The Most Unlikely Pastor

Welcome to Clearcast. It's a ministry of Clear Note Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. Clear Note, we're located on 10th Street, just a little bit east of Raceway Road, and we just wanted to take a minute and introduce ourselves, and you can learn a little bit about us, who we are, what we're doing. So, I'll start. I'm your host, Tim Dukeman. I have a background in in that I did half of a seminary degree at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville before eventually stopping that because the seminary had changed directions away from biblical faithfulness. And so, now I'm just a member here at Clear Note, and I'll let my producer, Martin, tell us a little bit about himself. All right, well, I'm...

My name is Martin. I grew up in central Indiana. I spent some time traveling and preaching, and then I worked as a pastor in Chicago for six years. During that time, I started looking at church membership and pastoral care and some of the issues of doctrine and theology and became convinced of Reformed ecclesiology, and in that process, started looking for a church. As I moved back down into Indiana and started looking for a church, and I found Evangelical Presbytery. And from there, walked in the doors of Clearnote. My wife and I joined the church last year, about May, I think. And that's kind of my story. I've got four kids, eight, seven, five, and getting ready to turn three. Actually, my oldest is getting ready to turn nine. So a boy and...

My oldest boy and three girls. And another one on the way. Yeah. And I am Dave, or Pastor Dave, or a few other things that the people around here call me. I'm one of the founding pastors of Clear Note Church. We started the church about 13 years ago, just a little more than that. Planted the church with Joseph Bailey, who is now pastor of Christ Church over in Cincinnati, Ohio. I've been the senior pastor for about nine years now. I wanted to tell you guys a little bit about who I am and why we're doing this podcast. I grew up outside of Chicago in the suburbs, and I grew up an only child with no father and outside of the church entirely.

There's a long story behind how I ended up in church. The short version is I met my wife, Vanessa, who gave me a Bible. And as I read it, I started to read it. I realized it didn't make any sense to me. And while I'd never been in the church, I'd also not been poisoned against the church or against religion. I really had grown up not knowing the difference between. major world religions, what they believed, even what their holy books were. And so I remember early on in reading the Bible, I didn't know the difference between the Jewish faith and the Christian faith or what their holy books were. I knew there was something called the Old Testament and the New Testament, but I didn't know who those books belonged to or if there was overlap or what. So really, I didn't know anything about the Bible.

And as I started to read Matthew and Mark, I realized that there's this man, Jesus, the Son of God, and these were the accounts or biographies of his life. And I read Matthew in a few days, and then I read Mark, and I looked at this copy of the New Testament that I had, and I thought, how many copies of the same story do these people need? And so that's how I started going to church. I thought, this stuff doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand. I started going to church, I guess that would have been back in 2004. And so I was a young man. I'd never been exposed to the gospel or the truth or anything. I started out in a megachurch, big church, 13 services a weekend that one of my coworkers went to. And I ended up going there for about a year or so.

But shortly after that, or shortly before, well, shortly, I went there for about a year. And then I ended up moving down to Bloomington, Indiana. There's more of the story there we'll get to in a minute. But I remember that when I met my wife, Vanessa, that she was different. Something was different about her. And something was attractive and something was beautiful about her that I didn't. i couldn't put my finger on i didn't know what it was she wasn't like the the girls or the women that i was used to interacting with um and so after not long after we met she'd given me a bible she said if i give you a bible will you read it and i said yeah sure and that's how i ended up you know getting a bible my first bible and going to church was her giving me one i often tell people that the way we ended up doing things is is never advisable so you're not in favor of missionary dating no i don't think missionary dating or evangelistic dating is uh is a good thing paul warned us in in first corinthians 15 not to be deceived that the bad company corrupts good morals and while by the world standards at that time i probably wasn't considered bad company certainly by christian standards i was bad company and so um however you know what can you say i'm glad the way god worked it out in our lives um

Having been a pastor now for over a decade, my observation is that we're an anomaly, that what happened for us is not what normally happens. It's almost never what happens. But there was some level of evangelistic dating, and that's how I started going to church. And I really didn't have a clue. I would say I was just virgin soil, if you will. I had a lot of questions, but I was not inoculated against the truth. My mom grew up Catholic, but I should say she grew up in a Catholic home. I don't know that she would ever say she was Catholic. But as soon as she was able, she got out of the house and shed all of those expectations or whatever. And then she had me when she was 30, 31.

