Michael grew up in a rough household. Most nights, he heard his parents fight, and on more than one occasion, he covered his father’s sleeping body up on the sidewalk near their home after a drunken bout. Pent up anger led Michael to disruptive outbursts at school, prompting his mom to ship him to live with his grandmother, a tough German woman who survived the Dresden firebombings in WWII.  From her rural country farmhouse, she taught him structure and discipline, yet still he struggled till God saved him at a Christian basketball tournament at age 17. Michael met his future wife Emily at a Bible study, and they’ve been blessed with 22 years of marriage and 9 children together. Author of It’s Good to Be a Man, he currently serves as lead pastor of East River Church in Batavia, Ohio. 

Welcome to the church and family life podcast fast your seatbelt here in here a great story from michael foster he's gonna the preaching at our conferences can know a little bit more about the guy so they can understand where he's coming from. These are my favorites. Yeah, they really are. And we've got Michael Foster on, a pastor of East River Church, author, a fun to read author, actually. I really appreciate the stuff you're writing these days.

So, Michael, welcome. Hey, tell us the story of your life, you know, start at the beginning. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, I haven't done this for a bit. Well, so I'm the oldest of three brothers.

There's two years between each of us. And my mom met my dad while he was out on probation as I recall for Grand Theft Auto and they met at a disco in Kansas City. My dad is from Independence, Missouri across the river. My mom is from Chicago. Her, my pater, or maternal grandfather, he died when she was 11 and My grandmother kind of freaked out and moved to Kansas to do this radical reboot where she started a home for a foster home that had like 14 kids in it with my mom and her brother my uncle and so my mom was kind of like thrusted into being a little mom to all these kids that my grandmother was looking over and had a slightly rebellious stage and met my dad at a disco.

And they got really involved and I was conceived and then they got married. And so I grew up in sort of KCMO part of the country for the first six years of my life. And not really a Christian family at all. I think there was a sort of Christianity was in the water around them. My grandfather, my mom's dad was a Presbyterian, but I never knew him.

And my dad's dad was really new age, he wrote a couple books on what demons had told him. He didn't call them demons. He called them the guardians. And so he was really into all that stuff. And my dad grew up doing lots of drugs and getting in lots of trouble.

And so that's the home I was kind of born into. Was he around much when you were growing up? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my parents stayed married until they were married for 29 years and they divorced. So I grew up in a home with them the majority of my life.

It was not a happy marriage. I think they loved each other, but it was just dysfunctional. They fought a lot. I cannot remember many nights where they didn't fight growing up. I definitely grew up in a very rough household.

What were your thoughts about the drug use and stuff like that? Did that hit you? So my dad overcame drugs before I came to age, where I can remember. However, did have a major problem with gambling and with alcohol and so he was an alcoholic and certainly gambled away our rent money Several times which I think he would admit to now and I can remember coming as I got older we lived above a bar In Lawrenceburg, Indiana right across from Seagram's whiskey plant and I have to go out there. He'd be so drunk I'd have to go out through the blanket and cover him up and just leave on the sidewalk and He wasn't like that at all times There is sober years and I remember I went to go see him when I was six he was staying at some sort of like a a like camp where they sober up and all this stuff and Back then Thundercats was a really popular 80s cartoon and the main character's name was Lionel.

He's like Like this the leader, but I said it why no that I was looking for a why no. And everyone at this sort of alcohol anonymous group really got a kick out of that. But I was pretty disturbed little kid, like very angry, would have crazy outbursts. And I was going to shiny mission elementary school. And I once like army crawled underneath my teachers desk and bitter.

I don't really know why I was doing that stuff. I don't really know where all that anger came from. I think children are very sensitive to their environment and they, I didn't know this for many, many years, but basically the guidance counselor said, you gotta get your son out of this school. They're gonna put him in a special ed class. He'll be labeled that the rest of his life.

And I didn't know that, but my mom sent me to live with my grandmother, had since remarried and relocated to Southern Indiana. She married a old farmer who had also been a correctional officer and had retired, Paul Peets, who was my functional grandfather, even though he's my step grandfather. So I went out to Osgoode, Indiana, a town of 1, 100 people, and moved in with my grandmother. And She still had one of the people that she had adopted my uncle Roberto. He was half black half Lakota Indian and Had all sorts of health problems that he functionally was like my older brother.

He's only six years older than me He was really into Dungeons and Dragons, which doesn't necessarily have to be like this deep evil, but he kind of took it to the dark places watched a lot of horror movies. Was into all that sort of stuff. Some of it was innocent like sci fi, but a lot of the stuff he was into is kind of dark. My grandmother, however, was a survived the bombing of Dresden. She's from Kenigsburg, and she came to the States after World War II.

