My earliest memories are of happy times in our Pentecostal church with extended family. Our life was centered around church and other community events, such as potlucks and revival meetings. A highlight from that era was the lunches and dinners my grandparents would take all their kids and grandkids out to after we’d attended church together.
I was always wanting to sit in the front where I could better see the passionate preaching and the lively gospel music. Every so often someone would run around the church, or start speaking in tongues or something else – which for a four year old is quite interesting! I insisted on responding to every altar call that was given, even if it was for quitting drinking or smoking. I wanted to be around the platform with those asking God for a change in their lives.
Youth and Youth Ministry
My family changed congregations from that little holiness Pentecostal church to a new thing called a “megachurch,” a charismatic congregation, and as I entered my teenage years, I had a desire to be in ministry. In junior and senior high school I was constantly serving in children’s, youth, and young adult ministry in various capacities; I began to be mentored by pastors and evangelists, and my friends were those in ministry careers. My wife Teresa, who hadn’t grown up in church but had an intense conversion to Christianity as a teenager, also felt a desire for ministry and we were married right out of high school. Our outings were church functions, and our conversations centered around theology and ministry issues. We decided to attend Bible College and work toward winning souls together for the rest of our lives.
We had a passion for youth and inner city ministry. I pastored in youth and associate pastor positions, learning the business and practical side of ministry under sincere and devout men.
In the course of time I took a pastorate in Tucson, Arizona. It was a small church, but my wife, three children and myself, along with our energy and passion, reinvigorated the community and it quickly grew. Being senior pastor of that congregation was the joy of our lives. We lived in a parsonage on-site with our children, and it was a peaceful and beautiful way of living. We loved the work and the people, and God seemed to be expanding our ministry; we were doing multiple large youth events every year and quarterly camp meetings on-site. We were seeing people dedicate their lives to Jesus, and it felt like we were living our dream.
Like many pastors, I attended the various conferences and fellowships for those in ministry. Unfortunately, I often felt like these gatherings were more like sales seminars or market driven events. It seemed to me that we were missing something as a religious culture, or to a greater degree, as an American culture. In our desire to modernize and make Christianity relevant, I felt we were missing something but I wasn’t sure what. I loved the people I pastored and the work of God in general, and I wanted to see if I could find out what was missing.
I began a study of John and Charles Wesley and the roots of Methodism and the Holiness movement. I discovered that John Wesley was accused of being a ‘papist’ by his opposition in England, and I wondered why. Among other reasons, it was because he had lifted verbiage out of the Council of Trent regarding prevenient grace. I didn’t know why a Protestant leader I looked up to so much would use such a specifically Catholic resource. I began to go back over the Holiness movements and back to the Protestant reformers; I wasn’t sure what exactly I was looking for, but I began to feel more and more like modern evangelicalism had missed something important.
The Pastor’s Conference and Mortal Sin
I was part of a group of ministers within the Assemblies of God that was committed to going back to the ‘roots’ of our movement. The group had a conference in Arkansas which I had been under the impression would be informative as to how to retrieve whatever it was we might have lost. But to my disappointment, the conference was more fundraising and marketing seminars with kits and programs to buy for advertising the local church. I was disappointed. I ended up driving my way back to Oklahoma City to drop someone off and then flying back to Arizona. On the drive, I listened to a link someone had sent me; it was a Catholic evangelist speaking on the early Church fathers. I had read some St. Augustine but not much else from the Church Fathers, so this was new material to me. As I continued to listen and drive, I heard other speakers discussing mortal sin and what the Catholic Church teaches dogmatically about it.
What I was hearing was like a drink of fresh water! While what I had experienced in the Evangelical world over the years was constantly shifting positions on doctrine and practice, the dogmas and doctrines of the Catholic Church sounded solid and secure, unchanging through the centuries.
I called my wife from the Oklahoma City airport. She asked about the conference, which I told her was terrible, but I also told her that I’d found some other things I was really excited about. When I related to her the unchanging teachings of the Catholic Church on marriage, and what the church teaches specifically about communion, she said, “that sounds great, but we’re not becoming Catholic, right?” To which I replied, “of course not! We’re only learning parts of church history we missed.”
Fatima Studies in Protestant Junior High and Deacon Jones
Looking back now, I can remember a few times that Catholicism had come across my radar in small ways through the years prior to this encounter with the Church Fathers.
When I was a child, I attended elementary and junior high in a private Christian school attached to the megachurch we attended. I was always reading something, and constantly borrowing books from the school library. On one occasion, when I was in 9th grade, I grabbed a book about Our Lady of Fatima. Somehow a Catholic book had found its way into the library at our Protestant school! When I read the details surrounding Mary’s apparition to the shepherd children, I remember thinking it difficult to deny based on the witnesses, but I didn’t know what else to do with the information until years later.
I didn’t have any anti-Catholic notions, but working in ministry as a young man, I thought the Catholic Church was outdated more than anything. When I was in my mid 20’s, one night I was cruising through the channels and happened upon the Journey Home episode with Deacon Alex Jones. He was from a very similar experience and background as my wife and I. His story was compelling, but I dismissed it, assuming he must have become Catholic because he had gotten burnt out in Protestant ministry, and I convinced myself that I was doing the most good as a pastor and evangelist in the Pentecostal Church.
