When COVID hit, and their regular congregations weren’t able to meet, their interest in Chesterton led them to start watching Mass online. They fell in love with the beauty and simplicity of the liturgy compared to the worship they’d been leading for so many years, and they began discerning their way home to the Catholic Church.

Read a written version of Lee’s testimony.

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He shares how he continued to wrestle with what Jesus commanded his apostles to do in remembrance of Him, and why he chose to enter the Catholic Church on the feast of Corpus Christi.

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Throughout my entire childhood, I witnessed my dad’s even-handed mockery of anything religious and my mom’s rather eclectic interest in everything religious. This polarity of perspectives shaped in me both suspicion and curiosity about religion. When I conversed about religion with my parents, who had adopted me when I was eight months old, they would always tell me, “Your biological parents were Catholic, but rather than having you baptized as a Catholic, we feel that when you are old enough, you should decide for yourself what you want to believe.”

My First Bible: Conspiracy and Curiosity

When I was in elementary school, my parents did allow my siblings and me to ride the neighborhood Sunday school bus that stopped on the street in our small Denver neighborhood every Sunday on its way to the local Baptist church. For some reason, my parents, who were not on the same page about their own religious convictions, also thought that they should put a Bible in my Easter basket when I was eight years old.

It was a Sunday morning in April of 1977, and there it was, nestled in the basket between the candy eggs and jellybeans, the green plastic grass, and the paddle-ball toy—a small white gift-and- award King James Bible. I grabbed it right out of the basket and stared at it in awe. My very own Bible! I knew it was an important book, but had no idea why, so I asked my mom to give me the scoop. She announced, in a conspiratorial tone of voice, that the Bible was “an ancient religious book written by a group of men whose goal was to control the masses through religion.”

My young brain wondered why she would want to give me such a book, but I was still curious about what it contained, so I set out to read it. I got to Genesis chapter six or seven, lost interest, and put it on the shelf. As I got older, I would go through this exercise repeatedly, occasionally thumbing through the shiny pictures inside, scanning the chapters toward the end that had red letters in four of the books, but never really figuring out what I was reading. Well into my late teens, the Bible remained a mysterious book for me.

“Mormon Cindy,” Confusion, and a Crisis

My family moved from Denver to Salt Lake City when I was nine years old, and my parents allowed me to attend the Lutheran church with my cousin. This didn’t mean their attitude toward religion had changed. I still remember my dad mocking my Sunday School class’s performance of a Bible song and having it become a standard family joke because we all found it funny, even into adulthood.

Despite these experiences at home, living in Utah opened my eyes to the reality that religion could permeate an entire culture. In Utah, discussions about God, Jesus, the Bible, and innumerable related topics were as normal as talking about one’s favorite sports team or television program. This further awakened my curiosity and openness to religious dialogue.

When I entered junior high, many of my Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) friends began attending religious instruction at a nearby LDS seminary during school hours. I saw them carry their Bibles and other religious books with them, eager to learn about their faith.

During my junior year of high school, I began dating a beautiful LDS girl named Cindy who, upon discovering that I wasn’t a Mormon, asked me to attend a series of discussions with the Mormon missionaries in her home. When I told my mother about it, to my surprise she exhorted, “Just be sure that if you read the Book of Mormon, you give the Bible equal time.”

I had also begun taking a karate class from a man who talked about being a “born again Christian.” He insisted that Mormonism was not “historic, orthodox Christianity.” I had no idea what that meant, but right away, I went from my crush on “Mormon Cindy” to a crisis. My pretty LDS girlfriend, her family, and all my Mormon friends at school were telling me their faith was the fullness of the truth, yet one of my mentors was telling me that not only was it not true, it wasn’t even Christianity! Again, my mother reminded me that I needed to make up my own mind, and my dad reminded me that no matter what decision I made, I’d still be landing in someone’s version of religious idiocy.

Born Again

During those days of crisis, my motives shifted dramatically from wanting to please my girlfriend, my karate teacher, and even my parents, to wanting answers in the simplest of terms: how could I know the truth, and how could I be sure I would end up in heaven when I died? On the evening of Thursday, July 24, 1986, I loaded up all the materials I had been collecting and took them with me to the Mormon temple in downtown Salt Lake City to talk with the missionaries there. I found a temple missionary and asked him a simple question; “How can I know Mormonism is true, and how can I be sure I’ll go to heaven when I die?” He replied, “Many are called, but few are chosen,” then smiled and walked away.

Confused and discouraged, I left too. As I left the temple square, I was immediately drawn to the sound of singing coming from a group of people marching up the street behind a man carrying a huge wooden cross. I couldn’t believe it! I ran over to the group and asked the first guy I met what they were doing. A young “surfer dude” from California, David, smiled as he said, “We’re taking this city for Jesus Christ! What are you doing here?” I opened my bag of books and blurted out, “I’m looking for God!” We stared at each other for a minute in excited disbelief; then, he asked me to step aside and sit with him on a bench in front of one of the buildings.

I told David about my experience with the LDS missionary and asked him the same questions: “How can I know the truth, and how can I know I’ll go to heaven when I die?” David took out his Bible and a small notepad and wrote down John 3:3 (“…you must be born again…”), John 3:16 (“…for God so loved the World…”), John 14:6 (“I am the way…truth…life”), and Romans 10:9 (“If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”). He said, “The simple answer is that you can know the truth by reading the Bible, and to be sure you’ll go to heaven you simply need to believe in and follow Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” Then he asked, “Would you like to pray and do that now?” I told him that I knew it was what I needed to do, but remembering my mom’s often-repeated words from my childhood, “You need to decide for yourself what you believe,” this was something I wanted to do alone.

The next night, after telling my parents and Cindy what had happened to me, I went to my karate teacher’s house to share the news with him. I had decided to be a “born again Christian.” I walked back to my car, and while sitting on the hood of my car in front of his house, I stared up into the night sky, praying aloud, “God I believe in you. I believe in Jesus. I want to serve you with my whole life. Please save me!” And then, like a flash flood, tears and joy filled me up, and I knew I would never be the same. In fact, that night, I knew my whole life had changed, and that I needed to serve God with my entire life. You could say that it was then that I first felt a call to ministry.

“Ignorance On Fire”

After my dramatic “born again” experience, I developed a ravenous appetite for theology, Christian preaching and teaching, and apologetics. I also began to listen to a daily radio program called The Bible Answer Man, hosted by the late Dr. Walter Martin. In this program, I “learned” that Mormons were wrong, Jehovah’s Witnesses were wrong, Seventh Day Adventists were wrong, and especially— CATHOLICS WERE WRONG!

What began as a deeply sincere quest for truth turned into what all my friends called my season of “ignorance on fire.” I attacked everything and everyone with whom I disagreed. I became an expert at tearing down the religious beliefs of others, and I learned that under no circumstances could I ever become Catholic. Catholicism, they taught me, was an apostate version of Christianity that had been corrected and restored to its original pristine doctrine and practice in the 1500s by men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and many others. Though this sounded curiously like the “restorationist” claims of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, I believed the people who were helping me, concluding that, like Mormonism, Catholicism was not Christianity, and that most Catholics were not Christians. This was something I heard repeatedly and eventually taught from my own pulpit when I later became a pastor.

The conflict with my family and most friendships became so intense and constant that my parents forbade me to keep a Bible in the house, listen to Christian music or any kind of preaching/teaching on the radio inside the house (even with headphones on), or attend church. They further forbade me to be baptized until I turned 18. Even my karate teacher told me on many occasions that my way of talking and “sharing my faith” was actually driving people away. I interpreted it all as persecution, and the day after my 18th birthday, I moved out of the house.

Baptism and the Navy

Like many young men in the late 1980s, after watching Top Gun, I rushed to the local Navy recruitment office. I signed up for the delayed entry program and was told to report to boot camp in San Diego, California, on July 6th, 1987.

I moved into a friend’s house on June 5th—the day after I turned 18 and graduated from high school—and spent the month preceding my enlistment attending a local Vineyard Christian Fellowship. I visited my parents on the 4th of July, asked my mom to shave my head, and then asked her and my dad to come to church the next morning to watch me get baptized. They agreed. I was baptized in water, and the following morning, I flew to San Diego. By evening, I was finishing my first day of boot camp.

The Wild West of Evangelicalism

When I joined the Navy in 1987, I began what was an exciting time of discovering all the different kinds of Evangelical and Protestant churches out there, as it often is for many young new Christians. It seemed that so long as a person believed that the Bible was the Word of God, believed in the Trinity, believed that Jesus was divine and “the only way to God,” there were innumerable possibilities with respect to just about every other kind of belief that a Christian could embrace.

During the year that my parents would not allow me to go to church, I simply didn’t have an opportunity to know much about “church life” as a new Christian. Once I left home and discovered I could visit a different church every Sunday, I initially felt like a kid in a candy store. There were churches that believed in the rapture (and others that didn’t), churches that believed in speaking in tongues (and others that didn’t), churches that believed in ordaining women (and others that didn’t), churches that believed you could lose your salvation (and others that didn’t), churches that believed in baptismal regeneration (and others that didn’t), and on and on. For every “true Christian church” that believed one thing, I could find another “true Christian church” in the same zip code that believed the exact opposite. All of these “Christianities,” as I came to see them, claimed to believe that the Bible alone was the sole infallible source of truth, and that their particular version of biblical truth was the most correct one. I also fell into that mindset.

In practical terms, my sense was that Evangelical Protestantism was basically an exercise in trying to get the most correct understanding of the Bible, and then finding a church or denomination that agreed with me (and the biblical teachers, authors, and commentators who I preferred to listen to and read).

From my understanding of the Bible, gifts of the Holy Spirit like prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues were still available and operating in the lives of Christians, just as they were in the Bible. So, I found my theological home among Charismatics and Pentecostals. The problem was that many of my fellow Pentecostals and Charismatics disagreed wildly about how these gifts became available to people, how to use them, and how to determine their legitimacy. Over time, my initial excitement began to feel more like I was a lone gunman in the wild west! It was me, Jesus, and my Bible (or rather, my interpretation of it).

