But in studying history — not just world and Church history, but the history of his own spiritual trajectory — he began to see that the God he had pushed to the side for years had been with him all along.

Derek shares how his faith and his marriage have helped him to see that despite all the wounds of his family experiences and mistakes of his background, he was always being called to be part of God’s family in the life of the Church.

Watch Derek on The Journey Home

The post Joining God’s Family – Derek Rotty appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

By the time I was a teenager, I had no interest in going to church, but during my sophomore year of high school, the Lord used the circumstances of friends and the ups and downs of life to start drawing me to Himself. The high school scene was filled with partying, and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this. As I watched friends wholeheartedly embrace the party scene, I began to feel alone, and on a deeper level, unknown.

I started going to Young Life, an Evangelical ministry to teenagers. At Young Life’s weekly meeting, I met college age leaders, who built relationships with me. I will forever remember walking down the stairs after school one day and hearing someone call out my name. It was a Young Life leader, Kathy, whom I had only met on one previous occasion. I couldn’t believe she remembered my name! There was something different about Kathy — a deep joy and contentment. I wanted that too. I felt like I had what most teens wanted: good grades, a stable home life, and friends. But there was something missing. The more that I went to Young Life and spent time with Kathy, the more I suspected that it had something to do with God. My developing relationship with God was very transactional. I made deals with God constantly — “Help me get through with these tests and this track meet this week, and I won’t ask you for anything ever again” — only to find myself praying the same prayer the next week.

A Personal Relationship

In June of 1991, when I was 16, I went to a week long summer camp with Young Life. I went looking for answers to questions like “How can I know God?” and “How can I have Him in my life?” Every night of that week, a speaker shared who Jesus was. I learned that Jesus was God with skin on, and that he came to earth and experienced everything humans experience — everything that I was experiencing. He knew what it was like to struggle and have difficulty and be betrayed by friends. Feeling so unknown, it was very appealing to think that Jesus knew the real me, understood me, and yet still loved me. I knew that sin separated me from God and understood that Jesus’ death on the cross was what made it possible for me to have a personal relationship with God. I asked Jesus for forgiveness for my sins and for him to live in my heart on June 21, 1991 and “became a Christian” that night. I remember having such peace and knowing that somehow “everything was going to be okay,” because the Lord was close and intimate — in my heart, not distant and uninvolved.

While the Young Life leaders and friends were happy for me and there was much excitement over a new believer, I remember thinking it strange that something so significant as becoming a new creation, crossing over from death to life, and going from condemned to forgiven could occur without any tangible expression of it. I was told that the angels were rejoicing, but it wasn’t tangible. There was no sign or symbol or anything outward, and I found myself wishing there was.

After high school, I went to Miami University, knowing that I needed to find a faith community. I landed in Campus Crusade for Christ, known today as Cru, and its athletic ministry, Athletes in Action, because I ran track and cross country. God provided friends and mentors during those years. I learned how to study the Bible and how to apply it better to my life. There were many “mountaintop experiences” through Cru’s ministry. My faith was strengthened through Bible studies, personal discipleship, retreats, conferences, and Spring Break trips.

While at Miami, I took a History of Architecture class. We examined and learned about structures from primitive times to the modern day in this class. I was surprised by how many churches were included. It was the first time I was exposed to the idea that a space can be used to draw people to God and that our physical surroundings can aid our faith. I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I recognize that these were Catholic churches using architecture as a way to express invisible realities. The class left a lasting impression on me.

Up to this point, the only Catholics I knew were ex-Catholics who had left the Church to become Protestant, or Catholics who were not practicing their faith. What I knew of Catholicism was what I had been taught by Protestants. These ideas included that Catholics relied on the traditions of men rather than God’s word, that they added books to the Bible, and that they had to work for their salvation.

After graduating from Miami and then Physical Therapy school, I began attending an Evangelical church in the Dayton area that had an active young adult ministry. I met Steve at this church, and we began dating. When I met him, Steve was a divorced dad with a six year old son. We dated for a year, then got married. I worked full time as a physical therapist until we welcomed a son in 2005, then another son in 2006.

When I was pregnant with our first son, I knew in my depths that motherhood was God’s call on my life. The primitive prayer for my son that I prayed for many years was that God would be “real” to him. I wanted God to be part of my boys’ everyday life and tangible to them, not distant and detached. I realize now that as I prayed that for my sons, this was also a prayer for myself. When I discovered “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), this became my prayer for my sons. It perfectly expressed what I meant for God to be “real” to them. Little did I know how much this verse would come to mean to me, too.

An Unwelcome Development

Around 2013, it felt like the ground shifted beneath me. By that, I mean that the things that had brought me joy and fulfillment, such as studying the Bible, serving in church, and learning about God, became flat and stagnant. I was unmotivated to do anything religious. I couldn’t even make myself do those things.

This was deeply disturbing for me. From out of nowhere, I felt like I was losing my faith. What was once so effortless now felt impossible. I questioned myself constantly: Did I not believe in God any more? Why was everything so flat, so dark? Why did I feel dead inside? Was this a denominational difference? Was I not evangelical any more? What had I done wrong? What was wrong with me? Why was I in a relationship with a God who felt so absent to me? What was the point of it? What was supposed to sustain faith? As I read back through my journal from this time, I am struck by my uncertainty about my standing with God. As a Protestant, there was no means of objective certainty in your standing with God, only your own faith and belief in your standing.

Because this was so foreign, and being a rather reserved person, I did not share with anyone what I was going through. I didn’t know anyone who had gone through such an experience, and I was embarrassed that it was happening to me. Furthermore, I knew what the response would be if I shared my experience at my church. I had sat under the teaching of my pastor long enough to know that I would be told this experience was essentially my fault. I expected to be told that I hadn’t studied enough, hadn’t prayed enough, hadn’t served enough, hadn’t given enough, or hadn’t been in fellowship enough. I know that I’m imperfect, but I had not willfully gone looking for things other than God. I couldn’t bear to be told to try harder. So while everything on the outside of my life looked good, I felt like I was withering and dying on the inside. That combination was unsustainable. I needed the outside and inside of me to match up, and I needed to not have to care about what anyone thought of me.

A New Direction

I had read about the practice of spiritual direction, which initially sounded offensive to me. Why would I let another person direct me in my relationship with God? Wasn’t the Holy Spirit supposed to do that? I was extremely uncertain if this practice was considered acceptable, or if it would expose me to false teachings. But I was so desperate that I searched through the Evangelical Spiritual Director’s website and reached out to one in another state. She agreed to meet with me over Skype. We began meeting in 2015, and I wept through the first several sessions as I recounted my faith history and spiritual difficulties. In spiritual direction, I drank from a deep well of grace. The director taught me about the ideas of consolation and desolation, that my desire for connection with God was from Him, that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that my desire for God pleased Him. She introduced me to other spiritual disciplines like lectio divina, visio divina, silent prayer, the daily examen, and fixed hour prayer (Liturgy of the Hours). God worked through these practices. I was experiencing Him in more ways than just through studying the Bible and in the type of prayer where I did all the talking.

I wondered why I had never heard about Spiritual Disciplines before. A pastor from my church had told me that, in the Reformation, when it came to these spiritual practices, the Protestants “threw the baby out with the bath water.” I didn’t really know what he meant because I had not studied Church history. But the more I learned about these practices, the more I recognized that they had origins in the Catholic Church — but of course, becoming Catholic had not crossed my mind.

As my faith was slowly recovering and evolving with spiritual direction, I was still having a hard time going to church, because it seemed to me that the Evangelical message was that you should believe in God because He will make your life better and you will be happy. On some level that may be true, but the Christian life seemed to be about a lot more than that when I considered the life of Jesus. Our family had gone to the same church for 19 years, and I thought maybe it was time to move on. During “worship,” I watched semi-professional musicians sing and play instruments on a black stage with screens and lights, where anything from a concert to a lecture to a theatrical production could be performed. I then received information from the sermon to apply to my life so that I could improve it.

While I know that God can be present in any environment, I longed for a space that encouraged a sacred sense. I wanted a space that drew my senses to God and aided a holy encounter. I began to look for another church and attended several different denominations. While some things were different, there was a core similarity to them that told me that, eventually, I would be feeling the same way there as I did at my current church. So I resigned myself to feeling stuck. It was becoming so difficult to worship in this environment, I started watching the online service at home on our couch, because I couldn’t bring myself to go in person.

In the summer of 2019, I read an article related to a current event by Leah Libresco Sargent. Her short bio caught my attention when it said she recently converted to Catholicism. I thought, “Why would you do that?” I watched a video of her speaking about her conversion on YouTube, and it struck me that she appeared to only consider Catholicism. No Protestant denomination was proposed as an option. I knew vaguely that the Catholic Church believed itself to be the Church that Jesus founded. I also knew that there was a book called the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Wanting to understand why Catholics believed this, I began to read it. 

I was astounded with the reverence for Christ I found in the Catechism, and how Christ-centered it was. From there, I started reading about Church history and the writings of the early Church Fathers. I discovered that the history I was presented with as a Protestant was incomplete and inaccurate. I found writings, which, while not inspired like Scripture, were by faithful men who left a record of the Church’s practices and beliefs, concerning such things as Baptism and the Eucharist. These were the beliefs and practices of Christians from the beginning, not distortions that sprang up hundreds of years later. As I read, I became convinced that the Catholic Church was the Church that Jesus founded.

Prior to reading about Catholicism, I was not aware of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Ultimately, this is what solidified my desire to become Catholic. Through this sacrament, the invitation to commune with God in objective certainty was offered to me. This was the tangible way to experience Jesus and participate with more than just my head and emotions. How had I not taken Jesus at his word when He said, “For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me” (John 6:55–57)? This was the fulfillment of “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8), which I had so desperately longed to experience.

Despite this deep attraction, there were some issues that I needed to understand better. The first was Catholic teaching on justification. As a Protestant, I was taught that a person is saved by grace alone through faith alone in a moment, when you acknowledge your sinfulness and ask Jesus to come into your heart to be your savior. This moment was like flipping a switch. It provided instant justification before God and a declaration of righteousness, but not actual righteousness. The words “salvation” and “justification” were also used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but it was evident that they were being used in a different sense. Rather than a singular moment in which justification and salvation were completed, a progressive process in which we are made righteous in a lifelong transformation was described. Stephen Wood’s Grace and Justification: An Evangelical’s Guide to Catholic Beliefs (Family Life Center Publications, 2017) helped me to understand how Catholics see the relationship of grace, justification, and sanctification. Acknowledging that initial justification is by grace, justification actually makes us inwardly righteous. Catholics view sanctification as part of the process of justification and not a distinct period after justification. I began to internalize a salvation that was not just “going to heaven when you die to spend eternity with God,” but one of a moral transformation as I cooperated with God to make me fit for heaven.

Additionally, I wanted to understand the role of Sacred Tradition. As a Protestant, the Bible was my sole rule of faith. I accepted this “truth” as self-evident. Was the Tradition of the Catholic Church man-made and an accretion to the simple gospel that Jesus preached, as I had been taught? Christian Smith’s book How To Go From Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (Cascade Books, 2011) challenged me to consider Tradition in a new way. These ideas from the book included that Jesus did not write books or manuscripts and that Scripture does not say that Jesus instructed his disciples to write down his teachings. “And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:18–20). Smith points out that Jesus seemed content to convey his message orally. “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you” (St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:23) and “I would rather not use paper and ink; instead I hope to come to you and talk with you face to face” (2 John 12). St. Paul and St. John reveal that they were teaching people, in person, what they had learned from the Lord. Smith notes that the early Church grew and functioned effectively through relying on authoritative, apostolic oral Tradition. As I considered the information from the book, that there was no way to mass produce the Bible until the 1500s and that most people were illiterate, Tradition began to seem plausible, given the rapid spread of Christianity in those times. Not to mention, how did I even know which ancient writings were Scripture? How did I know that 1 Thessalonians was inspired but the First Epistle of Clement was not? I realized that I was already relying on Catholic Tradition whenever I quoted Scripture, because it was the Catholic Church which defined the canon of the Bible through Church councils.

When I became curious and asked a question of the Catholic Church about her beliefs on an issue, such as the Marian dogmas or praying to the Saints, she had an answer for me in her documents and great minds throughout the centuries. Soon, I saw that history, reason, and theology sided with the Catholic Church’s position.

However, even though the Catholic faith was good in theory and on paper, as a practical matter, I did not know a single Catholic devoted to his faith. I prayed that God would bring a faith-filled Catholic across my path. That fall, Megan, a speech therapist, began working at the same school where I worked. When I learned that she was getting married, I looked up her wedding website and read the story of how she met her fiancé. They had met at something called Eucharistic Adoration. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded very Catholic. I could tell that she and her fiancé were very devout. Soon afterwards, I was able to speak with Megan privately. I shared that I thought God was leading me to the Catholic Church and asked if I could talk to her more about it. She agreed. We spent lunches during the next two school years discussing questions about Catholicism — everything from what a Feast Day is (and that there’s no actual food formally involved) to different Religious Orders. Megan listened and offered her perspective. I was able to catch a glimpse of what practicing the Catholic faith was like. I was so thankful that God had brought a Catholic who loved her faith into my life. Megan will always be a reminder of God’s faithfulness to me.

Coming Home

At this point, I knew that I wanted to be Catholic, but it wasn’t a straightforward path into the Church. My husband, Steve, had observed my faith struggle over the years and supported me in my exploration, but he did not have the same convictions. I was prepared to continue to go to the Evangelical church with Steve in addition to attending Mass on the weekends. Over time, as I shared what I was learning, Steve began to warm up to the Catholic faith and began attending Mass with me. When it came time for RCIA to begin, he agreed to go so that he could learn more and decide for himself. Ultimately, Steve decided that he also wanted to become Catholic. This was one of the most meaningful gifts he has given to me. I will forever be thankful to God for working in Steve in this way. Shifting a faith paradigm is difficult and unexpected in a marriage. I realize that it does not work out this way for all couples and am deeply appreciative of where we are now.

The last issue to be resolved was the matter of Steve’s divorce. For us to become Catholic, he needed a Decree of Nullity for his first “marriage.” He completed the paperwork, and we began RCIA in the fall of 2020.

Waiting for the Tribunal’s decision was difficult. Despite the anxiety of this time period, I appreciated the Church’s willingness to determine the validity of her members’ marriages. I had lost a Protestant friend at the time of our marriage 20 years earlier, because I was marrying a divorced person. I had been told by other Protestants that my husband should not have married again and instead continued to try to reconcile the previous relationship. I had also been denied leadership positions in Christian groups because I was married to a divorced person. Around that time, I read the guidelines regarding remarriage according to our Evangelical church. It seemed that our circumstances did not fall under their conditions for remarriage. The question came to mind: Why had our Protestant pastor married us when we didn’t meet these conditions? I sent an email to ask him and shared my concerns, but received no response. I did not pursue it further because, in some ways, I was afraid to know the answer. Because of these incidents over the years, I had lived with uncertainty about my marriage’s acceptance before God, despite the fact that we loved and were committed to one another and our family.

With this lingering uncertainty in the background of my mind over the years, there was relief in knowing that the Tribunal would look into the facts and conditions of Steve’s first relationship to determine if a valid marriage had occurred. The Easter Vigil came and went, while we watched the rest of our RCIA class enter the Church and we waited for a decision. In May of 2021, we received the letter from the Tribunal declaring Steve’s first marriage null, and we were free to enter the Church. We convalidated our marriage and were confirmed at a Wedding Mass held just for us, which happily coincided around the time of our 20th Wedding Anniversary. I was finally home.

