Creepy Catholics
It couldn’t have happened at any other point in my life. Let me explain. For most of my adult life, Catholicism had given me the creeps. As a young man of twenty-nine, fresh into ministry, I was privileged to take a mission trip to Campinas, Brazil. While there, our interpreter was kind enough to show us some of the local sites, including the Metropolitan Cathedral. As a budding young Baptist minister, I simply had no box for what I encountered there. The church was very large and magnificent. The outside was topped with impressive statues of I knew not who, and the inside was filled with intricate wood carvings, statuary, and even items of gold. There were also niches, each with its own statue, before which were prostrated several poverty-stricken old women weeping, praying, and burning candles.
Everything about this scene offended my Protestant sensibilities. I was a mission pastor whose first assignment had been to preach in a two-bay volunteer fire station to people living in a small rural subdivision that was interspersed with mobile homes, assorted livestock, and no small amount of junk. I had made significant sacrifices to take this assignment. In fact, I was barely scratching out a living at all.
A kind gentleman with ties to the mission had allowed me to park our mobile home on top of a small quarry in the subdivision that he sometimes used to mine material for his construction projects. It had electricity and a water well, and he allowed us to live there for free. Unfortunately, the water was not potable and contained such high levels of sulfur that many days you could smell the odor of someone running bathwater all the way into the living area. So, the opulence of this church turned me off. I couldn’t understand how a church could spend so much on accouterments while being filled with people who were clearly enduring grinding poverty.
Not only that, but the women who were groveling before the statues made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. How could this be anything but idolatry? It appeared to me that the Catholic Church was preying on the poor and entrapping them in superstitious practices only to further its own extravagance. Somehow, they had lost their way and were leading people away from God rather than to him. Every Catholic Church I visited subsequently served only to cement this conviction.
The truth is, I was probably biased against the Catholic Church long before this. I had attended school in a small German Catholic farming community, and although they accepted the few of us who were Protestant, it always felt like there was some kind of invisible barrier that existed between us and them that could never be crossed. For example, I instinctively knew that certain girls were simply off limits. The Catholics were going to date and marry each other, not us. We might live among them, but we could never be one of them. I also knew that there was no small amount of drinking and dancing taking place in that community, and that didn’t make sense to me.
Even though I was not yet Christian, my grandparents were Pentecostal, my aunt and uncle were staunch Baptists, and my mother had been raised in the Church of Christ. As such, I was already distinctly fundamentalist in my understanding of the Christian faith. I thought the old Baptist saw, “I don’t drink, I don’t dance, I don’t chew, and I don’t go out with girls that do,” was the essence of Christianity, and it seemed to me that these so-called Catholic Christians were probably not Christian at all. This would be confirmed in my mind some years later when my wife began to regularly encounter one of my old classmates at the store where she worked and was treated almost as a non-person. Overall, Catholics simply had not impressed me much, and I was predisposed to believe the worst about them.
Baptist Life
In 1993, I left the little mission church to pursue a seminary degree at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. We arrived there during the height of the “Baptist Wars.” This was a period of unrest in the Southern Baptist Convention in which the conservative wing of the denomination was trying to wrest control from the moderate wing. It was an ugly time in Baptist history, and almost no denominational structure was left unscathed. On our first day on campus, a popular professor had been fired by the conservative board, and the student body was in an uproar. That uproar only increased during our time there, and ultimately, the entire faculty was purged. Politically and spiritually, there was blood in the streets. My Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor told me that many of the students there were exhibiting signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As for me, I was humbled. I had arrived at the school unapologetically aligned with the conservative wing, but when I saw how they were treating those who disagreed with them, I felt in my bones that something was wrong — that the theological disagreements did not justify the unchristian behavior I was witnessing. I left seminary a changed man.
