I sat praying in a Catholic church at Holy Cross Monastery near Tombstone, AZ. This was unusual for me as I wasn’t Catholic. I had stopped in with my mother-in-law who was in mourning for her husband. This had been a place they liked to stop and pray. As I knelt, I prayed in tongues and in English, “God, I don’t understand the Catholic faith, but I’d like to. This is so strange to me, the candles, the images, the whole culture, but I’d like to understand. If there is anything good here to learn, show me, teach me.”
As we drove back to Texas from this road trip, news of Pope Francis’ election was on the radio. I thought it interesting that he was from Argentina. I was 36, married 14 years, and serving at my AG church alongside my wife who felt a calling to preach. I would never have thought that in a little over one year’s time, I would be a Catholic myself.
As a child in California I had been raised Baptist at a Spanish speaking church. About one year before my birth, my mother had begun attending there after a strong conversion experience she had watching a televangelist on TBN. Until then, she had been Catholic as was my Father. Some of my first church memories were of Sunday school stories and laying on the carpet studying the wood grain under pews during long sermons. In third grade we moved to San Marcos, TX and began attending a Full Gospel pentecostal church. I heard many sermons, attended many Sunday school classes and probably responded to about five altar calls to give my life to the Lord as my personal savior, have my sins forgiven and be saved from damnation. But I didn’t feel anything change inside.
As I was about to enter high school, I stopped attending church except for special occasions. After an awkward social period, I was introduced to parties, drinking and trying pot. It was when I experience getting high, that I really began to question my faith. If I had lived all my life never experiencing an altered state of consciousness, what else didn’t I know about. I assumed that Christianity was lacking and sought to discover what was being kept from me.
Along with a wild lifestyle, I entered college with a strong spiritual hunger. I would search the bookstores and libraries for information about religion and spirituality, mostly Eastern. I dabbled into Buddhism, Hinduism, Transcendental Meditation, and eventually became strongly New Age. I thought I could find truth for myself through study, discipline and meditation.
When I met my later-to-be wife, she also was very New Age. We became best friends and loved to talk about spirituality. This didn’t work out as our relationship was ambiguous and rocky. We dropped out of college our sophomore year, hitchhiked to a hippie gathering, and later tried giving up our possessions to travel the US in a Volkswagen camper van. We were a little late to be hippies, but we were trying. This was in 1996.
Our relationship and life began to fall apart and in desperation, we gave up our travel after three months. She returned to her family in Virginia, and I went back to Texas. I was so tired and sick of my life. After all my spiritual seeking, I decided to try going back to church with an open mind. I was not going to attend as a bored teen, I was going to try to see past the people (sometimes unfriendly), the music (not very interesting), the building (a school gymnasium)and try to see what was at the bottom of Christianity. Where did it all begin and what did it really mean?
I was ripe. This was in August 1997, and during the preaching on the glory of God. I experienced a strong conversion full of tears and a life transforming vision that gave me the fear of the Lord. After kneeling at the altar (I don’t think there was an altar call) and receiving prayer, I got up from that experience hungry to read the Bible and know who this mysterious God was. If he was the God described in the Bible, I had to read about him and try to understand what was known about him.
When I phoned Heidi and told her I was Christian, she was mad. She thought I had sold-out on my beliefs and search for truth. She asked me what I thought about tarot cards, crystals and reincarnation. I just told her that Jesus was alive and loved her and that she should try reading the Bible.
During the next few months, I mailed her worship music on cassettes which she would listen to on her drive to work. She said later that she would find herself raising her hand praising God in her car. When she read about Jesus, she felt his love and described feeling that he was in the room with her. She later moved back to Texas to finish her college and ended up giving her life to Jesus and being baptized at the nondenominational church my mother and I were attending. My father was still attending Mass I think. We didn’t have a close relationship and because of the religious differences between my mother and father, we didn’t discuss religion much. I don’t know how much my father had been catechized about his faith nor how much he was devoted to live it. Like I said, I relationship had been distant.