Marriage, Ministry, and More Anti-Catholicism

Toward the end of my six-year enlistment in the Navy, I met my wife, MaryJo, on the island of Okinawa. I was serving on a Marine Corps base, and she, a pastor’s daughter, was a missionary at the Youth With A Mission base. When we began our relationship, we both felt a call to be together and to devote our lives to ministry.

During my final year of naval service, I began taking extension courses from Moody Bible Institute. Just over a year after leaving the Navy, MaryJo and I moved back to Salt Lake City and began attending the church that had brought those “March for Jesus” missionaries to town that I had met back in 1986. At the age of twenty-four, I became an associate pastor in that church, remaining in full-time pastoral work in three different congregations for the next twenty years. The lead pastor of that Assemblies of God church often spoke out against both Mormonism and Catholicism in his sermons. He himself was a fallen-away Catholic who “got truly saved” and discovered what he called real Christianity after watching a movie about the rapture at a local Evangelical youth group when he was a teen. His sermons often contained what I eventually called “hint of lime anti-Catholicism,” because there was always a hint of anti-Catholic rhetoric in almost every bite. This reinforced my own anti-Catholic bias and gave me even more ammunition when trying to get Catholics out of their religion and into ours. I also discovered, in every congregation I served, that many of the members had grown up in nominally Catholic families, “found Jesus” in a Protestant church, and ultimately became anti-Catholic.

In hindsight, I found that much of my own anti-Catholic sentiments and understanding of Catholicism came from listening to their stories.

Leaving the Mayhem—Three Watershed Moments

In 2010, nine years into my twelve-year tenure as the lead pastor of our Foursquare Gospel Church in central California, I had the opportunity to attend a biblical seminary at no cost. Three things happened to me during that time in seminary that would change the whole course of my spiritual life, and ultimately, set the stage for my conversion to the Catholic Church.

The first happened when I received my international ordination. During the ordination service, surrounded by fellow Foursquare ministers and an elder in our church who were laying hands on me, I began to think, “What right do these men have to lay hands on me and ordain me to the ministry? What does ordination even mean? Where do they get their authority to do this? Who gave it to them, and to those who laid hands on them?” The question slipped into a kind of infinite regress, and as I stood there to receive the highest level of ordination possible in my denomination, I could not bring myself to believe that any of these men had any legitimate authority to ordain anyone!

The second occurred in my New Testament program in seminary when, during one of his lectures, my professor remarked, “Of course, we know before the New Testament was formally canonized in the fourth century, there was a fully functional, evangelizing, and growing Church that was spreading all over the world. In fact, it was not until after the council of Nicaea that there was universal agreement about which books should be included in the New Testament.”

While I already knew this was true, I had honestly never sat still long enough to think through the implications. I wanted to be a “Bible teaching pastor” because I thought that was the ideal. But what I learned was that, for hundreds of years, there was no universal agreement among Christians about which books even went into the Bible. In fact, many Christian communities were growing, flourishing, and spreading the good news of Jesus before they ever had access to many of the books of the Bible that I took for granted; many Christians in the first generations of the Church’s existence never even knew that some of the New Testament books existed! How was this possible, not just during the time of the first apostles, but for over two centuries after the last apostle had died? Something else had to be holding the Church together. But what was it?

The final thing took place during my course in the book of Acts in my last year of seminary. I had decided to study the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, and as one of my questions for further dialogue at the end of my study, I asked if the Church in Acts 15—the one that could speak definitively about issues of doctrine and heresy, and which had the power to bind all Christians to the same doctrine and practice—was still present in the world today.

My professors and most of my friends and colleagues all had the same answer—no. It was up to each congregation, each denomination, and ultimately, up to each Christian to determine for themselves what the Bible taught, and to do their best to find fellowship with other believers who shared those same convictions. In that moment, I saw Evangelicalism and Protestantism as a shattered pane of glass—irreparably broken into a million disparate pieces. I resigned from pastoring and left evangelical Christianity just before my final semester of seminary in November 2013. I was, however, not yet Catholic.

The “Four L’s” of my Catholic Conversion

It wasn’t until five years after I had left pastoral ministry altogether, and several years of wandering through varied church involvement, that I experienced what I now call the “four L’s” of my conversion to Catholicism.

The first “L” is LOCUTION. That’s a Catholic word that, when translated into Pentecostal terminology, means “a word from the Lord.” While I was coming home from a trip to the beach near my home in Virginia in 2018, I drove by St. John the Apostle Catholic Church. As I drove by and noticed it was a Catholic church, I very clearly heard the Lord issue a simple command: “Go to that Catholic church.” I could not deny that it was the Lord, but I had no idea why I was supposed to go there. With my many anti-Catholic beliefs, I was not considering becoming Catholic. All the same, I knew I was supposed to go. I shared this with my wife, and she asked to go with me. The next Saturday evening, we went to Mass together. While I was somewhat lost in the liturgy, I could tell something powerful was happening. I just didn’t have a frame of reference to make sense of it.

A friend of mine who had converted to the Catholic Church heard about my visit and encouraged me to read Scott Hahn’s book, The Lamb’s Supper, before going to Mass again. I ordered it, read it in four days, and the next time I went to Mass, I wept all the way through it. I felt like a color-blind person who had gotten his special glasses—“Mass Glasses”—and I could see what, just a few days earlier, had been hidden from me. As I drove away from Mass the second week in a row, I had two thoughts. First, “I need to become Catholic!” But second, “Oh no! Oh God! How can I become Catholic?! I don’t believe in Catholicism!”

The second “L”—LEARNING—happened in the months that followed that initial experience of the Mass. I discovered that I had learned nearly everything I knew about Catholicism from anti-Catholic apologists, former Catholic and anti-Catholic ministers, and former Catholic and anti-Catholic congregants. I needed to learn what the Catholic Church taught and believed in her own language and on her own terms, without the baggage that so often accompanied the perspectives of non-Catholics. I spent the next several months reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church and innumerable Catholic theology books, listening to hours of teachings and lectures by trusted Catholic voices, and attending RCIA classes at St. John the Apostle parish.

The third “L”—LISTENING—happened as I discovered the innumerable conversion stories that had been written by dozens of people just like me—seminary-trained Evangelical Protestants of every stripe who had left it all and joined the Catholic Church. I read their stories of conversion, of sorting through their theological difficulties, and of letting go of their claims of personal infallibility, finally trusting that Jesus had founded a Church—the Catholic Church—which, I discovered, was the very same Church I had wondered about during my study of Acts 15. To my joy, I discovered that this Church was, indeed, still in the world after 2,000 years!

The fourth and final “L” is something I never dreamed would be possible: “LOVE.” I have come to love the Catholic Church. This is because I have heard God’s voice call me to enter into worship with the Catholic Church. I have learned, from the Church herself, what she really believes and teaches, and I have listened to others who have made the same journey home to full communion. In fact, I regularly tell people that, although I was a Christian before, following Jesus and walking in as much light as the Lord had given me, the Catholic Church has told me the truth in the best way I have ever heard it told. Speaking of love for the Catholic Church, I’ll end with a quote that I have come to treasure from G.K. Chesterton who, when explaining his own conversion to Catholicism, observed: “It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it, they feel a tug toward it. The moment they cease to shout it down, they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it, they begin to be fond of it.”

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You might consider us “COVID converts.” Looking back on all that led to us leaving our deep-rooted Pentecostal heritage for something we knew absolutely nothing about can only be described as a gift— an outpouring of grace during one of the most troubling and isolating years most of us will ever experience.

During the pandemic, people were scared and living in hopelessness; yet God was at work within our lives. In the middle of the chaos, we would decide to leave the familiarity of our religious heritages, our families, and our friends for the truth we had found in the Catholic Church. It all started with a corpulent early 20th century author from England and a wonderful literary society that wasn’t afraid to shine a light in the darkest of times.

Born Under the Pew

My wife Valiree and I were both “born under the pew” in the Assemblies of God, a charismatic Pentecostal denomination, in which our families have extremely deep roots. We both have aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws who are pastors and missionaries; grandparents and great-grand parents who were preachers and missionaries— with my great-grandfather being one of the first Pentecostal evangelists in Norway. Other family members serve as teachers, musicians and worship ministers, church board members and dedicated lay people. I even ended up marrying a pastor’s daughter! In other words, our families are deeply Christian and very Pentecostal.

Growing up, there were many things my family and the Assemblies of God taught me were important to the life of a Pentecostal Evangelical, always backed up by Scripture: the importance of Baptism (of the Holy Spirit and of water), worship, Scripture, prayer, being a part of a church community, serving in the church, and holy communion (though it was viewed as entirely symbolic). Our childhoods were profoundly Christ-centered and ministry- centered, and our relationship with Jesus and dedication to church shaped absolutely everything we did. I thank God often for the blessing of growing up in such a religious, Bible- based, and Spirit-filled heritage.

It was never a matter of if you would use your spiritual talents and gifts for the church and evangelization, but how and where. Being of a strongly musical family (many of whom could sing every song in the hymnal by heart), and like so many others my age who cut their teeth during the star- studded wonderment that was 90’s Christian Contemporary Music, serving in worship ministry has always been a part of me. I loved it. I felt, and still feel, that God blessed me with that particular gift of service. To live out Psalm 95, playing guitar and singing at every opportunity, was my ministry and calling. Not only did it bring me closer to God through worship, but it also led me to my wife. Valiree and I met on the church stage (she plays piano), and we served together in Las Vegas, Nevada, as worship and youth leaders for many years as part of her father’s pastorate in my childhood church.

Fragmented

A few years into our marriage, Valiree and I left her father’s church in search of our own ministry opportunities. We spent time in many different churches and even other charismatic denominations outside of the Assemblies of God in worship ministry, serving in leadership roles across Las Vegas during our first 15 years of marriage. Being in a town that’s obsessed with showmanship, we were part of a very hip, modern worship scene with rocking music and first-class musicians. We would serve where we were needed, from youth ministries to conferences, new church plants, and Bible study groups. We were raised and wired to serve wherever and whenever we could.

