He grew up in Sin City. Raised in Vegas in the 1970s, Toby Logsdon spiked his hair and drenched himself in angry punk music. But this attempt to cope with childhood troubles brought him no lasting peace. At age 14, he attempted suicide. Now, looking back, Toby sees how God used this dark season as an angst-filled non-conformist to make him more bold as a Christian today. His later stints as a stockbroker and then casino dice man also yielded lasting lessons—that riches are futile, and men must press through in their work, even when it’s hard. Learn how God brought Toby from his post as a blackjack dealer on the Vegas strip to become a Reformed Baptist Pastor in the Seattle metro.

� Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of scripture, and today we get to hear a story about the power of the gospel from the lips of one of our preachers at our national conference Toby Logsdon. Hey Toby welcome Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me with you. I'm blessed to be here with you.

Yeah, so Toby is a pastor at New Beginnings Church in Linwood, Washington. And I just learned that the building that he meets in is the oldest one room schoolhouse in his county, in Linwood, Washington, which is in the Seattle area. Anyway, it's so good to have Toby here to talk about all these things. So, Toby, you know, as you know, what we want to do is have our preachers tell the story of their life and to explain how God captured them and all the things surrounding it just so people can have a greater sense of who that preacher is, who's preaching to them at the conference. So, tell us the story of your life.

Thanks again for having me you guys it's really a privilege and an honor to be able to share my testimony with you. It's not something that I necessarily talk about a lot, but you know like you said. This is something that that will introduce people to me. It will kind of tell you where I'm from and how I became who I am, how the Lord used certain circumstances in my life painful circumstances. Sometimes to mold me and shape � in Las Vegas.

I was actually born in Oregon, but my dad was getting his PhD in English and he got hired at the community college in Las Vegas to teach English. And so when I was like two years old, two and a half years old, we moved to Las Vegas and that's where I grew up. This was in the 70s of course when you know it's still old Vegas. New Vegas is very different but it used to be you know the desert was literally you go two streets behind our house and you were in the desert now it's a huge city but grew up in a nice nice neighborhood but you know in this neighborhood one day a pastor came to my parents door and invited them to his church so we started going to church when I was fairly young I think I was probably six It was an ELCA Evangelical Lutheran Church of America Church. If that tells you anything, if you know anything about the lca, very liberal with their beliefs, and they were back then as well.

I was never real active in the church. It never meant a whole lot to me, never really connected with me. As I grew up, it wasn't central to my week or my life in anyway. When I was still fairly young, I was abused by an older boy in our neighborhood. He was a cool guy.

He had an old Mustang that he drove around. Seemed like a real nice guy. Ended up abusing me and at least one other boy in the neighborhood that I knew of, possibly others. And obviously that's the kind of thing that really can affect a kid and it really affected me. And I didn't say anything to anybody because his threat was, if you tell anybody, I'll just tell everybody that it was your fault.

And so I had never told anybody, not for several years anyway. By the time I was 14 though, it was really sinking in and I was becoming very angry. I was even suicidal. I attempted suicide at 14, I got into all kinds of trouble, that's all I can say, without going into too much detail on long stories But yeah, I was very angry. I started pulling away from all my friends that I'd grown up with, especially other guys Had no interest in in being friends with with other with other guys.

Around that time I also started listening to angry music, punk music, and that really that stuck with me through, you know, throughout my teenage years listening to punk music. I even had spiked hair and I did all kinds of crazy things with my hair. Thankfully, I don't have it anymore. So I don't even have that temptation. All of it was to kind of create this persona where nobody would want to be friends with me because I didn't want to be friends with anyone but during those years and this extended into into my high school years I was really just learning to be a nonconformist you know when I put I first started listening to punk music I was you know experimenting � and you know some some light drugs and I just decided I didn't want to have anything to do with that so I even wasn't a conformists in the punk community I didn't do I stopped doing you know drinking and smoking and drugs you know kind of right off the bat I just decided it wasn't for me.

But during those years, I also became very active in in soccer and in martial arts. And those are things that I was I was pretty good at. And so being fairly good at soccer, I actually you know our high school team won the state championship and I had a couple schools that recruited me for soccer to play in college and I decided to play at this small college a small college affiliated with the elca it was a very small liberal arts college in southern california Scott you may know because it's not far from your stomping grounds. But that's where I was really introduced to things like universalism. The head of the religion department at the time was a universalist, there was a Marcionist there.

