Evangelical to Catholic: Ex-Pastor’s Conversion Story to Catholicism
My own conversion to Catholicism started, I suppose, when I met my future wife, Carrie, almost 15 years before she became my wife. We were both involved in a college ministry at Kansas State University called the Navigators. She was Catholic; I was not. However, everything about her was different than what I had seen in my perceived notion of the stereotypical Catholic.
My only experience with Catholics, for the most part, was my Dad’s extended family and a few neighbors that were Catholic, and what I chose to see in most of them was a stale, lifeless, religiosity that didn’t factor into their everyday life. Sure, they believed in God, and yes, they went to church on Sunday. But in my 20 year old, immature lens of the world, there was something about Catholics that didn’t sit right with me. And then I met Carrie. Her vibrant, charismatic, joy-filled faith was different than any Catholic I had ever known. And she was cute. Did I like her? Sure I did. There wasn’t much not to like about her, but she was Catholic! I had different plans, and it certainly didn’t involve Catholicism.
How Losing My Wife Led to a New Path
My undergraduate degree was History with an emphasis in Medieval Religion and Politics. At KSU, neither of the history professors that taught those classes were Catholic. One was liberal Protestant and the other was an Evangelical. I came away from that education with a continued skepticism towards Catholicism as an institution, but having looked at particular individuals in history, like Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, I wasn’t naive enough to think that all Catholics were bad. But still, I was pretty naive.
When I left college, I was thoroughly a reformed Calvinist in my worldview. For the next 10 years, Calvinism would shape my intellectual and spiritual life and give me a framework for which to develop and think. To this day I am deeply thankful for the Calvinist tradition that shaped me and the fruit it has borne in my life and so many others. I loved being a Calvinist! In order to feed my passion for knowledge and evangelization, after college I went straight to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the Chicago area to pursue a Masters in Divinity. At the end of four years, all within a month’s time, I graduated from Seminary, got married, and became an ordained Presbyterian Pastor for a small multi-ethnic Asian American congregation in downtown Chicago. Life was good, it was working out just as it should. The pieces to the puzzle were falling into place and I felt like I was directly in God’s will.
It quickly changed after that. The major theme of this chapter in my life was my wife’s sickness. Almost from the moment we got married, Glo started struggling with an autoimmune disease called Rheumatoid Arthritis. She was a 30 year old woman trapped in an 80 year olds body. This sickness brought us both to our knees as we prayed for healing and sought out medical advice. No drugs, no diet, no amount of praying, nothing we did or tried would ultimately alleviate her from pain. This part of my life is a very long story, and one day I’ll write about it all in one place, but for this article, all I need to say is that it didn’t end well. During her second pregnancy, she started experiencing lung issues, and after having an emergency C-Section to save our daughter’s life from hypoxia, Glo didn’t get better. After six months of struggling, she passed away from a lung disease that was related to her RA. In six years, my world had rather quickly gone from bliss to chaos. My wife had just died and I was a single father of two daughters under 3. My church was amazing. They were everything that a church community should be. But, after letting the dust settle, it was time to go home to be with my family. So I resigned from my post and turned my face towards Kansas.
The Day I Started Considering Catholicism
Up to this point, my relationship with Catholicism had grown more cordial. I was definitely more sympathetic to Catholicism as a whole. Part of that was my own theological journey, and part of that was simply seeing the bigger world more maturely. On the day of my resignation, I had lunch with my Senior Pastor to tell him I was going back home. He was a good man who understood my situation and wanted the best for me.
After I left, I went to a cigar bar to celebrate my 10 years in Chicago. This occasion called for a Maduro wrapped Churchill. After lighting it I opened up my kindle and a book that was 99 cents popped up on my screen. It was written by an author whose other works I had read and I respected his intellect. The book was entitled How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in 95 Difficult Steps. I had at least 45 minutes to suck down the delightful tobacco leaf, so I thought, “what the hell, it sounds interesting, I’ll give it a read.” That flippant response changed the trajectory of my life. Pretty much every word that Christian Smith wrote on those pages deeply struck a chord with my soul.
Could I Really Become Catholic? I Had to Find Out
So here I was. My wife had just passed away, I resigned from my church, I was moving from Chicago back to Kansas, I didn’t have a job lined up, and I was taking the next 6 months off to sort my life out and be there for my girls. Life was very open ended for me, and as I read this book and thought about my own next chapter in life, Catholicism just got a whole lot more interesting.
