My wife and I have been actively engaged in deepening our faith for over 25 years. We’ve read our Bible cover to cover numerous times, studied it, and heard tens of thousands of sermons. But what I had “known” about Catholicism during that time has now mostly been proven to be untrue or mischaracterizations of Catholic belief. Largely, I have found that what Evangelicals believe about Catholics comes either from other Evangelicals, Catholics who don’t know their faith, or Catholics who had negative experiences with their own church upbringing.
As a Protestant Evangelical, the only Catholics I had known were those who had come into our churches after “getting saved” or “born again,” so I just assumed that the Catholic Church must not be worthwhile for anybody looking for depth in their own faith. That’s the way it was — until I got around Catholics, and realized that many Protestant Evangelicals become Catholics for the very same reason: to go deeper into their faith. But what I heard was that “we need to pray for” so-and-so “because they’re Catholic.” The implication was that they need Jesus because they weren’t real Christians — as if people who belong to a Church that professes Jesus as Lord and Savior, a Church whose lineage goes all the way back to the original disciples aren’t real, authentic Christian believers. But I never knew any better. All I knew was what I had been conditioned to believe, that we born-again, Evangelical Christians were the ones who had it all figured out.
For those of us who are Christ followers, regardless of denominational or church differences, our God is a mighty God. He works through our brokenness and divisions, and I don’t think, biblically speaking, the fractures and divisions across the Catholic–Protestant divide and across thousands of different Protestant denominations was His desired will. I do think that his desired will was a unified Body of Christ, a unified Church of order and structure that’s much closer to the early Church and its founders and fathers — all of which and whom were Catholics — than what we’ve seen in the last 500 years, and certainly closer than what we see today. The Catholic movement of unity towards ecumenism (promoting unity across all of Christianity) is important, because we are not real enemies.
My wife, Amy, and I love everything about our Protestant background. We both believe that our salvation was good, starting the day we accepted Christ as our Lord and Savior. For me, that was November 26, 1995, and for Amy it was September 5, 1999. We were baptized, discipled, and mentored in Protestant Evangelical churches. We met and were married in a Protestant church. Our kids were dedicated and baptized in Protestant churches. Most of the best friends we have had in life, we met in Protestant churches. And we’ll have with us and enjoy some of those relationships for the rest of our lives. Protestants do fellowship very well, and we will continue to do life with our closest friends, many of whom are still Evangelicals.
God can and does use all things. He used a “Contemporary Christian” church and pastor to draw me to Him when I was 24. There, I confessed Jesus as my Lord and Savior and was baptized. He used a Southern Baptist church to disciple me, mentor me, and mature me as I grew from a spiritual milk infant in the knowledge of Scripture to a solid food, mature Christian knowledgeable in the faith after I moved to Florida when I was 25.
At that time, that’s what I needed — solid Bible preaching and teaching from the pulpit and Bible study through the life groups, Sunday school classes, and Bible studies made available through the church. I have numerous Bible verses hidden in my heart for every occasion through the memorization and meditation techniques I learned through the discipleship process. It was in my Evangelical church experience that I learned how to handle life and community with other believers. I know the Lord is in the Protestant Evangelical church because my wife and I experienced his supernatural peace, power and transformation there.
The Beginning of Our Journey Home
Amy began her own road to Catholicism two years before I did, being received into the Catholic Church in January 2022. When she started down this road, I told her that she should wait until I die to become Catholic. On the other hand, I’ve always trusted my wife, especially spiritually. She has always been the most-godly, Spirit-filled follower of Christ, so when she started this journey, I was supportive, knowing that, wherever she was headed, it was because God was taking her there. I did not want her to become Catholic, but more so out of fear — fear of what others would think, friends abandoning me and ministry donors leaving me. That’s why I told her she couldn’t become Catholic until I died.
For my part, I traveled more slowly. I wouldn’t even say that I was searching. But there was a longing to fill in what I thought were holes and gaps in my Christian faith — gaps in what I had been taught in my church experience that I now see were formed by the Protestant Reformation and by the ever-growing, ever-increasing westernized, Americanized, corporately modeled modern churches that would be unrecognizable just 75 years ago, let alone to those familiar with the Church in Acts. If you were to teleport the early Church here, they would figure out rather quickly and catch on to a Catholic Mass. Could you say the same about a modern Evangelical service?
In Protestant circles, churches and networks, much of our history is not told. Or if it is, it’s told as if Christianity didn’t start until the 1500s. And that’s because there isn’t a Protestant denomination or church that traces its roots back more than a few hundred years. In contrast, Catholicism traces its roots all the way back to Jesus. To my knowledge, the oldest Protestant decree (theological order) is the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647. There’s just naturally going to be a lot of misinformation and ignorance, an almost denial of history if you’re largely overlooking 1600 years — some three quarters of Church history.
One of the benefits of Catholicism in following the daily Mass readings, in addition to reading through the bulk of the Bible in about three years, is learning about the Church fathers and mothers. Every day, along with the Old Testament, Proverb or Psalm, and New Testament readings, we learn about the sacrifices, the humility, the charitable work, and the trials of those who came before us. Learning Christian history and the growth of the Church down through the centuries is largely absent from the many Protestant branches.