After seminary, we returned to Texas and began pastoring a small Baptist church in the panhandle. Overall, our experience was a positive one. Money became less of an issue than it had been during the mission and seminary years, and we were glad to be back in a place that felt more like home. However, the community had experienced a dramatic shift in its racial demographics, and the church was struggling with how to address it. There was tension between those who wanted to embrace the change and reach out to their new neighbors and those who just wanted everything to go back to how it was. My seminary years had equipped me for dealing with such tension, and I was able to respectfully speak to those on both sides while moving the church forward. Ultimately, I was able to lead the church to hire a Hispanic pastor to serve alongside me, and the church’s identity began to shift in a positive way.
It was about this time that my ministry took a dramatic and unexpected turn. At a pastor’s conference, I bumped into a denominational worker who had recently planted a cowboy church south of Dallas. He said, “You know something? You would be perfect for the cowboy church I’m starting.” I was aware of this church because it had been written about in our denominational newspaper, The Baptist Standard.
I didn’t really take the remark seriously because I wasn’t in any meaningful sense a cowboy. It was true that I talked like one and dressed like one, but that was due to my upbringing more than any actual experience. I had spent the first part of my childhood on my grandfather’s ranch in west Texas and so was immersed in the rural culture. My grandfather also owned a concrete construction business that specialized in building stock tanks, and he, my father, and my uncles built many of the concrete stock tanks that still dot the west Texas countryside. When Grandpa retired and sold the ranch and concrete business, we moved to a town that was populated by ranching families. My immediate neighbors were all involved in 4-H and FFA, and one was a veterinarian. Culturally, my needle didn’t move very much. A few years later, we moved again, and my brother and I attended school in that little Catholic farming community, where I spent many of my after-school hours putting up barns or driving tractors. These were formative years, and I never really left my boots behind, although my exposure was more tangential than relevant. Nevertheless, I wound up accepting his invitation to pastor the cowboy church he had started.
That turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. When I arrived, the church was already growing rapidly. It was meeting in a livestock exposition barn and was averaging around 300 in attendance, even though it was only a little over a year old. Property had been acquired for its first building, and the atmosphere was electric. Almost immediately, we fell in love with the people, and they fell in love with us. One of my mentors, who worked for the state Baptist convention, remarked that he had never seen a better fit of pastor and church.
Not only that, but because of the church’s exponential growth and the novelty of the concept, the church garnered a lot of press. Soon I was being inundated with calls from newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and others. At one point, I was even interviewed on the national Fox News Channel. The church had become ground zero for something much bigger than any of us had foreseen.
Trying to ride our wave of success, I teamed up with the denominational worker who had planted the church, and we began putting on clinics to help other interested parties launch their own cowboy churches. At its zenith, we were putting on multiple clinics per year in different parts of the country that were attended by hundreds of people from around the nation. We also organized a quasi-denominational structure to try to resource the new churches that were being built. The reality is that cowboy churches were so different from traditional Baptist churches that the denomination was ill-equipped to serve them.
These were heady days, and I loved being a part of it, although I did suffer a significant burn-out in 2008. I had run too fast for too long, and it finally caught up with me. Fortunately, our church offered us a paid sabbatical, and I adopted a much more sustainable pace when I returned to work. I wound up spending 22 years at Cowboy Church, and I can honestly say that these were some of the best years of my life. I loved the people, was content in my work, and felt honored to have been part of something that felt like a genuine movement of God. I had no plans to go anywhere else and didn’t believe that I ever would.
The Storm
Isn’t it funny how sometimes a storm can sweep down on you before you even recognize you are in danger? Although I didn’t know it, my storm began in 2019 with another unexpected invitation. After services one Sunday morning, a church member approached me and asked if I would like to go to the Holy Land. I replied that I would love to, but that such a trip was well beyond my means. She then asked, “What if it’s free?” “Then sign me up!” I replied. She very quickly organized everything, and soon I was headed to Israel with about 30 church members.
I remember being impressed by many of the holy sites we toured, but none touched me more deeply than the Church of the Pater Noster. That church contains many dozens of mosaics of the Our Father (the Lord’s Prayer), each in a different language. In that moment, I knew this was what God wanted the church to be — one family made up of people from every people, tribe, and nation, together in one church under the lordship of Christ. I also could not help noticing the hundreds of buses filled with worshipers from all over the world moving between the various sites. They were loaded with people from every race imaginable, speaking an almost infinite number of languages. There was one more thing I could not escape — the majority of them were Catholic. Indeed, as a Protestant, I felt like I was on the outside looking into a world that I didn’t completely comprehend. I didn’t draw any conclusions from all this, but something was beginning to stir in my heart.