As I write this, it has been almost two years that I have been Catholic. I continue to learn more about Catholic teaching and partake regularly in the sacraments. I never want to leave the Church where Jesus is present to me in a substantial way. And if, by God’s will, I would go through another period of desolation, I now have a rich history of Saints who have gone before me and experienced the same thing. They are a source of inspiration and consolation to draw upon, and they will pray for me! The Lord has provided everything we need in His Church to truly taste and see that He is good.

The post Taste and See: My Journey to the Catholic Church appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

Dr. Lewis now serves with the International Commission on English in the Liturgy – find out more about them at icelweb.org.

Read a written version of his testimony.

The post Dr. Benjamin Lewis – Former United Methodist appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

More info on Derek and his projects: derekrotty.com

The post Derek Rotty – Former United Methodist appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

My parents were raised Catholic before the Second Vatican Council, and both left the faith during the upheaval in the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the women’s movement were factors, but additionally both of them and others we knew had been personally hurt through their local Catholic parishes. Before they met each other, my parents had become atheists. They married in 1970, and I was born seven years later in Wisconsin. A few years after that, my sister came along. My parents were respectful, thoughtful, and intellectual people who dedicated their lives to making the world a better place. My father taught night classes at a community college and my mother was a doula. As a doula, my mother volunteered countless hours, including many nights, weekends, and holidays trying to make the transition to motherhood less traumatic for hundreds of teen moms, pregnant incarcerated women, and other women in crisis.

College and “The Church in Pittsburgh”

In college, religion intrigued me. There was an emptiness in my life that friendships, parties, and school couldn’t fill. During my sophomore year, I was struggling. A student in my English literature class befriended me. Before long, she invited me to a prayer meeting. I was skeptical, but at the same time open to new experiences. It was the strangest thing I had ever attended. My friend and her family were members of The Church in Pittsburgh, which was part of the Local Church movement (also called The Lord’s Recovery), founded by Witness Lee and Watchman Nee in China during the 1920s. The Local Church movement eventually came to the US, and it flourished here during the 60s. This movement has an idiosyncratic style of prayer and their own version of the Bible called the Recovery Version.

The Local Church is anti-clerical and anti-liturgical, although I didn’t know those words at the time. It also teaches the heresy of modalism (which denies the Blessed Trinity). My friend and her family were so kind to me that I became more involved with The Church in Pittsburgh, even after I began to suspect that things were amiss. Having grown up without religion in my life, I lacked a spiritual foundation to discern red flags. I had no idea which parts of their teachings were in line with evangelical Christianity and which parts were not. For the first time, I began to read the Bible, and I developed a simple, yet genuine relationship with Jesus. I was baptized by full immersion in a pool in the back yard of their house church on a warm summer day. For the first time, I felt like I did not need to be ashamed of my mistakes because I knew that Jesus loved me.

Still, I knew that something wasn’t quite right in The Church in Pittsburgh. There were constant divisions over matters of theology and practice. The church taught that if you pray about an issue, the Spirit will give you an answer. But what happens when two or three individuals pray regarding a particular issue and come to different conclusions? We had long meetings, and if people didn’t agree, everyone was told to go home and pray more, followed by more meetings. After I was baptized, The Church in Pittsburgh began pressuring me to spend more time with them, and they wanted to be involved in every aspect of my life. Something that started out really beautiful and sweet began to make me increasingly uncomfortable. It felt like my friend had initiated our friendship just to evangelize me.

When I was a junior, I met the official Protestant campus minister, an outgoing United Methodist woman. I left The Church in Pittsburgh and attended the ministry group for students on campus who belonged to mainline Protestant denominations until I graduated from college. In 1999 I graduated cum laude with a double major in English literature and mathematics.

The Worst Year

The year after I graduated from college, I rented a small apartment while working towards an additional bachelor’s degree in nursing to become a Certified Nurse Midwife and working a couple of part-time jobs. Not long after I had moved into my apartment, a neighbor asked me out. He was a friendly, good-looking guy, a couple of years older than me. He lived in the building next to mine, and he told me that he was a nurse at a local hospital. When he came to pick me up for our date, we stepped into my apartment so that I could get my purse and a sweater. I wouldn’t normally let a stranger into my apartment, but he was my neighbor. He already knew where I lived, and it seemed rude to make him stand on my porch while I grabbed my purse. Once he was inside my apartment, he attacked me. I was terrified. He was bigger and stronger. I lived alone and nobody knew that I was going out with him that night. He forcibly kissed me, he groped me, and he managed to unbutton and unzip some of our clothes. Without going into details, he molested me and attempted to do even more. At that point it must have been clear that I was going to put up a fight.

I asked him again to leave, and a few minutes later he left. Like many women, I didn’t know how to label what had happened to me. I thought at the time that the guy had been “a real a-hole,” but that what had happened was an unfortunate side of dating. I told my friends what happened, and they were supportive, but I’m not sure they grasped how upsetting it had been, or how frightened I was to live alone in my apartment afterwards.

It wasn’t until nearly 20 years later that I looked back on the event in a new light. My neighbor had sexually assaulted me, and the incident affected me much more than I realized at the time. It completely altered the next several years of my life. After the assault, I stopped showering regularly, and I shaved my head. It seemed safer to make myself as unattractive and un-feminine as possible. I felt stupid and revolting and tried to make my exterior reflect how I felt about myself on the inside.

How could I be so stupid to think that a nice, attractive, professional young man might want to take me out on a date? How could I be so dumb as to let a strange man into my apartment? I wrestled with who was culpable. The man who had assaulted me was still my neighbor. Living in my apartment alone for the rest of the year was terrifying, but I was too ashamed and humiliated to tell my parents that I needed to break my lease. I no longer trusted my ability to read social situations or judge if a person was trustworthy. My strange behavior negatively affected my social, academic, and professional life for a long time. I dropped out of the nursing program without finishing the first semester. My faith had been fragile before the assault, but afterwards it was nonexistent.

Healing

The minute my lease was up on the apartment, I left Pittsburgh and moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I shared a house with my sister and worked a series of low-paying, dead-end jobs for the next several years. I rarely thought about the assault, but it still profoundly influenced my self-perception, my behavior, and my life choices.

Today, with 20 years of perspective, I see my reaction to the assault as a sign of strength and resilience. I found a way to heal. I got a kitten. My hair grew back. Bit by bit, I began to piece together a measure of self-worth. I didn’t have any romantic relationships for several years, but I relearned how to make friends and developed meaningful relationships with both men and women. I joined a small United Methodist church around the corner from home. They were incredibly kind and accepting, never pushy or overbearing, unlike The Church in Pittsburgh. Slowly and tentatively, my faith began to grow again. I met the man who would become my husband, and I started nursing school again in 2004.

Love

When I met Mike, he was in his first year of seminary, preparing to become an Episcopal priest. My friends and family, who were mostly non-religious, were surprised that I was dating a seminarian, but when they saw that we had a healthy relationship, they accepted him with open arms. Our relationship developed slowly, in part because he was in seminary an hour away, and in part because I needed to take things slowly. He invited me to Easter Vigil at the seminary. Mike gave me a Book of Common Prayer, and I loved it.

In June 2005, Mike graduated from seminary and moved to New Orleans, where he had obtained a position as a curate (assistant) at a large parish. I had to take some summer classes to finish my RN degree, so I stayed in Wisconsin for the summer. In August, Mike was ordained as an Episcopal priest in New Orleans. I finished school in Milwaukee, and we got married at Trinity United Methodist Church in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 20, 2005. On August 29th, Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. We were still in Wisconsin when Katrina hit, but Mike’s apartment — the apartment we were supposed to spend our newlywed year in — was a total loss, and he lost his position as curate. There was no parish to go back to. The whole neighborhood was literally under eight feet of water. We were broke, homeless, and within a few weeks, I was extraordinarily ill with morning sickness.

