This is an introduction to you of my family's background from my perspective. It is pieced together, with supplementary material, from three sources. 1) My personal testimony written as part of going though D. James Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion in 1990. 2) An explanation of how my spouse and I joined the Catholic Church in 1992 and 3) A letter written to Father T about Religious Education.
***Personal Testimony 1990 - Written for D. James Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion***
My family's church background is pretty mixed up. My grandfather's family on my father's side was Catholic but my grandmother's family on that side suddenly decided they all wanted to become Seventh Day Adventists. Before that they were basically uncommitted. Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists do not mix very well and hence my Grandparents got divorced. This, among other things, may have turned my father off to churches, so he never encouraged me to go to church.
My mother was raised Presbyterian but when she married her first husband she became Catholic. She had to leave him because he was physically abusing her. When I was about six years old she had me baptized in the Lutheran church without my father even knowing about it. I think she only picked Lutheran because my parents’ best friends were Lutheran. They became my godparents.
Not very long after this Lutheran baptism my mother and I started to attend one of the two churches within a mile or so of our home out in the country, the Reformed Church, a historically Dutch Reformed Church. This was to be where I would learn what confessing Jesus Christ as my Savior means. But not right away.
Before I made my first decision to, more or less, follow Jesus Christ I thought I was hopelessly destined to be a bad boy. I had found myself in situations already in first grade that labeled me as a "bad kid." So, I tried to live up to the part; smoking cigarettes, swearing, stealing, telling lies. If God hadn't cared about me and drew me away from the direction I was going I think I would be among the worst before I got into Junior High.
The first change in direction came when I was in third grade. A friend who was in fifth grade and going through Lutheran confirmation had learned of the concept of repentance. It gave me hope. Maybe if I "resolved" to be good God would help me to not be a bad kid anymore. It was a salvation by works plan but it was a step in the right direction. It changed my direction.
As with most resolutions, I did not succeed at my resolution to be good, but I had made a choice to try and this put me into situations where I did learn the rest of the gospel message. By the time I was in fifth grade I had learned that, more important than repenting so that I wouldn't commit any new sins, I had to accept the gift of forgiveness of my old sins. Jesus could offer this to me because he had already paid the penalty for my sins through his death on the cross. By testifying to this before my church's leaders I was made a member of the church.
Admittedly, since that time I mostly tried to live a double life. If asked, I would confess Jesus Christ as Savior, but my behavior much of the time could be used as evidence that I was a hypocrite.
By the time I reached senior high school I could see how, slowly, God was making II Corinthians 5:17 come true in my life: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: the old has gone, then new has come." In spite of my hypocritical behavior, God was changing me to be more like what he wanted and convicting my conscience of the things he wanted me to drop.
My experience with Jesus Christ has not been very dramatic and I think I am one of the slowest Christians to get to know him better. I think my experience is best illustrated by the experiences of the pilgrim in *Pilgrim's Progress*. I have always known where I want to go but I am often drawn from the most direct route to meaningless side trips that start out looking promising but end up getting me burned. The great thing is that I know, like a shepherd, it is Jesus that comes and brings me back where I belong.
***Beyond the one page testimony ***
It was shortly after I turned 16 (1973) that I met the girl I was to marry. We quickly became a "steady" pair and basically stayed together until we were married in 1979. Those months when I left her to "play the field" it was only God's watching over me that kept me out of deep trouble.
While in high school we attended various Bible studies and had mutual friends that were speaking in tongues.
While in college together we attended Presbyterian, Evangelical Free, Fundamentalist Baptist, and a more Evangelical Baptist church. We appreciated the last one the most. I was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ almost steadily through college, but I was also in a Fraternity. I think I had one foot in the Church and one foot in the world.
After we were married, and when we finally moved to Town, we attended the Covenant Church. We loved the small group to which we were assigned. But when we moved to extreme other side of town we switched to a Church of Christ. That lasted only a year because we did not feel welcomed; we weren't related to anyone. We liked the pastor but they booted him out. I think they didn't like that he was welcoming too many new people.
We started church hopping again and were invited by a work colleague and Bible study member to the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. That went great until 1990 when somebody pushed to get Pastor Ken G booted. I had been church librarian. My spouse led music.
Our two older children were born while we were attending there. The Alliance Church does baptism by immersion as adults so our children were dedicated to the Lord while we were here. Both my spouse and I were baptized as children, her in the Methodist denomination at four months and I in the Lutheran denomination at 7 years, but both of us wanted to be baptized by immersion as adults as a testimony of our dedication to Jesus Christ. I did it while I was in college at the fundamentalist Baptist church and she was immersed in the swimming pool by Pastor G.