Between 2006 and 2017, we served in seven different churches, all in the same city, all with different interpretations of how to “do church.” The idea that something was wrong with this model started to penetrate me. I witnessed firsthand the type of division that seemed so deeply rooted in the Protestant culture: church splits and dissension over styles of music, styles of preaching, or even styles of management. If you didn’t agree with something, you would simply leave for another church or start your own.

In 2018, we started attending a non-denominational church, refreshed by the verse-by-verse Bible preaching and the focus on the cross, salvation, and winning souls for Christ, which seemed a positive departure from what we had experienced previously. It certainly checked all the boxes for us, and we saw many opportunities for growth and use of our musical talents and leadership from spending all those years in worship ministry.

It didn’t take long, though, for the same issues that plagued other churches in the Las Vegas valley to make their way there as well. Things modernized, got louder, bigger, and “better,” like so many other “seeker friendly” churches. The cross, normally located behind us on stage, was eventually taken down and replaced with black painted walls and new lighting—an attempt at making sure the experience was flashy, but not too offensive to “seekers,” as many Christian symbols can be.

Unsettled by this, 2018 brought about much prayer and personal study to help fill in some of the gaps. We took matters into our own hands, and my wife started homeschooling both our kids more intensively, with a purposeful Christ-centered focus. I remember, during this time, having a distinct longing to study how historical Christianity would view some of these big questions we had about ministry, the church, and our roles in spreading and sharing the love of Jesus through the modern worship experience. What was Christianity even like before the electric guitar?

An Englishman In Las Vegas

Whenever these questions of Christian identity crept into my mind, I would revisit a core group of authors who always had a positive impact on me, from modern influences like John Eldridge and Francis Chan, to spiritual giants like C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and my personal favorite, G.K. Chesterton. I discovered Chesterton when I was just starting out as a freshman majoring in English at the local university in Las Vegas, while flipping through an English 101 book and landing on a short poem called The Donkey. I started looking into who this Chesterton fellow was and discovered that C. S. Lewis was tremendously influenced by him. I was hooked, and I began searching for more Chesterton wherever I could find him. Whenever I felt numb to the modern church experience and needed intellectual reasoning behind my core beliefs as a Christian, I would visit Chesterton to see what he had to say about things. In fact, the first book I gifted my wife before we were even engaged was a copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. “Read this,” I said, “it’s the best book on Christianity I’ve ever read.” God bless her, she did read it. It wasn’t until much later that I would realize the role Orthodoxy played in our lives, or the blessing of having a wife so open to her husband’s bouts of zealously sharing what he’d recently discovered about our Christian faith.

Being quite the proud and bookish English major, I followed the American Chesterton Society, regularly visiting the Society’s website over the years. But it was during these challenging times at church I would fondly remember all those late nights I had spent in college, watching a show called The Apostle of Common Sense on a cable TV channel I’d randomly stumbled upon. It was during these years that I found myself longing for those expositions that Dale Ahlquist gave of Chesterton’s common-sense Christianity. There had to be something more to the way we “did church.” My curiosity about how Chesterton saw the world finally got the better of me, and I became a card-carrying member of the Society in March of 2019, receiving my first Gilbert! Magazine and starting to follow the group more intently on social media.

Setting The Stage

2019 was also significant for my ministerial career as a guitar player and worship leader. Not only did I have opportunities to play various conferences and concerts and help in recording original worship songs, but in March of 2019, I was able to travel with the worship team to Mexico City for a large outreach event featuring some big names in the Christian music industr y. I was humbled by the opportunity to minister at such a large event and genuinely moved as thousands of people came down to the stage to ask Jesus to be their Lord and Savior, while thousands of Bibles were passed out to new believers during the altar call. This was what we in worship ministry lived for—a chance to impact people through praise and worship music. Yet something gnawed at my heart as I watched the outreach service end and all those people made their way out of the stadium and back to their homes, never to be seen by us again. Was this all just a flash in the pan? Where will those people go to church tomorrow?

What Am I Protesting?

That same month, the Chesterton Society started posting a Chesterton Academy school trip to Rome on Instagram, asking for prayers to be prayed by all the students who were there in Rome visiting some of the most ancient and sacred places of our Christian faith. The thought of this was difficult for me to grasp. People I didn’t even know, praying for me? No secret handshakes? No “if you’re Catholic, we will pray”? No “us vs. them,” but unity—real Christian unity—something I had never felt before in my hyper-localized, competitive turf-wars church reality. I remember responding with a simple request for prayer, and just knowing that members of the Society were praying halfway around the globe for me was unbearably humbling.

If being a charismatic Evangelical taught us anything, it’s how we got it right, and how lost Catholics are, living in the shadows of empty cathedrals now serving as museums. Yet here was a very alive, very Catholic group of young people extending their hand in prayer and fellowship while meeting with other energetic, Christ-filled Catholics in Rome (how many of them are there?!), surrounded by unimaginably beautiful art and historic places. For the first time ever, I felt a real connection to those places as a Christian. Also for the first time, I asked myself, “If I am a Protestant, then what, exactly, am I protesting?” This was the same Jesus that we followed, right? As a Christian, isn’t this part of my history? In those moments, Christendom became real and universal and big—but somehow closer than ever before, and suddenly, everywhere.

Throughout the rest of 2019, I surveyed the Catholic Church, but from a distance. I would research Catholic vs. Protestant, finding as many documentaries as I could about Church history or the Reformation and looking up Christian apologists I admired for their take on Catholicism. I searched with the hope of them possibly talking me off this dangerous ledge, this secret little hobby of mine of being a member of the Chesterton Society, which I now realized happened to be very Catholic—and me suddenly ready to defend their being Catholic. The gap between how we “did church” versus what I was discovering about how Catholics lived the faith continued to grow, and I started questioning more and more why we believed what we did as Protestants.

The Show Must Go On

Then, like a crash of frying pans, a global pandemic hit in March of 2020. Everything screeched to a halt, including our normal worship and music routine. During the chaos of the shutdown, I was called upon quite often from various contacts to help fill in with playing guitar and singing while churches scrambled, deciding who was more at risk or what services would be kept and which would go fully online. Streaming and production quality were now of utmost importance. We had a show to do, after all.

Around that time, the Chesterton Society sent out an update, saying they were going to start streaming the Mass on their YouTube channel from a local parish in Minnesota, as all in-person gatherings were prohibited across the country. Intrigued, I tuned in to watch one day, and what I saw changed my life.

No studio-quality sound, no multi-camera shots and production lighting. It looked like someone was holding up a phone, and live-streaming the event. I had never even seen a Mass before, but it was most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The reverence and care taken, especially while preparing Communion, the beauty of what was unfolding, is hard to put into words even now. I just remember tears falling down my face, wondering what I had witnessed. Was that what actually happened at a Mass?

Suddenly, attending church became important. Being there became important. I wanted to be there! The preaching (I didn’t even know it was called a homily) cut through me because of its absolute hopefulness. I immediately rewatched the whole thing with my wife Valiree, saying, “You need to watch this.” Her reaction was the same as mine: tears filled her eyes.

We couldn’t get enough. Ever y opportunity we had and ever y posting on the Chesterton YouTube channel, we watched—Daily Mass, choir concerts, Easter Vigil, everything. One morning, I remember watching Mass early, and my son, then 5 years old, came down and started watching it with me. He asked why there was a cross, and why Jesus was on it. It broke my heart! We had a wonderful moment talking through the meaning of the sacrifice made for us on the cross. If anyone needs an example of why having a crucifix in church is important, this is it.

What Did We Just See?

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed and surprised at the reaction we had to everything we were seeing, I did what any responsible Protestant would do: I immediately purchased a copy of the Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul’s Are We Together?: A Protestant Analyzes Roman Catholicism. There must have been something I was missing, something that would show me why we weren’t all Catholics, and I was looking to Sproul to help identify it. This project did not have the desired effect. I would read passages from that book out loud to Valiree and ask her, “Do you agree with that?” “Of course I do,” would mostly be her response, to which I would emphatically say, “That’s Catholic!” It seemed like almost everything we learned through reading our Bibles and growing up in the Assemblies of God was in line with what I was reading about Catholicism.
We researched as a family and continued to watch Mass online. While I continued to lead worship and play guitar at our church every Sunday, something didn’t seem right anymore. Something had changed, and it scared me to death.

I Can’t Be a Catholic!

Still skeptical, I thought maybe there was something in the Catholic Catechism that would be my “Gotcha!” moment to dispel these beliefs. What a mistake that was! Not only was I agreeing with Catholicism as outlined in the Catechism, I found myself mentally defending their beliefs when I compared it with things I would hear or read regarding things like the “whore of Babylon” or a lack of a “personal relationship” with Jesus. I knew it wasn’t true, because I was actually reading what Catholics believe. I also knew what I had read in the Bible, and those two things lined up!

As I continued to research, enthusiastically sharing everything I was learning with my wife, I kept thinking over and over, “But we can’t be Catholic.” Who has ever heard of such a thing—Pentecostal, spirit-filled believers leaving the religion of their family and giving up all they’ve ever known? I remembered Chesterton and The Apostle of Common Sense show I used to watch. What channel was it? Some religious one with a nun. Maybe I can get my fill of Catholic teaching on the side, tuning in occasionally to fill in some of the gaps I was feeling with our own church.

Then, after work one day, in the late spring of 2020, I tuned in to EWTN on satellite radio, just to see if the content was similar to that of the Chesterton show I used to watch. As if on cue, I joined in the middle of a program called The Journey Home. “Wait,” I thought, “Did they just mention they were former Protestants who converted to Catholicism?!” I wish now I could remember who it was that was being interviewed, but I was floored. These people do exist! Converts from Protestantism do exist! It became a normal dinnertime listen on Monday nights for months as my wife and I talked through, and related to, the interviews of others who had “crossed over the Tiber.”

We continued opening the door a little more. Over the summer, we would watch Mass as much as we could online, and like any good virtual parishioner, signed up for Catholic content providers like FORMED and others, using our “virtual parish” to sign up. All the kids wanted was to be part of it. They begged us to be baptized and to receive real Communion like they saw others doing during online Mass. They hungered for it, and I envied them. What was once the simplest and most forgotten part of my church experience had now become the one thing they wanted most at church.

I Will Be Catholic No Matter What!

It was then we realized that to be a Catholic was to be fully Christian. How could we not do this? We needed to do something about it. I tried to recall what that Catholic parish it was that we used to drive by when I was a kid, when we’d joke about all the Catholics trying to hurry to get to Mass, causing a traffic jam at the stop sign. We looked it up online, and I found the priest’s email address. If anything, the process of discovering Catholicism and becoming increasingly excited about finding this “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45–46) does make you bold—bold enough to knock on every door you can find.

During this time of COVID lockdowns in the fall of 2020, churches were just starting to open back up with extremely limited reservations-only style online ticketing, with temperature checks at the door. Though the website said it was restricting in-person attendance to current parishioners only, we didn’t care. We had to see a Catholic Mass in person, and I would register us as quickly as slots became available for that week so we would not miss out. I emailed the priests (all of them on the contact list; I didn’t know the differences or why there was more than one at this point), explained our situation a bit, and asked for a meeting.

What we heard back was not entirely encouraging: “Please call the office to schedule a meeting.” Upon calling, the main priest had availability a week or so later, so we put that on the calendar. In the meantime, we kept attending in person as much as possible, and we began observing all that was around us: why do they kneel? When do they kneel? Googling “What to do at your first Catholic Mass,” we mostly sat toward the back to not look too out of place.

When the time came for our first meeting with the priest, we shared our story…and he hesitated. He said, “I’ve heard of people like you, but I’ve never actually met one. Why would you want to be a Catholic now? Are you sure you want to do this? You’ll create absolute chaos in your family!” I responded quickly, “Because it’s the truth!” I’m sure my face said, “Duh!” Unfortunately, this was one of many encounters on our journey over the years with priests that didn’t quite know how to handle us or the situation we found ourselves in. We were somewhat demoralized, but this was counterbalanced by a wonderful RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) instructor who had heard about us and would sneak us into Mass whether we had a reservation or not. We wanted it so badly, and she knew it. She was more than happy to go out of her way for the four of us.

After a few months of RCIA and absorbing everything we could, Valiree and I were confirmed in the Catholic Church on Divine Mercy Sunday (the Sunday following Easter), April 11, 2021. My kids, eager to move past just receiving a blessing in the Communion line to fully receiving the Eucharist themselves, asked us both with excitement and wonder after we received our first Holy Communion, “What was it like?” “Home,” I said. It tasted like I’d come home.

Our kids finished up RCIC (Rite of Christian Initiation for Children) while Valiree and I both served in the RCIA class helping other converts learn about the Church. We also began volunteering in various other ministries at our parish, helping out wherever we could. Then, on Easter Vigil in 2022, my son and daughter were both baptized, confirmed, and received their first Holy Communion, something they both were anxiously awaiting.

His Ways Are Higher

For many, the pandemic brought out the worst in people. But even years before, something much darker was making its way through charismatic Protestant circles. Genuine men and women of God were starting to turn their backs on their faith in large numbers as praise and worship artists, Christian authors, and popular pastors we grew up with and learned Christianity from in the 90s were suddenly renouncing their faith. This startling trend was made worse by the church shutdowns of 2020, and sadly, to this day I still hear of those I served with who haven’t returned since, their disenchantment with religion reaching a boiling point.

Yet here we were, somehow able to find the deeper truth instead of abandoning it. It has been incredible to reflect on the people and the connections God has sent us along this journey, and how everything unfolded over the last few years. There were challenges, and I had my apprehensions, wondering to myself many times, “How could this be?” But here we were.

During our first RCIA classes in the midst of the pandemic, only a few of us met together, masked up and six feet apart. After one session, I went up to our instructor (who knew our background at that point) and asked him fervently, and maybe even with a little bit of fear, “Why me? Why my family? Why now?” He then looked me in the eyes, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Because you listened.”

Even now, as I reflect on the circumstances that led to our conversion, I am in awe at the hand of God gently guiding me, nudging me, and showing me a closeness to Him and His Son that, even growing up in a very charismatic tradition, I had never felt before. For us, it wasn’t about leaving anything. It was about entering into the fullness of Christianity—the same Christianity that was handed down to me from my parents and grandparents, just made complete in the Catholic Church.

The post Chesterton, COVID, and the Catholic Church appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

*****

I wrote this essay over a decade ago when I was in a very different phase of life. I’d given up my position as the pastor of a lovely little church on Cape Cod and relocated with my wife and three children to St. Louis. Here, we were received into the Church, and I began the process of being ordained to the priesthood. Even then, I was still feeling my way into the Catholic Church. At the time this essay was published at the website Called To Communion, it garnered a number of responses, one of which was the question of how I might feel in the future about the words I had written. Would I still feel happy to be Catholic?

I have to say, I feel the exact same today. I still find myself, even if I’m older and wearier in some ways, standing in wonder and awe before Christ and his Church. If anything, the enchantment has only increased. I’ve fallen even more in love with Christ. The only explanation for this spiritual growth is that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has pried open a door in my heart. I peer through and the world beyond is timeless and wide, filled with the glory of God. In some way, even though I’m still lingering somewhere between, as it were, the porch and the altar; and even though none of us will be home until we finally meet God face to face, at the Mass, embraced by the communion of saints, I am somehow, nevertheless, home.

“Hear yet my paradox: Love, when all is given, To see Thee I must see Thee, to love, love;
I must o’ertake Thee at once and under heaven. If I shall overtake Thee at last above.
You have your wish; enter these walls, one said: He is with you in the breaking of the bread.”

– From The Half-Way House by Gerard Manley Hopkins

At Yale, there used to be an auxiliary library buried underneath the green in front of the Sterling Memorial Library. One fine fall day, I happened to find myself not out amongst the foliage but rather tucked away below the sunshine and the sod, reading a book. I suppose it was an odd choice. This was the ugliest space I know of on an otherwise beautiful campus. So ugly, in fact, that it was targeted for a remodel and is now gone. But there I was, and perhaps even more odd, I, a good Anglican- priest-in-training, was reading Cardinal Newman. Not the good parts that we Anglicans agreed with; the parts about the Oxford movement and the Church Fathers. No, I was reading the Apologia; the story of his conversion to the Catholic Church. I was particularly bothered by one specific bit. I was at the part where Newman makes his point that, fundamentally, there is no difference whatsoever between Arianism and Anglicanism. One is reviled and discredited, the other respectable and vital. But look closer, Newman argued, look underneath. What is there? Rebellion. There, buried beneath the sartorial splendor, the monarchy, the gorgeous liturgy, the incense, the polyphonic chant, and the prestige of Oxford was a group of Christians steeped in the bitter throes of willfulness. Yes, it is wrapped up in the respectable sounding doctrine of the Via Media, but of course, the Via Media is the last refuge of all theological scoundrels. Newman got to me that day, blinking in the fluorescent lights of a now disappeared world. My own world, comfortable as it had been, began to slip away as well.

Or perhaps it really slipped away the day I read the story of another convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is the Hopkins who I am convinced could convert the world through his poetry if only we gave him our attention. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” indeed. But for Hopkins, this only became the case through his own participation in the mystical life of the Church. His poetry before his conversion he came to consider vain; worthy only of being burned (yes, he actually did burn all of his poetry). While still at Oxford, Hopkins saw the beauty of the Catholic Church and became determined to convert. In the intervening period, as all his friends and sometime prospective employers tried to talk him out of it, he wrote in his journal that he felt “like an exile.” I read those words and the Holy Spirit did His work and I understood that until I converted, I too would feel the pain of exile.

It had taken me a good bit of time to work my way to this point. I grew up a free-church Pentecostal of sorts. I never thought of myself as anti-Catholic. But in retrospect, goodness, was I anti-Catholic! The problem with Catholics, everybody knew, was that they worshiped statues. Nothing could be more clear. As a child, I simply assumed this to be the case. There were statues in their churches, none in mine, prima facie idolatry.

Sadly, this manner of thinking is implicit in Protestantism. I suppose it is the blindness that comes with rebellion; like Adam hiding from God in the garden because he had lost sight of the true Good. It isn’t necessarily our place to blame our separated brethren. After all, most didn’t choose to be born Protestants and be indoctrinated in the habit of divisiveness; but it certainly is our place to be patient with them and to pray for them, and when the occasion calls for it, to attest steadfastly to the truth of the teachings of the ancient Church.

I bring all this up because this was the position in which I found myself as a young college student. Dissatisfied with my own brand of the Christian religion which denied it was a religion and my own inherited tradition which denied it was a tradition, I thought briefly about Catholicism. I even went to Mass a few times. It was fascinating. I was attracted to it. I felt something solid about it, comforting, and yet, I knew for a fact that these people worshiped statues! Okay, with age, my critique became a bit more subtle. But in the long run, aren’t all our arguments against the Church just as silly and vain? She outlasts us all. We can kick and scream and throw tantrums; legislate against her, slander her, outlaw her priests and persecute her children: the Church still prevails. She fears nothing. And because of this, she is able to be generous and patient.

The greatest novel of all time (no one argue with me on this) is Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. In it, Waugh describes a family who keep their country seat at Brideshead in the ancestral home. The family itself is a mixed lot—a father living abroad in sin, a domineering mother, a son who is a flamboyant dandy, a worldly daughter, and an overly-childlike daughter. Waugh describes the slow decline of Brideshead as the family disintegrates and scatters. This dissipation works itself out universally in the advent of the Great War, which finally swallows up all of England and turns Brideshead into quarters for Army command. In the end, though, we are left with a scene in the house’s private chapel, where the altar lamp is still lit and a lone priest says Mass for an old woman. I am a lot like that family. Many of us probably are.

