Pat and Marilyn Nemmers joined us at Harvest Baptist Church for Summit Meetings 2025. This week Pastor Walton spoke with them about God’s work in their lives.
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Episode Transcipt
Chris Harper: Welcome to Harvest Time. My name is Chris Harper, and our host on this program is Pastor Gary Walton, the lead pastor of Harvest Baptist Church. Every week, we spend these twenty five minutes together telling you the stories of our church as we interview our members and other friends of the ministry. We have two services at Harvest Baptist Church every week, The first at 08:45AM, the second at 10:45AM on Sunday. We have Japanese and Korean translation during the 10:45AM service, and that’s also when we livestream at hbcguam.org. hbcguam.org. This week, we’re back in encounters with Jesus from Mark 9:17-29. Don’t let your doubts defeat you. Let’s begin today’s Harvest Time by welcoming Pastor Gary Walton. Hi, pastor.
Gary Walton: Hey, hafa adai, Chris. We’re coming back to our series this Sunday, and we’d invite you to come. Just this idea that one meeting with Jesus can change the whole journey of your life. And so we’re just looking at some of the encounters that the Gospels tell us of different people with Jesus, And we’re coming up on this very cool story in Mark chapter nine, where this, dad comes to Jesus to have his son healed, and Jesus says to him, If you believe, all things are possible. And I love the response of this, dad.
They’re asking for healing for his son. He just sort of cries out and he says, I believe, but help my unbelief. And I just think that’s a story of so many people. It might be your story that, that you’ve lived. And if you want to know what the Bible has to say about that question, I’d encourage you to come and join us this Sunday.
We’ll have a group of people that will worship God together, they’ll fellowship, you’ll find a sweet family, and we’d love to have you come and join us this Sunday. Well, I’m really privileged to be able to welcome and introduce to you, Pastor Pat Nemmers and his wife, Marilyn. They’re here on Guam for a week of special meetings, and we’ve had such a great time together. Glad that they’re here. Glad thank you for joining us on Harvest Time here today.
Pat Nemmers: Well, hafa adai to you as well, and it’s great to actually be in person in studio with you having shared this spot with you about a week or so ago.
Gary Walton: Yeah, about a week ago we did this over the phone and that was great, but it’s better to be in person.
Pat Nemmers: Yeah, it really is. And to have my sweetheart with you.
Gary Walton: Well, that’s the thing, right? Even better for Marilyn to be here. You guys did the whole long plane ride, Marilyn, and you’re here, and we’ve loved having you here on campus.
Marilyn Nemmers: Thank you. It’s been wonderful to be here, Pastor Gary. We’ve really enjoyed our time, and we enjoyed last night or getting to share our story. So Yeah. It’s it’s been a great time here.
Thank you.
Gary Walton: This is your first time on Guam. Right? Pastor Pat?
Pat Nemmers: Our our first time. We’ve been to many places, but we’ve never crossed the international date line Oh, until no.
Gary Walton: Yeah. Okay. Could you feel it? Did something change when you went over?
Pat Nemmers: We felt it a little bit, but we were just discussing with it this morning. We’re surprised and we’re thanking the Lord that we have not had serious jet lag as a result. I think part of it is because we broke it up staying a day in Hawaii.
Gary Walton: Yeah. Yeah. That probably did help a little bit. Pastor Pat and Marilyn have been here for our summit meetings. When you’re listening to this, we’ll just be past them.
They came for a Sunday through Wednesday set of meetings and we’re interviewing right in the middle of that. We’ve had just such a fantastic time. God has used your ministry of the Word and your story together to bless our church family so much, we’ve been so grateful for that. And of course, Faith and I have just enjoyed some personal time getting to know you guys and really thankful for your willingness to come.
Marilyn Nemmers: I’ve really enjoyed our time here just as short as it’s been. It’s been a joy to meet both you and your wife, Faith, Pastor Gary, I just really, really have enjoyed our time here.
Pat Nemmers: And we’ve been overwhelmed with this place, not just the church, but the schools and just the way this place runs, the Harvest House. So many impressive things, so many impressive people living for the glory of God. I can say without any shame, and to my wife, I can tell you this. When we visited the Harvest House, my wife was in tears from the beginning until she left. Yeah.
And just so so many things beyond just nobility, just beautiful things honoring to the Lord. This has been a real privilege, Pastor Gary.
Gary Walton: Well, it’s a humbling thing, I think, for any of us that are here, to be able to be living out the work of God that, you know, in a way that only he could do it. And I I know God’s working all around the world. We’re gonna talk about God’s work through your lives, the ministry that you’re, with, but we we do sense that God just has a hand of blessing on this place, and we’ve been able to just part, you know, come along beside as servants of God and see him doing some amazing things. And glad to be able to share it with you, but really thankful that you’ve been able to come and help us.