Being an Evangelical also meant being very well schooled and having a personal relationship with Jesus, which was great for growing as a man or woman, a husband or father, wife or mother. But often, the message of church sermons centered around personal spiritual growth, with almost no reference to going out to serve and minister to the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten, the hurting around us. When it was mentioned, it was either in the form of an overseas mission trip or of a day of service, with matching “Serve The City” T-shirts… and then we’d come back and have a big “pat ourselves on the back” celebration with food trucks. I found, instead, that having a heart for the suffering is embedded everywhere within Catholic teaching — in the daily prayers, the daily Scripture readings, the DNA of the Church.
When I started going to Catholic Mass with Amy, I was struck by the stillness, the holiness, the richness and reverence that one feels within the church and the Mass itself. All of that was long ago stripped away from the seeker-friendly Evangelical services, most of which I find have become more like productions, with gimmicks, where they may not even have a cross on display anywhere within “the church.” I’ve always heard it said that Catholics were ritualistic. But really, what’s more ritualistic than a neatly choreographed production of a church service? Every Evangelical service follows the same pattern, just as they accuse of the Catholic Church. The difference is that modern-day Evangelical churches, while they may not admit or recognize it, start with the question, “How would 21st century Americans like to worship God?” rather than, “How would God like to be worshipped?”
Another thing that struck me was that the Easter celebration didn’t begin on Palm Sunday and end on Easter Sunday. Within the Catholic Church, you celebrate Easter through the whole season of Lent. And the week leading up to Easter, you could be in church on Holy Thursday when the Last Supper and Jesus washing of the disciples feet is commemorated, on Good Friday when our Lord was crucified, on Saturday night for the Easter Vigil, and again on Easter Sunday if you wanted to. That’s how serious Catholics commemorate the death, burial, and resurrection of our Savior. And for weeks after Easter Sunday, the Church’s daily readings and teachings build upon the resurrection and everything that happened afterwards, with Jesus appearing to the disciples, the Great Commission, and into the book of Acts and our roles as Christ-followers.
It’s the same way with Christmas, as Advent is celebrated within the Church from the very beginning of December. In recent years, Evangelical churches have begun to embrace Advent as they adopt some of what the Catholics have been doing for 2,000 years. I realized that the purpose of observing Lent and Advent, with their fasts, feasts, and sacrifices, was not works-based legalism, but rather a preparation of our hearts and minds for the birth, life, death, and ultimate resurrection of Christ.
My wife’s journey home to Catholicism began as she looked around our church home at the time and just felt that something wasn’t right – something was missing for her. She had grown tired of the production, the gimmicks, the entertainment, the social aspect of it all. She couldn’t quite put it together, so she asked God, “Is this what worship is supposed to look like?” And God’s still small voice asked her in return, “What did it look like in the beginning?” Amy thus began her journey having no idea where it would lead.
As Evangelical Protestant Christians, we were always taught that Catholics over the early to mid-centuries added layers upon layers to true, biblical Christianity before the Protestant Reformation rode to the rescue to strip away all the excess and return Christianity to its core. But was this true?
The Deep Dive
When Amy did her deep dive, and when I subsequently did mine, we found the following: what Christian worship looked like for 1,500 years (again, think about how long that is) is exactly how the Catholic Mass looks today: a unified time of liturgical reading, communal worship, communal confession, communal prayer, communal greeting, all the while focusing on the altar containing the Body and the Blood, the sacrifice of our Lord and Savior, concluding with the partaking of Eucharistic communion. Simply put, and this was not what we expected to find.
In our search, we discovered that the earliest surviving documentation of the Catholic Mass is from 108 A.D., written by St. Ignatius of Antioch, who used the term Eucharist without stopping to explain it — which seemed to indicate that the term was already in use and well known.
The writing by St. Ignatius is also the earliest surviving mention of the Catholic Church, which comes from the Greek word katholikos, referring to the “universal church.” This was synonymous with the “Christian Church” for 1400 years before Protestantism came into being.
The Game Changer
For me, the game changer in my conversion to Catholicism was the Eucharist. It’s always been widely accepted in Protestant churches that communion (the Lord’s Supper) is “symbolic,” although I’ve never heard a sermon on John 6:49–66, nor ever really heard it discussed, at least not in any kind of depth. And, for whatever reason, it’s become traditional practice to embrace this “symbolic” gesture (quarterly in the Southern Baptist churches I’ve been in, though many Evangelical churches have moved to a weekly communion) almost as casually as you would go over a quarterly fiscal report.
Yet, as I discovered when I dove into the early Church, the altar with the Body and the Blood was always the central focus of the worship. It wasn’t about the music, nor about how dynamic the pastor was. It was about the Body and Blood of Christ. This has huge implications for how we approach worship. Catholics attend the Mass because its sole focus is Christ. Their focus and encounter with God comes through the altar, the Body and the Blood Christ shed for us.