Becoming a Clergy Family

I loved Mike and had wanted to marry him, but I didn’t particularly want to be a clergy spouse. But I decided that it would be an adventure, and I would just figure it out! When I was about five months pregnant with our first child, we moved to a small town in rural Mississippi where Mike would be the vicar of the Episcopal church. The Southern church ladies tried to be kind, and I did my best as well, but the cultural differences made things difficult. I was a vegetarian, not a lifelong/cultural Episcopalian, and was a Midwesterner and city girl through and through.

To make everyone in the parish as uncomfortable as possible, we had a homebirth in the rectory using a midwife. We had a beautiful, healthy baby boy who unfortunately suffered from colic. He was an unusually sensitive baby, cried a lot and rarely slept for more than an hour. One day, a church lady asked to hold the baby. I told her it was not a good time for anyone but me to hold him. He would have a complete and total meltdown that would take hours to settle down from if anyone but me held him. I’m not sure that church lady ever forgave me. She thought I was being rude. This event became a turning point in how I saw my role as a clergy spouse. I knew that my son’s health was a higher priority than her feelings. I was doing the right thing, but it didn’t always endear me to my husband’s parishioners.

We spent two years in Mississippi before moving to central Louisiana, where Mike accepted a position as a curate at a large parish. Shortly after we moved, I gave birth to a daughter. On our third wedding anniversary, we had a newborn and a toddler. I wanted to be more involved in church life, but it just wasn’t possible. Aside from Sunday morning services, most church events were not conducive to bringing small children, and we couldn’t afford to get babysitters all the time. I also found it difficult to connect with most people in the congregation because many of them were quite wealthy, while Mike and I were barely making ends meet.

I remember one night that Mike and I were expected to attend a social dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town. We really couldn’t afford to pay for a babysitter and pay for dinner at a fancy restaurant, but we did it anyway and tried to make the best of a rare night out. The conversation revolved around a trip one family had taken to New York City, where they had seen a show on Broadway. Another couple chimed in, “We saw that show in London; it was wonderful.”

I didn’t want to be rude or antisocial, but there was literally no way for Mike or me to participate in the conversation. We listened and ate silently. Those were the years I barely left the house. The baby napped from 9 to 11 a.m., the toddler napped from noon to 3 p.m., and the baby napped again from 3 to 5 p.m..

Spiritually, my faith was strong, but I was in a dry spell. To further complicate things, Mike was becoming increasingly interested in Catholicism. I contacted a Roman Catholic priest to see if he could help me locate a spiritual director. I wanted to learn more about the Catholic faith. Initially, the Catholic priest wanted to talk to my husband about the Pastoral Provision (a way Anglican/Episcopal priests can convert and become ordained as Roman Catholic priests). Local bishops are not required to accept candidates under the Pastoral Provision, and the local bishop did not pursue this option with Mike. It was a disappointing part of the journey. (Due to the sensitive nature of conversion and the struggles for married men to find fellowship within a clergy so defined by celibacy, the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith now requires two years to elapse before the question of the PP can be asked or considered.)

The Episcopal Church was changing during this time, and Mike and I were beginning to feel like there were fewer Episcopal churches that would welcome an Anglo-Catholic priest like him. After three years in Louisiana, we moved on, hoping that Mike could find a long-term position in a church that would be a better fit for us before our oldest child started kindergarten.

To the Border

In 2011, we moved to the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, where Mike was the priest of a small mission church. Even though the church was small, they had very strong lay leaders. We hoped to stay in Texas until the kids were in high school. Mike and I bought our first house. The folks at our church were friendly and easy-going. I gave birth to another daughter. Sadly, it was less than a year into our time in the Rio Grande Valley before some pretty big cracks began to emerge in the parish.

One by one, the wonderful group of lay leaders at our church moved away or stepped back. There weren’t many laypeople left in leadership by the time Mike and I had unpacked our bags. We were willing to go anywhere God called us, but it can be difficult to find priests who will move to the Rio Grande Valley, so the church had been without a priest for some time before we arrived. The lay leaders were tired, which is understandable, but when Mike came, they were so relieved to have a priest that they wanted him to take over everything. Unfortunately, that is not how healthy churches function.

There were many things that we really loved about living in the Rio Grande Valley. We lived just a few miles from the border, and the region has a vibrant and unique culture. I learned to cook authentic Mexican food. The kids were able to attend an amazing Episcopal school at a neighboring parish. I made friends with our next door neighbor. The cost of living is low compared to many other parts of the country. I was welcomed into a support system in the group of clergy spouses. We had tamales at Christmas, and for every birthday we bought a gigantic piñata. Our church had problems, but Mike worked hard, and we hoped that everything would come together.

The Issue of Life

I had grown up in a pro-choice family. As a young woman in the 1990s, I thought it was absurd to assert that an embryo or fetus under 12 weeks had value or could feel pain. I thought that both men and women had a right to enjoy their sexuality in any way they saw fit, as long as it was between consenting adults. It seemed horribly unfair that women were forced to pay a much higher price for this freedom than men, in the form of contraceptive side effects and unplanned pregnancies. First trimester abortion seemed like an imperfect, but acceptable method to help rectify some of this inequality — as long as I didn’t think too hard about the babies.

I was revulsed by pro-life leaders like Randall Terry. As far as I could tell, they did not care about women’s mental or physical health. I found it insulting when pro-life people would nonchalantly toss out the line “choose adoption” as a solution for women facing unexpected crisis pregnancies. In addition, I had seen pro-life people use pictures of dead fetuses mislabeled with inaccurate gestational dates. I concluded that pro-life people were liars. I had even worked briefly at a Planned Parenthood family planning clinic (not an abortion clinic) after moving back to Madison after college.

I never thought to reevaluate my beliefs about abortion until I came across a documentary about the pro-life movement on Netflix one day while we lived in Texas. I began to see for the first time that there is a much more nuanced and compassionate way to look at the issue of abortion. It is possible to genuinely care for pregnant women facing difficult circumstances and care deeply for the lives of the unborn. Caring for people is not a zero-sum game.

I saw for the first time that the pro-abortion movement itself lies, claiming “it’s just a clump of cells.” Once my eyes were opened to the reality that unborn babies deserve human rights beginning at conception, not at some other arbitrary stage of development, I couldn’t continue my previous stance. By this time, I was a mother of three. It now seems absurd to claim an embryo or fetus under 12 weeks has no value.

Things Fall Apart

After working hard at our church in the Rio Grande Valley for four years, the situation hadn’t improved. The parish never seemed comfortable with Mike’s Anglo-Catholicism, even though he had been open and honest about who he was before they called him to be their priest.

My mother died in 2015 after a short, terrible fight with cancer. Just two months after her death, I suffered a miscarriage. The tension that had long been simmering at our parish continued to grow. I suspect they might have suggested to Mike that he needed to move on earlier, but they didn’t feel like they could do that to us while my mother was dying.

The Episcopal Church encompasses a broad spectrum of theological viewpoints. Some people see this as a strength. I began to see it as a drawback. You can ask ten Episcopal priests the same question and get ten wildly different answers. Parts of the Episcopal church are theologically liberal; others are theologically conservative. Some are high church (smells and bells), some are low church (praise band). The various Episcopal seminaries vary widely in what they teach and how they form seminarians. Between 2002, the year Mike entered seminary, and 2016, the Episcopal Church changed significantly. When it became clear that we would have to sell our house and leave our church in the Rio Grande Valley, we weren’t sure that Mike would be able to find another parish that would be receptive to a theologically conservative Anglo-Catholic Episcopal priest. If we weren’t going to become Catholic willingly, God just might drag us in kicking and screaming.