That was in the spring of 2019. By early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began washing up on American shores wreaking havoc in all our lives. It began as a faint rumor from someplace far away, but by the second half of the year, elected officials were panicking, and in most areas, they were directing churches to close and curtailing social gatherings. In our area, they shut down most non-essential businesses for several weeks. It was so odd. I had never seen the interstate highway so empty. Everything was eerily quiet and empty. Most churches, including my own, chose to cooperate with local officials and temporarily halt live services in the name of public safety. No one liked it, but the last thing we wanted to do was make things worse. Few of you will have to imagine the blowback that resulted from all of this, because you lived through it, too. People became angry. Conspiracy theories began to fly. People also began to pick sides, some generally supportive of public safety measures and others believing the whole thing was made up. The hostility that I witnessed between my fellow Christians during this time was unlike anything I had ever encountered. For a pastor, there was simply no winning position. No matter what you did you were going to make enemies. I remember telling my brother many times during this period, “Man, we need an adult in the room.”
But that was not to be. 2020 was an election year, and our already divided nation was undergoing one of the most divisive and acrimonious presidential races in modern history. Some people became so inflamed that they severed relationships and “unfriended” anyone on Facebook suspected of embracing the opposite view. No dissension was allowed inside the camp. Sadly, this carried over into the church. Although I had always endeavored to keep politics out of the church, this was a tsunami before which I seemed to be powerless. I could control the content of the service, but I couldn’t control the attitudes of the people. Despite my best efforts, political remarks did sometimes slip from the stage, and keeping voter guides and other political materials out of the church became a game of whack-a-mole. Much less could I control the conversations in the pews. It finally got to the point where some members no longer felt welcome and left the church because it had become “too political,” while others threatened to leave because it was not political enough. A cowboy pastor down the road even made national news by declaring from the pulpit that “You are not voting for Democrat or Republican, you’re voting for good or evil, one or the other.” He almost made it sound like people were going to hell if they didn’t vote for “his” candidate. I know he was convinced that he was doing the right thing, but I was witnessing first-hand the carnage this kind of rhetoric was inflicting on the church and the damage it was doing to souls, and I sensed in my spirit that something was truly and deeply wrong. But the storm was not over yet.
It was about this time that we received a call from our youngest son, Jonathan. He had come out as an atheist several years before, but was now calling to tell us that he had converted to Orthodoxy. Sadly, I must admit that I didn’t really know what Orthodoxy was. All I knew at the time was that a few reputable Protestant Christians, such as Hank Hanegraaff and Frederica Mathewes-Green, had converted, so I assumed that it must be, well, orthodox. We had also had an Orthodox guide during our time in Israel. He had impressed us with his mature faith and knowledge of the Bible, so we were delighted that our son was moving in this direction, and I was anxious to learn more about his new faith so that I might better encourage him in it. At this juncture, I resolved to do two things simultaneously: 1) learn more about Orthodoxy, and 2) begin reading the Church Fathers. I knew about the Church Fathers from my seminary days and was aware that there were several volumes of their collected writings. I had always wanted to explore them but had never found the right time or motivation. But now, the right time and motivation had come, so I found a collection of their works online and began reading at volume one, chapter one, page one.
Oh No!
It didn’t take long for the foundations of my Baptist/Evangelical faith to begin to crumble. I very quickly began encountering passages such as these:
Our apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect foreknowledge of this, they appointed those [ministers] already mentioned, and afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry. (Letter to the Corinthians Ch. 44 — Clement of Rome)
See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid. (The Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, Ch. 8)
It is well to reverence both God and the bishop. He who honours the bishop has been honoured by God; he who does anything without the knowledge of the bishop, does [in reality] serve the devil. (The Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, Ch. 9)
Understand, these were very early writings, probably late first century, and they threw me into an almost immediate crisis, because there was one thing I could not escape — whatever the early church was, it certainly didn’t resemble my Evangelical faith.