You see, conversion is a gift. Mother Mary holds her Son for us, patiently suffering at the foot of the Cross. We can ignore her, go our own way, rebel—it doesn’t matter. Hanging on the Cross, Christ says to each and every one of us, “Behold your Mother.” She is here still. Waiting. We may be elsewhere, doing God knows what, but above the altar the candle still flickers. This is the light by which, in time, we find our way home.

As a young Pentecostal, I wasn’t yet ready for the Church, but She is patient. And so my story continues.

I became an Anglican. This was a place that seemed to have it all: dignity, beauty, wonderful music, good order, tradition, and of course, they didn’t worship statues. I don’t like the idea of tearing into the Anglican tradition as far as specifics go, so let’s be content with Newman’s fundamental insight. As nice as my sojourn in Anglicanism was, I began to feel a lack. It was like the Nothingness from Never-Ending Story (the scariest movie of all time, don’t fight me on this). It’s hard to explain; I just know that after a while my heart wasn’t in it. I was still wrestling every single, little belief I held. There was never any rest.

What was worse, having been taught that a good follower of Jesus always goes to His Holy Word for life-giving truth, I could not help but notice that the word of God speaks of something called “The Body of Christ.” This Body is identifiable; it consists of those who have been united with Christ through Baptism and have received the Holy Spirit for purposes of holiness and witness. It is ordered by the governance of Bishops, thus allowing orthodoxy to flourish and the ancient Gospel truth to be defended; as Paul advises Timothy, the Church is the “pillar and foundation of the faith.” (1Tim 3:15 NIV) The Body of Christ is the Church, visibly united, gathered around the crucified and risen Lord, and fed by Him in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This is the way in which Christ is present to His people. He is, of course, not confined to simply being present in the Communion feast but this is His chosen way, a marked moment, if you will, by which all other moments are defined. If Christ is potentially present in this world in any place, it is because He is first present in the Eucharist. This is why He says “unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you have no life in you.” He is our sustenance. He is our all. So, as Church, we are called to visibly gather around the Lord’s altar to give thanks and to be fed. This is not just a mysterious, ancient rite. It is the redemption of the world.

You can see the problem here, right? I was on the outside looking in.

In a real sense the Church has become fractured. We no longer gather around the table as the One Body. To me, this means much more than an organizational difficulty. This means that we have presented to the world a scandal. We have divided up the Body of Christ. We have protested against each other, separated ourselves, held our doing God knows own judgment up against that of the Spirit-inspired Church. A close reader of the Bible will come to the conclusion that what, but above Christ and his Church, the Head and the the altar the candle Body, are inseparable. And yet, in our practice, we pretend that this is not the case.

It is a big deal, a really big deal, for Christians to hold themselves apart from visible communion. We might all protest from our various theological kingdoms that we aren’t the ones who have gotten it wrong. We are not to blame. Perhaps not. Or perhaps all of us in every corner of Christendom are to blame. No one gets off easy with this one.

Ultimately, my goal is not to point the finger at others but to examine my own conscience. Had I held myself apart from visible communion with the Catholic Church because I thought I knew better? The answer is, yes, I had. My journey towards the Catholic faith has not, at its core, been a journey of personal enlightenment or one in which I have held up the Church to my own opinions and finally found it acceptable. This would be to make the Church too small, and as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, the Church is ever so much larger on the inside than it seems from the outside. Mine has been a journey towards faith. I have learned to believe first so that I might later begin to understand, rather than understand so that I might then believe. My intellect simply isn’t up to the challenge that the latter option presents. I trust that when Jesus breathed His Holy Spirit into His disciples He was anointing His Church to be, among other things, the guardian of the sacred and simple truth of the Gospel.

I have learned to rest in the truth that the Church teaches. I do not make my own salvation through knowledge or emotional experiences, through following this teacher or that. Whether I realize it or not, God is doing a great work in me. It was begun at the Cross, is sustained by the Holy Spirit, and will be completed at the final judgment.

I borrow this analogy from the English poet and convert John Dryden, but it fits me. In the Aeneid, Virgil writes about an encounter that Aeneas has in the forest outside of Carthage. He has wandered there after losing many of his men at sea during a storm. In the forest, a woman approaches him, falls into conversation with him, and comforts him in the midst of his troubles. It is only after she turns and walks away that he recognizes her. It is his mother. He recognizes her by the way that she walks.

I am sure that I could put up a good fight on all of the various theological and biblical reasons why I believe in the Catholic Church, but I would really prefer to say simply that the visible, undivided Church, the Church that Jesus prayed for in His last moments with His disciples, the Church that is the Mother of us all not on her own merits but because she holds Christ within her womb; this I have recognized by the way that she walks.

Even though I’m making a bit of an attempt, this is not the kind of thing that one explains between the soup and dessert course while at dinner. At least this is what Newman once said when asked “why become Catholic?” It is a deeply personal and intimate spiritual journey. It is the search for one’s mother. In this case, she has been here all along.

I can say this—in turning to the Catholic Church I do not turn to something foreign and alien to Anglicans or Evangelicals. I turned, rather, to the Catholic Church in order to become more fully what I already was. I have been raised to expect joyfully the activity of the Holy Spirit in my life; I expect Him all the more. I have come to understand the beauty of the English liturgy, the patterns that are formed through Common Prayer, the primacy of Scripture, and salvation through Christ alone apart from my own efforts; I believe in those all the more.

I have decided to give what I am to God, which means to take my place in his Body here on earth. My hope in Christ is that my gift given and carried along by the work of the Cross will be acceptable and pleasing to God, and that the promise to those who die to the old life is that they will have new life more abundantly.

I would like to quote from the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, also a convert to the Church, who spoke these words to his parishioners. I too spoke these words to my parishioners during a tearful farewell. I wish I had written them, but I will make these words mine: “To those of you with whom I have traveled in the past, know that we travel together still. In the mystery of Christ and His Church nothing is lost, and the broken will be mended. If, as I am persuaded, my communion with Christ’s Church is now the fuller, then it follows that my unity with all who are in Christ is now the stronger. We travel together still.”

This wouldn’t be a conversion narrative if I didn’t make note of the fact that on October 16th, 2011, my wife and I publicly professed our faith to be that of the Catholic Church and were given the sacrament of confirmation by the Most Rev. Robert Carlson, Archbishop of St. Louis. This was the best day of our lives .

*****

An earlier version of this story first appeared on the website Called to Communion on October 26, 2011. Reprinted with permission. 

The post Into the Half-Way House: The Story of an Episcopal Priest appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Courtney has also shared a written version of her testimony: read it here.

The post Courtney Comstock – Former Pentecostal appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

As the opening line of the Rule of St. Benedict states, “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” I’m writing this on the Memorial of St. Benedict, a fitting time to reflect and be thankful. So get ready for “lift-off” as my journey home into the fullness of the faith and service in the Catholic Church takes flight.

The Early Years

I was born in 1957, at the dawn of the “space-age,” when the Russian satellite Sputnik set the Space Race in motion between the United States and the Soviet Union. Just south of Seattle, WA, where my brother, sister, and I were born, my father was employed as a Boeing engineer working in Space and Defense. This meant he worked on many projects related to Cold War issues and directly on the Saturn V main stage rocket, which eventually sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon and safely home. Because of my father’s work, we moved wherever Boeing sent us — from Seattle to Huntsville, back to Seattle, down to Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach, and then back to Seattle for good. My childhood was shaped by NASA and Boeing, interest in beauty and the arts, and the great outdoors. This background would help shape an unexpected pilgrimage into a strange, yet beautiful, world of grace, love, and wonder for me as an ex-Evangelical Protestant pastor, for my wife Diane, and our two teenage girls.

My memories of church life during my early childhood, mostly at a small Missouri Synod Lutheran Church in Huntsville, AL, are vague but important memories of loving people who treated both my siblings and my mother with kindness. (My father rarely attended.) My mother did a good job giving us a knowledge of God’s existence and basic Christian morality formed from the Ten Commandments. Flannel graphics were a favorite of mine, especially before Sunday school classes began depicting rocket launches and safe re-entry instead of religious principles. One significant event from this time occurred on a Sunday after church, as I was watching a weekly program on a Christian television station. I remember this episode had to do with a family tragedy, and as I watched the program, the thought ran through my mind that, as an adult, I would like to be helping families with hardships and challenges. This experience still guides me.

As I grew older and began high school, my family’s involvement in church waned. I became enthralled with the NFL and Sunday football. In short, we soon became “Christmas and Easter Christians” and neglected church life in general. If I had to describe where I was in my spiritual life at that time, I would say that I was a believer in God but didn’t see how God could be interested in my life. I did believe Jesus was the Son of God, but I had no concept of what that meant or why it mattered. As for the Holy Spirit, somehow, He was part of this, but how, I had no clue. In fact, my life after high school was rather confused and unguided. I had no idea where I was going or how to formulate a plan to get anywhere. Boeing and engineering didn’t interest me; working at Boeing in any capacity didn’t interest me; a career in business didn’t interest me either.

For the first time in my life, I began to search for a purpose, a deeper meaning in life, and goals to pursue. College sounded like it could help provide an answer to these questions, so I effectively rolled the dice and wound up at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. I had no idea what I was going to study, but I was drawn to psychology and sociology.

Ora et Labora — Prayer and Work

In 1978, I arrived at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, just south of the Canadian border and north of Seattle, in the afterglow of the “Jesus Movement” of the late 60s and early 70s. I quickly became involved in campus ministry, previously unaware that such a thing even existed on college campuses. In the dormitories were numerous posters recruiting students to any number of secular and religious group meetings. One of those was for Campus Crusade for Christ, which I visited and became involved in for a short time with a friend I met on the crew team. Here I was introduced to the Four Spiritual Laws, and even helped my teammate lead people to Christ. One day, this same friend asked if I had ever visited a monastery. I had not, so he invited me to visit a Benedictine Abbey, just across the border in Mission, British Columbia, Canada, named Westminster Abbey. Here, I was introduced to a new world of beauty, peace, and prayer which would begin my long journey deeper into Jesus’ heart and eventually into the Catholic Church.

