Meeting Jesus
The story of my journey from serving as an Evangelical missionary in a Catholic country (Croatia) to becoming a Catholic myself begins with the prequel of my unlikely journey to becoming an Evangelical missionary in the first place. I was raised in a non-religious home by parents who both had Catholic fathers but were not raised as such. In the midst of the turmoil caused by my parents’ divorce in 2nd grade, I sought comfort and refuge in the family of my best childhood friend, who regularly attended a large Southern Baptist church in the Atlanta suburbs, spending most weekends with them, and thus attending Sunday school and worship services regularly.
Under the influence of this beloved family and their faithful church, I began to identify myself as a Christian, finding in this community the stability, security, and definitive moral guidance that was lacking at home. While I cannot identify an exact moment when I became “born again,” I was eventually baptized at this church in 1992, at the end of my sophomore year of high school, making my “public profession” at that time.
Sadly, my faith journey soon calcified into a self-righteous moralism. Since Christianity had provided a way of escape from my dysfunctional family, I felt morally superior, not only to them, but also to the rest of the world. Filled with pride, I supposed that most of the world’s problems would be solved if people were just as religiously moral and serious about education as I was! This attitude was exemplified in the way I utterly shunned my younger sister when she got pregnant during my senior year, something I viewed as a threat to my stellar reputation.
Receiving the Father’s Discipline
After a year at a private university, I transferred to Georgia Tech, where I encountered academic failure for the first time in my life. This shook me to the core of my achievement-based identity and threatened my sense of worth. Through it, the Spirit made plain to me the folly of my academic idol—basing my worth and confidence on the judgments of men (my professors) was shaky ground for building an identity. The Spirit led me to understand and embrace that my worth and identity were based foremost on being a redeemed child of God. This was liberating!
During this time of spiritual growth, I became involved in the ministry of Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ). Cru impacted me greatly by giving me opportunities to discover and use my gifts in teaching and evangelism. I quickly became obsessed with sharing the Gospel on campus and viewed this as my primary mission as a student, regularly initiating conversations that I hoped would lead to a presentation of the “Four Spiritual Laws” so I could lead people to “pray to receive Christ,” and engaging in apologetic debates on campus, while trying to equip other students to do the same. Upon graduation, I joined the Cru staff as an intern, then worked for the organization for five years while enrolled in a Reformed seminary part-time, with a view towards an academic career in theology or philosophy.
My experience in seminary, though, left me increasingly skeptical about the possibility of ever knowing theological truth with certainty. I encountered endless doctrinal debates, replete with conflicting arguments that seemed equally compelling and impossible to adjudicate. There was no basis for distinguishing between ‘major issues,’ for which consensus was required to achieve unity, and ‘minor issues,’ over which believers can healthily disagree. This skepticism devolved into a cynicism-bred depression for which I sought professional counseling. Soon thereafter, I left the Cru staff and seminary, abandoning plans for an academic career in theology or philosophy.
Looking back, my real problem was with sola Scriptura, which I saw as creating doctrinal division and confusion. Lacking a framework for critiquing this presupposition of Protestantism, or any alternative to it, I did not have a healthy way of dealing with it.
Throughout my college years, I had affiliated more with Calvinism and became involved with a Presbyterian (PCA) church that had a vibrant campus ministry. I converted to Calvinism because I believed its doctrines to be more faithful to the teaching of the Bible, as I understood it, than the Baptist tradition I had grown up in. I remained a Presbyterian until formally dissolving my membership with our local congregation upon developing Catholic convictions and taking RCIA classes.
A Sudden, Unexpected Conversion
These new convictions became manifest in a rapid, unexpected conversion experience that unfolded in the course of a little over a week, the soil of my heart and mind having been cultivated by months of listening to Atlanta’s Catholic radio station, The Quest, and by reading Paul Kengor’s A Pope and a President, which tells the marvelous story of how God providentially used the informal alliance of Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan to topple the Soviet Empire. This book greatly increased my esteem for the papacy, as I realized that the pope was the only Christian leader on earth who was in a position to have such enormous geopolitical influence for God’s Kingdom, and I could not deny the evident holiness radiated by the pope.