July of 1990 we had attended the July 4th Family Camp at this church's Bible camp and retreat center, I had been here for two men's retreats and on one Bike-a-thon. When my wife picked me up after the Bike-a-thon we stayed overnight and ate with the first through third graders there at the time. It was mighty generous of Gordy, the camp director, to let us stay for free.
My spouse had been feeling out of place at this church for some time but the week at camp really brought it to the surface. We wondered what was wrong with us that we were not having a wonderful time. It was just "ok" for us. We were here with people that drove half way across the length of the state several times a year to this camp and we were not appreciating it the way they were.
I had committed myself to coach Bible Quizzing for the school year of 1990-1991 but we made sure that we did not get re-elected to music coordinator and librarian. We planned to slip away quietly. It was tough enough for our kids to form a peer group of Christian kids their own age in a fellowship that had a grand total of three other kids in the range of ages that our kids were at. Many times our daughter had come crying to us because the girls who were older than her would not play with her. We had persuaded the Sunday School to let her advance early and be with the five and six year olds, but that didn't help our son. With the Gs leaving it was even harder because Debby was our favorite babysitter.
January of 1991 we slipped away from the Christian and Missionary Alliance. We left even though I continued to coach teams of Bible Quizzers though April of 1991. The first place we went was to First Baptist. We thought we might like it there because they had an excellent set of children's programs including Sunday School, Children's Church, and Awanas, but there was another problem to be solved. We wanted our children to attend a Christian school. This church was not affiliated with a Christian school. The best we could come up with was a Lutheran School about 8 miles away. The problem was that the only way we could afford this school was if we became members there. We thought the Baptist schools were too fundamentalist.
For us to become Lutherans was more of a step theologically than I think it would be for a Lutheran to become a Catholic. Lutheran's view of the Eucharist and Baptism is more like the Roman Catholic Church in our eyes than it is like the more Evangelical churches from which we came. We were following any lead that we thought might be coming from God so we gave it a try because it was important to us that our children get the same story in school as they do in church.
The Lutherans, particularly the Missouri Synod, take the Eucharist seriously. We were considering becoming members of the church to get our kids into the school.
After a time we came to feel this also was not where God wanted us and we were contemplating returning to First Baptist Church and maybe just send our kids to a Catholic school because it would be closer to what our values are than the public schools. It was during this time of wondering where God wanted us when I saw what I hoped was a clear signal from God.
During this time we received a letter from a couple who had been very close friends for years. They happened to be Roman Catholic and they asked if we had ever considered the Catholic Church. We could not have said we hadn't but we could say that we never thought we could ever actually believe what the Catholic Church teaches about the Eucharist, Mary, the Saints, Apostolic Succession and the like. We had started examining the Catholic Church just before we started attending the Alliance Church.
The funny thing was that both of us noticed a little bit back then and especially now that all of our closest long term friends were Catholic, the ones that have stuck with us. In fact we stopped and stayed over night at a couple's house on the way back from that Fourth of July trip to the Bible camp and had a wonderful time, more fun than we had the whole week we were at the camp. This is a couple we have been friends with since we were in college and this couple is, of course, Catholic. Both my spouse and I had roommates in college that, not only still kept in touch, but we also considered our best friends, and both were also Catholic.
When we considered the Catholic Church back in 1984 before starting to attend the Alliance church my attitude was a little bit on the side of I could go in and teach those Catholics something about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. My attitude was not that I had something to learn from the church but that I had something to teach the Church.
Another reason we could not say we had never considered the Catholic Church was because I was getting desperate enough to get our children in a situation where their church and their school were both telling the same story that I was considering attending Catholic services just for that. But we still had big problems with Catholic doctrines, My spouse more so than me.
A short time later we were visiting one evening with our Catholic friends after having received their letter. I began to ask them at the kitchen table all the questions about the common objections Protestants have with the Catholic Church; What makes Catholics think that it really is the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist? How can you believe in Purgatory? Why do Catholics feel so uncomfortable when Evangelicals say they know that they are going to heaven?
They did a good job answering my objections. He quoted a guy named Scott Hahn whom he had been listening to on some cassette tapes he had. The saying goes; I think Fulten Sheen started it, that there are only about a hundred people in the United States who hate the Roman Catholic Church but millions who hate what they think the Roman Catholic Church is.
They lent me their tape of Scott Hahn's conversion story and I listened to it twice by nine o'clock the next morning. I decided right away that I was going to look into the Catholic Church.
