After bad experiences with Pentecostal “revivals” and living a young adulthood of drugs, violence, and suffering, Lisa Campbell sought refuge in an Assembly of God church. Lisa was introduced to Catholicism after she married a cradle-Catholic.
I have to begin my conversion story by relating something of my family life. My father worked for the government as an air traffic controller. They transferred him wherever they wished even though he had a family. So, we moved from state to state when I was a little girl. My youngest brother and I were born in Minnesota, our home state. I was born in 1948 in Minnesota and baptized October 31 that same year in Selma, Alabama, which tells how often we moved. My other brother and sister were each born in a different Southern state. Because of our constant moving, establishing a stable spiritual home was quite difficult for us.
Dr. Dale Pollard is a former Lutheran, Baptist, Assembly of God and Presbyterian. Dale joins Marcus in sharing his long journey through many strands of Protestantism into the Catholic Church.
After forty years as an active Christian, Beverly Lebold began praying for a Catholic teenager she had met on a foreign prison ministry mission. Little did she know that by helping this Nicaraguan teammate, she would find the True Presence of Christ.
Growing up a cradle Catholic in Argentina, Ercy Joy Ghiringhelli had a powerful experience with Jesus in the Eucharist. However, over the course of life, she became attracted by revival in Protestant churches. She eventually became an ordained Nazarene pastor and worked with the sick and suffering, until flipping channels one day, she came across an episode of The Journey Home.
I was bored with the Catholic Church! All I did was daydream through Mass and my catechism classes. When I was 10, my parents stopped going to Mass, but my father would still drop off my sister and I at the church.
The Drill Sergeant walked into the barracks and yelled, “Who wants to go to church? Be out front in 10 minutes!” Being an eighteen-year-old raw recruit in desperate need of
The divorce of his parents at a young age had a significant impact on Chris Padgett growing up in North Dakota. It brought his mother back to church in the
As I try to recount my journey into the Catholic Church, I feel as if I could write from so many different perspectives: history, the sacraments, the saints, Mary, or contraception. All of these words characterize, in part, my reasons for becoming Catholic. I feel like each represent a small book I could write. In this story though I want to connect how I believe my particular Protestant tradition prepared the way for my entrance into the Church. I pray it will encourage many more to fulfill the prayer of Christ “that all of them may be one as I and the Father are one” (John 17:21).
Once a minister of the Episcopal Church, I am today a Roman Catholic Priest, serving as pastor of the parish of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas. As it turns out, becoming a Catholic priest brought me “full circle.” Allow me to share with you how and why.
I am about to turn 40 years old. The older I get, the less inclined I am to speak about myself. I’d rather talk about Augustine, Aquinas, or someone else that time has vindicated their right to be heard. On the other hand, telling my story reveals to those who listen that the things I speak about are things that have guided the course of my life and truly reflect what is most meaningful to me. There is an enduring value, I think, to listening to the life-story of another. The more durable, coherent and compelling the discoveries of another turn out to be, the more meaningful and transforming they may turn out to be for another. Since my life has several significant “twists” and “turns,” some find it at least curious that I have settled in the Roman Catholic Church. My arrival in the Catholic Church was neither quick nor easy. This arrival was not in the recent past. My initial choice to be Catholic and the present are separated by more than ten years. I think time has shown that my choice to be Catholic was neither hasty nor shallow. I hope you will find the following brief account helpful in your own journey.
I also came across people such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians who questioned the deity of Christ. We both appealed to the Scriptures for our beliefs, my interpretation against theirs. I blew this off because I knew that Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, always had believed in the deity of Christ (looking back, it seems I was already appealing to Sacred Tradition, though I didn’t know it at the time). To me the Bible alone doctrine was the other side of the same coin as theological liberalism. It solved nothing, leaving everything in question, and nothing certain.
Help us share the truth and beauty of the Church.
Help us share the truth and beauty of the Church.