The beauty of the monastery was stunning. Overlooking the Fraser River, with a north side view of Mt. Baker in Washington State, bald eagles flying overhead, and big timber all around, the impact of this first visit still remains with me many years later.

In fact, I have visited this monastery many times over the years and have brought groups up for retreats and study. Yet it was the beauty and artistry of one of the monks’ works displayed in the chapel and around the monastery that focused my attention on God’s creativity through human genius. The monk’s name was Father Dunstan Massey, OSB, and he was quite well known as an artist around the Fraser River Valley. He specialized in concrete reliefs and frescos, and his artistry speaks to me of God’s wonder. Indeed, his work was his prayer.

Father Dunstan, the grandeur of creation, and other encounters with God through beauty became a gentle path deeper into His love and compassion, which would prove to be of immense consolation in the storms of life to come. The Benedictine Rule would become a huge influence on my life. St. Benedict’s 12 Steps of Humility and their impact on the shaping of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous became patterns within the development of my ministry over the years. The Benedictine motto, “Ora et Labora” (prayer and work), is a simple and profound way to live and learn a life of prayer and devotion “one day at a time.”

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and learned that, while I had become a good listener and loved to minister on the streets, in jails, and occasionally on campus, this was not the most employable degree. As a result, I spent a year doing carpentry with a friend. After this time, I was invited to intern with an Assemblies of God campus ministry (Chi Alpha) with the hope of being equipped enough to pioneer a campus group on a college campus that had a supporting church nearby desiring a new chapter. We studied from well-known works of Protestant Evangelical theologians, occasionally mixed with an Anglican and, very rarely, a Catholic spiritual perspective. We conducted street dramas, traveled to different parts of the western United States to help other campus ministries, led small groups, raised our own funds, and generally became confident that we could pioneer a campus group anywhere we were called. Soon, I would indeed be called upon to begin a new campus ministry, but I needed a partner to go on this adventure with me. Diane would become that partner.

Diane and I met when we were both college students. I didn’t know her well in those years, but during this year of internship, our relationship began to flower. I admired her faith in Jesus, her prayer life, and her willingness to step out of her comfort zone in teaching, street ministry/drama, and planning outreach. Of course, I also thought she was cute.

At the end of our internship year, we were teamed up to start a campus group in Kearney, Nebraska at what was then known as Kearney State College. We set out on a cross-country adventure to another culture amidst the cornfields and hog farms of south-central Nebraska, right along the Platte River. Here, our relationship would be tried in the difficult circumstances of a new culture, an unfamiliar land with intense winters and springs, and of a longing for the big timber, mountains, and flowing water of the Pacific Northwest. Despite the difficulties, our two years spent in Nebraska were fruitful. The campus ministry grew, and Diane and I grew closer. We were engaged in Kearney. Then we said good-bye to our Nebraska friends and headed back to the Evergreen State to start our new life as a married couple.

During our time in Nebraska, we had become acquainted with many campus pastors from different denominations, all of whom were very helpful to us. What Diane and I quickly discovered, however, was that our internship in campus ministry fell short in equipping us to converse with them in matters of church history, theology, and much of pastoral ministry. As a result, I desired to go to seminary and learn about these different subjects. We needed to earn money for that to happen, though, so off we went to Alaska and Yukon to drive tour buses in the Great White North for two seasons before I took the plunge into seminary.

I began my studies at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, an interdenominational seminary begun by two Anglican Professors from England — J.I. Packer and James Houston. This was a marvelous place to learn (and I must say that many themes introduced to us here eventually found their fulfillment in the Catholic Church). Over a four-year period, we learned about Church History, Christian Spirituality, Systematic Theology, Preaching, Pastoral Care, Greek, Hebrew, and most important to our journey, the Early Church Fathers and beauty. The Early Church Fathers introduced to us an intriguing world of commitment to the Eucharist, prayer, and tradition, aspects of the Church we would later come to understand in a truly Catholic perspective instead of a curious, but still Protestant, worldview. All this we received as God’s gifts in our lives. It was a wonderful time of reception — a time of filling.

Memento Mori — Remember that You Will Die

As I worked toward the completion of my Master’s Degree in Theological Studies, I concentrated on Pastoral Care and Family Ministries. At this time, I was working in an addiction recovery center for adults and teens, helping families deal with recovery issues and treatment plans. Diane was working at a local nursing home and caring for a neglected population of elderly people. After graduation from seminary, I was eventually hired as an associate pastor with a large, local Assemblies of God church which functioned more like an Evangelical community church. This was the same church that sponsored the college campus group where Diane and I had interned. It was quite familiar to us and was an honor to serve on staff. My duties included running counseling services and recovery groups, developing internships in pastoral care, expanding our local food pantry into a food bank, and partnering with community services in the county to help families. I enjoyed this work and felt called to care for people in distress. However, during the 16 years I worked at the church, there were three experiences, all having to do with personal trauma and loss, which drew us into a search for consolation and care which only the Catholic Church was able to provide.

The first of these experiences was the discovery of our infertility as a couple. Anyone who has been part of this journey knows what a loss and burden it can be for a couple totally open to children and wanting to raise a family. In this struggle, we found there really was nowhere we could turn to find comfort or solace. We knew of no groups, no people to talk with, and no support. We were alone, and our church had no resources to help us. Diane and I spent five years praying for God’s direction amid this suffering. Were we to have children? Should we utilize artificial means to conceive? Is adoption for us? Where and how do we proceed with adoption? How are children to be part of our lives? These questions drove us deeper into prayer and into intense listening for God’s guidance.

The Lord did indeed guide us and grant us comfort during these difficult years. We came to the firm conviction that the Lord wanted us to pursue adoption overseas in China. We were in the early wave of North Americans adopting Chinese orphans. Due to the one-child policy instituted by the Communist government, many “unwanted” female babies were either aborted, victims of infanticide, or sent to crowded orphanages where they were cared for as well as they could be by the staff. Describing the adventures of this adoption experience would require an additional story; suffice it to say we traveled to China without a child and two weeks later came back with our eight-month-old daughter, Amy. Two years later, we would head to Vladivostok, Russia, to adopt our youngest daughter, Anna, also eight months old. As we settled into life as a new family of four, we were surprised that the pain of infertility was overwhelmed by the joy of adopting our children. Every family is a miracle; ours is no exception.

As the years passed, we nurtured our family and our ministry, building a community of care and outreach in the church. In time, the mission of the church became obscured, and growing a church in numbers became the top priority. In the midst of this change, the second of three losses occurred in our lives — the sudden death of my mother due to cancer. She was the hub of the family, and her death brought about profound changes in my extended family. This was a time of confusion and deep grief. Coupled with the changes in the church, we found ourselves longing once again for solace and community, but found none. We were searching intently for a deeper meaning and purpose of the people of God and church worship.

This search steered me into a doctoral program in urban leadership and spiritual formation at Bakke Graduate University (based in Seattle at the time, now based in Dallas). In this program, we learned more about the spirituality and leadership of serving the needs of the poor in urban settings, of creating communities of care and outreach, and of diving into the mystery and majesty of human interaction in the act of ministering care in God’s compassion. I would often pray in the St. Ignatius chapel at Seattle University and found this space compelling, drawing me toward beauty and prayer. Here, I discovered many more contemporary Catholic authors and people who became heroes to me. Diane and I were also drawn to Celtic Catholic spirituality and the “thin places” of the world, those places where heaven and earth are thinly veiled to one another. We had no idea that this would be the perfect description of the Catholic Mass, but the journey was beginning to take on new dimensions for us. It was also here that I came across a wonderful quote from G.K. Chesterton in his masterpiece, Orthodoxy, giving us insight to the Christian life.

“Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.… Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996. p. 239.)

In 2007, I graduated with a Doctor of Ministry in Transformation Leadership and Spiritual Formation and soon after discerned that my time at the Assemblies of God church was coming to an end. Through a series of many staff changes and circumstances, Diane and I knew that our hearts were being pulled somewhere else, though where that would be, we did not know. We knew our view of the Communion service was changing, that the Lord was somehow present in ways we couldn’t articulate.

Our view of Mary was changing also. We knew that Protestants didn’t understand her or her role in salvation history. They could not help us answer the question of what her role was, and what our relationship with her ought to be. We knew it had to be more than a casual appreciation for her at Christmas.

One final issue that we could not resolve was the issue of authority. With so many opinions about Holy Scripture, what or whom were we to trust, and why should we trust them?

I resigned my position, which for a career pastor can be devastating, with the loss of income, an uncertain future, the disappearance of community and friends, and vanishing support networks. This was the third of the losses that would send us into a “desert wandering” for five years, until one Christmas Eve when our world was turned upside down.

My family loves Christmas. As part of our Christmas tradition, we would attend a Christmas Eve service somewhere in the county. Diane thought we needed a new experience of Christmas Eve as a family, so in her wisdom and attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, she suggested we attend Children’s Mass at Sacred Heart Parish, just up the hill from the church where I used to be employed. This sounded like a good idea to me, since I had been in the parish church occasionally to pray and look at the beauty of the sanctuary, statues, and candles. So, off we went to Children’s Mass. We had no idea what to expect, but knew the kids would be cute, Christmas carols would be sung, and hopefully English (and very little Latin) would be spoken. We were right! The kids were cute, Christmas carols that we knew were sung, everything in the church was decorated beautifully, and very little Latin was used. We were stunned!

We left that Mass wondering what the Lord was doing. While there, my eyes became fixed on the crucifix in the front of the church. It seemed that Jesus was speaking directly to me, saying that He knew the pains and sorrows of humanity, and more than that, the pains and sorrows my family and I had endured. He was saying that here, in the Mass, in the Catholic Church, our search for deeper meaning and purpose would find its answers. Here, Mary would be our Blessed Mother. Here, living water would finally quench our thirst.

