The Tiber: Neither Deep Nor Wide
A Former United Methodist Minister Returns to the Mother Ship
I believe that all of our journeys are a crooked path, and each of us would not be who we are if the path were straighter. Hindsight being 20/20, I would do some things differently if I had to start over, but on the other hand, I don’t regret the journey, because I learned a lot of things that come in handy now that I’ve ended up where I am.
The story of my conversion to Catholicism really goes back to my childhood. My father’s family is Italian, and that meant Roman Catholic. I was baptized in the Catholic faith, and my paternal grandfather (“Papa Lou”) was a great influence on my faith as I grew up. He made it a priority to get to Mass every week, and though he didn’t talk like an evangelist, no one who knew him would have questioned his faith. But the Catholic church of the early 60’s gave my non-Catholic mother the cold shoulder, so when my family moved to Wisconsin, brand loyalty was not at the top of the list when it came to finding a church. So we joined a neighborhood church that both my parents were comfortable with, and I was raised as a Lutheran.
Having been baptized as a Catholic, I don’t know if I’m technically a convert or a revert, but the sequence of events in a nutshell goes like this: Baptized Roman Catholic, confirmed Lutheran, ordained United Methodist. I became a Methodist for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the fact that my high school girlfriend was a Methodist. But I was also attracted to the “pluralism” of the United Methodist church, which for me amounted to a license to believe and do anything I wanted without accountability to a higher moral authority. This sounded pretty good to a young guy in high school and college.
In college I got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ and became a fundamentalist. Bless their hearts, they meant well, but I could never get on board with their style of evangelism – you know, going up to someone you don’t know, the “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet in hand, and sharing the faith, with the hope of extracting the “sinner’s prayer” from the poor soul. On the other hand, the deep reverence I have for the Scriptures is a legacy of that time in my life, and so I have to assume that God was at work in me, in and through Campus Crusade. It was a strange mix in those days, because while I was hanging out with the Campus Crusade crowd during the week, on Sundays I went to the campus Methodist church, where I helped out with the music ministry. The United Methodist church tends to be theologically liberal, especially in Minnesota where I went to college, and especially on college campuses. So I bounced back and forth between the conservative approach of the parachurch organizations to the liberalism of mainline protestants. The result was that I learned to speak both languages, and get along with people in both camps. Not that I’m saying I did it all without compromising my faith, because at that age my faith wasn’t very developed, so it would be more accurate to say that my faith was influenced by both side of the spectrum.
A year after graduating from college, I decided to go to seminary. I figured, why not study the most important topic there is – theology. I was very naïve, however, regarding the various schools of thought surrounding the interpretation of Scripture, and I assumed that one seminary was just like another. After all, they all study the same Bible, right? By the grace of God, I ended up at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA, an inter-denominational evangelical protestant seminary. I consider my time at Fuller to be a great awakening to the many treasures of the Christian faith. I learned the tools of biblical exegesis, studied under professors who were both brilliant and spiritual, and grew in my faith by leaps and bounds. It was at Fuller that I went from being a fundamentalist to an evangelical – and yes, there is a difference! It was also at Fuller that I discovered the difference between a reformed (“Calvinist”) approach and an “Arminian” approach to soteriology. Most of the people at Fuller were more Calvinist than Calvin was. Of course, as a Catholic I now know that they were really just more Augustinian than Augustine was. Be that as it may, I was always more Catholic in my understanding of free will and salvation than my colleagues at Fuller.
When I graduated from seminary with an M.Div., I ended up on the path toward ordination. I was still very naïve to the extreme liberalism in the United Methodist denomination, and so I had no idea how the next decade of my life would be an exercise in swimming upstream. But I was ordained, and I accepted an appointment as an associate pastor of a church of about 1,000 members in south central Minnesota. After two years there, I was moved to what they call a three point charge: two small churches of my own, and part time responsibility as a youth minister at a third (larger) church, all along the beautiful Mississippi valley at the border of southern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Two years there, along with the continued struggle for orthodoxy in the church burned me out, and I eventually decided to go back to school to get a Ph.D. I finally felt like I knew what my calling was. As a pastor, while many of my colleagues visited the people of their congregation all week and then wrote a sermon on Saturday, my routine was to work on my sermon from Monday to Thursday, and then on Fridays drag myself outside to visit a few people. I felt I was gifted in the teaching parts of ministry, but not the pastoral parts. So I was going to teach. However, I decided that it would be best to attend a United Methodist-related school, since I had taken considerable heat for having gotten my M.Div. at Fuller. I requested, and received, an appointment to attend school at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. It was there I completed a Ph.D. in Patristics – the history and theology of the early church.