and she had married a guy who was Palestinian, and they had agreed that my mom would marry him so that he could become a citizen and be able to move here to the States, and then they would divorce, and he would be able to bring his wife and his children at the time, previous children, he had four daughters, that he'd be able to bring them over here. So the whole plan was just for him to be able to... to immigrate to the U S from Israel. And then my mom got pregnant and that was a monkey wrench. Um, my dad, um, did not want another child, um, never pressured my mom to have an abortion. As far as I know, he was a Muslim. And yet within a few months of me being born, once he found out that I was a boy, not a girl, um, somehow he communicated to my mom that he was going to take me.

and go back to Israel with me. And so that's when he and my mom split. And basically he ended up going back to Israel, remarrying his former wife, and having six more children. So I'm an only child, but I have ten half-siblings on my dad's side. Actually, I have one on my mom's side as well. But I've only ever met the two boys, my father's other two sons. I've never met any of the other half-siblings in person. um and my mom never remarried and so i grew up uh in a house where we my mom worked two full-time jobs basically until i could contribute financially around 14 i you know i'd had a paper route earlier than that but when i turned 14 i yeah you could get a summer job and stuff and so we grew up i think you'd i think it'd be fair to say we grew up poor um and spent a lot of time alone um you know with mom working two jobs whenever she was home she was sleeping and so really i was raised by

Although internet wasn't really a thing then. I was sort of raised by the TV, by pop culture, by rap music, by coaches. I played sports through high school. And so I think in a lot of ways I was just very normal. Did you have any exposure to the gospel when you were in high school? No. I mean, I knew a few kids whose names were Christian. But as far as anybody coming to me and saying, telling me the gospel, no. But in high school, I was, I mean, it's sad to say, but there are people that Christians say, yeah, I'm not going to go talk to that guy. And I certainly would have been in that camp. Like, I was big. I was pushy. I was aggressive. Well, some things never change. Come on now, come on now. But I would not have been the kind of guy. I wouldn't have thought, I wouldn't have said that I was necessarily mean to Christians or wasn't hostile toward them. I didn't know anything about them.

but I can see how I would have been intimidating even then to kids my age. And so, no, I mean, I never had never been in a church. I think my mom dropped me off at a VBS one time because one of her friends was taking her kids there for like free daycare. And so I might've gone to a VBS when I was a little kid for a few days, but I don't remember anything at all about that. But yeah, I got out of high school. I graduated high school. I thought I might go to college. I decided not to. I got a job as a tree trimmer. It was supposed to be a summer job. It turned into a job. I worked there for five years until I moved away from Chicagoland. It was toward the end of that, about a year before I moved, that I became a Christian. I'd met Vanessa. In those intervening years, I spent my life. My life was marked by...

Working a ton. I probably worked 55, 60 hours a week. I'd go to the gym two or three hours a day and I developed quite a pool playing slash gambling habit. And so that was what I spent my time doing was working, working out and gambling, playing pool. I actually met my wife at the pool hall. And so there's a fun story there about how we met. But toward the end of that, us meeting, she gave me the Bible and I read it and started going to church. And it was really strange. I'd never met people like that before who were, they're just different. Um, it was really refreshing. It was something attractive about it. I mean, we can all talk about churches and what's good and what's bad and what's, um, we should be striving for, but they really was as a whole, a different place than I'd ever in a different group of people than I'd ever been around. Um, and that was attractive to me. It was, there was something that I,

It was clear these people had something I didn't have. Anyway, when I met my wife, she was finishing up her undergraduate degree out in Southern California at Biola University, and then she was applying for grad school. She applied at a couple of different schools. She ended up agreeing or going to Indiana University to study music to get her master's in music education. And so that made her a lot closer to me, being in Chicagoland. When she was in California, it was quite a drive. But when she was in Bloomington, Indiana, then she was closer. And so I would go down and visit her once or twice a month. That first semester she was in school. I had just become a Christian, and one of the things that was really shocking was I was going to this megachurch up in Chicago, and then I go to this little church that...

