Tony was born and raised in Southern California. At age 16 he met a young woman and a year later they were married (Getting married at 17 is not something Tony recommends. In his own words “I was way too young!”). Soon afterwards they had a daughter and shortly thereafter, real problems began. “It was mostly my fault”, Tony concedes. By 19 he’d become a full-blown alcoholic. Between the booze, drugs and women, his wife had had enough and filed for divorce. He says he can relate completely to what Paul says in Romans 7:19 “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.” “I found myself powerless to resist temptation” Tony confesses.
After intense begging, his wife allowed him to sleep on the couch and not on the street. It was at this time that God placed an on-fire Christian in Tony’s life. “I was working alongside a walking Bible”, he says. Not only did this man, Joe, know the Bible inside and out, but he lived it! He displayed true Christian love and shared the gospel with Tony daily. “I would go home every night and dig out this Bible another friend had given me and check out what Joe was telling me. After a week or so I began to read the entire New Testament.” Beginning at Matthew 1:1, a light went on when he reach 2 Corinthians 5:17. “I knew that I needed to become a new creature, not just change some of the things I had been doing.” Tony got on his knees that night and cried out to the Lord for salvation from his sinful life. God answered Tony’s prayer, and a month later his wife Michaelyn, and their two best friends received Christ as Lord and Savior. They had determined, (in his wife’s words), “Anything that can change a jerk like you, has got to be real!” They immediately began a three-month search for a church that “just taught the Bible as the Word of God”. They ended up at Calvary Chapel of Downey, California, where they grew and served for the next 13 years. Convinced it was God’s will, they moved to Tucson, Arizona, and immediately plugged into Calvary Chapel of Tucson where they both served for the last 17 years. In 2005, God led the Johndrows to Calvary Chapel of the White Mountains.