Pastor Tommy Schneider

There are some people out there that have a light inside of them that shines on everyone that they come in contact with. Pastor Tommy Schneider is one of those rare people. Everyone that has come in contact with him, it seems, has felt it. His light can brighten your day, ease your pain, and inspire you to greater things.”I’m a simple guy,” Pastor Tommy says, “I don’t have degrees, I’m not trying to be anything but what I am, which is passionately in love with Jesus.”Tommy is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Vail Valley, a church that he started seven years ago when he and his wife, Debi, along with a small group of others from Calvary Chapel Santa Barbara, made the move to Vail to start a sister church.Calvary Chapel’s worship leader and assistant pastor, Stephen Couch, knows Pastor Tommy well as a man, a pastor, and a pretty good surfer.”He’s just a lighthearted surfer with a passion for people and a passion for Jesus,” Couch says. “His love for people is genuine and his love for Christ is genuine.”Sunday mornings you can find Pastor Tommy in the auditorium of Berry Creek Middle School and during the evenings, at a smaller venue at the base of Wildridge in Avon. It doesn’t matter which service you attend, you will laugh and, most likely, shed a few tears.After a service at either place, it will be apparent that Pastor Tommy has been blessed with a gift. Week after week he peppers his sermons with his own life stories, sound effects and all. Pastor Tommy has two children, a daughter, Sarah, and a son, Barrett. One day three-year-old Barrett began preaching from his father’s sermon binder while riding in the car, his young voice booming from the backseat, “God taught me how to run fast, and I was a good listener.”For Tommy, the message out of his son’s mouth was a good one and it became his Sunday service: “God desires us to share his message of love and move forward with it, rather than stand complacently,” Tommy says. “And if we’re good listeners, we can go where He leads us.”Tommy grew up in California, just a few blocks from the beach. At the age of 10, Tommy’s parents divorced and from sixth to eighth grade, Tommy attended boarding school. By the time he was 16, he was out of boarding school and on his own, paying rent, and grappling with tough decisions.”I came home and the house was a wreck. My mom was classic ’80s and addicted to crack cocaine.”Tommy started a document delivery business when he was still in his teens called Coastline Carriers. He delivered loan papers and escrow documents around the city using his skateboard. A few years later, Tommy invested with a friend in a vacuum cleaner, sewing machine and ceiling fan store, called Empire Vacuum.”It was about that time I met my wife. She brought her vacuum in for service she walked into the store and just killed me, and I was like, ‘There she is.’ As she was leaving I told the guys who were working for me, ‘That’s the woman I’m going to marry.'”For Debi, the attraction was mutual.”I thought he was a total babe,” Debi says with a laugh. “I knew I could marry him and fall in love with him when I saw the smile lines by his eyes; I knew it when he picked me up for our first date.”After five weeks, Tommy proposed and now the couple has been married 14 years.Pastor Tommy was not raised with God, in fact, he says, it was the opposite. But when he and Debi were invited to a married couples’ dinner at a local church, they accepted, even though they were still just dating.”I remember sitting there next to a friend of mine and these couples went up and shared their testimony of why they were in love and what made their marriage work,” Tommy remembers. “They weren’t preaching, it wasn’t an evangelical tent meeting or something, it was natural, real life, and I remember it took me by surprise that I was enjoying myself.”He enjoyed himself so much that he went to church again on Sunday and even accepted an invitation to attend a men’s prayer group breakfast later in the week.”We had breakfast and then we started to talk. They bowed their heads and began to pray and as they were praying one guy started to lift this woman up who was caught in drugs and whose family was hurt by it, and all the sudden, I realized they were praying for my mom. And I remember thinking, they are praying for me and these guys don’t even know me and I just started crying. It was awesome. These guys, they weren’t praying for new cars or their jobs, they were praying for my mom and her sobriety.”God grabbed Tommy’s heart and hasn’t let go since. The following Sunday, Tommy stood up with the pastor after the service and gave his heart to God.”I remember going forward and standing with my pastor and Debi and not being able to think of anything except that my shoes were getting wet from the tears that were hitting my feet. I was crying on everyone’s feet,” Tommy says. “From that moment forward, I felt a sense of, first off, just love for God because he would take me from the drugs and the brokenness and the pain and would go, ‘I love you, and I forgive you, and I make you my own.'”Three months after he and Debi married, Tommy’s business crashed and everything that he had worked for and they had thought safe, was gone. The pastor of the church asked Tommy if he’d consider taking a job as a janitor and Tommy willingly accepted. And when it came time to hire a youth pastor for the church, they saw Tommy in a new light.”The night they interviewed the last guy, I had all of their kids with me cleaning the kitchen. One guy looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you should apply for this job,’ and I said, ‘I’m the janitor, are you kidding me?'”Tommy had no previous experience with children, even though his natural magnetism drew them to him. The leaders saw Tommy’s potential and hired him to be the youth director. Tommy says that his seminary was teaching children the Bible.”I think it’s actually the best way to learn the Bible because God’s message is simple,” Tommy says. “It’s not complex, and you don’t need to be a scholar to understand it, because God wanted every man and woman to be able to receive the love of God. It’s really the way the message should be always.”Tommy was present for the majority of Calvary Chapel Santa Barbara’s growth, from about 300 people to 2,000 (the church today has close to 4,000 members) and the church moved from building to building, the last building was two blocks from the beach and happened to be right across the street from a rescue mission and homeless shelter.”My wife and I were getting ready to have our first daughter and my mom was heavily involved in drugs,” Tommy says. “It was really very painful, I told her that she couldn’t be a grandmother, she couldn’t hold my daughter, and at that point she was at the lowest rung and she asked me to go with her to the rescue mission.”They put her in the program and she wasn’t able to talk to us for 90 days and in that process, Sarah was born. What’s so neat is my mom got sober and then she asked Christ into her heart and she wasn’t forced, she wasn’t coerced, she just really saw her need for forgiveness.”Today, Tommy’s mother still works at the Bethel House, the program that saved her from drugs and brought her to God.In 1997, after having come to Vail for vacation a few years in a row, Tommy’s senior pastor approached him about starting a church in the Vail Valley.”We prayed about it, contacted the people here in Vail that wanted us to come and then flew out and met with them,” Tommy says. “Then I challenged them to meet as a group and do a home group and we started meeting on the same night and we fellowshipped from across the country.”The first service Pastor Tommy did in the valley was on Oct. 12, 1997 and 50-something people showed up. Since then the church has grown steadily and has 250 families involved today, with services overflowing with people eager to hear Pastor Tommy’s message of God’s love.”We really love this community, we love our church and we love the people in it. We delight in what we get to do, it’s kind of a dream for us.”I think that (Calvary) is a church of people that are in love with God. I love that the heart of our church is that we desire to be very unified, we have great friendships with many of the other pastors and I feel like walls have come down in our community. Church’s are place where the wounded and the broken hearted and everyone can come, the church needs to not have walls.” VTCaramie Schnell can be reached at cschnell@vailtrail.com.