And old tough woman, German woman. And my grandfather, like I said, was a farmer and a retired correctional officer. So my life went through a radical change when I went to live with my grandparents. So even though I'm Gen X, I really was raised by a much older generation and they had a lot of impact on my life. When I came out there, I wouldn't eat anything, but like chicken nuggets and hamburgers and hot dogs.

And Germans eat disgusting things. They eat brown, brown swagger. They eat blood sausage, brain cheese. They eat like all the worst things in the world. And this stuff would get served to me.

And I remember I'd have to eat cow's tongue and we'd always say it's the food that takes you back. Right. So then, you know, with my grandmother, if you don't eat, you, you so I would sit down the dinner table, and I would get in trouble if I wouldn't eat. And what I would do is I would sometimes eat it and swallow it with water. So she wouldn't let me have water to the very end of the meal.

And if I didn't eat it for dinner, it got served to me for breakfast. And then it was served to me again for dinner. If I didn't eat it then I got spanked and sent to bed. And they really broke me down. But one story I tell to people, I've told to my children anyhow, is that I can remember in the middle of the night getting up and going into the kitchen and eating a piece of cheesecake that was in the fridge and waking up the next morning and being confronted by my grandmother whether or not I'd ate that cheesecake and I denied it right Like that would have been a capital offense in my parents' household.

We were so poor, we didn't have anything. That would have been something very special you'd rarely have. And my grandma, like Michael, you know you did it and I still wouldn't admit it and then that that night we I got like another She gave me like this huge piece of peach cobbler and said this is your home. You're allowed to eat this stuff, right? So it was a grace that I wasn't really used to.

I don't think she was a Christian at the time, although we did occasionally go to a Lutheran church in Napoleon, Indiana. But it had structure and had all those old values. And that really ended up setting me aside from my brothers who grew up mostly underneath my parents. So I lived with my grandmother a couple years and then spent almost every summer there and many weekends there. So I kind of grew up in two homes.

I grew up with my grandparents and my adopted uncle and I grew up with my parents and they're very different worlds one was a country house with structure and discipline and With my parents, you know, I we bounced all around they eventually moved to Indiana took me back Then we went to Bloomington, Indiana lived on University campus. I went to University Elementary, very liberal, right? That's where the sexual revolution started with Kinsey and all that, so it's this little toxic cesspool of liberalism amongst corn and quarries. And so yeah, I was taught about all sorts of sexual perversity in fifth grade while there. It was just very where we are now, like Bloomington's been there for a long time.

Wow. So then we ended up kind of bouncing around a lot where we went to Goodland, Kansas for a little bit. Then we went to Greensburg, Indiana, and then from Greensburg out to Roanoke, Virginia, and Roanoke, Virginia back to Indiana, and then eventually landed in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. And very unstable environment. When you're a kid in environments like that you're You're always trying to recreate yourself at each school and since you don't have a history you can kind of do that right And I can remember being at my senior graduation.

And we had, you know, a couple days before graduation, we all met in the cafeteria, and they played this video. And so many of my peers had gone to elementary school together and had all these shared experiences and all these connections I had none of that right and So I didn't have a deep connection to place outside of my grandmother's farm. So I think I idealized Osgoode, Indiana and living on a farm and having goats and cows and chickens. And I was a little boy would terrorize all the cows until they lit once. I tried to catch a calf and the mother cow did not take too kindly to that and tossed me into a barbed wire fence.

So then I came out and shot the cow with my BB gun the next day. So But I we When I was with my parents, there was a lot of instability. They were not Christians. They would never be against Christianity. They would be for America.

They were very conservative, at least in their professed values, but wouldn't really go to church or anything like that and had a tendency to expose us to a lot of occult stuff, cult books, cult movies. I think we grew up kind of a fearful group of little boys And I was a big reader. I started reading novels, like third and fourth grade. And the first novel I ever read from start to finish was the book It by Stephen King in fourth grade. It was a very bad book for kids to read.

But yeah, I was very bookish nerd, really all into middle school. And I've been reading a book a week since I've been a little boy. And I got that from my mom. My mom is a huge reader, So I'm always in the middle of a couple books. And right now I'm working through a lot of Midwestern fiction.

