assembling together is that people don't like to come together and worship on Sunday, because you've got football going on Sunday.

The culture has so many things going on in culture.

The schools have their sporting activities on Sundays too, routinely, even for little children.

I mean, even the children. When I was a boy, we didn't play baseball on Sunday. It was only on Saturday. I mean, and that's how much our culture has changed since then.

So you're saying even in the secular society, Little League was not conducted on Sundays?

Even in—yeah, there was respect towards Christianity, and that was, what, 60 years ago or so. So things have really changed. And what was the question again?

I was just saying why, in your opinion, have many professed Christians not treated the church as the family of God?

Yeah. The other thing is lack of a commitment. There's a lot of—they come to hear a message and go home, and that's their Christianity for the week. So they act like a Christian on Sunday and go home.

But your identity as a Christian is that you are a Christian. You live your life as a Christian, and that the church is so valuable for your growth and for your maturing as a Christian, for your understanding of truth.

This is what God has ordained. He's given us the institution of the church so that we all can mature in the faith, and he's preparing us for heaven. But like I say, there's a lot. Brother Josper could probably come in with a lot of other reasons as well, but there's very—the society now has turned against Christianity.

Like we were just talking about, it used to be respectful of Christianity. We may not have been a Christian nation, but we had a lot of Christian influence, and that's gone away. The worldly philosophies have changed with the CRT and the DEI and the LBGT, whatever.

All these things have mounted against the church, and now Christianity is almost evil and narrow-minded. So there's a lot of contributing factors in our cultures. It's one of the things I'll be talking about.

How did the worldly culture get into the church? And it has. I see people one time a week at church, and they don't want—there's so many activities going on in the church as part of the church, like the pastor studies and gives a discipleship meeting, a prayer meeting.

You have all these different aspects, and they have no interest in it. If the Holy Spirit really grabbed the whole of your heart, you would have this great desire to learn. And in my particular church, I find that the women have this desire to learn what the they're not interested in the church.

The world is competing with Christians and their time and their efforts and who they are as Christians. I don't know if that makes sense.

Oh, yeah. In fact, that's been an element of the church for as long as I remember, even if you watch some of the old Western movies from decades ago, the earlier part of the 20th century, and you'll very often hear the rugged, manly cowboy say something like, I'm not much of a praying man, but, you know, I'm not much of a church-going man, never have been, but.

And that was supposed to be something that we would admire in a man. But in fact, the true church of Jesus Christ, when it's properly and truthfully opening up and exegeting the Word of God, there are a lot of demands upon the men of the church to be manly and masculine and so on.

But anyway, Pastor Joshua, a lot of this has been exacerbated because ever since the coronavirus mandates came down and churches began towing the line of the leftist government to shut down their churches and people got used to that.

I still know people, some of whom are my close friends, who have shocked me because I thought that they had more biblical integrity about this, but it would shock me and say, oh, I don't go to church anymore.

I just watch worship services on TV, and I have a little Bible study going in my house and that kind of a thing. But this is not worship or being obedient to the Scriptures about being.

Submissive to local elders, is it? Yeah, no, I mean, you can't fulfill the New Testament in these kind of setups. You know, you think the Lord's Prayer, we're praying, Our Father, the Lord's Supper is a communal gathering together.

You can't honor your elders. I mean, one of the—I think the whole idea just defies the very identity of what a Christian is, you know, our ontology, our being as believers. When you read the New Testament, you see us defined as brothers and sisters, beloved, dear friends.

You read Paul's letters. When you read Romans 16, you see this list of greetings, or maybe the end of 3 John, where John says, you know, to greet the believers by name. There's this kind of intimacy that's there.

And I think consumerism, selfish isolationism, have both so drastically impacted the way we think about churches. I mean, you think of the language of church hopping, and church swapping, and this kind of stuff.

And we talk about the church like a changing gin, or something like that. Or, you know, I used to shop at this grocery store, and now I'm going to this one. It's so consumer mentality. What can I get out of your church?

I mean, I have newer Christians sometimes who are moving to our area, and they say, what can your church do for me? And I'm always like, well, first off, it's not my church, it's his church. And, you know, there's a lot that you're asking in that question.

Let's think about what the church is, because I would love to share with you that, you know, and answer that. But they're thinking, like, does your church have Zumba? Does your church have...

I don't even know what that is. Is that one of the internet ways of watching worship? What's Zumba?

Zumba is like an athletic... It's like CrossFit for women, I think, or something of that nature.

Oh, okay. All right.

So, you know, this is the kind of stuff people... these are the questions our generation is asking, because we have... I remember Eugene Peterson wrote a book years ago about how the pastors, he wore, and pastors have become shopkeepers, trying to keep some students.

And we have lost, really, the integrity of the gospel and the very identity of a church being the brothers and sisters with the elder brother of the Lord Jesus Christ being in Christ, and how you can't have Christ without his family.