My name is Tanner Klinge. I had a great upbringing with wonderful, loving parents and a sister who I’ve always considered a best friend. I was baptized at a very young age so for a while I was under the assumption that I was saved because I was baptized. My family went to church and Sunday school, but as I got older I found more and more reasons why I didn’t want to go and slowly our church attendance started falling off. I had the basic understandings of who God was and who Jesus Christ was, but things never clicked for me and I was lost.
I feel God started working on me in December of ’08. I had been through some tough times, but out of nowhere I struck up a conversation with my first love, Chelsey, who I hadn’t talk with in 5 years since the last time we were together. Our relationship continued to grow quicker than I thought, but has been a true blessing in itself. Then we met Pastor Mike at Matt’s house unexpectedly, which was quite interesting because he wasn’t anything close to the “Pastor Image” I had of church leaders. He was a normal guy with a great sense of humor and easy to talk with, where I thought he would have been in a suit and tie, extremely stuffy, and difficult to understand. Then Matt getting baptized was a very inspiring thing to experience, which made me feel that I was missing something in my life. Going through the Stranger book (The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus
