I grew up in a denomination called the Church of the Nazarene, and my family was devoted to the church; we were there at least three times per week. Pastors and Sunday School teachers taught me a lot: I learned that Jesus died so that I could be forgiven and have eternal life. Having a sense of the Holy Spirit was emphasized in our Sunday services, where feelings of the Holy Spirit “moving” were important. Often, preaching was very animated and focused on hell and judgment. I also learned about “entire sanctification,” in which a person has a “second definite work of grace” and receives the Holy Spirit. Entire sanctification breaks the pattern of sin. Often, people would claim they had not sinned for many years.
At 5 years old, I went forward to kneel at the prayer rail my church called “the altar” and received Jesus as my savior. I was very excited, and I felt a change in my young heart. However, at 6, I again went to “the altar” to receive the Holy Spirit. I felt nothing. I decided that I must not be worthy of what other people around me received from God. As a result of this teaching of entire sanctification, every mistake or sin I committed left me feeling like a failure and unworthy of salvation. As a child, I was often worried that I did not deserve heaven and even had nightmares about Satan.
I was also taught, whether intentionally or not, to be anti-Catholic. My church prominently displayed tracts by Jack Chick. I learned many things: I learned that the Pope was the antichrist, and the Catholic Church was a “false religion”. I learned that Catholics were not Christians. Catholics believed in mere religiosity, much like the Pharisees in the New Testament. Catholics had no room for the movement of the Holy Spirit in their churches. Mass was purely a ritual with no real spiritual substance. By contrast, my church was dynamic. We were engaged by upbeat music, fiery preaching, and an “altar call” nearly every week. Sometimes, people would stand up and testify about what God was doing in their lives, even to the point of running out of time for a sermon. Surely, this was the authentic faith. Plus, Catholics, I was told, did not read the Bible and relied mostly on their traditions. We, on the other hand, knew the Bible to be the only source of the faith.
I had a mostly positive and nurturing family life. My sisters and I never doubted our parents’ love for us. We were a typical, suburban family, living in a middle class suburb of Cincinnati. My parents held nearly every lay position they could along the way.
Through my teenage years, I listened almost exclusively to Christian music. I learned to play the guitar and started a Christian band in high school. At 18, following my desire to play music professionally, I moved to Nashville, where I attended Trevecca Nazarene University, and majored in Philosophy and Religious Studies, graduating near the top of my department. Near the end of college, my wife and I were married. Upon graduation, I accepted a job managing a contemporary Christian radio station, where I was also the morning show host. However, at this same time, my philosophical and theological education had led me to a crisis in faith. I became an agnostic, unsure whether there was a God, but knowing if there was, I was not good enough to experience Him.
For several years after college, my wife and I continued to go to church. I listened with a critical ear. Under the inspired preaching of one particular pastor, I began to see that all my religious and philosophical questions found their answer in Jesus. I prayed at “the altar” again, knowing that Jesus wanted me to truly follow him. Within a year, my wife and I relocated with our two-year-old daughter to Kansas City so that I could attend Nazarene Theological Seminary. A few years later, I received a Masters of Divinity with honors.
Interestingly, at seminary I learned some things that surprised me. These seemed to be mere tangents at the time, but were seeds that would not be harvested for over two decades. Like Mary, I pondered these things in my heart.
First, my denomination believed in the sacraments. I had grown up believing baptism and communion were merely symbols. In Seminary, I learned that there was something more in those two sacraments (our only two). The professor explained that they are an outward sign of an inward grace; God was truly present and active, though he could not explain how.
Second, I learned that tradition and liturgy were important. I had never heard of a Christian calendar before. We did not recognize Lent growing up. We had Palm Sunday and Easter services with nothing in between. We did not have a Christmas Eve service. I heard about the lectionary for the first time. Preaching, in my experience, was always based on whatever the pastor was “led” to preach. I gained an appreciation for tradition and the rhythm of the Christian year that I did not have before.
Third, I learned about what we called the “altar”. These are the kneeling rails in the front of the church. Preachers often said, “lay your all on the altar” as a way of saying you should give your whole life to Christ. However, these kneelers, I learned, were not the altar. The altar is a place of sacrifice. One of the major problems with calling the kneeling rails “the altar” is that it turns my act of prayer into the sacrifice, making my personal sacrifice the heart of my salvation, subtly turning the focus away from Jesus’ sacrifice and toward my own.