In fact, if it's any indication to this day that school is still there, the head of the religion department today at this small Lutheran college is Muslim. So that kind of gives you an indication of their doctrine there. And so I just kind of accepted whatever they taught me because I figured, you know, these are teachers and pastors. These guys know. And so I really had no interest in Christianity.

Wasn't anywhere on my radar, wasn't anything that I felt like I needed. I felt like you know I had been a pretty moral person by not smoking, not drinking, not doing drugs, you know, for X number of years. But that was all swept out from under me eventually when is my junior year? A friend of mine, a good friend of mine at the time invited me to church and I would have said no except it was an evangelical free church and so I was thinking it was free of evangelicals. Through a story, you know I've been taught very I've been taught to think very negatively about evangelicals in my college.

So I went but reluctantly and not expecting much. But when I heard the gospel, I realized that not smoking not drinking, not doing drugs that that was but basically II had no ground to stand on before God and that was when the Lord opened my ears to hear and to believe the gospel. It was at that church in Conejo Valley in Southern California. And so for about the next two years I was really active in that church. You know, if there was a Bible study, I'd go to the Bible study.

If there was a men's thing going on, I'd go. If they were doing baptisms, I'd go. I was really active for two years. Got to know the pastor really well. The questions that I had about stuff that I'd been taught at my school, the pastor, he knew how to handle all those objections, all those questions and so whenever I had something I could go to him and really got to know him well.

He was really a rich blessing in my life. I got to graduation, I had planned on becoming a clinical psychologist after graduating, but the pastor at this church had encouraged me to at least pray about and consider going to seminary so I applied for a few seminaries one of them being Dallas Theological Seminary and I was accepted for the fall semester of 1995, which was honestly way too soon for me to be going to seminary. And I'll get to that in a minute. But in the semester that I had between when I graduated and when I was going to be going to seminary, I met my wife. I actually met her on Valentine's Day just accidentally.

We were online. It was in an IRC chatroom. It was a Christian debate room and you know, not that I thought anything of it, but you know, that was the first time that I met her. Eventually, we started talking more and more. I asked her if I could call her.

I called her. We started talking every night. Sometimes until late, late, late, end of the night. Eventually, I said, you know what, I gotta, I gotta meet this girl, because I'm really falling for I really have strong feelings for her and she was living in Colorado I was living in Las Vegas at the time I flew out there I actually proposed within 24 hours and and she accepted you know who's the crazy one here � And she accepted. Who's the crazy one here?

We'll call it a draw. So she accepted, despite both of our parents having some concerns, but we decided to get married that December, December 30th that year between the fall and spring semesters while I would be at Dallas Seminary. � after we got married during the spring semester at Dallas, I started encountering some textual criticism again. And it was much harder material than I had encountered in college. I had no idea how to respond to those things, and I didn't have a pastor like the pastor that I had in Southern California who could help walk me through the solution, the answers.

And so that really shook my faith but also at that time it was my wife's first time living anywhere but Colorado so she was kind of homesick so between everything I just decided to to drop out I figured it just wasn't for me so I dropped out of seminary after after one year at Dallas and we moved to Colorado where my wife was from I � up being trained and working as a stockbroker there which was interesting but within probably a year and a half, two years, my wife's parents got divorced and it was painful and it was messy. They'd been married for 24 years, 25 years, and Christina just wanted to leave because it was so messy and she didn't want to be stuck between kind of a tug of war. So she asked if we could move to Las Vegas where my parents still lived and where, you know, they would have a grandpa and grandma who were still married for our kids to know as they were growing up. We had a son at that point. So we moved to Las Vegas in 1998.

I decided when we moved that I didn't want to be a stockbroker anymore. Aside from the fact that I hated working 12 and 14 hour days and talking with people on the phone and very uncomfortable situations, I was just a terrible salesman. So just to be honest, I couldn't sell, you know, anything, I couldn't sell a heater to to an Eskimo. And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know, you know, what career path to pursue.

And so my college roommate came into town at one point and we started talking and he said hey why don't you get into the casino industry while you figure out what your next step is. And that seemed like an okay plan to me the you know the city is full of casinos so I so I became a table games dealer in las vegas also soon after we had moved to las vegas we had started attending a a church It was a church plant that was extremely seeker-sensitive. And we became members there. My parents also became members there. And there was one Sunday where the sermon that the pastor preached was so bad he twisted scripture so badly that we all just decided to leave it was just that bad you know we left my wife and I left and my parents also left well we never we never heard anything from that church again, but my parents had the pastor show up at their house and he was calling them day and night, begging them not to leave because as he told them they were his biggest givers.