Entering the Church

In the summer of 2016, we sold our house, got rid of 75 percent of our belongings and moved our family back to Madison, Wisconsin, where we made plans to enter the Catholic Church. We told very few people what we were doing; we wanted to leave the Episcopal Church quietly. It was an enormous leap of faith.

Mike was unable to secure a secular job before we moved, so we trusted that we would be able to figure out something after we got to Madison. It proved to be incredibly difficult for Mike to transition to a secular career path. He had given up the Episcopalian priesthood to become Catholic but struggled to find a career that made good use of his gifts and experience. Today he works at a drug and alcohol treatment facility. It is a challenging field, but he has the opportunity to use his skills which he gained in the ministry to help people in our community. 

Confession was another obstacle that I had to overcome. Just as I had worked through my issues with the Church’s teaching on abortion, study and practice of the faith helped me to overcome my doubts about the Sacrament of Reconciliation. In the end, I was completely shocked and surprised by this Sacrament, which continues to yield grace and peace. To describe the change in me fully, I would need to spill another thousand words. Suffice it to say that I no longer harbor doubts about the graces that one can receive when he or she submits to what the Church teaches and dives fully into the faith.

Meager Provisions, Ample Grace

My mother had passed away less than a year earlier, and my dad offered to let us stay with him until we could get on our feet. We moved during the summer so that the children wouldn’t have to change schools mid-year. Mike and I and our three children entered the Church in September of 2016. We were 39, and we assumed that our baby days were behind us… but we were wrong! I discovered in October that I was pregnant, and I gave birth to another son the following spring, just weeks before my 40th birthday.

During the 11 years that I was a clergy spouse, I always felt a little bit (and sometimes a lot) like an outsider. One of the best things about becoming Catholic is that I know that I can walk into any Catholic Church in the whole world, and I belong there. I began to realize I could trust this Church to teach the Truth. I don’t need to read a dozen books and consult multiple priests and then form an opinion on every imaginable area of theological minutia. My husband and I like to joke that we are always doing things The Most Difficult Way Possible. We always end up where we are supposed to be, but we have never once taken the easy path. Our family made significant financial and personal sacrifices when we left the Episcopal Church, but now that we are Catholic, we feel like we can live out our conscience, and that is the better portion.

Becoming a Christian didn’t make my life easier. It gave me the gift of grace and provided my life with a spiritual foundation. As a Catholic my spiritual life feels like climbing a spiral staircase. As the liturgical calendar spins around and around, my faith grows richer with each step.

The post The Most Difficult Way Possible appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

But when some friends of his became Catholic, James was deeply disturbed, and tried to talk them out of it. That process of revisiting the Catholic Church with eyes ended up helping James to see a number of aspects of Catholicism that he had simply missed as a cradle Catholic.

The post Back to the Truth – James Beaumont appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

The answer to the “how” question is a story, and it follows pretty closely the three stages of conversion noted by G.K. Chesterton: “It is my experience that the convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind …. The first phase is that of the young philosopher who feels that he ought to be fair to the Church of Rome. He wishes to do it justice; but chiefly because he sees that it suffers injustice …. The second stage is that in which the convert begins to be conscious not only of the falsehood but the truth, and is enormously excited to find that there is far more of it than he would ever have expected …. And the third stage is perhaps the truest and the most terrible. It is that in which the man is trying not to be converted” (The Catholic Church and Conversion, Ignatius Press, 2006, pp. 72-77). If I may be allowed to sum up each of these in a word: fairness, discovery, and flight.

Beginning to be Fair to the Catholic Church

I like to say that the first stage started when I read C.S. Lewis in the 9th grade. But it really started long before that. I grew up United Methodist in Georgia, the son of two United Methodist “pastor’s kids.” In fact, three of my four grandparents were ordained ministers in the United Methodist Church. So I had been baptized as a small child and was active in Sunday school, children’s choirs, and eventually the church youth group. In the summer before I started high school, I attended a “Chrysalis Flight,” an intensive three-day Christian discipleship retreat experience for teens. I came away from that weekend with a desire to grow in my faith, and I picked up a copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Reading that book changed my life. It was like opening a door onto a whole new world. It was the first book I read that caused me to think seriously about my Christian faith, to think about it not merely as something good and true, but as the only explanation (among all the philosophies and religions of the world) that really explains everything. It was my introduction to apologetics, philosophy, and rational argument. I was hooked. I loved the simple profundity of Lewis’s style, his ability to take complex concepts and explain them in everyday language. I started reading every C.S. Lewis book I could get my hands on: The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, collections of essays and sermons. C.S. Lewis became my undisputed favorite author.

Through my reading of Lewis, I first encountered the doctrine of purgatory. As Lewis writes in Letters to Malcolm:

Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt, you know” — “Even so, sir.” (C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964, pp. 108f.)

As a Methodist, I considered the idea of a post-mortem cleansing a logical conclusion from John Wesley’s idea of Christian perfection. If God is going to sanctify me by His grace, if He is going to work in me to make me perfect as He is perfect, then what happens if I die before that process is complete? Will God leave undone the good work He began? Or will He “bring it to completion” (Philippians 1:6)?

About a year after I started reading Lewis, my dad came into my room one day and said, “You know, Benjamin, if you like C.S. Lewis so much, there’s another author I think you should read.” Then he told me about G.K. Chesterton. “There’s a book of his that is similar to Mere Christianity, and I think we have a copy of it downstairs. I’ll try to find it for you.” He came back a little later and brought me a copy of Orthodoxy. I started reading and was almost instantly conflicted.

I was a devoted fan of Lewis. He was not only my favorite author, he was my first literary love. But Chesterton seemed every bit as clever and insightful as Lewis, if not more so. I hated to admit it, but perhaps I liked Chesterton even more than I liked Lewis. By the time I finished reading Orthodoxy, I had resolved the conflict: though I retained my appreciation of C.S. Lewis, I had a new favorite author. I then began to read every Chesterton book I could get my hands on.

The more I read, the more I came up against the fact that Chesterton joined the Catholic Church as an adult. In many of his post-conversion books, he wrote things in defense of Catholicism that seemed to make sense to me, but I didn’t know enough about the Catholic Church to know what I really thought about it all. The more I read, the more I had to admit that I didn’t know much about the Catholic Church, but I wanted to learn more.

In high school, I also began reading some early Church Fathers and medieval theologians. The youth director at my Methodist church started a theological reading club for the juniors and seniors in high school. He called it the “Dead Theologians Society.” We met weekly to read and discuss such works as The Confessions of St. Augustine, On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius, and selections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. The group was supposed to continue with readings from Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and more recent theologians, but we never got that far before the group’s attendance dwindled and the project was abandoned. On my own, I was also reading St. Anselm. As a result, much of my early theological reading was decidedly Catholic. No one told me to be careful about what these authors wrote. No one warned me that Methodists didn’t believe everything that Augustine or Aquinas believed. I simply read these great thinkers, and found that what they had to say made a lot of sense. So, at the same time I was reading Chesterton, I was also getting a solidly Catholic introduction to theology.

No one warned me that Methodists didn’t believe everything that Augustine or Aquinas believed. I simply read these great thinkers, and found that what they had to say made a lot of sense.
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I also experienced in high school my first encounters with the mischaracterizations of Catholic teaching. Let me give two examples. The first occurred in Sunday School, where I was participating in a “Disciple Bible Study” that covered most of the Old and New Testaments in 34 weeks of daily readings with weekly meetings to discuss. When we read Matthew 16:13-20, the famous “you are Peter” passage, I knew enough about Catholicism to know that this was the basis of the idea of papal authority. So I asked my youth director, who was teaching the class, “Why aren’t we Catholics?” He seemed a little surprised at the question, and one of the other students made a dismissive remark about the appalling behavior of the popes in the Renaissance. I didn’t know enough then to explain the Catholic position, but I instinctively knew that the sinfulness of individual popes in history was irrelevant to the question of teaching authority. (Infallibility is not the same as impeccability.)