So anyhow, so I wasn't inclined towards sports or anything like that. But when I hit middle school, I realized I had to kind of change and that being this a smart kid wasn't paying off at all It wasn't socially paying off And I became friends with a couple guys that were into boxing so I got into boxing I got in the mixed martial arts. I love football. I wrestled all throughout high school. My kids wrestle.

I was a wrestling coach at one point. So I kind of really started to change between eighth and ninth grade into a different guy. Hit the weights, put on muscle mass, went from not being able to lift 100 pounds to rep in, you know 245 with ease and and really got into that sort of stuff and then started hanging with a cool crew, having been one of the cool kids. I was team captain on my wrestling team, and team captain on cross country. I wasn't good at cross country.

I just did it to keep my weight down. So cross country was frustrating. In wrestling, I could take my frustrations out on the person I'm wrestling against and cross country is just too quick for me to catch up to. So anyhow, I got cool, I got a girlfriend, I got all the things that probably a middle schooler thought would make you happy. And I wasn't really happy.

And at the time, my youngest brother, Wayne, started going to this Pentecostal church where they were teaching him about Jesus. And I had been pretty much agnostic my entire life and never really thought about God almost at all This is certainly a presence like a feeling of judgment that all people have right everyone knows they're under judgment they feel it when you watch horror movies the judgment you feels the monster right and God is a monster to those who are rebels I think that's the underlying psychology to a lot of those horror movies, you know But But I never really thought about Christianity at all until high school where all these Christians started carrying their Bibles around to class. It was annoying to me. It was annoying because I didn't see them reading them. It was annoying when I confronted them to ask them why they believe what they believed and that they couldn't give me a real good answer.

I'd gotten really into Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan and a lot of the kind of predecessors to what would eventually become new atheism, which is already dead now, right? So the waves of history just keep on smashing against the shore. And so I became a pretty aggressive atheist in high school. And Also a lot of the girls I knew who were professing Christ were sleeping with my friends or being sexually active with my friends So I remember telling this one girl Amanda.

She said why aren't you a Christian Michael? And I said look Amanda don't waste your time here. Okay Even if Jesus is real I can pretty much guarantee that he doesn't want you to be his PR. Okay. I know what you did this past weekend.

So I was surrounded by a lot of that sort of hypocrisy and I used to watch the TBN for fun Because I thought it was hilarious. I used to prank, I used to prank Benny Hens all the time. I used to prank him and say, you know, what if I give you $10, 000, you know, or what if you give me $10, 000? Once you get $100, 000 back, or I used to call them and confess to fake sins. Like I'm calling because I need to know, is it gluttony if I'm just eating vegetables?

I eat so much vegetables, I get sick. We just like nudge with these people all the time. And- too much time on your hands. It was the nineties. We didn't have the internet quite yet.

Back then there was no star 69. You could prank someone. They didn't know who you were. You know, those days are gone. But, But we would mock Christianity quite a bit.

So Wayne starts going to this Pentecostal thing and my mom gets convicted by it and starts going to a different church with the guy she met at work. Then All my brothers go. I was probably 15 or 16 at the time. I refused to go. And then my dad, who had been struggling with alcoholism, drunk in biblical terms, he goes and he stops drinking.

And I won't lie, that did capture my... That was like quite a change. But still, I was really annoyed because it just seemed very social to me. And so, at the time, I got all these people talking to me about Christianity all the time and I had this girl I was dating that I thought I was gonna marry and all this stuff and I remember she once told me don't don't you go be like one of those Christians and honestly that made me upset I'm like look I'm gonna do what's true. Like don't tell me I can't be a Christian Like I don't think she understood That I was trying to the pursuit of truth, right?

But I can remember people saying why do you reject Christianity and I say well I believe in selfism that you should make yourself the best person. So I was just like a loss, unregenerate, self-centered, narcissistic, better than everybody pagan. Right. That's like, you know, what I was. And, so then, I got into some fights.

I got expelled from school. I got in a lot of trouble, and it had me kind of questioning what mattered. And so I went to church on Easter, my mom begged me to, I went there for her. And then I would go to the youth group every once in a while and they were like really fascinated that I would show up. And I remember this one guy, he would always whisper cuss words in my ear during worship songs.

And because he thought it was cool. I was like, it's not cool. I would, you know, and I cussed all the time, right? Like all the time, but I was like, man, all these people trying to be something they're not, it was annoying to me. But I, I had this biology teacher, coach Bowel, who is a man of science.

He was a reserve football coach. His two sons were two of the best athletes in Indiana State history. He was everything I thought a man should be, right? Manly, smart, well-educated, respected, helps people. And we had, I had him in a class where he wouldn't teach on evolution.

