Evangelizing the Heart: Lessons from My Journey into the Catholic Church

When I entered formation for the diaconate in the Albany Diocese, I was in a class all by myself. Luckily, there were four men two years ahead of me that I had the privilege of getting to know over a year. For me, it was my first of three years of formation; for them, it was their last. Two of those four men were converts to the Catholic faith from other Christian traditions. I, too, was a convert, coming from the United Methodist Church.

Looking back, my journey to the Catholic Church goes all the way back to my childhood. I remember Catholic friends of mine in elementary school talking about Saints with their parents and thinking they seemed really cool, but wondered why we didn’t have Saints in the Methodist church. The church I grew up in located in Austin, TX, was a bilingual church that primarily favored Spanish for the Hispanic community. I never became fluent in Spanish so I liken it to attending the Latin Mass if I was Catholic. Even though the services were in Spanish, I always felt there was great reverence and love of God in our worship.

Communion was offered only once a month, on the first Sunday. The church had windows that were fused glass (as opposed to stained glass). I liked the beauty they imbued in the church, along with a portrait of Jesus in the church narthex and crosses in every room. There was also a small sacristy that only the pastor and designated people could enter. In the early 1990s, the church was assigned a new pastor. The previous pastor always wore a suit to worship services, but on his first Sunday, the new pastor walked into the narthex wearing a white robe with a stole and carrying a crosier. I immediately thought to myself, “he must be very holy.” To me, it gave an even greater sense of reverence for worship.

My parents knew how to run the domestic church. We would pray as a family, and my parents would read the Bible and their Upper Room devotional daily. I still have the first Bible they bought for me on my shelf in my office. The one thing I looked forward to every summer was the Conference (like a diocese) youth camp in the mountains of New Mexico. They would have the perennial altar call at the last service of the camp, but they also had a call for boys (and later girls) feeling the call to ordained ministry. During my last two years at camp, I felt the Holy Spirit move me to go up. Years later, I was ordained a Deacon in the Methodist Church.

A few years after studying Sacred Music at Southern Methodist University, I went back to work on a Theology degree. I took two semesters of church history, and the professor, Dr. Bruce Marshall, was himself a convert to Catholicism from Lutheranism. He had us read all primary resources, so we were reading Justin Martyr, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas just to name a few. I began to wonder why the church I was a part of did not believe what the church fathers believed. I remember coming to believe that the Eucharist was the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and not simply a memorial or consubstantiation as some Protestants believe, as opposed to transubstantiation which goes back to the ancient Church and Jesus himself. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, believed in frequent communion. How is it that we veered so far off not only from the early church, but the founder of the Methodist tradition? Just two years after being ordained a Deacon in the Methodist church my wife, Kirsten, and I began attending RCIA classes at a nearby parish, St. Jude in Allen, TX. The priest at this Catholic parish was also a convert, coming from the Anglican tradition. He was also married and had children and grandchildren. This was before the Anglican Ordinariate, and Pope John Paul II himself had to sign-off on his ordination to the Catholic priesthood. We were only there for a year because I was accepted to start studying for a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies / Sacramental Theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. I withdrew after only a year of study, but I gained a new appreciation for the early church and the importance of Tradition. I just didn’t have much of an interest in studying and searching for ancient texts at the time. But this is something that I may have an interest in for the future. While in northern Virginia I was hired as the music director and educator at Holy Family Catholic parish and school. Still being a new Catholic, I felt blessed to be working full-time for a Catholic church for the first time. I got to know the Deacons at the parish and told them I had been a Deacon in the Methodist church. They encouraged me to pray about becoming a Deacon in the Catholic church. My time at Holy Family was only four years, but those four years were a true blessing. The next step in me and my wife’s journey landed us in the Albany diocese of New York.

We moved to the capital region to be closer to her family. I found a job teaching at a Catholic high school in western Massachusetts. I looked forward to teaching religion, but also learned that the culture in the northeast is much different than the south. Many, if not most, of the students at the school were not Catholic, and many not even Christian. I realized that even though I knew how to teach the Catholic faith and its doctrines, I did not yet really know how to evangelize. I was also surprised to find that some of the teachers at the school were not Catholic, and some had no faith at all. This was a very different situation coming from the Arlington diocese where the schools had a strong Catholic identity. I only taught there for a year, and the year after I left the school closed. Sadly there are no Catholic high schools now in western Massachusetts. The northeast, one of the most secular regions in the country, is ripe for re-evangelization. But the church must be bold in following the Truth taught by our primary teacher, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

After three years of working at a parish in the Albany diocese as the parish life coordinator and youth director, I landed where I am currently both employed and serving as a Deacon. I have been at St. Edward the Confessor Catholic Church for over seven years now, and two as a Deacon. I have been blessed to work with youth and families here, focusing the faith formation program on evangelizing youth and their parents. The tools for evangelism that I acquired from studying at St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry have been fruitful.

Every course I took at St. Bernard’s had some form of evangelism in its curriculum. I appreciate the fact that St. Bernard’s includes “...and Ministry” in the name of the school. It has given me the tools I was lacking years ago that are now so very necessary to re-evangelize our very own communities. It is exciting to know that others who I have studied along with are not only teaching the Catholic faith, but also evangelizing, that is, sharing the Good News, of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.