I was like many teenagers: The Church’s proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ just did not seem relevant to my life. I never made a conscious choice to be an atheist; rather, I just assumed that the Church had nothing to say to me.
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It was difficult to watch Mary receive the Eucharist while I remained behind in the pew. I imagined how hard it would be to watch my family go up for Communion without me. The words spoken by the congregation in Mass — “Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word and I shall be healed” — both irritated me and gave me hope.
From my days at Princeton Theological Seminary, I believed in the authority of the early Church to speak definitively on the content of the Christian faith. I had no doubt that the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon spoke with the authority of the Holy Spirit. What I had not thought about much was what happened to that authority in the centuries since.
I wrote anti-Catholic tracts and opened a post office box with the intent of distributing them. I spent long hours in the library researching local Catholic history compiling a “spiritual map” of my community…I marked each Catholic church with an “X”.
I was born into a Muslim family in Kurdistan in northern Iraq. I was the 5th child of a large family. The Arab culture and the religion of Islam were the dominant influences, overshadowing the three other nations in Iraq, the largest of which are the Kurds.
I was a child of the manse. My father was a Presbyterian minister and my mother the director of Christian education. I had a good Christian upbringing and after college served as a lay Presbyterian missionary in Caracas, Venezuela.
I was quite young the first time I saw him, so I don’t remember where it happened. But I do remember being terrified by the sight: that tortured man, thorn-crowned,
“I was a ‘baby’ Christian struggling to live as one, becoming more and more aware of my sinfulness, as well as my inability to make the needed changes.” Marilyn Grodi discusses her journey home.
The founder of The Coming Home Network discusses his conversion from being a Presbyterian pastor.
Musical legend Dion DiMucci’s life radically changed when he turned down a fateful plane ride with Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly.
An excited Southern Baptist associate pastor, Gray Bean, eventually saw the logic of his Protestant doctrines falling one by one. Now he is a Catholic priest!
“The more we studied, the more the beauty, majesty, weight and history of the whole of the Christian world seemed to open up to us. We had not really left our core beliefs behind at all – indeed we love and greatly appreciate what we had been given in our Presbyterian communities – we had only fleshed them out in a real sense.”
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