My conversion story

When I was 12 years old, I asked my Sunday school teacher whether Jesus really is the Son of God. Her response was that it didn’t really matter much whether He was or not; the important thing is that we live good lives and love others. Such was the quality of my early formation in liberal Protestantism. Later, after my weak faith collapsed under the influence of secular humanism at university, I followed up with a short stopover in Eastern religions, the occult, and pretty much doing as I pleased. It was a dark and meaningless way to live, but I was consistent: if there is no God who cares, you might as well please yourself. Thanks to my praying grandmother, good friends who reached out to me, and the writing of Francis Schaeffer, I became an evangelical Christian in my early 20’s. Meeting Christ was a powerful conversion experience - an introduction to joy, love, and purpose. For the next 25 years I worshipped in independent community churches, and most recently the Christian & Missionary Alliance, where I was involved in lay leadership for a few years.

The longest part of my journey to the Catholic Church was the five years I spent leaving Evangelicalism. It was a time of puzzled searching for ‘something more’ and of blaming myself for not feeling completely at home in what seemed like a vibrant community. Because I had dramatically come to faith in Christ through the ministry of evangelical believers, I was convinced that evangelical churches had the Truth, and that my dissatisfaction was due to some deficiency or immaturity on my part. The questions that my received theology couldn’t answer, I put down to not having studied enough, and stored them on a shelf labelled ‘Things someone will explain someday’. Leaving was not an option; in my mind, to leave my bible-believing church would be to leave God, a terrifying step back into the darkness that I had been ‘saved’ from. This is a deeply-held conviction among evangelicals, one reason why their journey into the Catholic Church is usually a turbulent one; they know that their souls are at stake. During this time, I discovered Mark Noll’s ‘The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind’, a thoughtful analysis of Evangelicalism which gave me my first inkling that I wasn’t alone in longing to wade in a deeper theological pool. It was some time, though, before I went looking for that pool.

Eventually, exhaustion did the trick. I was worn out, and didn’t know why. I hadn’t felt close to Jesus for a long time. Frankly, there were times when I really needed Him to show up, and He didn’t. What else did I need to get closer to God: another dynamic women’s conference? a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit? more bible study/prayer/spiritual warfare/potluck suppers? I had been there, worn out the T-shirt. Needing a retreat, I resigned from all of my church responsibilities. With time to rest and pray, I started to ask new dangerous questions such as 'How do I really know what to believe?'; ‘How do I know that my church - denominational age: about 100 years - has more of the Truth than the equally-Bible-believing Baptists down the road?’; ‘Evangelicalism is only about 250 years old; how do we know that we have the inside track?’ and ‘What about those sheep and goats in the book of Revelation, the ones being judged on their works?' With all of this re-evaluation, my shelf of unanswered questions became way more crowded than the shelf labelled ‘Things I know for sure.” Things shifted inside me: at Sunday services, I began to feel more like an observer than a participant. Oddly, I sometimes wanted to kneel at church, but we didn’t do that. I wanted times of silence, but there were few. I wanted reverent music, but instead heard a worship band playing upbeat praise choruses designed to ‘enhance my worship experience’. Was I just getting old, or was something else going on? I honestly didn’t know. In the meantime, one of my sons was playing drums in an Anglican rock worship band and at a Catholic Teen Mass, and the other had abandoned church altogether. I couldn’t decide which of them I was more concerned about, but one thing was for sure – I didn’t have to stay ‘for the sake of the kids’. For the first time, I considered trying out another kind of denomination, maybe Anglican (Episcopal) or Lutheran. Surely, I thought, there would be some believers there, and the worship would be more quietly reverent.

I started to work in a bookstore that carried a lot of Christian writers, including those of Orthodox and Catholic persuasion. There I discovered Peter Kreeft and Thomas Howard, both converts from Protestantism to Catholicism. Looking through catalogues at the store, I found the others: David Currie, Karl Keating, Scott and Kimberly Hahn, and early Christian writers such as St. Ignatius of Antioch. Where had these people been all my life and why didn’t I know about them? Or rather, where had I been all my life, and why had I thought that real Christianity began with the Reformation? Catholicism moved onto the radar for the first time, and the Church began to exert her magnetic pull.