I mean, really help us.
Pat Nemmers: It’s been a joy. Thanks for letting us hang out with you.
Gary Walton: Pastor Pat is the long term senior pastor at Saylerville Church. Twenty seven years, do I have that right? Then from That’s now, God called them together to this ministry and has blessed it over the years. The church has grown from, I think you said around 300 people to now large, maybe close to 1,500 with eight seven, eight church plants in the same area, and so just God’s hand of blessing has been on you.
And, you know, your story together, you had a chance to share it with our church family, and I I wanna ask you a little bit more about it here. Could you just talk about how God brought the two of you together? Pat, why don’t you start, and then Marilyn, if you can give us a little bit of God’s work and your story of your families together.
Pat Nemmers: Yeah, so we are two families that became one. I was married for sixteen years to my first wife, Nina. We had seven children together. We began our walk with God together back in 1982. We both came to Christ in 1982, in September 1982, in fact.
And then in 1995, about nine years into our first ministry in Central Iowa in The States, Nina, my wife of sixteen years, who gave me those seven children, suddenly had a heart attack and died in my arms. And in a heartbeat, literally my world was turned upside down. And so I suddenly became a widower with seven children. And I knew of her, but I didn’t know her, not personally anyway. I’m talking about my wife Marilyn now, who and she had become a widow about six years earlier.
She had three children. And, we did meet one time at a at a special homeschooling event that put us all together. My first wife was still alive. Marilyn’s first husband was gone. What do you remember about that first encounter, honey?
Gary Walton: In fact, could I even back you up a little bit more too, Marilyn? Pastor Pat, you came from a Catholic background. Marilyn, you did too.
Can you tell us a little bit of that and then move it to the question that that, your husband was just asking you?
Marilyn Nemmers: I grew up a Roman Catholic also and all my life was and my parents were. And so, I started dating a young man in high school that was attending a bible believing church. And so I always had the influence or as we were dating, I had the influence of his mom in my life. And I always knew that there was something different about her. She never really was outgoing with her faith, but she lived it in And front of she always was very readily inviting us to for me to come to visit her church.
I always remember that about her.
Gary Walton: Mhmm. Yeah.
Marilyn Nemmers: She was a very loving woman, very loving.
Pat Nemmers: So that was your influence, and mine came from my brother. I too was raised in a strong Roman Catholic home, loving home. I have no regrets in my upbringing whatsoever.
Gary Walton: Yeah.
Pat Nemmers: But I had a a brother who he was a wrestler, which is in our estimation the greatest sport of all time.
Gary Walton: Wrestlers always think Yeah.
Pat Nemmers: And so we’re both wrestlers and he had just graduated from high school and encountered the Gospel that Christ you could have a personal relationship with God through the Lord Jesus. And he came to trust Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. And he started sharing with me. And I was just getting into high school and I could really care less at the time. But as Marilyn talked about her mother-in-law, her future mother-in-law, who became her mother-in-law, how godly she was, I recognized that in my brother.
He was just really different. There was something magnanimous about him. I just felt drawn to him and yet it was also very convicting to be too close to him because I didn’t know God. So but as I would end up marrying Nina and we, you know, started having kids. We actually just had one.
But this brother of mine was very effective in sharing Christ with me. Some other people came into my life as well, a guy that I worked with and all of them passionate about talking to me about Jesus. And in the fall, as I said, of 1982, I recognized my need for a personal Lord and Savior, repentance, and I trusted him as my personal savior. And and I think Marilyn’s was again, we didn’t even know each other then. Right.
You came to Christ a little bit before that, I believe.
Marilyn Nemmers: Yeah. Just a couple years. But it was kinda funny. It’s isn’t it just ironic how the people that God puts in your life, like God put my mother-in-law in my life, God put I went back to work part time when my my oldest was just what was he? A year old or whatever.
But the lady that I met to take care of him while I was working part time, she was a Bible believer. And she always loved me, loved me, loved me. And I never realized all those times that she was praying for me and praying for my son and my husband and I. And I never realized that until one day when I the day that I did accept the Lord into my life. She she found me that afternoon and she came running to me.
She was so excited to tell me that she heard the good news. And I said, What? And she said, I heard that you trusted Christ And as your it’s like, I didn’t realize it was such a big deal. I don’t know. But
Gary Walton: It is amazing. I love hearing the different points of contact of God using different people along the way that you don’t even know, but all of those were not coincidental. God was bringing different people to give you a little piece of his word that grew. You both experienced significant loss before God brought you together. Marilyn, can I ask you specifically about that?
Can you share a little bit of that journey of how the Lord sustained you through that?
Marilyn Nemmers: I was thankful that God had grounded me nine years before. As a believer, I put my trust in Christ when I was 25. Nine years later, my husband, he ended up being sick. He needed to get a liver transplant. Then God put my church family had been really important to me.