The conversations on Catholic radio made the faith feel both fresh and familiar at the same time — most of it felt deeply agreeable and consonant with what I already believed. As for distinctly Catholic doctrines that I disagreed with, for the first time I was listening to Catholics explain these things on their own terms instead of Protestant polemical critiques of them, and I grew to appreciate that they were at least coherent within the Catholic system. For example, I quickly accepted that praying to the saints was a valid application of the idea of the communion of saints, and that invoking their intercession was no more problematic than asking your pastor to pray for you.
As a result, I became open to the critiques of Protestantism I encountered on certain programs, especially Dr. David Anders’s Called to Communion. I only had to consider his arguments against sola Scriptura a couple of times to become persuaded of the folly of this Protestant presupposition. Dr. Anders taught me that this doctrine, along with many others I had taken for granted, were not held historically by the early Church.
Once this pillar of the Reformation dissolved in my mind, I knew that, logically, Catholicism was now a real option — a realization that was deeply unsettling, given that the trust gap between my heart and the Church was enormous. If sola Scriptura is not true, then the Church was God’s main vehicle for preserving His revelation in Christ, and God had given this Church the authority to infallibly define Christian teaching. Now open to the interpretive authority of the Church, I became receptive to its other teachings that clashed with Protestant pillars. I soon reconsidered the doctrine of sola Fide, finding in Church teachings a much wiser and coherent understanding of the relationship between faith, works, and salvation that made more sense of the biblical data and presented a richer understanding of justification.
Still, to bridge the trust gap that remained, I had to take a step of faith in the direction the Holy Spirit had been tugging me subliminally. On the way to pick up my children from school, I called Dr. Anders to make plain “what was stopping me from becoming a Catholic.” This was the first time in my life I had ever felt inclined to call a talk radio program of any kind! My question expressed my lack of faith in the Church due to its alleged historical sins and errors: “Why didn’t the Church have the capacity to reform itself in the 16th century? Why did it take someone like Luther to confront the Church’s errors?” As usual, Dr. Anders gave a well-informed answer with gentleness and respect, but it was not so much the content of his answer that impacted me as the humbling sense that there was SO much more I did not know.
This small step of faith proved to be the catalyst that propelled an irreversible paradigm shift in my mind within a single week. I discovered a lecture by Dr. Anders on the problems with the Reformed conception of assurance of salvation — namely, that while the elect’s salvation is secure, knowing that one is elect is based mainly on one’s own personal assessment of growing holiness achieved via introspection. That spoke to the core of my existential struggles caused by Calvinism.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? ‘I the LORD search the mind and try the heart, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings’” (Jeremiah 17:9–10).
Whereas the sola Scriptura critiques were mostly theoretical to me, this argument was deeply personal. Since my first depressive episode, mentioned earlier, I had gone through two other very serious episodes of depression and had never been able to identify and address the root causes. However, with the help of a loving, skilled Presbyterian therapist, I discovered that I was suffering from scrupulosity, a form of religious OCD. There are a number of varieties of this disorder. Mine was very similar to the Puritan’s notorious obsession with finding evidence of their own election to obtain assurance that their eternal destiny in heaven was secure. I had been doubting my own standing as one of the elect for many years, often finding insufficient evidence in the motives of my heart and damning counter evidence in my thoughts, frequently obsessing over the meaning of blasphemous thoughts I occasionally had for the state of my soul.
Dr. Anders quoted a historian on the Puritan psyche, who said that they had “exchanged the treadmill of penance and indulgences for the iron couch of introspection.” This cut to my heart like a knife! I too had lived for years tortured by an introspective approach to gaining “assurance of salvation,” morbidly obsessing over the spiritual meaning of my thoughts and emotions. Simply contemplating his portrayal of the sacramental approach to assurance offered by the Church as a more objective way of knowing one is in a “state of grace” was enough to liberate me from the “iron couch”! I now knew there was another way!