Another example of the unfair mischaracterization of Catholicism came when I attended a Christian music festival with my youth group. One of the speakers at the music festival argued that Catholics were not real Christians, and he cited, among other things, their “superstitious” beliefs about communion. I remember being taken aback by his remarks, and I felt compelled to consult one of his books in the merchandise tent after his talk was finished. I encountered in his book arguments against Catholicism that, like his talk, seemed to misconstrue the Catholic position. Again, I didn’t know enough at that time to articulate a clear Catholic rebuttal of what he said, but I knew that his arguments rested on a faulty understanding of Catholic teaching. These experiences, and others, gave me a growing sense that the Catholic Church was frequently misunderstood and misrepresented by her opponents. I wasn’t yet ready to accept the Catholic Church’s claims, but I was beginning to have serious doubts about the arguments against those claims.

These experiences, and others, gave me a growing sense that the Catholic Church was frequently misunderstood and misrepresented by her opponents.
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Discovering the Catholic Church

By the time I had started as a freshman at Asbury College, a non- denominational Christian liberal arts college in Kentucky, the question was in my mind, “Should I become Catholic?” The question was not yet an urgent one, but I gave it a lot of thought and prayer and study. Three things in particular helped me along the way to answering that question in college.

The first major help came in the form of books. I had already been reading the Bible, Augustine, Anselm, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton. But now, at college, I had access to so much more. In addition to course textbooks and the resources of the college library, I was blessed to find several works of Catholic apologetics at local used bookstores. But the single greatest printed resource came from the college library’s book sale during my very first semester. It was 2003, and the college had ordered the second edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia for its library’s reference section. This meant they were selling the original 1967 edition of the New Catholic Encyclopedia, nineteen volumes in all, for a total of $50. As a freshman in college, I didn’t have much money to spend, but I knew this was a good deal. So after thinking it over, I bit the bullet and bought the set. For the next four years, it sat on the back of my desk in my college dorm room. Whenever I had a question about some Catholic teaching or practice, I would pull a volume off the shelf and start reading.

One of the advantages of attending a non-denominational Christian college was that almost everyone took their Christian faith seriously, but not everyone agreed on questions of theology.
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Conversations with my college friends were the second major help I received in answering the question, “Should I become Catholic?” One of the advantages of attending a non-denominational Christian college was that almost everyone took their Christian faith seriously, but not everyone agreed on questions of theology. Many of my friends were some version of Methodist (whether United, or Free, or Evangelical), but one of my closest friends was an evangelical Presbyterian, raised in the Reformed tradition of John Calvin. So we frequently discussed and debated theological differences between Wesley and Calvin. One conversation in the cafeteria will suffice as a typical example. Someone raised the question of which of God’s attributes was most important. The Wesleyans at the table made a case for holiness as the fundamental divine attribute; my Calvinist friend, though clearly outnumbered, made a compelling case for sovereignty as more fundamental than holiness. I remember thinking at the time that the debate was fairly even, and perhaps there was something more fundamental than either holiness or sovereignty. So I looked up “divine attributes” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, and found that there is something more fundamental: aseity (“from himself”-ness). As the Catechism puts it: “God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end. All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 213). So what distinguishes God from His creatures is not holiness or sovereignty per se, but the fact that God’s holiness and sovereignty (and all His other attributes) come from Himself, whereas any holiness or sovereignty that we humans might attain comes not from ourselves but from God. This distinction not only helped me see a deeper Catholic answer to a Protestant debate about divine attributes; it also helped me to understand the difference between worshipping God and venerating the saints. God can make someone perfectly holy, and that person is still not God, because the difference between God and His creatures is not one of degree but of kind: God’s holiness is His own, from Himself; any holiness that we gain is pure grace, a freely bestowed gift from God. When we worship God, we praise Him for who He is in Himself. When we venerate the saints, we praise them for what God has done in and through them. As long as that distinction is preserved, the more we praise the saints, the more it redounds to God’s glory.

When we venerate the saints, we praise them for what God has done in and through them. As long as that distinction is preserved, the more we praise the saints, the more it redounds to God’s glory.
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This argument about divine attributes was one conversation out of dozens. From purgatory to saints to discerning God’s will, there were numerous questions that my friends and I discussed and debated. Sparring with people from different theological traditions helped me better understand my own, and drove me to see what answers the Catholic Church offered.

Professors were the third major help I received in answering the question, “Should I become Catholic?” Several of my college professors had what I would call Catholic sympathies. They would say, although not in so many words, that they agreed with the Protestant Reformation as a whole, but they wished we had kept this one aspect of the Catholic Faith, or that one Catholic tradition. The trouble was that different professors had different sympathies. So, one by one, I started putting the pieces together. Whenever the subject of the Catholic Church came up in any of my college courses, I thought about it and related it to this question of becoming Catholic. In French classes, I was being exposed to a strong Catholic culture, with the celebration of saints’ feast days. In courses on ancient and medieval philosophy, I was reading more Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Through music ensembles, I was being exposed to Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, and various musical settings of the Mass. One of my English professors was a Chesterton scholar, and I had many fruitful conversations with him in his office.

But probably the most influential Catholic sympathy came in a history course on Western Civilization. The professor sought to present a fair and balanced picture of the state of Catholic Christianity on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. He made a particular point of saying it was not all bad. Yes, there was corruption in the hierarchy, but medieval and early Renaissance Catholicism also witnessed growth and dynamic renewal through new religious orders like the Dominicans and Franciscans, the fervent work and prayer of traditional monastic communities, the founding of universities, and the patronage of the arts. The professor presented a complex and nuanced picture of pre-Reformation Catholicism.

Boccaccio’s Decameron. One story in particular addressed the issue of corruption in the hierarchy of the Church, and turned the typical Protestant argument on its head.
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Then he had us read selected stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron. One story in particular addressed the issue of corruption in the hierarchy of the Church, and turned the typical Protestant argument on its head. In the story, a Parisian Jew named Abraham surprises his Catholic friend by deciding to convert, even after visiting Rome and witnessing firsthand the corruption in the Church’s hierarchy. He explains that, from what he saw, the pope and the cardinals in Rome appeared to be doing their best to bring about the utter destruction of the Christian religion. However, since this did not occur, but instead Christianity grew and flourished, he became convinced that the Christian religion must truly be guided and protected by the Holy Spirit. From this story, and from the complex picture of pre-Reformation Catholicism that my history professor presented, I began to see that the sins of its leaders actually made the Catholic Church’s claims harder to dismiss. If the Catholic Church was merely a human institution, how could she survive — and thrive — with such weak and broken human leaders?

I began to see that the sins of its leaders actually made the Catholic Church’s claims harder to dismiss.
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All of these ideas and experiences drove me to action. I had been reading books, debating with friends, and encountering Catholic sympathies in my professors. Now I needed to do something about it. So far it was all in the realm of ideas. I needed practical experience. So on January 9, 2005, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, I made my first visit to a Catholic church for Sunday Mass. I looked up the closest parish to my college and found my way to St. Luke Catholic Church in Nicholasville, Kentucky. I was struck with how normal the Mass seemed. I am not sure what I expected, but the evident faith of the congregation dispelled any notion I had that Catholicism was merely a “dead tradition” or a bunch of people “going through the motions.” The Mass did not seem so different from the Methodist communion services of my upbringing. It was strangely familiar. Though I would not have said so at the time, in hindsight I would say it was like coming home for the first time. By this point in my journey, I had gone well beyond being fair to the Catholic Church. I was now growing rather fond of it, discovering that it was true, not only occasionally, but regularly. In fact, it was proving a dependable source of wisdom and truth. I was well on my way to answering the question, “Should I become Catholic?” The question was now urgent, and my answer was imminent.