It had seen us grow those years after we accepted the Lord into our lives. We started growing. We started walking with the Lord. We started being a part of that church family. And I never realized how how crucial that church family was gonna be to my life in the years after after Lori went home to be with the Lord.
Gary Walton: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The sustaining fellowship of the saints is a powerful, powerful thing.
Marilyn Nemmers: I always said that these two friends that I had in my church were my Aaron and Ur, Hur. They were the ones that were holding up my arms when I was weak, I couldn’t do it by myself.
Gary Walton: Pastor Pat and Marilyn gave this just incredible testimony Monday night of our conference. In fact, you could go onto our website, I think, Chris, and we’d be able to find, you know, they did a back, you know, back and forth testimony that worked.
Chris Harper: hbcguam.org and just click on sermons. You can find the audio and you can find the video of that.
Gary Walton: Yeah. I’d encourage you to go back. If you weren’t with us on that Monday night, I’d encourage you to go back and watch that and listen to that story of God’s grace in your life. So married twenty eight years ago, something like that. Okay.
You brought together a family of 10 children from toddlers up to teenagers. What were some of the challenges and the joys of blending such a large family?
Pat Nemmers: Challenges and joys. Well, there are probably more challenges than joys. Now, it really was a wonderful joy to come together for the two of us. We were so happy that God had melded our hearts together. It was a genuine challenge to bring all of our children together.
Gary Walton: I’m sure.
Pat Nemmers: And as I mentioned there, our children love each other. They get along just fine. But it was, you know, they had to find room to bump into one another. Have 10 kids moving around in one location.
And so we did have to navigate a number of things. Probably the biggest thing we had to navigate early on was we were very close in proximity to where Maryland’s first church, first family, first relations and friends were. We’re literally twenty five minutes from that. Mhmm. And it was a, as she mentioned, a marvelous church.
Gary Walton: Yeah.
Pat Nemmers: And marvelous friends, a great place to be. But it became it was so powerful. It was almost like a magnet to Marilyn and to her kids just to keep going back that way. So that didn’t really pull us together very well. And so in the providence of God, he the church I pastored for nearly a dozen years was a great church, but we really felt like it was time to leave.
And Saylorville Church came after me, and so we as a unit, all 12 of us, moved from the Northern Part of Iowa down to the middle part of Iowa, way too far away for them to go back to church every Sunday, you know. And so we all were in one church. That really unified us, didn’t it, honey?
Marilyn Nemmers: Very much so, very much so.
Pat Nemmers: And tell our listeners what we did as a family every Sunday night because that became something our kids have never forgotten.
Marilyn Nemmers: And they still talked about it to this day. Every Sunday night, all the kids knew that no matter where they were, they had to be home around 10:00 and we would sit in the living room. Now we had a little living room, so there was All 12
Pat Nemmers: of the tiny living room.
Marilyn Nemmers: All 12 of us would sit on the floor, chairs, couch, whatever. But we sat together as a family and we would talk about the highlights, our highlight from that day. Now it could be, as Pat aways said, could have been something he preached about, it could have been someone we encountered, it could have been something that we learned in Sunday school.
Pat Nemmers: Maybe a song.
Marilyn Nemmers: Yeah, a song. Just whatever it was. But we had to share a highlight from the day.
Gary Walton: I can see it. I absolutely can see it. Yeah, it really seems like a beautiful picture.
Pat Nemmers: Well, I’m telling you, you asked to a child, and they’re not children anymore, they would tell you about that special half hour we had every Sunday night. Because, you know, some of them spoke much, most of them spoke little, but they all said something. And they knew coming into that night actually they knew coming into the day, I need to be thinking about what God this whatever however God however I encountered God today. I can just one story. We had a son that was starting it was our son that was starting to go into a dark place.
He was not healthy spiritually. But one son he wasn’t we didn’t make it obligatory, so he hadn’t said anything for several Sundays. And then on this one particular Sunday, he said he named the person. I think his name was Ron. He spoke to me today in the the foyer, and that and then I’m quoting him.
He goes, and that really made me feel good. And I remember thinking, and I tell you, our listeners who are Christians out there, there might be a little boy or a little girl out there that just needs to hear you say a kind word to them and it might just make their day. I’ll never forget that.
Gary Walton: Yeah. Wow, that’s powerful. Pastor Pat, you’ve led Saylorville Church for twenty seven years now. How has your personal story of loss, restoration, how has it shaped the way that you shepherd people in their seasons of pain and just seasons of life?
Pat Nemmers: Well, thanks for asking me that, Pastor, because it factors into everything.
It factors into my preaching. You know, I wrote a book a few years ago, and in that book I talk about how the loss of my wife revealed to me my lack of empathy that I had. If you’d asked me before I lost my wife, I would not deem myself as not compassionate. But when I lost my wife, God showed me I was not nearly as compassionate as I thought. Wow.