One memorable evening I was curled up with David Currie’s ‘Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic’, hearing Catholic teaching in evangelical language, and I realized with dismay that all of my big questions were being answered. With the other reading I had done, this book was adding to my conviction that the early Church looked more Catholic than Protestant. To complicate things, if the Catholic Church is the church that Christ founded, I had no business being anywhere else. Now what? I put the book down, knowing that reading any further would make me accountable for what I learned. The conversation went something like this: “Why are you doing this to me, Lord? . . . . Why this, why now, why CATHOLIC?” . . . Silence. . . . And in the silence, alongside the dismay, the first faint stirrings of hope. Maybe, just maybe, he’s right. Maybe there is more, and maybe it’s true. Maybe…. I put the book away for a couple of days, thought about it, then picked it up again. Soon afterward, I attended a Catholic Mass for the first time in my life.

I attended Mass every second week, alternating with my familiar church. It was peaceful at Mass. I didn’t know that Jesus was there waiting for me, every week - physically present, in the Tabernacle and on the altar. I didn’t even know what a Tabernacle was. My good friend, also from my previous church, was making the same transition. After Mass, we would sit outside on the church steps and wonder “What is it? It’s not the congregation – most of them look bored, and they don’t even sing. The music? The preaching? Great, it's amazing how much you can say in 15 minutes, but that's not it. It’s something else.” And we'd go for breakfast and try to sort it out. Every second week became 2 out of 3, then 3 out of 4, then every week.

We joined the RCIA. There were plenty of ups and downs in RCIA, but anything worth doing is worth doing with spunk, don’t you think? In my opinion, evangelicals becoming Catholic belong in ‘special’ class and nose-to-nose sessions with a caring, tough priest, because:

*We ask perfectly reasonable questions that most lay Catholics haven’t thought about, such as ‘What does the Church teach about how to be saved?’ That is a pretty important question, and when no one can answer it in language we can understand, it increases the anxiety level considerably.

*Most of us evangelicals-in-transition are spiritually arrogant and independent. We think it's normal and healthy to be wrapped up in our 'Jesus and me' spirituality. Because the culture we come from has held us responsible for our own scriptural interpretations and our own spiritual welfare, i.e. we’ve been our own ‘popes’, one of the most important aspects of our formation as Catholics is taking enough time to get over that.

*Thirdly, many of us are in need of emotional healing. My friend and I were no exception. We argued. We wept. We kept the team after meetings to ask more questions. And gradually, we learned to trust. I will be forever grateful to the RCIA team for their gracious, patient love. They spent a year digging through the roof so that they could lower this paralytic down to Jesus. Because they did that, I began to believe that God does love me, and my heart came to life.

Of course, it’s about the Eucharist. I remember the evening that I ‘got it’. The suffering and death that Jesus endured for my salvation was not only a 2000-year-old event to remember from a distance, but in the Eucharist, His sacrifice is present reality. This was flesh on the bones of the belief system that I had held for years. It was a move from a land of skeletons and shadows, memories and longing, into a world of flesh and blood and life. Jesus is truly, really present in the Eucharist, where heaven and earth, time and eternity intersect. And all that time I thought He hadn’t been ‘showing up’? He’d been at every Mass for the last two thousand years! From that evening on, there was nothing that could keep me from the Catholic Church.

I was received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church at the Easter vigil, 1997. This is what I wrote to my RCIA director the following week:
“I have had an encounter with the living God, who has sealed me with His Holy Spirit and taken up residence in my heart in a deeper way than I could have imagined possible. The joy is too deep to be plumbed, the peace is absolute, and the knowing that I am home is without a shred of doubt. I knew Jesus before, but I never felt that my heart was at home before now. … I’ve taken my place at the table, and I’m open-mouthed with amazement that I’ve been invited, but there it is. I’ve been invited, and here I am……I told you a while back that I hoped I wouldn’t die for a long, long time, because I’d only just begun to live. Well, I had no idea how true that was – now I have a glorious glimpse of what I was talking about, and I am awestruck.”

I think of it this way: I was raised in a series of foster homes, where good people cared for me and did their best. Now as a Catholic I have discovered my real family: my Dad, my Mom, my real brothers and sisters. Having been raised somewhere else, I speak with an accent and bring my own unique baggage to the family estate, but I know that these are my people. Being bicultural isn’t always easy, but over time I have come to see it as a blessing. Evangelicalism gave me many gifts; Catholicism has given me their fulfillment. There is a sweetness in this that is hard to describe exactly, but here is one example: sometimes as I walk forward to receive Christ in the Eucharist, I hear in my mind the song that is played at the Billy Graham crusades as people come forward to receive Christ into their hearts: 'Just as I am, without one plea but that Thy blood was shed for me, and that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come, I come.' With the deepest gratitude, I now come to receive Him, Body and Blood, soul and divinity, in the company of the Saints and angels. Thanks, thanks be to God.