During seminary, I was on staff at a “seeker sensitive” church. Two other staff members and I were very close, and we were in a small accountability group together. The ladies in the group would help with each other’s children. We would have dinners together. One of the men, whom I will call Charles, would help watch our kids. It was a tight community. In our men’s small group, I remember how horrible it would be to have a child who was abused. The three of us discussed what our reactions to something like that might be.
After serving in two churches in Kansas, my family, which now also included two sons, moved to Northwest Indiana. I became the senior pastor of a Nazarene church there. The church was in decline, having merged twice with two other churches, and relocated out of the city into a more suburban location. From my second Sunday, I realized I had entered into a toxic environment. I became the target of severe and usually unfair criticism. I also made mistakes, obviously, as we all do. However, over time, the toxicity became too much. Even many of our closest friends had turned on us. My family and I had to leave for our own psychological and spiritual welfare.
By this point, my faith was again in crisis. I could no longer hear God above the noise of my life. Why would he allow this horrible experience, especially when we were giving everything to serve Him? Extreme rejection and abuse was the net result of our dedication—at the hands of God’s people. It was extraordinarily painful. I began saying “church people” with such derision, that a friend of mine said I spit venom when I used that phrase. I told my district superintendent (a leader over many churches in an area) that if that was how church people acted, I did not want to have anything to do with them or their god.
I left full-time ministry. We relocated back to my hometown so that I could go to law school. I earned a Juris Doctor, again with honors. Law school was very difficult and intense. During that time, I began drinking. I had started drinking at my last church as a way to relieve stress and to bond with some of the men. This was in spite of the fact that the Nazarene church took a hard stand against alcohol. Over time, alcohol became a way for me to numb the pain. But, the more I drank, the worse I felt about myself. After law school, the stress of my new legal career was overwhelming. I drank more and more.
Early in my practice, one of my friends from my Kansas City men’s group called. He told me that Charles was arrested for molesting two very young girls. Charles had built a ministry focused on the rural poor. I realized that Charles had put himself in a position to be surrounded by vulnerable people and none of us recognized it.
Within a couple of weeks of my telling my family that news, my then college-age daughter told us she had tried to pretend her memories were just nightmares. They were not. Charles had also sexually abused her from the time she was 3 or 4 until she was about 6. I was utterly devastated. This is a man I considered a true friend. Yet, he broke that trust in the worst possible way. This explained my daughter’s struggles. She was in and out of relationships with men and with women. She also had a significant drug and alcohol problem. Again, the question plagued me—why would God allow this to happen?
Meanwhile, I struggled more and more with my own alcohol consumption. My wife found Celebrate Recovery, a Christian recovery program. After working the steps with my sponsor and a group of men, I got sober. My daughter joined that process. She had become pregnant as a result of yet another sexual assault. She also got clean and sober. My granddaughter was born in the summer of 2018.
I continued in ministry part time after finishing law school. For seven years, I was a part time “worship leader” in a United Methodist church. Unfortunately, the denomination was splitting over whether homosexuals should be ordained as pastors.
We discussed the issue numerous times as a church staff. After one of these discussions, I finally understood the roots of the problem. There was a serious lack of biblical knowledge. We all seemed to believe that our individual, subjective interpretation of the Bible was equally valid. It was a sola Scriptura problem. If one lacks the foundation of a solid education in the Bible, how can they interpret it? Even some who supposedly had received a biblical education could “reimagine” texts. By doing this, they could make the Bible conform to their ideas of morality, instead of being formed by the Bible.
I remember asking a Methodist pastor, “Doesn’t it make you want to be Catholic so that we would know what the official stance is?” Her response was, “Absolutely not.” But, I thought, the church needs to be united in times like these, if we are going to stand against the world’s influence.
At the same time, God blessed my legal career. I became a magistrate in a domestic relations court, and found that there was a lot of ministry to do there. I also began pastoring a small, country Methodist church part time. The little congregation could no longer tolerate the moral relativism of the Methodist church. I helped them leave the denomination.