Wow! And man, I was, I felt so burned, I felt so offended, and I just thought, you know, I, if this is what Christianity is, I don't want to have anything to do with it. So between not knowing how to deal with all that textual criticism stuff, the liberal theology, and you know, and then what I was, you know, being taught, you know, elsewhere, and then feeling really burned by this church. Just all these factors you know I stopped going to church on a regular basis for about five years. You know having left the church I was also under the impression that God was done with me.

And as I considered my life, I felt like this was all just leading to this moment where God would would not have me back and that was really based on my misunderstanding of a passage in Hebrews chapter 6 but that my misunderstanding of that passage just crushed my my heart crushed my soul for those five years at some point after about five years I I did come across an explanation of those verses somewhere online that made a lot more sense than you know that that you can lose your salvation and that you know god will just wash his hands of you if you walk away from the church for a season �tual criticism, some of the Lee Strobel stuff, Norman Geisler stuff. And so I finally had answers to a lot of the textual criticism questions that I'd had for so long. You know, going back to, you know, 1996 when, you know, when I was confronted with those ideas in seminary and just didn't know what to do with it. So I started going back to church and I was just suddenly on really on fire for the Lord knowing that he did love me, knowing that he was calling me back after all those years, and still feeling like there was a calling on my life.

I decided that I would at least reapply for seminary. You're still dealing blackjack in the casinos? Yeah, blackjack and dice, blackjack and dice. How'd that go on your application for seminary? Exactly, I actually told them, told my wife, told the seminary when I got there, I said I figured I had no chance of being accepted.

So I had nothing to lose by applying. But I actually got accepted at Norman Geisler's Seminary, Southern Evangelical Seminary, which is in Matthews, North Carolina. And there I could study under Norman Geisler. I could learn how to address the not only the textual criticism but the literal the liberal theology that had shaken my faith for so many years so in in 2004 that was right around when the the housing market was really bubbling up, we were able to sell our house for enough money that I could go to seminary for a few years and we'd be able to not only buy a house, but we were able to afford to live for a few years. Although I did work part-time at a bank clause in seminary, but yeah, I didn't make a lot of money, but so we moved to North carolina where I earned my masters of divinity.

When we were getting close to graduating or when I was getting close to graduating a friend and I started talking and we got in touch with a pastor in the community that � in Little Rock, Arkansas, who wanted to plant a church up in the Fayetteville, Arkansas area. So we moved to Arkansas with my seminary friend and his wife and his family in 2008 with the plan of planting a church being sent by this church in Little Rock. Well, about a year into planting this church in Fayetteville, we found out that the elders at our sending church in Little Rock. They denied inerrancy and they had some really liberal views of scripture. And just because of my background, it just wasn't going to work for me.

It wasn't going to work for my seminary friend either. You know, he studied apologetics as well and you know had some some real problems with the theology that we were hearing from this church in Little Rock. So we wrote a letter to that church to to express our concerns. They ended up telling us, you know, we're severing ties. And so I ended up being in Northwest Arkansas without as a church planter, without a sending church.

I think it was probably four or five, maybe six months later, there was a church in Northwest Arkansas. We had become good friends with the pastoral staff there, and they agreed to work with us to plant the church in the area so you know we got back to work with that probably a year later you know we we had about 40 people who were attending our bi-weekly evening services and so in my opinion you know 40 people is it is a pretty decent following you know there are weeks when we don't have when we haven't had 40 people here. When I first got here, there were weeks when we had six people here. So we had 40 people who were attending our bi-weekly evening services, so I thought, you know, that's probably enough to just start, you know, start the church. So I sat down with my friend and his wife to suggest, you know, that we consider, start meeting, that we start meeting on Sunday morning every week for services.

And he looked at his wife and kind of laughed and they said, we're too busy. I thought, what? I'd been there for a couple of years at that point. We moved there with the sole intention of planting a church And my seminary friend, he was a good guy, but I think he was just being pulled in a lot of different directions. Not long after we had moved there, he started teaching in the public school system there.

And that was a 70 or 80 hour a week job. You know teachers have long long schedules during the week and so he was busy and that made it apparent to me that the Lord might be leading me somewhere else that you know there might be another opportunity or another place that the Lord would have me serve. It just seemed like we were hitting one obstacle after another after another and so after a lot of prayer � of planning this church in northwest Arkansas. And that time was coming up in the next few months. And so I told my friend that I was going to, you know, just prayerfully explore my options, And I found an ad on a church employment website for, you know, that was looking for a pastor in the Seattle area.