Heid and I both loving God and wanting to serve him side by side married in May 1999. We both wanted to serve in full-time ministry but didn’t really know how to do that. She was about to finish her teaching degree and I hadn’t finished college yet. We wanted to be missionaries though. We had our first child, Mattie, in 2001. I worked various jobs and ministry rolls. I 2003 I quit my job and we went to work at a parachurch organization called the International House of Prayer. It wasn’t easy for us to raise support to work there as it was not a paid position. My wife and I just knew that God wanted us to serve him and we tried to find our place in ministry there at IHOP-KC. I served on a small worship team, and some dance ministry. My wife and I became house church pastors and worked in healing rooms and on prophecy teams. This was a very charismatic environment. For those who do not know about IHOP, they are like a Protestant monastery devoted to keep prayer and worship going 24/7, which they have been doing since 1999.
We felt God call us back to Texas from Kansas City at the end of 2004 feeling that we were going to start a ministry back in Texas promoting city gatherings of prayer and worship, but back in Texas things didn’t work out. Instead I ended up finishing my Bachelors in Fine Arts in Painting and working with troubled teens at a shelter. For a year we even worked at Father Flanagan’s Girls and Boys Town in San Antonio houseparenting seven high school boys in CPS custody. We ended up becoming public school teachers in Mexia, TX, my wife teaching 3rd grade and I teaching high school art and photography.
We were very involved at our local Assemblies of God church. We taught Jr.High and High School sunday school and worked a lot with the youth on Wednesday nights. We became great friends with the pastor and his family and worked together on fundraisers and conference trips. My wife and I began to study to become credentialed in the Assemblies of God. I took two years of part-time classes at an AG college working to get a M.Div degree, but stopped after learning that my three year old daughter was deaf. It was during this time period that I was kneeling at the Catholic church in Arizona.
When I returned back to teaching, I asked one of my Catholic students for a book to read to learn about the Catholic faith. He had recently finished his Catechism classes and been confirmed. He gave me his Youth Catechism book to read. As I read it, I found it beautiful, at times troubling, and very well thought out. I found myself agreeing with many of the teachings already and when something like the communion of saints came up, I would find the Catholic explanations just as convincing if not more than my arguments against these doctrines I was resistant to.
I began a year-long study of many Catholic books and watched several Journey Home programs. I was excited and scared. Excited to feel that I had stumbled upon so much knowledge, beauty, and revelation of my Lord Jesus. Scared because I felt this would be very troubling to my marriage, ministry, and church relationships. In my upbringing I had been exposed to anti-Catholic sermons, lessons, books and videos that had told me that the Catholic church was the whore-of-Babylon in the book of Revelation and the Pope an anti-christ. Even if my immediate relationships didn’t hold anti-Catholic views, I knew that people in my town and congregation probably had heard and read some of the same anti-Catholic teaching I had.
I think I began to feel awkward around my Christian friends. I had never been one for small talk preferring to try to discuss what was really going on in a persons life. Now I began to feel scared and awkward because I didn’t want to have to share what I was going through. I didn’t want to become a person that was trying to convince others that the Catholic faith was real and right and that some of the things they had been taught were misleading misrepresentations. I didn’t want to be someone who was trying to “take” people out of my friend and pastor's church back to mass, nor did I want to be a person that would try to explain to my friend and pastor that I didn’t feel that I nor he had the profound responsibility to lead and pastor the church and define doctrines according to our own interpretation. My wife and friends became worried, but I just could not stop reading these books. I wanted to know Jesus and to understand the Bible. I wanted to know what Jesus and the apostles really had created on the earth, not just my twenty-first century American protestant interpretation of it.
Some of the books that had the most profound influence on me during this time are The Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth published by St. Mary’s Press (because of its concise explanation of Catholic teaching that cleared up many stereotypes I had), A Biblical Defense of Catholicism by Dave Armstrong because it was imperative that my beliefs not go against Scripture, and Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett because it showed me in the words of the first Christians and church leaders what the church originally looked like and why.