We stayed away from the church, and from Mass, for two weeks trying to sort it out. We were a bit numb, but Diane and I were convinced that God was ushering us into full communion with the Catholic Church. We asked the girls if they desired to attend with us, and even if they desired to explore the possibility of becoming Catholic; they were game to try. So that we could become better prepared for this further adventure, we felt the need to find out more about the Church, if we could. We went to our local Barnes & Noble and found a book which became incredibly helpful to us, Catholicism for Dummies. We still refer to this book from time to time! Eventually, we were introduced to the parish priest. We invited him over to our house to pepper him with questions, attended RCIA, and prepared to enter the Church at the Easter Vigil in 2012.

Entering into full communion with the Church has been an oasis for us. Our journey has not been so much a wrestling with doctrine and tradition as it has been discovering where consolation, beauty, and joy manifest Jesus’ love on earth in the most deeply personal and authentic way. We have been overwhelmed by Jesus’ Real Presence in the Eucharist, the love of our Triune God and our Blessed Mother, and the wonder and beauty of the Church unfolding before us.

Why enter the Church in this time of trial and scandal? Perhaps it was precisely because of these wounds that the Lord led us here, to help tend to a Church that needs renewal, strength, and care.

A few years after our entrance into the Church, I started inquiring into the Diaconate upon the encouragement of our parish staff, not knowing what that entailed. It was a whole new world of potential pastoral involvement, and I wasn’t quite sure if I was up to the challenge. I told Diane, my wife, that unless someone approached me at coffee and donuts after Mass, I would forgo the honor. As I sat enjoying my donut and coffee after Mass, our parish priest made a beeline to me, telling me I needed to apply. I felt this was the Lord’s prompting! So I applied, was interviewed, along with Diane, and entered the formation process, which was quite challenging on every level.

In the second year of formation, we were graced with attending a Coming Home Network retreat at the Archbishop Brunett Retreat Center in Federal Way, WA, which was our home for formation throughout the years. The retreat was wonderful and life-giving, thanks to Jim Anderson, Ken Hensley, and Monsignor Steenson! On December 19, 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I was ordained a permanent deacon of the Catholic Church. It had been quite a journey!

In the years since my ordination, I have been impressed with the immense prayerfulness of God’s people and gained a growing love of the saints, especially St. Joseph and our Blessed Mother. I am filled with wonder as I serve the Mass and am thankful for the Divine Office, praying for the profound needs of the Church worldwide. I have also become a regular follower of On the Journey with Matt, Ken, and Kenny on the CHNetwork website, finding their insights helpful in the challenges of the diaconate.

Greater than those challenges, though, the diaconate has brought me fulfillment. Along with preparing and preaching homilies at Mass, it is one of my joys to pray for those who have died and to help those who struggle with loss to find a way home. My current role offers many opportunities to minister to bereaved families and pray for the souls of the dead as they are committed to God’s good earth, one of the corporal acts of mercy. This work brings me back to St. Benedict. One of the disciplines of the Benedictine Rule is to remember that we all will die, Memento Mori. It is not a morbid preoccupation with death, but a daily discipline to remind ourselves that our lives are short and need to be filled by the Holy Spirit with virtue, humility, and fortitude — the love of God.

Blessings to you on your own journey home! Kyrie Eleison!

The post Kyrie Eleison – Lord Have Mercy appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

I was born into a Catholic family in May of 1953, baptized as a baby, went on to do my confession, received my first Holy Communion, and was confirmed by Bishop Buswell at Our Lady of Guadalupe church, the oldest parish in Colorado. I loved everything about God and the Church. I even saw myself serving as a priest one day, but would eventually dismiss the thought because I wanted to be married and have children. My mother would have us pray the Rosary whenever there was a need, and made sure we went to Mass; but my father was sporadic in attending church and never prayed the Rosary with us, although I knew he loved God.

I grew up in Conejos, a small community in southern Colorado, where my ancestors were some of the first settlers to make their homes there. The story is told that, when my great, great grandfather brought the first settlers to the valley, one of the burros refused to go on, and they discovered a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the site, so they began their settlement in that area and built a church to honor her. In another community, one of my great grandfathers donated land to the Catholic Church so that a church and a cemetery could be built. I was told that another ancestor would spend time by the river praying and reading the Scriptures. Looking back, I am thankful for their faithfulness.

In my teens, I slowly began to drift away from the Church by not receiving Communion and eventually not attending Mass at all. I always seemed to find an excuse for not going. I did manage to go to Christmas Midnight Mass and Easter, along with all the other “C&E Christians.” After high school, I entered the United States Navy in November of 1971, and my church attendance eroded even more, but I always felt that God was somehow with me. I do remember going to a Catholic Church once, when I was stationed in Hawaii, and I felt God’s presence and experienced the beauty of the Mass with the local people. But I never went to Confession or Communion. At this time, my older brother was getting involved with a United Pentecostal Church (UPC), and I saw a change in his life. He would talk to us about God whenever we were around him.

While in the Navy, I had a friend who was with a Christian youth group. He talked to me about giving my heart to God. I remember going to bed that night and talking to the Lord, telling him that I was not ready to give my heart to Him. I felt that doing so would make me “miss out on life” at the time, but my plan was that, at some point later on, when I was ready, I would wholeheartedly give my life to God.

Getting into Pentecostal Ministry

When I was discharged from the Navy, in the fall of 1975, I attended college at Adams State in Alamosa, CO, but didn’t attend Mass. By this time, my brother, Tom, had moved to Denver and had invited me to a revival at a new UPC church that he and his wife were helping to start. I drove up to visit a service there and was taken with the music and emotional preaching. In the spring of 1976, having finished my college fall semester, I moved to Denver, where I got involved with the UPC. The services had music and a lot of emotion, and since I was somewhat of an emotional person, I was drawn to them.

I had an experience with the Holy Spirit and felt that God was real. I wanted more of Him. Remembering my prayer in Hawaii, this time felt similar. I wanted to sell out completely to God. The UPC preached a “One God” message and that baptism had to be performed using the phrase “in Jesus’ name.” From what I could see with my limited Bible knowledge and church background, I felt they were preaching the truth. I earnestly began to study the Bible and the Oneness doctrine, trying very hard to justify to myself that what I was being taught was the truth. Prayer became a big part of my life, and I became active for the congregation, knocking on doors and inviting people to church.

After a couple of years, I felt a call to preach, and I approached my pastor about going to Bible school, but he felt it was better for me to sit under his leadership and learn from him. I was soon getting invitations to preach at some of the local churches.

Our denomination held a camp meeting once a year, usually in the mountains close to Denver. The tradition behind this meeting dated back to the time when the various Pentecostal organizations would meet in the summer to have fellowship and discuss administrative matters.

It was at one of these camp meetings, in July of 1978, that I met my wife, Susanne, who was from Albuquerque, NM and was a recent convert to Pentecostalism. Her whole family was Catholic, and her father’s favorite saint was St. Ann, so all eight of his girls had an Ann in their names. Susanne was in Craig, Colorado, helping her sister with her children, when she joined the Pentecostal Church. I had an opportunity to preach at her church, and there was an instant connection. Within six months, we were married.

We were married on January 1st of 1979 because we wanted to start the year together. Looking back, I can certainly say that bringing us together was by the hand of God. She has been a wonderful partner in this journey of life that we share. We had been in Denver for about a month and half when we took on pastoring a Home Missions church, with about eight individuals, in Walsenburg, Colorado. It was a struggle financially and spiritually. Since it was difficult to find employment, we literally prayed for our food, rent, and gas money, and God always supplied.

I remember going to a community church fellowship, where all the churches had been invited to participate. I was asked to be the master of ceremonies. The local Catholic priest was invited to speak, and I remember him speaking about the division in the Church in general, and how Protestants kept building new walls to divide the Christian community. It didn’t go over well with the attendees, but it left an indelible mark in my memory. But it was only later that I came to realize just how many new church organizations had sprung up over doctrinal and other issues.

While working with this Home Missions church, I studied all I could about our church’s beliefs. One study that I enjoyed immensely, was on the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and how God instructed Moses to build an Ark that would contain the two tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments, the pot containing the manna from heaven, and Aaron’s rod. To house the Ark and to initiate the worship of the one true God, the Israelites were to build a tabernacle that contained a Holy of Holies, where the Ark was kept. Instructions were given as to how the Levitical priests would perform their duties and minister to the people and how the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies to make atonement for the people. Eventually this type of worship was transferred over to Solomon’s temple. My study of the Tabernacle would eventually help me to better understand the Catholic Church.

Continuing in Ministry

After about a year and a half, we returned to Denver and our home church, where I assisted the pastor and got involved with the Spanish language ministry. We were in church literally all the time. There was Sunday morning service, Sunday night service, Tuesday night Spanish service, Wednesday night midweek service, Thursday night prayer, Saturday morning visitation and Saturday night Spanish service. The Spanish-speaking folk were a wonderful group of people, and we experienced some powerful services.

It was during this time that my daughter, Kristina, and son, Michael, were born. I was ordained into the UPC at a church camp meeting in the summer of 1984 and continued to minister in the Spanish speaking church and would preach for outside groups whenever invited. We had some (as they say in Pentecostal circles) “mighty moves of God,” and there were times when we had awesome deliverance services. We were even involved in a Spanish language radio ministry, called “El Camino de Amor.” In 1985, we were told about a church in Alamosa, Colorado that had been started, but the pastor had left. Leaving our home church, the Spanish church and all our friends to pursue that opportunity was indeed difficult, but I felt that we needed to move on from that comfortable situation.

For an entire year, we traveled every weekend from our home in Aurora, Colorado about 250 miles to minister to a small group of people in that assembly. Some of the congregation were former members of a Oneness Apostolic organization that had closed their church. We also had a wonderful opportunity to spend nearly every weekend with my parents, who lived about 30 miles from our new church assignment. However, the traveling back and forth eventually took its toll on me, and we decided to move back to Denver and start a UPC church in one of the suburbs where we lived and worked. Unfortunately, the organization thought it best for us not to start another church, and I began to question my future in the organization. In 1987, we decided to leave the UPC and take some time to think about our journey.