All of these thoughts were stirring in my soul when I told my wife that I believed God was calling me to the Catholic Church. Exhausted from the pandemic as an ER nurse and a number of family issues, she declared, “I don’t have the emotional energy to engage with this right now. Call and talk to Brad.”
Dr. Brad Gregory is a theology professor at the Catholic University of America, hired originally as a Reformed Presbyterian scholar. She and I both knew that if anyone could talk me out of converting, it would be Brad! I wanted to ask him, with as much as he knew about Catholicism, why he was not a Catholic. I emailed to ask for a phone meeting. He replied, “I would be happy to talk with you but full disclosure: I am joining the Catholic Church at Pentecost. I will try to be as objective as I can.” Whoa!
We talked for over two hours the next week, and it was the most exhilarating, meaningful conversation of my life, covering history, philosophy, sociology, biblical theology, and more. We were truly of one mind. By the end of the conversation, I knew my mind had changed fundamentally, along with my heart, and that this change was irreversible. The Catholic Church was who she claims to be!
How God Prepared Me, In Retrospect
Though my conscious conversion process took place over the course of one dramatic week, looking back on the last 20 years of my life, I can see how my mind and heart were prepared gradually and subliminally to open me to the claims of the Church through three developments: 1) a deep, gradual change in my personal epistemology; 2) a growing awareness that the essence of Protestantism is a spirit of subversion; and 3) a PCA church that made increasingly plain the weaknesses of Calvinism by practicing it consistently.
While teaching Theory of Knowledge, an informal epistemology course for academically advanced high school students, I immersed myself in my own study of epistemology with a particular focus on the work of the chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi, known best for his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge. A convert to Catholicism from Judaism, Polanyi argues for the centrality of a personal faith commitment to a particular historical paradigm for knowing anything, including natural science. A paradigm consists of a received tradition and an authority structure one submits himself to that defines the normative domain of knowledge. By rejecting the authority of the Church and the need for Sacred Tradition for knowledge of divine revelation, the Protestant Reformation prepared the way for the modernist epistemological position that eschewed all authority and tradition, supplanting it with individual reason as a sufficient starting point for knowing truth with certainty. But if scientific knowledge requires dependence on tradition and authority, surely one needs these to have theological knowledge!
As I watched the conservative, “white Evangelical” political and cultural bloc become overrun by wild conspiracy theories arising from a settled disdain towards experts — whether in government, science, or media — I began to see that at the heart of Protestantism was a revolt against the very notion of divinely appointed, human authority as being essential to rightly knowing God’s revelation, and that this same spirit animated postmodern secularism, with devastating results for Western Civilization.
This problem became evident to me in my PCA church’s response to COVID. Once we returned to in-person worship services in the Fall of 2020, the church started acting like the pandemic was over. The congregation largely ignored the pastors’ weekly exhortations at the end of the service to follow social distancing guidelines and to socialize outside — so much so that the pastors soon ceased giving them — and everyone was ignoring our local health officials’ urging to wear masks in public. My wife saw firsthand in the ER how COVID was raging through our community, and every time the elders prayed for her publicly, I felt upset that they were engaging in the kind of disregard, even open disdain, for authority that was making the pandemic much worse than it had to be.
Eventually, I confronted the elders privately concerning their violation of Scripture’s commands to respect government authorities. The entire session of elders respectfully met with me — unbeknownst to them, on the same day I called Dr. Anders. Here, problems with the exercise of their own ecclesial authority became evident. Reformed ecclesiology makes a fundamental distinction between ministerial and magisterial authority. It claims the church only has the ministerial authority to bind the consciences of its members by simply declaring what is revealed in the Bible. They renounce the magisterial exercise of authority that proscribes belief and practice not found plainly revealed in the Bible.