Within a couple weeks I had read through three biographies of Evangelicals who became Catholic, and I had purchased the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I opened up page one and began reading. At this point I was definitely intrigued, I was drawn to the Church’s stability through the Magisterium, I had a deep respect and agreement with Catholic moral teachings, and I had shifted in the last ten years toward a more Catholic understanding of Justification, but could I really become Catholic? Surely there were just too many points of contention in my head: Purgatory and Indulgences (I still struggle with indulgences!), praying to Mary and all that mumbo-jumbo, why confession to a priest, and what about my Calvinist framework?
For an entire summer, my nightly routine was to put my girls down to sleep, light a cigar, crack open a refreshing Dr. Pepper, and read the Catechism. I read, I checked footnotes, I went on intellectual rabbit trails, and purchased secondary books to read as questions came up. The surprising thing was this. The more deeply that I explored Catholicism, the more profoundly my respect for the theological component of the Church grew. The tipping point for me was paragraph 1505.
This One Line in the Catechism Changed Everything
Throughout this time, I had been deeply wrestling with God and struggling through the loss of my wife. I was asking the typical questions of why. I was sad, lonely, upset, angry, and sad again. It was a deep struggle. About 2 weeks before our second daughter was born, I had gone on a prayer retreat and in that retreat God spoke to me and said in a very clear and articulate voice. “Chad, I want you to pray that My kingdom would come through Glo’s suffering.” I had no idea what that meant, but immense peace fell over me and I began to pray that prayer for the next six months until my wife died. Then I stopped praying that prayer, and I struggled with it for another 12 months. Why did she have to suffer? Why did she have to die? What’s the point, God? In the midst of this struggle, I read paragraph 1505.
1505 Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick, but he makes their miseries his own: "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases." [Mt 8:17; cf. Isa 53:4] But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover. On the cross Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and took away the "sin of the world," [Jn 1:29; cf. Isa 53:4-6] of which illness is only a consequence. By his passion and death on the cross Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion.
That passage struck me like a ton of bricks and brought more clarity to me than anything else could. It was like being submerged in freezing cold water while your lungs are trying to take in air. The Holy Spirit spoke, and instantly my mind began churning through my rolodex of painful memories as I found meaning for them all. At that moment, I knew I wanted to become Catholic. I just had to get through some of the hurdles that were holding me back.
Marian Doubts and Meeting Leon Suprenant
Ultimately, the major hurdle for me was Marian theology. I had begun to dive deeply into the theological development of Mary and was reading a number of books that addressed the issues from scripture, history, tradition, and theologically. By this time I was reading a book on Mary and Scripture edited by Scoyt Hahn and Leon Suprenant. I knew a lot about Scott Hahn by this point, but didn’t know anything about the other editor. I was reading this book the night before my first RCIA class and I remember praying very specifically, “Lord, please provide someone for me who can answer my intellectual questions.” So I went to RCIA and the first person I met was a middle aged man who looked like he could have been my dad (I was 33 at the time). We had name tags on and his name looked very familiar but I had no idea why. As we talked it was clear that this guy had some knowledge. He started asking which seminary I went to and then he told me he had a friend who went to Gordon Conwell, and I was like, who is this guy? I asked him what his friend’s name was (as if I would know who his friend was! Sometimes the Evangelical circles are small like that), and he said, “his name is Scott Hahn.” As soon as he said the name, Scott Hahn, revelation struck me. It wasn’t the name of Scott Hahn that I was marveling at. It was the name of the guy I was speaking to. I realized his name was oddly familiar because he had been the co-editor (with Scott Hahn) of the book I was reading the night before… Leon Suprenant.
I still ask myself to this day, what are the chances that I would be reading a specific book about Marian theology (there are a lot of books on Mary), pray to the Lord after reading the book that I would meet someone at RCIA who would be able to answer my theological questions, and then, in the basement of Prince of Peace Church in Olathe, KS (of all places!) God would drop the co-author of the book I was reading in the RCIA class I attended? Greenlight! If God wants to answer your prayers, he will do it in very specific ways. Leon became my sponsor, and in April of 2014, I became Catholic.
Reconnecting with the Girl Who Started It All
Now, I could end the story there, but in poetic fashion, I have to finish this story where I began. Remember how my journey to Catholicism started? I met this intriguing Catholic girl in college who was different from any other Catholic I had ever met. Well…in God’s providence, a few months after my becoming Catholic, God had serendipitously allowed our paths to cross again (that’s another story). Somehow, she had never married (that’s another long story that she’ll have to tell someday), she was still a very vibrant and faithful Catholic, and yes, she was still drop dead gorgeous, so I married her!
If you're considering your own path to Catholicism or simply curious about the steps involved, stay tuned for my next blog post. In it, I'll be answering your top questions about the process of becoming Catholic, from RCIA to baptism and beyond. Be on the lookout for some helpful insights to guide you on your own journey.