I said little, it was 200 and some people, but little by comparison. I go to this church down in Bloomington and I'm like, this was so different. These people are not the same kind of people. Everything is different. The people are still sweet. The people are still friendly, but these people are involved in each other's lives. They love the word of God. The preaching was completely different. Everything was just weird. How was the preaching different? I remember when I went to the megachurch, I remember thinking, I wrote a letter one time, and I wrote that every time I go there, I always feel so good when I leave. I always felt so affirmed. It seemed like it was almost the point, was that I was supposed to leave feeling affirmed. And I was never confronted with my own sins, not even obliquely, I would say. Maybe I was just hard-hearted or blind and didn't feel it yet. I don't want to place all the blame on them, but I never felt like anyone put,

a you know a hurdle for me to get over i have to process i just came away feeling affirmed whether i was you know whether i was a christian or not just didn't seem to matter whereas when i was in bloomington i was confronted with what sin was really for the first time and that i was a sinner and that that was actually it was a category that i didn't ever had in my life like you grow up in the world, it's like, well, everyone's good people and they have good intentions. Sometimes they do really bad or foolish things. We're not sure why. Maybe it's because they have a lack of education. Seems to be a pretty good. Or a mental illness. Or a mental illness, yeah. And obviously education and mental illness have, they belong somewhere in the conversation, but not everywhere all the time. And so I got this new category of like, you're actually, you're not a good person. You actually, there's an explanation for why you do these bad things that you know are bad.

and that don't make you happy. And you've recognized they don't make you happy, but you still seem to, you can't get away from them. And here's why. You know, the scripture says that we're slaves to sin. We're sold into sin, bondage into sin. And I'm like, yeah, that makes more sense than all this other stuff. And so that was, it's weird. What it was, was it was refreshing. It was like, oh, finally, people who are honest, people who will like, Tell me about myself and about my own weaknesses. And it's something that resonates with me. It's not what I hope is true about me. It's what I've found to be true about me. And that there's hope for people who recognize that. That was probably the biggest difference. When I showed up, I remember the pastor of that church just not having a clue what to do with me. Because here's this...

young lady who plays the viola who's petite who's quiet who's very sweet and she's brought in this man who is six two who's at the time was coming out of bodybuilding who had bleached hair who had a bunch of earrings seven earrings had a tongue ring has tattoos and they're sitting together at the front of the church and and i remember him telling me later he's just like i didn't know what in the world to make out of you you sat there with your arms crossed with a poker face absolutely no expression this is him describing me and it's like and there's this sweet girl and there's this this what i don't know what to call him a man a boy something with all these muscles and tattoos and piercings and all this stuff but he keeps coming and um Really, I mean, that was his perception. My perception was I was just like a dry sponge just soaking up every bit of the water that was being offered. And so that was really meaningful in my life. I became a Christian before I moved to Bloomington, but I've talked to so many people about their Christian experience in their life. And it's like they spent so much of their growing up years, even if they grew up in the church,

with bad teaching, without being confronted about their sins, without being really even taught the Bible or to believe the Bible. And I never had any of that. I mean, within a few months of coming to faith, I was in a church that loved the Word of God, that honored the Word of God, that taught the whole counsel of God and wasn't afraid to confront you with your own sins personally. And that can be really scary. And a lot of times it ends up being offensive to the people, but not to everybody. And it wasn't to me. And so I remember one time when I still lived in Chicago, I was down visiting and I wanted to marry Vanessa. Now, I'd never seen a marriage and I was a brand new Christian. I have no idea. So I don't even know what marriage is. I've not even seen a bad one. My mom never remarried. But I'm like, I think I want to marry this girl.

But I don't have a clue what that means. And so we went and met with the pastor and his wife. And one of the things he said to me that was most helpful to me, I mean, everyone was crying. Everyone was crying a ton, except for him. His wife was crying. I was crying. Vanessa was crying. It was just a very painful conversation. But one of the things he said to me was, if she was my daughter, I would not let you near her, whether you're a Christian or not, just based on your history of of with women i would not let you near her because you just have in your wake is just a a long line of of destruction where you've taken advantage of and harmed other people for your own your own benefit and that was i mean obviously that hurt obviously that was sad we went we went into the counseling meeting like asking me asking like what do we need to do to move towards marriage and we came out of the meeting being told you guys need to break up like this relationship is a mess

And they were right. And I still lived in Chicago, so I've got to get back in my car and drive back up to Chicago. And we ended up breaking up. I don't remember if it was the next day or a few days. I do remember it was Valentine's Day. I called Vanessa on Valentine's Day. I said, we're going to talk in a few days. So I called her on Valentine's Day. And we broke up. And it wasn't like, we're going to break up and be friends. This was before the social media. I mean, this was when everyone thought AOL was the thing. We're old, Tim. Yes. All of 41. And when we hung up that phone call, it was both of our understanding, though it was very painful, that we would never speak again. Wow. And it's like, she had some of my stuff, and I had stuff of hers. And it's like, well, what are you doing? And you're like, well, I guess I just don't have that stuff anymore. But then there's this question. I had also agreed before we'd broken up.