And it was so frustrating to me. And then he told me he didn't believe in evolution, which I just, I didn't know such people existed. I mean, you don't believe in evolution. And so then he explains it all to me and I had this girl Margaret Smith, poor Margaret was like had to deal with me harassing her for being a Christian, but she was just godly. She didn't have good answers.

But I couldn't deny there was a quality of her life. I couldn't deny that there was a quality to her life that I hadn't seen elsewhere. And so I did what every guy does when he meets a woman he's fascinated by and can't explain. I tried to get her to go on a date And that didn't work out But I remember at the end of that sophomore year She said we're gonna do this summer and I said, I think I'm gonna try to get closer to God She really has I got I don't know. I just want to see if there is a God and if there is I think you know, I should probably have some sort of relationship or knowledge and So I go to this basketball tournament with the guy that liked to cuss in my ears And it turned out I was on a basketball tournament.

It turned out it was like it was a two-on-two but they all said this guy come out preach the gospel and he preaches the gospel and And they have an altar call, you know, it's in southern Indiana And I walk up and pray with them and God just, I just got saved by the Holy Spirit. It wasn't evidence. It wasn't this or that crisis. It was scales removed from my eyes. I once was lost and I was found.

I saw and believed. So how old are you? You're now at late high school, right? 17. 17.

And then all these guys surround me and lay hands on me and they start going, so like I'm not like, I wasn't much of a feeler at the time and So anyway, I kind of like sneak out of the crowd almost I like almost like they didn't know I was gone And I went outside and and I told God I said alright, I was wrong. I was wrong. You're real. I was like, well, this is too much. Please be patient with me.

And then, immediately started attending church. I would confront people at school. I'd go from table to table during lunch and witness to people. I was a pretty big intimidating guy at this point and would just not hold back. I started going to Bible studies one night after my non-Christian friends had ditched me.

I ran to these skateboarders at a local drug store where they were skating, and they invited me to go to Bible studies with me. And I'm still close friends with one of them I talk to every week, and he's here in town many years later. I just got pulled into these Bible studies and ended up at a Calvary Chapel, which I always tell people is a great starter church because they actually love the Bible. They accidentally made me reformed by turning me on to Marloy Jones and to a book by John MacArthur that he edited. He had a great chapter on expository preaching throughout the centuries.

I went and bought all these commentaries from those people. Immediately started reading. The first book I ever read after I converted was Augustine's Confessions in the Cross and the Switchblade, because that's what was in our high school library. Yeah, and so I've always kind of had an eclectic mix of influences and then when I went to college, I became pretty much obsessed with the church fathers. So I have a son named Athanasius, a son named Cademan, a son named Cyprian.

I had a daughter who passed away named Isiah. I really loved that stuff and slowly became reformed and I never thought I'd be a pastor in a million years. It wasn't a people person back then but God really changed me and Met my wife at a Bible study knew she was the one we dated for four years, which is way too long all throughout high school and got married God's blessed us with nine children and eight with us, one ahead of us. And we actually celebrated 22 years of marriage last Saturday. And it's a good life, man.

It's good to know Jesus. I'm glad to be saved. I'm glad to be among his people with my name in his book. And yeah, that's kind of, there's so much more to everyone's story, but that's, that's my story in 25 minutes. Oh my.

Okay. So how did you become a pastor? What's the story on that? So it's kind of funny, actually. One of the skateboarders I met at that drug store, he disappeared because he met a girl and they wanted to hang out.

So he asked if I could fill in for him one week at the two Bible studies he taught And he just never came back. He never came back. So, I became the guy. And at that time, I hadn't even read the entire Bible. And so, I would go read, I don't know how many times I've read through Matthew Henry's commentaries.

But I bought Matthew Henry's commentary from Barnes and Noble, and would just read through it and make notes, and then go teach these Bible studies. These Bible studies grew from 10 to 12 people at one point to 105 people. And we had to pray there wouldn't rain. We'd meet outside these little teen Bible studies. And then I became the head of a skateboard ministry that we would set up all these skateboard ramps and hundreds and hundreds of kids would come and skate and we'd sit them all down preach the gospel news would come out there all the time and So me and a couple friends ran that ministry for about three years Wow all over America me and it's cool to see the old newspaper articles and so all we ever knew was teaching Bible studies and street preaching and Calvary Chapel has a really heavy emphasis on church planting and I fell in love with that.

And slowly realized I was called to the ministry. I fought it, because I never idealized the ministry. I knew it was gonna be costly. And I knew that it would mean a lot of people not liking you, hating you for stupid reasons. And slowly but surely, I really just resigned myself to that calling.