Meanwhile, I was watching Orthodoxy videos on YouTube and learned that it was closely related to Catholicism, something which, if I had ever known, I had long since forgotten. Furthermore, my reading was revealing that the early church was indisputably sacramental, hierarchical, and was already being referred to as “catholic” from its earliest days. That the early church was Catholic didn’t surprise me, because I had always understood that to be the case.
What did stun me was just how Catholic it was and how early. I had never really thought it through. I think I envisioned Jesus as sort of a 1960s-style guru hanging out on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with his merry group of fishermen-disciples who, “filled with the Spirit,” would go out after the resurrection, preaching the evangelical good news and planting house churches. I had always believed that most of the Catholic trappings came much later, as the church gained acceptance under Constantine. I was now beginning to realize just how naïve this was. The reality is that I had always favored the simplicity of Evangelicalism and had never seriously deconstructed my faith. But now that I was in that process, I was being confronted with the unthinkable possibility that Catholicism might be true.
At this point, however, Orthodoxy was still a possibility. I continued to scour the internet for information about the differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and watched several online debates. I also viewed several Catholic and Orthodox services online. But honestly, Orthodoxy felt very alien to me as a Westerner, and I harbored serious doubts about my ability to adapt to it. Furthermore, it seemed to carry in its DNA some of the same weaknesses that the pandemic and election had forced me to confront in Protestantism. They had no “grown-up” in the room, no central authority equivalent to the Papacy that might enable them to resolve theological disputes or address serious cultural concerns. Moreover, their congregations tended to be largely ethnic and homogenous, and that was very unlike the vision that had so inspired me in the Church of the Pater Noster. So, I struck Orthodoxy off my list and began to focus solely on Catholicism. I read numerous books and watched countless hours of debate. I wanted to be sure that what I was beginning to believe to be true really was.
The Aftermath
I’m still not sure when my conversion took place. My heart converted before my mind was even aware of it. I sometimes compare it to watching a football game where you are not rooting for either side but are just watching to be entertained. However, as the game unfolds, things happen that begin to draw you in, and soon you find that you really do care and are rooting for one team to win and the other to lose. I’m not sure when it happened, but that’s what my conversion was like. Once I determined to set aside my Protestant lenses and follow the evidence wherever it led, I found myself rooting for Catholicism to win. That’s when I knew that I was going to wind up coming into the Church. My heart had left Evangelicalism and was now Catholic. That’s when I contacted the Coming Home Network. It’s also when I told my wife.
In retrospect, I wish I had shared more of my journey with her sooner, because then it wouldn’t have been such a shock. But the reality is, I didn’t want to risk disrupting her faith until I was sure. Thankfully, our marriage is strong, and even though she had serious reservations, she was willing to listen to me with an open mind. I made two requests of her. First, that she would listen to the On the Journey series with Matt and Ken, and secondly, that she would attend an upcoming CHNetwork retreat with me. She reluctantly agreed to both, and God used those means. Shortly after the retreat, we began attending Mass together and making final preparations for my retirement. I preached my last sermon on Palm Sunday 2023, and we were received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. Much to my surprise, our priest offered me a job shortly before we entered the Church, and I am currently serving our parish as Adult Faith Formation Coordinator.
This whole journey has felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, but I see God’s hand in it all. Catholicism is not a place I thought I would ever be. It was too alien, too strange, too wrong. God had to work to get me here. But, with a gentle tug in the Holy Land, a sharp elbow during the election and pandemic, and finally the blinding epiphany of my son’s conversion, I tumbled down the rabbit hole and discovered the most wondrous place — the Church that Jesus founded, the barque of St. Peter, filled with saints of every time, tribe, and nation joyfully praising and serving God together in his eternal Kingdom. I could not have gotten here at any other time or in any other way. It required a perfect storm, but I’m so glad that God, by his grace, sent it, because now, I am home.