Attempting to Flee from the Catholic Church

In the fall of my junior year of college, I began attending RCIA classes at St. Luke Catholic Church and started going to Mass every Sunday that October. I also decided to join the parish choir. These may not sound like the choices of someone who is trying to flee from Catholicism, but they were an attempt to immerse myself in the life of the Catholic Church to see if personal experience would confirm my private study. I was putting all my reading and argumentation to the test. Was the Catholic Church really what Chesterton said it was? Did my experience in a real Catholic parish match what I had read in Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and various books of Catholic apologetics? Did the Catholic Church look from the inside like it did from the outside? In a way, I wanted my picture of Catholicism to be proven wrong. It would have been more convenient to keep the Catholic Church at arm’s length, to admire and respect her while remaining Methodist. I was not exactly looking forward to the conversations I knew I would have with family and friends if I became Catholic. But my regular exposure to local Catholic worship and fellowship did nothing to overturn or contradict my years of study and prayer.

In my attempt to find a way out of joining the Catholic Church, I also started asking some trusted spiritual mentors, “Why aren’t you Catholic?” I was hoping that their reasons would be sufficient for me, too. They were not. I found them admirable, but not applicable to me. I even had one professor warmly congratulate me on my impending decision, and confess that he had often wished he had the opportunity to learn more about the Catholic Church.

The Unfathomable Final Step

As Chesterton says, “This note on the stages of conversion is necessarily very negative and inadequate. There is in the last second of time or hair’s breadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe. The space between doing and not doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast” (The Catholic Church and Conversion, Ignatius Press, 2006, p. 83). My story so far has been rather cursory and preliminary. This is intentional, because even on the eve of my Catholic confirmation, I was not able to articulate fully all the ideas, impressions, and experiences that went into my decision to join the Catholic Church. It was such an intensely personal thing, I botched more than a few attempts to explain it to family and friends. There were a thousand tiny reasons that all amounted to the conviction that the Catholic Church was right, its teachings were true, and for all its human element, it was truly guided and directed by the Holy Spirit.

There was also in this whole process a growing awareness of being providentially guided to this conclusion. I had been raised by my parents, and encouraged by my Methodist upbringing, to look for God’s hand at work in my life, and to follow Him with trust and confidence. I could now see enough of the past shape of my life to know what present decision I needed to make, even if I could not predict the future outcome. At the Easter Vigil of 2006, as a junior in college, I was confirmed and received into the Catholic Church.

Further Growth in the Catholic Church

Some of my family and friends were afraid that by joining the Catholic Church I would be entering a spiritually cold and dark place. I have found it to be quite the opposite: dazzlingly full of light and warmth. I have been fortunate to know some wonderfully kind confessors, wise spiritual directors, and dynamic homilists. I routinely have the Scriptures opened to me in new and compelling ways. I have made many Catholic friends and encountered in the Catholic Church inspiring examples of faith, hope, and love. I have grown in my Catholic faith and have found a fervor and tenderness in Catholic devotions. I am nourished by the Word and the Sacraments. God has been immeasurably good to me. My heart is full.

After graduating from college with a degree in Classical Languages, I was accepted into graduate school at the Catholic University of America, where I received my master’s and doctorate in Greek and Latin. In my time at CUA, I was further nurtured in my Catholic faith by daily Masses and frequent confessions at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and evening prayer at the Dominican House of Studies. I was also involved in a Gregorian chant schola and the young adult group at my local parish in Maryland. I have never regretted my decision or doubted my conviction that the Catholic Church is who she claims to be. In fact, after fourteen years of full communion in the Catholic Church, and worshipping at over 3,000 Masses in seven different countries, in seven different languages, I am more convinced than ever that I made the right decision, and that I am where God wants me to be. I am home.

The post Why and How I Became Catholic appeared first on The Coming Home Network.

One night, the pastor preached a sermon challenging all of us to recommit our lives to Christ and sacrifice anything that stood in the way of obedience to God. For me, that obstacle was the band. It had become my life, instead of Jesus. But how could I manage that change?

A few days later, an old pastor friend called to ask me to become youth pastor at his church. I knew God was calling me, so as hard as it was to leave the band — not to mention my girlfriend — I packed up and returned to Iowa to begin my new life as a youth pastor.

At this point, obviously, I had no thought of becoming Catholic. As with many converts, my journey of faith was not a straight line, but a lengthy series of zigs and zags, successes and failures, moments of clarity, but also periods of confusion.

As with many others, I had misconceptions, obstacles, and hang-ups. The biggest obstacle for me was the fact that my faith/church perspective was also my career. Throughout my 22 years in ministry, I have held many positions: senior pastor, teaching pastor, worship leader, missions coordinator, etc. The Christian Faith was my career, and the prospect of leaving it all behind to become Catholic was something that I would later wrestle with greatly. Early on, I was totally intent on being a Protestant minister.

There were no Catholics in my family. Growing up, I had no exposure to the Catholic Faith other than what I had heard from people who hated it. When I met my wife, Estelle, I asked her if she went to church. She said, “I’m Catholic, but I don’t go to church.” I took her to my church, and she loved it! We were married in the United Methodist church where I worked, and never looked back. Until.…

As with others who ultimately convert, my first experience with a Catholic who actually practiced his faith proved to be life changing. His name was Devin Schadt. At the time we met, he was working as a graphic designer. I had hired him to create a logo for our youth ministry, and that led to some interesting conversations about faith and church, and eventually to his Catholic faith. My first impression of him was that he loved Jesus and had a vibrant faith. This seemed strange to me, because as I sat in his dining room looking at the logos he had produced, I was intrigued by the icons, paintings, and other “Catholic looking” stuff he had in his home. Who would do such a thing? What was his deal? I had to press him on this.

I had never actually heard a Catholic talk about Jesus the way Devin did. I had assumed that he just hadn’t read the Bible enough to see how his Catholic faith contradicted the Scriptures. I was licking my chops at the idea of sharing some simple verses with him and explaining the Gospel. Certain that after a few minutes he would be ready to become a “real” Christian, pray the Sinner’s Prayer, and leave all that superstitious hocus pocus behind him, I asked him, “Devin, when were you saved?” I wanted to see how a Catholic would answer this question. I didn’t expect much. Boy, was I wrong!

Not only did Devin have an answer to that question, he had his own questions for me. Questions I was in no way prepared for! For example, “Keith, where did your Bible come from?” “By what authority were the books of the New Testament canonized?” “Why are there so many Protestant denominations?” “How do we know who is accurately teaching the truth of Christianity, when there are so many differences between Protestant denominations?” And many more!

Where were these ideas coming from? As intrigued as I was, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the possibility that the Catholic Church might actually be the one true Church founded by Christ. The very idea that there was a single true Church, founded by Christ Himself, was something new to me. I had always believed that what mattered was a person’s faith and belief in the Scriptures — not any connection to an institution. Devin was helping me to see that the Bible itself shows that Jesus not only founded a Church, but that it still existed today through the handing down of the Faith and authority of the Apostles. However, this was not something I could easily accept.

Devin and I would go on to have many such conversations over the years. We would travel together on a pilgrimage to Rome and Medjugorje. And we would argue passionately; I was trying to make him a Protestant, and he was trying to make me a Catholic.

During this time, my ministry and my family were growing. I loved my role in my church. God was moving and things were great. Although there were many things Devin had shown me that challenged my Protestant thinking, I remained aloof, afraid to seriously entertain the idea of converting.

There was one night in particular when God called me out. One of my friends was leading the youth in a communion service at a church camp. It was nothing new to me, but as he worked his way through the service and held up the bread and juice, he said, “this represents Jesus.” I knew that this was not what Jesus had said. I also knew this wasn’t what the Christian Church believed for 1500 years. It was as if God was calling to me to “come home and I’ll show you more.” I broke down and left the room. I called Devin and confessed to him that I was feeling called to become Catholic. I was terrified he would rub it in my face that he was right (because that’s what I would’ve done), but he didn’t. He simply said he was there to help.