So I've been an assistant associate pastor, and I've planted two churches. And I love being a shepherd. I love the people. I think I always hear people say ministry is great except for the people. The people are the ministry, right?

I get the tongue in cheek, but you got to protect your heart, right? The glory is being there from birth to death, marriage, high points, low points, and seeing folks become people you never imagined in a million years they would become because God's grace is so powerful. Theological heroes over the years, they change, right? They move. They don't move too much for me.

Calvin is my go-to. I love John Calvin. If you talk about John Calvin like he's a dead intellectual, I know you haven't read him. Calvin is, I love his pastoral heart. Good book is Calvin's Company of Pastors is a fantastic book on that I actually read his consistency notes.

I got a copy of that cost a lot. So Marloy Jones is like a lot of people who's been a big influence I love JC Ryle Thomas Watson, I love those Pearson guys that were punchy but Accessible right super practical. Yeah. Yeah, I can't stand John Owen. I can't stand him.

I know people love him. I just hate his writings. And I would recommend the doctrine of repentance over John Owen almost any day. Cause I just think the doctrine of repentance by Watson is such a better, More accessible way to mortify sin then Owen stuff and I know people get upset by that But I just want people to read a book and actually apply it. Yeah, I'm like, oh good You're right Owen, you know, and I think look he's a gifted man, but I love those guys They're easy to grab a hold of So a lot of those punchy Puritans.

I love Thomas Manton. He's great. I'm deeply influenced by all the writings on the Westminster standards. I love reading that stuff just for fun. So That'd be some of them.

I don't have very many. I love Chuck Smith. Chuck Smith was an imperfect man, had all sorts of problems, had a couple of occasions to meet him. I just love his love for the Bible and his risk-taking nature, which didn't always pay off. Yeah, he did.

He took a lot of risk on a lot of young guys and some of them worked out really good, right? Yep, they did. And I think that's something I'd love to see more in pastors again. So, yeah. Wow.

That's really great. Okay. So you've been writing books. You wrote a book. We're going to talk about that in another podcast.

Yep. What's, what do the next five years look like for you? Well, I really Love where I'm at. I love Claremont County. I love Batavia.

I'm a localist I really think you should spend about 80% of your effort on the time and place God's put you and God's put me in Claremont County right now And So these are the people I want to give attention to so I'm writing a whole lot. I wake up every morning and I write Thousand to two thousand words every morning just out of practice, you know, and I'm working on a couple books right now I've got a book over at founders. It's a Devotionary is what we're calling it a little more than a devotional a little less than a commentary It's on the certain on the mounts about twelve hundred words Each entry is So you could use it as a family devotional. I've got that book over there. I've got Blue-collar confessionalism, which is kind of my reflection on the search for a people place in a past that I think is a big part of the Americans are confused and they're trying to find a place they belong.

It's Just kind of like writing on recapturing American Christianity so Doing that and then me and Emily are trying to finish a book that's on marriage and children It may be called it's good to be married certainly would sell better if I did that. I just don't like doing that stuff. I like having a different name and I don't like running brands into the ground. I hate when it was like, wow, it hit hard for 12 year old Mexicans. I know you can sell it, but maybe I'm a little bit of a hipster in that way that I want to do it different every time.

But you're not going to have chicken soup for everything. I hate that stuff. But yeah, I think those, those are the things I'm trying to get done Those are pretty far along projects and I've written a book called troublemakers, which is a book for like I don't know like a 12 a 10 to 12 year old boy would love it and It's just all the stuff me and my brothers got into which is like, like something like you'd read. It's like an 80s movie like Sandlot. But that was our childhood.

We grew up in a time where we would disappear for 12 hours a day and no one knew where we were. And little did they know we were riding the back of trains and jumping off train bridges and building boats and going down a river and and stealing entire Dumpster full of Frito Lay chips that were past their best buy date I mean, I just These are the things that I and my kids love when I tell these stories So I thought it'd be kind of fun to tell that story. So I'm really very much just writing I don't do conferences very much anymore But you know, like I like what you get to doing at yours, you know, I really do care about the family and church. That's more of my domain than being a cultural commentator. I want to be connected to what's going on in the culture.

I care about it. But I want it to be very applicable to the people that are in front of me. That's what really burdens me at this time in my life. Yeah. Wow, Michael, thank you so much.

What a great story. Hey, can't wait to have you at our conference. And yeah, until we meet again. Thanks so much. God bless.

And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can be with us next time. Helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.