And I sent them my resume. One of the elders here started listening to my sermons on BibleStudyPodcast.org, which was a podcasting ministry that I had started when I was in seminary with the idea that because my seminary didn't teach me how to preach, I needed to learn how to preach. And so, you know, I started Bible study podcast.org. The seminary I went to actually only had a one week class in preaching, which did not give me any confidence at all that I was ready to preach. So, So one of the elders here started listening to my sermons on BiblesUttyPodcast.org and after he heard me, he urged me to pursue employment here, to consider, perfectly consider coming here, to come up here and preach as a candidate for the church.

And so I came up here in December of 2010 to preach as a candidate. And the following week, the church voted unanimously to call me as their pastor and we accepted and so we moved here in early 2011 and I came here for only $700 a month if you know the Seattle area it is that's a rough program really yeah It's a rough place to have a ministry and it's very expensive here. I came here for $700 a month knowing that this church was kind of on its last leg. And that might be exaggerating on the, you know, the, the generous side. This church was somewhere between being on life support and being dead, but you know, we, we felt like this was, we prayed around it.

We felt like this was where the Lord would have us. We had some friends in Washington in the Seattle area. So we thought We actually know some people there. Let's go ahead and go for it. Even for $700 a month, it didn't matter.

But God has blessed and sustained our ministry here. There were weeks, there were months when we first got here when they said, don't cash your paycheck until Thursday, that's when the funds will be ready for you. But you know, over the years, God has blessed this church, he has sustained our ministry. And now I've been here at this church for just over 12 years now. Wow.

Looking back on my testimony after 12 years of pastoring here, I'd actually say that there were two things two very painful things from my childhood and early adult years that have actually served me very well as a pastor the abuse that I suffered that made me a nonconformist in my teenage years. Being a nonconformist has served me really well as a pastor. You know, in an age where there's so much pragmatism and the church is just, it's being torn apart by basically being conformed to the ways of the world. Right. I am perfectly comfortable to this day, I am perfectly comfortable swimming against you know the flow even if that means going alone you know if if I've got a conviction on something that I think that you know the American Church is is mistaken on you know I I'll take it to my elders you know I trust them I've got some some pastor friends that I that I trust who are solid but I am I'm very comfortable being a nonconformist and I think in this day and age that serves a lot of pastors well funny thing I've actually gotten to know a few pastors solid guys reformed Baptist on Twitter who also grew up listening to punk music and being nonconformists you would never guess that God would use that for a good thing.

Yeah, but it's pretty niche Yeah, but he definitely has another doesn't mean I would encourage anybody to get into punk music, but I'm just saying and the other thing is you know in in the casino industry not only did I develop and as a stockbroker right not only did I develop a very unique perspective on the futility of worldly riches and worldly treasure but the casino industry also demands an extremely strong work ethic because you burn out � that industry right away. Everybody does. And so it taught me how to push through when I feel like I've hit a wall and that was something that I didn't have when I came into the casino industry and that comes in really helpful, you know, in weeks when I'm tired, when I'm being pulled all kinds of different directions. And I just feel like I don't have the energy to put in all the work for a sermon that that week. And so it helps having co-elder who can who could step in, obviously that's always good having a co-elder who can preach from time to time.

But there's just no substitute for a good strong diligent work ethic that knows how to push through you know when you're wanting to take a break and you have a lot of work left to do. So the Lord has actually used those things to strengthen me and perhaps prepare me for pastoral ministry. Isn't that wonderful? God, he uses all things, all things in our lives to work together for good so what a story what a story from a blackjack table to a pulpit yeah I don't know if there are many pastors out there who can say that they've traveled that road. You're the first that I've ever met.

I have met former Punkers but not blackjack dealers. The last year the final year that I was a dealer, I was I was working at the Aladdin at the time. It's now Planet Hollywood and it got bought out in the last year that I was there. But let me tell you, once I caught fire for the Lord again, I was evangelizing from the blackjack tables and you would be amazed how open people are to talking about the Lord while they go and, you know, throw their money away. But yeah, that's another thing that the Lord used you know my casino experience for is evangelism I I really love evangelism, I have a heart for evangelism, Our church actually has a team of street preachers that we send out into the streets to preach outside of football games and baseball games and all those types of things.

So evangelism is very important to me. Always has been. Praise the Lord. Toby, thank you so much. It was, it was really neat to hear your story.

Thank you thank you for having me. God bless you and can't wait to see you at the conference. Likewise I look forward to being there. Good deal. Okay well Jason there goes another one.

Here's another. Pretty neat. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.