A friend of mine told me about a Oneness Apostolic family church in Denver and arranged for me to speak there. The elder who had started the church requested that I pastor it, and in 1990 I was elected pastor. The congregation had a nice building with a parsonage, whose basement was used for Sunday School. The church had never really participated in communion services, so I took the opportunity to introduce them to the Lord’s Supper. When I lifted up the bread to mention the words of the Lord over the bread, I felt a supernatural touch on my head and shoulders, and later on in life I would realize how sacred that moment was.

I remember talking to one of the ministers about how, in the Apostolic church, there was no progression of faith for members. It made me think about the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and how one must prepare for each of them.

After pastoring a couple of years there, I felt that I had done enough, and resigned. We attended an Assembly of God church for a time. They had an early morning prayer time that I enjoyed. We soon left the Assembly of God, and since the Oneness doctrine that we were involved in was unique and different from mainstream Christianity, we started a Non-denominational church named Christ Church in August of 1993. Our intent was to minister to folks that were coming out of the Oneness organizations and had nowhere to go. We found an office complex where there were other churches that had rented space, and we were fortunate to meet a gentleman by the name of Mark, who owned the building. He was very kind and never raised our rates. I found out about a couple of other churches that were Oneness Apostolic, and we would get together with them for camp meetings and fellowship.

A friend of mine hosted a live television show in the morning, where he would pray for people on the air, and there were times when he was not available, so he would ask me to sit in for him. I really enjoyed praying for the callers’ needs. As a result, we were able to start a half hour program that would broadcast at five in the morning. Needless to say, we did not get much of an audience, and it didn’t last long, but it was an experience.

 We had a great group of people, but after a number of years, I began to question the validity and futility of pastoring while also working a full time job. The fatigue finally got to me. We closed our church in 2007 and began to attend a large Vineyard church that was near our home, with lively music and positive sermons. My time in the Navy had provided me with a background in computers that opened opportunities for me in computer operations and software engineering, so I always had a career and an income. I worked for various government entities and finally started working for the Federal Government, retiring after thirty years of service.

Moving and Church Shopping

In 2009, my wife and I moved to Indianapolis when my job was transferred there. While in Indianapolis, we visited a number of churches — Reformed, Mennonite, Methodist, and a Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW) — but we finally settled into a megachurch that was part of the Reformed movement. They had three morning services: one for the more traditional folks, that had hymns and a choir, while the other two were more rock and roll oriented.

 We attended the early morning traditional service so we could hear the choir and sing the hymns. We were gone a lot on weekends, so we weren’t there all the time, but the pastor there took a paid sabbatical, then eventually left. From what I heard, some members of the congregation were not too happy with him, anyway. As a Protestant minister, you are evaluated on your ability to preach a good sermon, and if you don’t connect with the people, you can find yourself looking for another job.

Turning Towards Catholicism

While living in Indiana, we took a cruise to Europe, visiting Barcelona, Rome, Athens, Istanbul, Ephesus and Malta. Seeing the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica was amazing. Walking into that great building and viewing all of the history before us was so captivating that it made me want to become a Catholic right then and there.

In 2012, when I retired, Susanne and I made our way back to Colorado and settled in Pueblo West. We began to attend an Assembly of God church, but searching for something more, we moved to a Church of God fellowship — again finding a great group of people, beautiful music and worship. But still, something was missing in my life.

Years earlier, my wife and I had attended some funerals of our family members who were Catholic, and every time we would leave the church, we both felt something special. One weekend, we took a drive to the Santuario de Chimayo, a Catholic shrine in Chimayo, New Mexico. It is one of the most popular pilgrimage places in the United States. When we entered the chapel, we could feel the beautiful presence of the Holy Spirit. Many miracles have been attributed to the Lord through the Santuario. The visit left a huge impression on us.

Every time we went to a Catholic Mass, I was envious of the people receiving Communion. I began to study about the Catholic Church, and soon I could no longer attend services at the Protestant church we had chosen. Poor Susanne! She loved the worship there, but I could not bring myself to attend. I explained to her what was taking place in my life, and I think she must have thought to herself, “What is going on with this guy?”

Finally, I asked her to go to Mass with me at a Catholic church, and she accepted. When we went to Mass, I was soaking it all in. From the moment the priest entered the sanctuary until the last benediction was given, I was seeing things in a different light than when I was younger and attending Mass just to satisfy my mom. By this point in my journey, every part of the Mass had taken on a new meaning for me.

 I became fascinated with how the early Church formed after the Apostles passed away, and who took over the mantle of St. Peter and kept it moving forward. Reading about the early Church fathers, like Clement, Polycarp, Ignatius and others, made me realize how God used holy men to develop a Church that would last two thousand years. Reading about the heresies that were often unfortunately created by clergy members who were Catholic, and how the Church had to call councils to discuss these various new doctrines and determine what was true and what was false, led me to believe that these men of God were led by the Holy Spirit. Some of these heresies still exist in some form today, but the Church has stood strong against them all.

What I loved about the early Church is that it was not just one man coming up with a doctrine for the Church, but it was a collaborative effort, with bishops from the various regions getting together to discuss and approve the teachings according to what had been handed down to them from the beginning. Also, seeing that the early Church was liturgical in practice, and that we got the Bible from the Catholic Church, completely changed the way I thought about Christianity.

For years, I could not let go of the Oneness doctrine and struggled to fit in, because in the UPC we didn’t believe in the Trinity, while nearly every Christian denomination outside of the Oneness movement does believe in the Trinity. I began to immerse myself in studying the doctrine of the Trinity, and the more I studied, the more sense it made to me. After reading about the early Church, how they believed in the Trinity, and the importance of the Eucharist, I was ready to make the change. I earnestly prayed that God would lead me and Susanne to the True Church. I remember reading about a professor named Mark McNeil, who was a former UPC minister, and how he managed to study his way into the Catholic Church. I found his story through the Coming Home Network, an apostolate formed by a former Presbyterian minister, Marcus Grodi, who had converted to the Catholic faith. His testimony and that of others helped me to see that it was possible to return to the Church. At this point, Susanne was not quite on board yet, although she would attend Mass with me at various churches.

Returning to the Church

I got in touch with Ken Hensley, a former Baptist minister who is in charge of Pastoral Care at the Coming Home Network (CHNetwork). We talked on the phone, and I signed up to receive their monthly newsletter describing different issues and conversions. Honestly, these testimonies were such an inspiration to me that I couldn’t help but want to become a Catholic. Ken arranged for a Zoom meeting with folks from different parts of the country. Susanne was impressed with the folks on the meeting. We planned on going to one of the retreats sponsored by CHNetwork, but COVID struck. We then started doing daily devotionals at home, using materials from the Catholic Church.

During this time, I prayed for my wife, knowing that this transition was difficult for her. As the pandemic began to wind down, we still had not attended any church, but just continued to do our private devotionals. I was aching to get back to Mass, but I knew that Susanne needed time to process everything.

One night, we were at dinner with one of Susanne’s sisters, who asked where we were going to church. Susanne replied by saying that we were interested in going back to the Catholic Church. It took everyone by surprise — including me — but I realized that she had been trying to be open to the Lord, and He was showing her the way back.

I immediately signed us up for the CHNetwork retreat that was being held in Milford, Ohio in March of 2023. We made a road trip of it and were graciously greeted by some wonderful people at the retreat. Meeting people that were on the same journey as us, along with others who were a few steps ahead of us along the journey, was inspiring. Protestant ministers who had given up their livelihood by leaving their pastorates and joining the Catholic Church made us realize how difficult it was for them, but it was encouraging to us to see that they were willing to do it because of their love for God and the Church. We enjoyed visiting with them and sharing our story. Susanne and I were a bit concerned about Confession, but we had a very wonderful Monsignor, Jeffrey Steenson, who helped navigate that process for us. We were prayed for by the group before our confession, and the next day, after a lapse of almost fifty years, Susanne and I had the wonderful opportunity to receive the Eucharist. I can’t describe the feeling that I had when I realized that I was actually taking the precious Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. We both looked at each other and shed tears of joy. We felt that we were honoring the words of Jesus in John 6:53–58.

That evening, we attended our first Eucharistic Adoration, and it was beautiful. Sitting in silence and meditating on the Eucharist before us provided us a new perspective on being Catholic. The retreat was informative, and just listening to the walks of faith that people were taking was exciting. We made a lot of new friends, people who will always be a part of our lives. Heading home from Milford, Ohio, we located our parish church, St. Paul the Apostle, in Pueblo West. We began attending there and had our marriage blessed by our priest, Father Edmundo Valera.

Leaving the Pentecostal/Apostolic organizations was difficult because of the wonderful people we came to know, love, and appreciate. On the other hand, there is no more searching for truth, no more looking for a church, no more debating various doctrines, no more wandering in the wilderness of confusing beliefs. I am thankful for the opportunity to learn more about the history of the Church — the one that was started by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

I am grateful for my beautiful wife and best friend, Susanne. She is my true north and is at my side in this journey. Our daughter and son were brought up in the Oneness movement but are no longer associated with it. Our prayers are that, one day, our son and daughter, along with their spouses, our grandchildren, family and friends, will come to understand that our move to the Catholic Church was done with much prayer, study, research, meditation, and sincerity. I feel that we have joined the ranks of a lot of other ministers and lay people who felt the tug of the Holy Spirit and studied their way into the Church. I know that it will be difficult for some of our family and friends to accept our journey. But it is our journey, and we will continue to explore the depth and richness of our Catholic faith.

The post A Oneness Pentecostal Minister Becomes Catholic appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

While others were mocking these televangelists for their over-the-top personalities and lavish lifestyles, Lisa was looking to them for spiritual guidance.

She talks to Matt Swaim about some of the nuances of that theological worldview: the role of language, the thinking around wealth and health, and the celebrity pastor culture.

Lisa shares how deconstructing from that form of Christianity led her to find a spiritual home in the Catholic Church.

Watch Lisa on The Journey Home

The post From the Prosperity Gospel to Catholicism – Episode 30 appeared first on The Coming Home Network.