Again, I had to ask myself why the earliest Christians were considered cannibals. Historically, I found, it’s because the most identifiable element of the Christian life from the beginning was the Eucharist, the Real Presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine. It was there from the beginning, when the disciples’ eyes were opened after the resurrection in Emmaus, when Jesus blessed, broke, and gave them the bread.
When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.… they found the Eleven gathered together… who said, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” (Luke 24:30–31, 33–34)
It was there at his last act with them before the crucifixion during the Last Supper. It was there in 1 Corinthians 10:16, where Paul refers to the “participation” in the Blood and the Body. And it is there in Revelation 3:20, when Jesus extends his invitation to repent.
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. (1 Corinthians 11:23–30)
Both Catholics and Evangelicals partake in “remembrance” of Jesus, but only one group takes the Word “is” as literal. The question becomes, how can one who takes communion in an “unworthy,” yet “symbolic” manner, be guilty concerning the Body and the Blood of the Lord if it is indeed only “symbolic,” to the extent where people were getting sick and dying?
There was no debate nor question in the early Church about the Real Presence of Jesus’ Body and Blood in the bread and the wine — just as there was no question about the liturgy, the properly ordained clergy, or the ritualistic form of the Mass. We have existing documentation that dates back to the late first century, just decades from Jesus’ resurrection, in the form of the Didache, which outlines the teachings of the apostles regarding Church order and the sacrifice of the Eucharist. These teachings, order, worship, and sacrifice still exist today in the Catholic Mass.
All the early Church fathers (like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, just to name some of the more well-known figures), whom Protestants will selectively quote, were practicing Catholics who believed in the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Eucharist. That is, they believed in the conversion of the substance of the eucharistic elements into the Body and Blood of Christ through consecration by the priest. Transubstantiation has been with us since the earliest generations following Christ, and was widely accepted, practiced, and established Church doctrine for 1,500 years before Protestantism existed.
The earliest documentation about the literal Body and Blood of Christ is from Ignatius of Antioch, written in 110 A.D. Ignatius was the second bishop of Antioch, who learned from the Apostle John, the same John who wrote John 6. St. Ignatius writes:
“I have no taste for corruptible food nor for the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, who was of the seed of David; and for drink I desire his blood, which is love incorruptible” (Letter to the Romans 7:3 [A.D. 110]).
“Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God.… They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which that Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 6:2–7:1 [A.D. 110]).
Even Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, believed in the Eucharist and wanted to hold to its teachings. Amy and I once heard an Evangelical pastor who believed in the inerrancy of Scripture, who taught that the Bible is literal, that the best defense of Scripture is Scripture, critique Martin Luther for using Scripture as a defense of Scripture at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, a meeting of Protestant reformers to discuss the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The pastor said:
“Luther finally says, ‘All right guys, Matthew 26, here is the Word, here’s the key’ — This IS my body.’ He wrote ‘is’ because, doggone it, Luther was right. He has Scripture to back him up. ‘Is’ means is.
And then there were brothers who came to extend the right hand of fellowship, and Luther would not have it. Because the disagreement was going to be bigger than the advancement of the gospel. And by the way, I believe Luther was wrong. And by the way, not only do I believe he was wrong, I believe he was unreasonable.”
So Luther was wrong for taking the Bible literally in this case, but he was correct in doing the opposite of what Paul called us to do in Paul’s pleas for unity in leading a revolution that forever fractured the Body of Christ? While reasonable minds can certainly disagree, I will always err on the side of those who were a lot closer to Jesus’ time than anyone who came in the last 500 years. For me, I’ll always go back to Scripture, and my understanding of Scripture does not say that the bread and the body are symbolic. It tells me:
“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever.” This he said in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.
Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at it, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you that do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who those were that did not believe, and who it was that would betray him. And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him (John 6:49–66).
I’ve always been taught that the Bible is the literal word of God. I don’t know how much more literal Jesus could be than he is in this passage. He used the word “is” four times: “This IS the bread from heaven”; “The bread IS my flesh”; “My flesh IS true food”; “My blood IS true drink.”
He also tells us, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” To me, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that the Bible is the literal word of God, but then, when it no longer suits your narrative, centuries later, say that Jesus is just being symbolic here.
When they turn away, He doesn’t say, “Hey, I was only being symbolic.” He doesn’t explain it away to the disciples as a parable, as he does on other occasions. This is pretty literal. And why did they turn away? Because they believed He was being literal, and a first century Jew would fully and completely understand the context.
We pondered and prayerfully wrestled with many other questions as well: salvation, Church order, Church authority, sola fide, sola Scriptura, Mary and the saints, baptism, etc. As we worked through all our questions, it all pointed to and led us on our journey home to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
This is not a path that we would’ve chosen, nor a path we were looking for, but rather one that God chose for us, although I did everything in my power to avoid it. Several years ago, Amy and I shared the same prevalent Evangelical understanding that Catholics “aren’t real Christians.” But like being called to salvation, once God gets hold of your heart, it’s no longer you, “but Christ who lives in you” who is now in control.