So, for example, one elder argued that they cannot tell people to wear protective masks at church services because the Bible does not say anything about masks. I noticed, though, that they could be more magisterial in their application of Scripture when it came to unforeseen behaviors that they cared more about. I left that meeting seeing clearly a fundamental problem with the relationship between their ecclesial authority and their interpretation of Scripture. Hebrews 13 commands us to obey our church leaders and submit to them. But if I am only compelled to obey what is plainly taught in infallible Scripture, and I have a sacred right to private judgment, then why am I told to submit to them as fallible men? Why do I need them to “declare” what is in the Bible to me, when its meaning is clear to all in the first place?
This church held to a number of ecclesiastical ideals that I grew to view as incompatible with its Evangelical Protestant foundations. In this way, my Calvinistic church prepared me to become Catholic. As the Spirit opened my mind to the claims of Catholicism, I found in the Church a solid foundation for these ideals and a richer application of them.
First, my PCA church was committed to liturgical worship, taking seriously the “normative principle” that we should only do in public worship what is commanded in Scripture, thus eschewing contemporary, innovative worship styles governed by the desire to be “relevant” and to entertain. God has revealed how He wants to be worshipped and our highest obligation is to do so rightly.
However, the Bible was not written to function as a liturgical manual, and defects in the sola Scriptura framework arise when it is treated as such. For instance, not long after we hired a new senior pastor, the church started only permitting ordained elders to read the Bible in worship services. Ironically, this approach felt too “Catholic” to me, suggesting that only our priestly class of leaders could be trusted to handle the Bible. When I brought this concern to the pastor, he replied that this practice was taught in the Westminster Confession on the grounds that, whenever Scripture is read publicly in the Old Testament, it is done by ordained ministers. I objected that this detail may be incidental in these stories, and not a normative rule for all time, but knew that there was no way, on the basis of Scripture alone, to know the difference.
Second, the church emphasized the sacraments as vital “means of grace,” admonishing us, whenever there were baptisms, to “remember and improve upon” our own baptisms, drawing on the fact of our baptism for spiritual strength. Even more important was carefully examining oneself in preparation for receiving the Lord’s Supper, which was administered weekly. We were urged each week to examine ourselves lest we receive the elements in an “unworthy manner” and thus “eat and drink judgment upon ourselves” (2 Corinthians 11:27).
I struggled to make sense of these warnings. Without faith in Christ, we stood condemned already by our sin, destined for eternal torment if we were not elect. How could consuming this bread and wine “unworthily” make this condition even worse? And while Calvinists believe these elements are more than symbolic, emphasizing the “spiritual presence” of Christ, there was not anything particularly sacred about them that would give them this power. Their sincere emphasis on the importance of these sacraments was incongruent with the underlying sacramentology.
Third, the pastors, who preached through entire books in the Bible, did not gloss over passages that suggest our eternal destiny is somehow contingent on our continuing faith or ongoing obedience. Calvinism teaches that all of those who are really “justified by faith alone” will, invariably, persevere to the end. Though perseverance is guaranteed by God’s sovereign might for all “true believers” who have been irrevocably declared righteous in justification, it is still nonetheless required to get to heaven.
Here is where the fault lines first began to emerge for me. I knew of people personally, and throughout history, who fell away from faith, in spite of having given every indication of being “true believers.” The only possible explanation for this phenomena is that they were not sincere Christians in the first place. But surely they, and those closest to them, thought they were. How, then, could anyone who regarded himself as a Christian, consciously believing the Gospel and practicing the faith, ever know whether he was actually saved?
The simple answer to this question of “assurance” was that you can know that you truly belong to Christ through the fruits of the Spirit: all true believers will progress in sanctity, evidencing increasingly Christlike character, and conquering the power of sin. I knew, though, that these people had evidenced this fruit in their lives, and I myself had gone through periods of much greater fruitfulness in my younger years compared to what I experienced in middle age. In fact, since 2015, for over a five year period, I had been in a prolonged state of “spiritual desolation,” largely fulfilling my Christian duties, but with a heart that felt “lukewarm” and plagued by persistent sin patterns.