During this year my wife and I had many heated and passionate discussions. It saddens me to think of the emotional trauma this season had on our relationship. My wife was adamant that she did not want to be Catholic nor did she want our kids to be. Although she would listen to me share what was burning on my heart about the Church on good days, she did not want to read any Catholic books. We weren’t perfect, but our faith had given us a strong vision together and now it seemed like this foundation was shaking. I never felt that the vision God placed on my heart in my Protestant church background was wrong or somehow empty now, I could see it finding it’s rightful place.
Before reading the The Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth and hearing Catholic teachings first hand and not through Protestants, many of my first judgements against Catholics were pacified. For instance, I always first thought of the verse where Jesus says not to call anyone on earth Father. I assumed from this verse that Catholics must not read their Bible or at least don’t base their faith practice on it. Dave Armstong’s book gave me enough of the Catholic point of view on this topic that my ignorance began to come down. He wrote about how in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, Jesus called Abraham, Father Abraham, and how Paul writes in his letter that he is a father to the Christians in the church he planted. He says they do not have many fathers, but he claims to be their father. I had never considered any alternative explanations than the arguments I had heard.
I began to contact the local priest and tell him that I was studying the Catholic faith and liking what I was reading.
I remember once that year telling my wife during a heated discussion that I would would wait five years until I became Catholic, just to make sure it was the right decision. A month later I was emailing our local priest telling him that I longed for the Eucharist and would probably have to face the consequences of being misunderstood for it. I soon entered the RCIA program and began to study under a deacon.
An important factor in my journey also happened that year. Our Assemblies of God pastor felt lead while studying and preaching on the book of Acts, to have our congregation take communion every week. He felt the Spirit say it would help to end divisions in the church. The ironic thing is that he asked me to lead our AG congregation in taking communion every week.
As I researched, prayed and prepared every week to lead our congregation in this remembrance, I would often quote 1 Corinthians 11. As I would read to the congregation the soberness of St. Paul telling the church that if they took communion in an unworthy manner they could get sick or die, it sunk in that this was not just a memorial. People do not die from a memorial. What was I doing?
I spoke of my concerns to my pastor and told him that perhaps he should have someone else lead the congregation in taking communion, but he encouraged me to continue. Communion became the sweetest and most profound time of the service every Sunday for me. Coupled with my study of the Catechism and the early Fathers, this weekly experience of communion was driving me to consider and long for the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.
One day in my one-on-one RCIA meeting, I told the deacon about the conflict I was feeling in leading a congregation in taking communion every Sunday when I knew it was not believed by them to be the Real Presence. He recommended that I stop leading in this manner because I knew better now.
It still troubles me to this day at times. Was I on a journey of leading that AG congregation and my family on a discovery of the early Church view of the Eucharist, and I simply ran ahead too fast for them? I do feel that it would have been wrong to expect my wife and people in that congregation to convert with me and to have delayed my entrance until they so discovered that desire for themselves. That would be presuming that they would eventually join, and I had no guarantee. I still pray that my wife and folks from my AG congregation I used to serve at will come to study, reverence and understand the Catholic faith. I currently attend an early mass and then join my wife and children at the AG church service. Sometimes my wife will accompany me to Mass. At times I still sit in on her Sunday School class and interject encouragement to the class.
One of the most challenging parts of this journey was not having my wife alongside of me. I couldn’t judge her for not reading the books I chose to read or even in asking the same questions I had asked. She felt called to preach, and we had both been seeking to be credentialed by the Assemblies of God. My becoming Catholic felt to my wife like I was not supporting her dream to be a preacher in the AG. I tried to reassure her that I loved it when she taught from Scripture and that I did not feel that me becoming Catholic was a stumbling block to her calling. I know there are many opportunities in a Catholic parish to encourage people, pray for them and teach even though one is not a priest or deacon. She did feel that this challenged her path to being credentialed though.