Many Strands Form a Rope
Now, however, as my wife and I began watching the Coming Home Network archives of testimonies from ministers converting who shared our background, we found their stories compelling. We also listened to materials from several other apostolates as well, such as Catholic Answers. We found many people from our background who’d had similar feelings and journeys to ours, and who had ended up in the Catholic Church.
Paralleling all this, I was pastoring what was becoming quite a successful church in Tucson. The church we were leading was thriving, but the congregation was noticing a difference in my sermons. We began a mid-week study dedicated to the early Church. All the while, my wife and I filled our conversations with talk of the Eucharist. Of all the doctrines we studied, this stuck out most to us. If Christ truly established the apostles as his successors and the Eucharist as the center of worship, and if it truly is Him, how we wanted it!
All these conversations were between her and I; no one in our church knew what we were actually considering. On one occasion, my wife asked me, “if we believe Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, I want it, I can go to a Mass and receive, what’s stopping us?” I replied, “we haven’t been received into the Catholic Church, and we’re pastoring a Protestant congregation.”
We were in a tough spot. We knew no one to help or give advice, and we wanted to receive Jesus. We decided to attend something Catholic and try to connect with a priest. We initially attended a charismatic prayer meeting and then attended a pro-life rally. It was at that rally that I asked the leader of the event if he would refer me to a priest that would help a Protestant pastor navigate the process of resigning the pastorate and entering the Catholic Church.
I was introduced to Father Robert Rankin, a Byzantine Catholic priest. I was very nervous to meet with him, and instead of asking him any theological questions (I brought a list of more than 50 of them), we ended up talking and laughing about ministry work. We hit it off immediately. That began a time of meeting with Fr. Rankin nearly every week as we asked our questions and related our fears about resigning the pastorate.
I remember the first Byzantine Divine Liturgy I attended. When I saw the priest lift the host, I remembered the words of Christ, “if I be lifted up…” I wept and was overcome with desire for Christ.
Laying Down One Thing For Something Better
In the Assemblies of God, it is customary to have communion the first or last Sunday of the month. Given what I had come to understand about the Eucharist, I had tried to avoid celebrating it in my church, but on the last occasion, I could not. It was so difficult as I knew it was a mockery of what I had come to believe about Communion.
I went home after the service and told my wife I needed to resign from the church, and let the chips fall where they may. The next week I held a board meeting and shared with the board, friends, men I respected and cared about deeply, that Teresa and I were resigning in order to enter the Catholic Church. It did not go over well. There was crying and some yelling. They were hurt and didn’t understand. It was decided that the next Sunday would be my last Sunday and I could give a farewell address. That next Sunday, pastors I hadn’t met from the Assemblies of God showed up and told me to keep it short. It was a very difficult day. I was saying goodbye to my dream of working in God’s church but I knew that I needed to receive him in the way He commanded us to, in the Holy Eucharist.
One More Stretch
Once we announced our resignation, many people from the congregation reached out the following week. As it turns out, my mid-week teaching on early Church history had caused many of them to independently investigate the claims of the Catholic Church and at least a dozen church members also wanted to enter the Catholic Church with us. We all began meeting with Father Rankin every week and attending Divine Liturgy. He encouraged us to visit Holy Mass as well throughout the week.
Financially, things were very difficult during the transition, but God provided.
It wasn’t long before Easter 2017 was upon us. We were all received into the Church, and we were all so happy. We had all made our first confession and now received our first Holy Communion. It was a glorious day indeed.
Trials and Victory
There were many trials for us the first couple years after entering the church. There was a season of reanalysis. It seemed like anytime we went online we were hearing Catholic apostolates putting down the Pope and the Church. We began to be discouraged as churches shut down during COVID.
In our moment of discouragement, we decided to commit to a Novena to Our Lady of Guadalupe at a local parish. This was a big change for us. We experienced God’s love like never before during that Novena. As radical to our Christianity as it was to become Catholic, our new devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and praying the rosary daily was just as radical. It was beautiful to see how things began to fit so well once we began the daily rosary and other devotions to the Blessed Mother.
My Grandfather’s Witness
When we resigned from the pastorate, I was very nervous about the reaction from my grandfather. My grandmother had already passed and my grandfather wasn’t well, but they had been a great influence in my life and I knew he was so proud I was pastoring. When the family told him about our decision they expected him to get upset, but instead, he said he was happy, as he too had been listening to audio books on Church history and Mary. It was a few years later he announced that he too wanted to enter the Catholic Church. My heart was so happy. He came all the way from Washington to Arizona so he could make his first confession in our parish.
My grandfather was eventually received into the Church and was able to receive Sacraments the day before he passed. He was a lifelong Southern Baptist and always a man who sought to go deeper in his faith. It means so much to me that he followed revealed truth all the way to the end of his life.
We’re so thankful to all those who had a part to play in our journey. We wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than in the Catholic Church.