Consequently, I began to doubt whether I myself was a true Christian and thus one of God’s elect (and could not shake the suspicion deep in my soul that I was actually a reprobate — one elected for damnation before the foundation of the world). If I was not a true Christian, I never had been one, and thus had been deceiving myself, and those closest to me, for nearly 30 years. But how could I become a true believer now? Pray to accept Christ and get baptized again? Even if I did, how could I know if it was sincere and authentic this time?
These head games wrecked my psyche and drove my scrupulosity, making me preoccupied with the spiritual meaning of my secret thoughts and deepest motives, looking to them for evidence of my election, or lack thereof.
This problem was exacerbated by my experience of participating in the Lord’s Supper, which I rarely found meaningful or spiritually beneficial. I would go through seasons of study where I tried to meditate on sacramental theology to prepare myself for the table while making sure I was scrupulous to confess my sins. How could a true, elect believer have such a persistently inert spiritual experience at the Table?
Studying the Catholic Church’s soteriology, ecclesiology, and sacramentology while beginning to attend Mass, I encountered these same three themes, but taught with a wisdom that is much more coherent, beautiful, and credible than in Calvinism.
Counting the Costs of Discipleship
Because my former church is stridently anti-Catholic, and my family continued to attend until last September, my journey has brought with it painful social strife. When I first disclosed to my pastor that “my thinking about the relationship between the Bible and the Church has become essentially Catholic,” this created a crisis among the church’s leadership. My teenage children were approached without our knowledge or consent by the pastors and given grave warnings not to listen to me about Catholicism and that my soul was in danger of being lost.
Not long after that, I went through a couple of meetings that amounted to depositions (or inquisitions!) whereby my beliefs were ascertained. By August, the session of elders voted to not serve me communion. Within weeks, they asked me to renounce my membership vows or face an excommunication trial. To bring the issue to a head, I was mailed a formal request from the Session to cease attending Mass and RCIA, and to “return to the church of Jesus Christ” and believe the Gospel. They knew I wouldn’t do this, so in my written response I said I could still fulfill all my vows but one: to submit to the leadership of the local elders. By February 2022, they called a congregational meeting to announce that I had left our church to pursue Catholicism, a church whose sacraments they do not regard as validly administered.
This conflict caused me to forgo joining my RCIA cohort at the Easter Vigil. I wanted to give my wife more time to come to terms with these sudden, profound changes. Instead, I was confirmed later, on All Saints’ Day of that same year. My RCIA sponsor was a deacon named Joe Hrovat. His parents are Croatian immigrants. Hrovatska is what Croatians call their country. He didn’t know that his last name means “the Cro-at”!
Since my confirmation, the conflict with my family’s church has only worsened. I felt a strong obligation to support my wife in raising our children in that church, so the elders granted that I would still be welcome to attend, so long as I agreed not to discuss Catholic doctrines. Having no interest in stirring controversy, I gladly agreed and kept my promise.
Yet my very presence as a Spirit-filled Christian in their midst became a threat to their belief that Catholics are not Christian, which they wanted the congregation to hold to. In the summer of 2023, the elders voted to ban me from the premises of the church, going so far as to send the deacons to confront me at a Vacation Bible School event for parents to compel me to leave. When I pushed back on their accusation that I was “proselytizing,” they considered the matter again, deciding that my simply being Catholic was sufficient reason to ban me from the church — this time using their otherwise renounced magisterial authority to apply to me the command in Romans 16 to avoid false teachers!
Since becoming Catholic, I have experienced a spiritual revival, marked by a significant healing of my mental health problems and a renewed desire to use my gifts to build up the Church. I help teach RCIA and have started a local evangelism team for St. Paul’s Street Evangelization. Still, I feel deeply the wounds of division caused by the Protestant revolt, as these are manifest within my family. I continue to pray and strive for a unified family life that mirrors the unity of all Christians that Christ prayed for and that will be ultimately realized when He returns.