When I would think about seeking to be an AG minister, I would think about having to ecumenically interact with other ministers in the city. How would I know that what I taught was the best interpretation of Scripture? Could I authoritatively say that I was the man to help lead them to heaven, speak at their weddings and comfort them at funerals that their loved ones were in a better place? The idea of having that responsibility on me and my changing moods and interpretations of Scripture scared me.
I finished my RCIA classes and joined the Catholic Church on Easter Vigil 2014. My wife and children attended with me. It was a powerful and profound experience to feel back at home in the original church Jesus founded.
I felt that my understanding of the Christian faith was no longer fragmented and abstract but a continuous historic faith. I was not struggling to find and piece together my doctrines for myself. As a pre-Catholic Christian, I had found my doctrines on topics like salvation, the rapture and tribulation had changed over time towards a Catholic understanding of these. If the Catholic Church was Scripturally correct on these doctrines, what else did they know and how long was I going to struggle to find these doctrinal positions on my own? Along with reading some great Catholic apologetics books, I trusted the Catholic Church on the areas of doctrine I still didn’t fully grasp.
Being an art teacher, I use an analogy based on art to help me understand what has happened to me. Being raised in a post-modern world, I was taught a pluralist relativistic view of life. My world was like a cubist/abstract painting with multiple points of view all stitched together. Just like a cubist/abstracted painting, my life might be interesting but it didn’t make much coherent sense. I guess modern man is asked to live at peace in an incoherent reality, but I just couldn’t stay there and have peace.
When I decided to follow Christ, I felt like I found my horizon and a vanishing point. I could now see more clearly up from down, wrong from right, good from evil. Life was not relative. Yet because of so many different denominations existing and each person being asked to interpret the Bible on their own for themselves (a form of Bible relativism), this vanishing point would still slightly shift. I knew Christ as the vanishing point, but whose interpretation of him and his teaching.
In visual art, to have a painting or drawing be in proper perspective, one must have a horizon and stable vanishing point. Artists like Picasso created cubist art that showed reality from multiple perspectives at once, losing clarity and coherent meaning in the process. Becoming Catholic was like finding my steady vanishing point. It was a stable point in life rooted in the incarnation of Christ, passed down through apostolic succession, and currently in focus with the Magisterium and Papacy keeping doctrine stable. My Christian worldview was steady now.
As more denominations give up orthodox positions on contraception, gay marriage, poverty, and a literal hell for instance, I hope more non-Catholic Christians will realize the instability of a Sola Scriptura Christianity. When people cast off the authority of the Church who gave us the Bible, it is just a matter of time until the people cast off the authority of the Bible itself. For Christians who dislike relativism, I would ask them to see that Sola Scriptura and the multitude of denominations it has lead to is a form of Biblical relativism. It says, “Well, you read the Bible and found that it teaches this view, while I read the Bible and it teaches me this differing view. We have to be ok with differing positions even though they can’t both be right.”
I currently continue to pray for opportunities to explain the Catholic faith with authoritative teaching from the Catechism, Councils, Early Church Father’s writing, and Sacred Scripture. It vexes me to see so much anti-Catholic misrepresentation online by my fundamentalist companions. I understand where they now are. Not too long ago I too used to think the Pope would be the second beast of Revelation and that the Catholic Church was the whore of Babylon. I pray that this ignorance will one day be illuminated by knowledge, love and truth.
I continue to teach art at a public high school in a small Texas town near Waco. I feel a new freedom to lean upon the authoritative interpretation of Scripture in the Catholic Church. I no longer have to strive to have a cutting edge revelation and interpretation of Scripture that “wows” others. I feel freedom to focus on loving people, especially my wife and kids and to seek to lay down my life for my friends. I pray that one day the church’s unity will be restored, in the mean time I continue to pray and work seeking that unity in my family though service, love, humility and forgiveness.
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