It was my study of Patristics that ignited the dormant flame of Catholicism in me. As many others before me have found, one cannot study the history of the early church without realizing that sola scriptura, for example, is an invention of the Protestant Reformation, and does not really reflect the understanding of the church fathers. In addition, I got the chance to study for a summer at the American Academy in Rome. My formal studies were in the history and topography of imperial Rome, but my informal exploration led me to a deeply devotional appreciation for everything Roman.
My conversion to Catholicism, however, was as much about leaving the denomination in which I was ordained, as it was about joining with the Church of the apostles. As long as I could make it work, I was determined to continue trying to stick it out in the Methodist world. This was for two main reasons. First, I was not ready to give up my status as ordained clergy. Second, I saw the denomination as a mission field, and felt obligated to continue to try to save it. But eventually I got to the point where I knew I could not stay any longer in a denomination where my offering dollars could be used to fund abortion lobbying and who knows what else. It was time to leave. The only question that remained was – where to go?
The decision to leave the United Methodist church and give up my ordination was the harder decision. By the time that decision was made, it was almost just a matter of admitting in my head what my heart knew. By this time I had married an amazing woman who happened to be a cradle Catholic. She was a very good sport about getting married in a Methodist church (two, actually – we eloped at the Methodist church in Rome, and then later were married legally in the Methodist church that’s built into a skyscraper in downtown Chicago). But she never felt at home in the Methodist church. Of course she wanted us both to be Catholic, but I had to come to that place on my own. I scheduled many meetings with the pastor of the parish we eventually joined, and asked him all those questions protestants ask. Interestingly, I now get asked to go to parishes and lecture on the answers to those questions.
I eventually came to understand that I was really a Catholic at heart all along. When the time finally came, I sent a letter to the United Methodist bishop explaining in detail exactly why I was leaving the denomination. The envelope included my certificate of ordination. Turning in my credentials like that was very liberating. I was no longer under the authority of a hierarchy that I believed was driving itself farther and farther from apostolic Christianity. I no longer had the dilemma of having to submit to leaders whom I believed to be unorthodox.
The letter I wrote to the bishop was written as an open letter to everyone I knew in the United Methodist denomination, and it included the reasons I was leaving, and the reasons I was becoming Roman Catholic. Some of those reasons are as follows:
I found that the United Methodist denomination had taught itself to justify a disregard for Scripture, in favor of a postmodern criteria of comfort. This is where the interpreter becomes the authority over the text, rather than the other way around. The interpreter decides which parts of Scripture apply and which do not, based primarily on a comparison of Scripture with personal experience or “comfort level.” This leads to what I called “the hypocrisy of ultra-tolerance,” which is the assumption that there is no sin, except the imposition of moral standards, and the only heresy is the claim that such a thing as heresy exists. The hypocrisy reveals itself when those who preach tolerance forget to be tolerant of anyone too far to the right of themselves. They label people “intolerant,” and by this they justify their lack of tolerance toward them.
My study of the early church led me to understand what went into the definition of orthodoxy. It was a centuries-long struggle, which, though painful at times, was guided by the Holy Spirit. To accept christologies which were thoroughly and sincerely explored (and found lacking) in the early church, as though today they are acceptable, assumes that an individual in the twentieth or twenty-first century is somehow more enlightened than the synods and ecumenical councils of the church which spanned over 400 years and included people who were much closer to Jesus and the apostles then we are. This is the very height of arrogance, and yet I found it to be the operating principle in the hierarchy of my former denomination. The leadership of the denomination was all too ready to jettison the written word of God, and embrace universalism in the name of political correctness.
Now as I think about being Catholic, and as people ask me about my conversion, there are a few things I will always tell people – reasons why I’m glad I’m Catholic:
Walk into a protestant church, and what’s in the center? The pulpit. That’s because the preaching of the word is the center of worship. Preaching is good, but of course preachers are only human. Now walk into a Roman Catholic church, and what’s in the center? The table, because we are a sacramental church. We are a church that embraces the mystery of the living Word, the Lamb of God. And every time we celebrate Mass we proclaim the gospel most perfectly (I Corinthians 11:26). While my personality doesn’t like mystery (I want to answer all the questions), the truth is that the more you try to get to the bottom of the mystery, what you really find is a deeper mystery. It’s a bottomless well. The mystery is not all explained away, as it is in some other traditions, on the contrary, the mystery is embraced.
Finally, I guess I just came to the point in my life when I longed to be part of the one church that is connected by an unbroken chain going all the way back to Jesus and the apostles. And to add blessing on top of blessing, after joining our parish, I was offered a full time job on the staff, and now I get to live my faith as my day job, a dream I had all but given up on.