And that gives me and not just toward those who lost a spouse through death, but it has impacted me when I see someone who loses a spouse through divorce of their own not of their own doing, that type of thing, or other kinds of losses. I can look back and say, Lord, thank you for grafting this into my life. It’s made me a better pastor.
Gary Walton: You know, it’s something I’ve noticed repeatedly. People who have suffered deep loss rarely I don’t I can’t remember a person that comes away from that feeling like like, my loss is so much greater than other people’s. I actually always feel the opposite. It’s as if their heart of empathy has been opened up to all kinds of other losses. Yeah.
And in fact, sometimes I wonder, yeah, you’re so compassionate in that loss, but yours was so much greater, but I haven’t found that. I think there’s just an openness.
Pat Nemmers: And I would even say we don’t compare.
Gary Walton: Yeah, exactly. That’s the point.
Pat Nemmers: We don’t let if someone says it’s always kind of disingenuous when someone says, I know exactly how you feel. Well, is that even possible? So I never say that to somebody. We often say, we know something of loss, and we’re here to encourage you with some of the things that God has done to encourage us. Yeah.
Gary Walton: Marilyn, mom, ministry partner, what have you seen God teach you through the years about faith and family and just serving God together?
Marilyn Nemmers: God has always got my back. Mhmm. I, so many times, think that, you know, he doesn’t understand. I remember as a teenager, I I really struggled with being that obedient, you know, teenager. And I always fought back, you know, think thinking, you know, you don’t understand.
You don’t understand what I’m going through. But my heavenly father always understands what I’m going through, and I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful for that.
Gary Walton: Amen. Yeah,
Pat Nemmers: it was Spurgeon who said, Never dost thou misunderstand or misinterpret me. And that’s true of our God, right? Never misunderstands, he never misinterprets us.
Marilyn Nemmers: And you know, many times we think we have it tough. I remember when my first husband was in the hospital and we’d be walking down the hall going to a meeting or an appointment and my husband would be in the wheelchair and we’d be pushing him. And you’d always run into someone who had it a little worse, a little tougher than you. And it made me thank the Lord for what he had done in my life, what he was doing in my life, because that person had a lot tougher than me. And I think God just used that to always keep pointing me toward him.
Gary Walton: Maybe I could ask both of you guys this. You haven’t been on Guam long, but you’ve been around a little bit. We’ve had a chance to introduce you to some people and get a burden a little sense of the island and Harvest Ministries. As as you end up here, we still got a couple more days, then go. What will be your burdens?
What will be your how will you pray for Harvest in Guam? And and what ways could you could you encourage us, you know, as you just think about what God’s doing here?
Marilyn Nemmers: When I when we walk around and I think of all the different ministries of this church, be it the the littles to the grade schools, to the high school, the college, the
Pat Nemmers: Harvest House.
Marilyn Nemmers: Harvest House. It it it just blows my mind. I mean, I’ve seen ministries, but there is so much God love here at this at this location. Mhmm.
And it blesses my heart to see how God’s using each and every person here. And I just I I I just I just marvel. I marvel at what he’s doing here. I marvel pastor Gary. Amen.
Pat Nemmers: I hate to just say dittos, pastor Gary, but I just wanna say dittos. There is a lot of love emanating from all sides here. I would say that the students, they’re precious. They are precious to run into. And the servants, I mean, we came into the studio, you enter and we have been introduced to countless people.
We can never remember all their names. We’re in introduced to another servant out here just moments ago, and she her she smiled, she radiated, and she here she I think she’s picking up garbage at the time. And that speaks volumes to what God is doing in these harvest ministries.
Marilyn Nemmers: Amen. Yeah.
Gary Walton: Yeah. Amen. Well, I’m not just saying this. You guys, have come and fit right in, and, God has appointed you for this time. You’ve blessed our church.
You’ve blessed us individually and encouraged us. I’m thankful for Saylorville Church willing their willingness to release you for a little bit of time to be here. And, you know, our our prayers that, you know, God would have kinda grafted us together in some ways that we’d be able to pray for each other, encourage each other. And I know that you’ve done some things actually to lift up our arms here. And, so we thank you for that.
Thank you for coming and serving God in this way.
Pat Nemmers: It’s been our joy.
Marilyn Nemmers: It has our joy.
Chris Harper: And thank you for listening to Harvest Time. Of course, at this point in the program, we wanna personally invite you again to Harvest Baptist Church, two services this Sunday, 08:45AM and 10:45AM. We have Japanese and Korean translation during the 10:45AM service. And that’s also the service we livestream at 88.1 FM and khmg.org. We hope to see you this Sunday.
Thanks again for listening to Harvest Time.