Somehow I stumbled upon Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World podcast. Simultaneously, my wife was listening to more and more Catholic teaching, including Fr. Mike Schmitz. With her encouragement, I watched a homily and I was impressed with Fr. Mike’s biblical understanding and his obvious heart for Christ. I agreed with everything he said. As I continued to listen to Jimmy Akin, he would present a Catholic perspective on mysteries. He was not only fair but he was reasonable. I realized that he and I were in basic agreement about theology, science, and many other topics. And…he was Catholic. Through Jimmy’s podcast, I discovered Catholic Answers. I began to listen to the podcast regularly and realized that the Catholic perspectives on many issues were more biblically based than I had been led to believe in my younger years.
God began to change my mind. He used my own study and preaching to direct me toward the Church. During this time, I preached through Matthew and John. I had some new insights.
First was the passage in Matthew where Jesus proclaims, “You are Peter/Rock and on this rock/foundation I will build my church.” I realized that my previous understanding of that passage did not make much sense. I was taught that the “rock” upon which Jesus would build His Church was faith in Christ as the Messiah. But, why then would Jesus call Cephas “Rock” and then go on to say that he would build His Church on this rock? It is plainly evident that it was not upon Peter’s faith, but upon Peter himself that Jesus would build His Church.
Jesus goes on to tell Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Many of my charismatic protestant friends would spiritualize this. They would pray for the binding up of evil spirits and Satan. They understood this in a context of spiritual warfare. But I could clearly see that the context did not support this interpretation. I knew my Greek. The “you” in this passage is singular. Jesus is giving the authority of heaven to Peter as an individual—an individual who was the leader of His Church.
Second was John 20:22-23. After the resurrection, Jesus tells the apostles, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” In my protestant framework, I had no way of interpreting this passage. The apostles can forgive sins? That did not make any sense to me — not until I understood it as the authority given to priests by the bishops, deriving from the authority of Christ himself.
Another passage I preached that had always struck me was Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John’s Gospel. Jesus himself prayed for the Church’s unity. When the Nazarene Church planned to celebrate its 100th anniversary, my seminary’s church history professor said, “should we celebrate the further fracturing of the body of Christ?” This stuck with me. As a Protestant, I could see no resolution to the problem of a lack of unity. How could I preach unity as Jesus’ followers continued to splinter?
On Labor Day, 2022, my wife and I decided we would attend a Mass. We had been to Mass only a couple of times through the years. We sat in the back, mainly so I would not be embarrassed by not knowing what to say or when to stand, sit or kneel. It was strange to go to church and not be the minister. After Mass, the woman sitting in front of us introduced herself. She noticed we did not go forward for communion and knew that we were new there. We told her we were not Catholic, but were beginning to explore the possibility. It just so happened that this woman, Sharon, was one of the leaders of RCIA which started in about three weeks. On the way out of the church, I said to my wife, “that was not a coincidence.” I knew it was God’s direction.
We began RCIA. My wife was ready to become Catholic. I was ready to discern, but I still had many theological issues to overcome. Throughout the process, I kept listening to Catholic Answers and other Catholic podcasts. My adult son pointed out that many of the people we listened to on various subjects on podcasts were Catholic. As I listened, in particular to Tim Staples and Jimmy Akin, I realized that they came from a background somewhat similar to mine. My defenses against Catholicism slowly went down. I also read Dei Verbum and found out that the Catholic Church takes the Bible more seriously than many of my Protestant friends did.
Nearing the Easter Vigil in 2023, I still had issues I could not resolve. The way Catholics often spoke about Mary was difficult for me to understand. I also saw no biblical basis for most of the Marian dogmas. So, I called Jimmy Akin. He told me to look into the magisterium. If I could trust them and their authority, I would be ok. That is what he had done.
One day, Cy Kellet said something like, “I am so glad I don’t have to figure these things out. There are people much smarter than I am who do. I just need to accept it.” That made total sense. I did not need to figure everything out. I needed to submit to those who are guided by the Holy Spirit.
At the Easter Vigil, one of the questions asked of candidates is if they believe everything the Church teaches. At that moment, Father Ed and I locked eyes. I said, “I do.” It was a God moment. I was willing to let go of my arrogance and pride. I was not the authority and the source of knowledge. I was ready to submit to Christ’s Church.
As of this writing, my wife and I have been Catholic for three years. My two adult sons were confirmed at the Easter Vigil last year. My daughter is also in OCIA and her little girl attends a Catholic school.
As I attend Mass, I am often struck that Jesus is really present there. He chooses to be present with me and allow me to take his body into mine. What an awesome opportunity to experience His divine life in me. I finally found the fullness of the faith in Christ’s Church.