to go on a trip with a man down in Bloomington, Bob Kaplowitz, who's since gone to be with the Lord. I would stay at his house when I'd come down to visit her. And I'd agreed to go on a spring break trip with him to Florida. And Vanessa was supposed to come with me. And we were supposed to go with another couple and with Bob. Well, obviously, Vanessa didn't come on the trip. The question was, am I still going to go? So I drive down from Chicago, go on this trip with Bob. to see if I'd want to move in with him, to move down to Bloomington. And during that trip, I agreed to move to Bloomington. So here I am. I'm just very raw from this breakup. It's like two weeks old. And I'm back down in Bloomington, then going to Florida with this man, and deciding to move to Bloomington, where Vanessa's at. At least we had the benefit of distance to help us heal. And now I'm facing, am I going to move to Bloomington? And I agreed to move to Bloomington. And when people ask me now, why'd you move to Bloomington? And I say,

It wasn't for Vanessa, not primarily. I mean, obviously, she's my wife now. But at that time, it was clear to me that I had to let go of that relationship. And really, the reason I wanted to move to Bloomington was because it was the first time I'd ever had anybody care enough about me to tell me the truth. And I've been a pastor now for 13 years, a Christian for longer. The stories I hear of how people's, how their pastors refuse to do that or are scared to do that or don't know how to do that is really, it's unsettling because I look at my own life and we could be good reformed folk and speak with perfect approved language. But the way I feel is that if I hadn't had someone be that honest with me, I don't think I would have become a Christian. If I'd stayed in that mega church, I don't think my life ever would have changed.

Yeah. Wow. Because nobody had anything to say to me about going into downtown Chicago and to Wrigleyville and partying on the weekends. Like no one cared if you lived with your girlfriend. No one cared if you were fornicating. No one cared about anything. They didn't care. I remember being in a small group and no one cared that like, it was a singles group. And basically what it meant was all of the, it was just a big dating pool. It was a success pool. It was like we dated and we broke up, but we weren't pure while we dated. And now we're still in this group and it's awkward and we're dating someone else. And nobody had anything to say about it.

um, that certainly wasn't calling me to the, to the truth. And so, um, but that experience in Bloomington did change your life. You and Vanessa married and now you have how many kids? Yeah. So yeah, Vanessa and I, yeah, we, I, so I did move to Bloomington. Um, we, we were broken up for about seven months. We got back together, dated for about eight weeks and then were engaged for six months, got married. And, um, Got married back in 2006. Now we've been married a little over 17 years. We've got 10 kids and an 11th on the way. I almost said we've got 11. We don't have 11 yet. I was thinking you had 11 for a second, actually. No, unless I'm really miscounting. We have 10 kids and a baby coming in January of next year. So we're excited about that. So yeah, life is really different. I mean, I grew up an only child outside of a Christian home.

You know, with no exposure to that. Now I'm married. I've got 11 kids. I'm a pastor. So it's been this really, you know, I don't want to say it was Saul to Paul, but these type of, it was a dramatic change. My life is, Vanessa is, I often tell people, Vanessa is the only person who ever knew me before I was a Christian that I'm really still in meaningful contact with today. She's the only guy who knew me before Christ and that I'm still involved with or have close relationships with. i mean i still have some friends but most guys are loners and i didn't have a whole lot of close friends you know the guys at the pool hall and i somehow didn't seem to you know build a real strong bond right so um but now i've got a family and a you know wife and children family a church family mothers and fathers in the faith all the things that i lacked growing up and that's the kindness of god to me and so i remember when i became a christian and

the transformation in my life i thought i want to tell other people about this like if i can save them some trouble i've gone through a lot of trouble like this is doesn't tell all the you know these are the highlights not the low lights of of my life um so in a way a lot so in a way this podcast is about trying to talk to the at least maybe some of the people that you were at 21 years old we titled the first season things I wish somebody had told me when I was in my twenties. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So maybe we'll cover some of the stuff and dig into some of the things you talked about. Yeah. Um, and, uh, so that's, that's pastor Dave. It's Tim. Yeah. Yeah. Me. That's our story. Yeah. I realized I forgot to include this, but I do also have four kids and one on the way. So, uh, yeah. So right now all of our wives are expecting. Right. When is, when is, uh, Carrington due? Yeah. So she's due at the beginning of February. Okay.

Yeah, we're right at the end of January. Oh, wow. Okay. We're November, and the baby will probably come early. So we're in the lead right now. There you go. Yep, yep. Martin will be winning for a few months now.