It was nothing new to me, but as he worked his way through the service and held up the bread and juice, he said: This represents Jesus. I knew that this was not what Jesus had said.
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I wish this were the part of my story where I converted, but it isn’t. Fear held me back. I bailed out because I couldn’t wrap my mind around how this conversion business could work in my otherwise comfortable life. What would I do for a job? What would my family think?

My wife was raised Catholic, but never went to church. In fact, it was through dating and marrying me that Estelle’s journey out of the Catholic Church was completed. I had told her, “The Catholic Church is just a bunch of unbiblical man-made traditions. If you want to experience real Christianity, come with me to my Bible church.” She did, and that was that. She had moved from being a non-practicing Catholic to a person with a passionate relationship with Jesus, and now even a Protestant pastor’s wife! How could I explain this? All these nigglings combined to overpower the conviction I felt, and I put this whole Catholic thing on the shelf for many years. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life that I did not have the courage to follow through on my conviction.

It would be more than a decade later, after many of life’s ups and downs, that eventually God’s call to come home would become something more than a niggling. I had been the Pastor to Youth and Mission at a medium-sized United Methodist church for a couple years when Greg, a good friend of mine, invited my wife and me to attend a screening of a movie called Apparition Hill. It was a documentary that followed seven strangers on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje. I hadn’t thought about that trip I had made to Medjugorje in quite a while, but when Greg called, I figured I’d better go, since he was the one who originally took me on that first all-expenses-paid trip all those years ago. My wife, Estelle, and I had gone with Greg and his wife, Sandi. The movie brought so many things to my mind that a few times it had me in tears. It’s a great film on many levels, but for me it was clearly used by our Blessed Mother to reach out to me.

Without an authoritative voice to interpret both Scripture and history, chaos and schism were inevitable. For the United Methodists... the cultural issues surrounding marriage and Scripture were unraveling what was once a strong…
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I had been in a bit of a storm in my church. Although my local church was great, our denomination as a whole was a mess. It had become clear to me that, without an authoritative voice to interpret both Scripture and history, chaos and schism were inevitable. For the United Methodists, as for many other Protestants in these twenty-first century times, the cultural issues surrounding marriage and Scripture were unraveling what was once a strong denomination. I found myself at odds with many members who wanted the church to change with the times. It didn’t seem to bother them that the Scriptures clearly defined things like marriage and human sexuality. “That’s just one interpretation.” “The church has had it wrong all these years, and we will fix it.” “God doesn’t hate. He/She loves everybody so you can’t judge anyone.” These were just some of the statements I was up against, all the while knowing that I really didn’t have a leg to stand on without some kind of external God-given authority to tell me otherwise. At one point in one of my conversations with an extremely liberal pastor friend, she said to me, “Keith, if you believe all that Church authority stuff, then why aren’t you Catholic?” Good question!

I was beginning to open to that idea again. It seemed that the more I thought about everything Devin and I had argued about, now — all these years later — what he had said was making perfect sense. I was in a different place; the shoe was on the other foot, and I was learning that not listening to God is the worst thing you can do. I still had various objections; I still had my issues. But I had begun to feel a new sense of calling, a new presence of truth in my life.

It took me a while to put my finger on it, but it all came together as I was preparing to preach a sermon on the Annunciation (it was Advent, so we Methodists could talk about Mary). As I worked on it in my office, I was overcome with emotion. The more I thought about Mary, the more I was aware not only of how amazing she was, but how connected to the Holy Spirit she continues to be. I actually felt her presence. Then, when I preached that sermon to my congregation, I could feel the Holy Spirit moving. I talked about how Mary was the New Eve and the New Ark of the Covenant. I talked about how amazing she must have been for the angel Gabriel to greet her as “full of grace.” The people were so intrigued by this. One man came forward afterward, in tears confessing that he’d never heard anything like that before. There is so much more I could say about this decisive moment, but the bottom line is: my doctrinal objections were solved, not by arguments, but by the Blessed Mother capturing my heart.

But again, there were the unresolved issues. What changes would my life be confronted with if I converted. I still had no idea how the transition could work. My dad had told me on one occasion, “Keith you can’t just quit your job and become Catholic, there needs to be a way.” He meant that I needed to know how I would feed my family. What would I do for a job? What about my ministry?

The answers to those questions wouldn’t be revealed to me for some time. But my personal moment of truth came one night as I prayed before a crucifix. I was telling Jesus, “Lord, I am ready to become Catholic, but I need you to make a way.” With as much clarity as I have ever received from God, Jesus spoke to me from the crucifix. “I am the way, the truth and the life. You don’t need me to make a way, you just need ME.”

I knew what that meant. I had just been receiving a blessing during the Mass because I couldn’t receive the Eucharist. Jesus was showing me that He was not only truly present in the Eucharist, but also that my primary need was not for God to make things easy or fully revealed, but rather that I was being called upon to step out in faith and just do what He was calling me to do. He was showing me that what I truly needed was not control, or assurance, but Himself.

When I returned home that evening, I told my wife that I needed to convert. I knew she had experienced the same sense of struggle with what was happening in our denomination, but I never expected her to join me in this journey of conversion (or in her case, “reversion”). Her surprising response to me was, “Keith, if this is what God is calling us to, then I am all in.”

The next day, I walked into my senior pastor’s office and told him that I was going to become Catholic. It was a major shock to the congregation; we had been planning so many projects together. In fact, my last Sunday there we had the groundbreaking ceremony for our new $10 million facility.

It was difficult. I loved those people in my former church, and still do. I didn’t want to hurt them; I didn’t want them to feel abandoned. Many were supportive because they loved me, but some thought I had lost my mind, and some were hurt. There were many painful moments in my departure. When you’ve spent your entire life and career in ministry, the connections and roots run deep. It’s important to understand that there will be a cost, sacrifice, and pain. But, there is also much to be gained in such an exchange.

Even if we lose everything we have in this world but gain Jesus, we have won! I had to get to the place where I didn’t need it all to work out perfectly in order to convert. I had to be willing to sacrifice everything for Jesus. Once I was able to take that step, it all became clear. There was no looking back. Jesus said, “the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (see Matthew 13:44).

After all those years, I was finally ready to buy that field. I am so happy I did. On October 8th, 2017, I was received into the Catholic Church. My wife was there beside me, returning to the Church, as I made my profession of faith, along with a couple of close friends. It was an incredible moment.

As expected, since becoming Catholic, life has not been easy. I have lost friends, money, security, stability and more. But what I have gained has been more valuable than I could ever have asked for. What I sacrificed does not compare to the blessings I have received. God has been true to his word. I know that no matter what happens in this life, I will never leave the Catholic Church. My life’s mission now is to help others on their journey of faith. I am so humbled that God has allowed me many opportunities to do what my heart most desired.

As expected, since becoming Catholic, life has not been easy. I have lost friends, money, security, stability and more... .What I sacrificed does not compare to the blessings I have received.
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In 2018, I wrote a book called The Convert’s Guide To Roman Catholicism: Your First Year in the Church. In this book, I try to help converts understand what it will be like to make this transition, not just on the theological level, but also on the practical and personal levels. I am gratified to see how it has helped many people in their journeys, but also in how it has helped cradle Catholics to see the Church through the eyes of a convert. Additionally, I have started a YouTube channel, a live-streamed daily Rosary prayer group, and a podcast called Catholic Feedback. God has also opened the door for me to travel and speak about my faith at parishes and events. The response has been amazing. When you follow the call of God, it doesn’t mean life will become easy, but it does become more meaningful. I am grateful for the grace He has given me, and I wonder about where this journey will take me from here.

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Find more of Keith’s work at keithnester.com.

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