Father S. asked me when our friends told him that I was interested in learning more about the Church if I had been to Mass. I was pretty sheepish when I said that I had not been to Mass yet.
I started attended Mass before Easter Vigil 1991. I went with another couple to Easter Vigil and told another friend that was received into the Church that night that I really envied him.
My spouse and I had many discussions through April and May trying to figure out why I was so drawn to the church and why she was so hesitant. She had several things she felt she would lose if she became Catholic. 1) She wouldn't have as much opportunity to use her musical talents. 2) She thought the children’s' programs in the Catholic Church were nothing to compare with the programs at First Baptist. 3) She thought she would have to believe not just the Apostles' Creed dogma type teachings of the church but also she would have to swear to all the more peripheral teachings like the rosary, purgatory, lighting candles, etc.
On April 12 I got an appointment with Father T. to ask him some of these questions. My spouse and I had made a prioritized list of all the personal pros and cons for each of us of things that were important to us that we would be either gaining or losing if we became Catholic. I shared this with Father T and he assured me that the Roman Catholic Church is big enough to accommodate the diversity.
My spouse started in June to give it a try. We went to the 10:30 Mass, and the music was perfect for her and many other things just made her feel this was where God wanted us.
Ever since then she has been digging into all kinds of books on Catholic spirituality and we listen over and over to Scott and Kimberly Hahn tapes, Gerry Matatics, and Steve Wood. We enrolled our children in the closest Catholic school. That backfired.
Our oldest daughter enjoyed preschool and kindergarten but was more and more miserable at St. Francis as she moved through the grade levels. She was very relieved when we moved to a small town and she and her siblings got to go to public school.
But in the mean time we attended parish #1 for a few years. During this time I got on the religious education committee. It got very hot and controversial because I had a vision and the directors of religious education did not share my vision. After leaving Parish #1 and moving to Resurrection I wrote Father T. this letter...
***Letter to Father T. about why I thought religious education was ineffective ***
I am sorry I have been delayed in getting back to you. You had asked me a question and I was unable to form a clear answer at the time (during the last Faith Formation Advisory Council meeting in January). I would have liked to write to you in February but we were on the team for the Feb Engaged Encounter and spent the month fine tuning our talks. So I knew that I would not be able to give your question the attention it deserved last month.
Pete wrote down and then read out loud what he had to say at that meeting. This example helped me to choose to write a letter as a better way for you to understand where we are coming from and a better way for me to organize my thoughts. A letter also does not require you to digest it all in one sitting.
I feel that I should do my best to answer the question you put to me at my last Faith Formation Advisory Council meeting. You had asked me what one thing I would change about the way youth religious education is done. I thought about it a lot over the days following the meeting and I think the one thing I would change is that I would bring the activities, the methods, into tight focus with a specific goal, not loosing sight of the ultimate, long term goal.
However, to really understand why I have chosen the goal that I have I should fill in some blanks you may have about the experiences we have had in our faith journey. Some of our story you have already heard but to make sure nothing falls through the cracks I will share it again. I think that you read our conversion story written shortly before Easter Vigil 1992 so I will not repeat it here but only make reference to it.
My wife had a pretty solid Methodist background and, in junior high, about the same time as I did, became committed to the evangelical cause, what Campus Crusade for Christ refers to as the "Great Commission". I did also about the same time when we were in Junior High. However, we did not go to the same high schools and so our paths did not cross until senior high.
My background was not as solid as My spouse's. My father's father side of the family was Catholic, all the way back to Germany. However, during my father's youth his mother's side of the family suddenly went from unchurched to become Seventh Day Adventists and my Grandma joined them. This caused a great deal of discord in the family and my grandparents eventually divorced. This battle over churches may have been most of what turned my father off to "organized religion" and consequently I have had little encouragement from my father to become involved in church, or para church organizations. My mother's background was Presbyterian but her first husband was Catholic. She picked up some Catholic practices and theology before they were divorced which she carried with her into her marriage to my father. I was their only child.
My parents best friends were Lutheran so when my mother got a chance she had these best friends become my Godparents and had me baptized as a Lutheran when I was 7 without my father's knowledge.
With a mixed up background like this you probably sense that denominational loyalty was not very strong with my mother and me. Since the Reformed church was less than 2 miles away (five miles closer than the Lutheran church) we switched, to save gas mostly, I think.
The next few paragraphs relate the same story as I wrote back in 1990 for a class in which we were learning to share our faith and give our personal testimony.
I was a goof off in Sunday School, Sunday night Youth Group (a confirmation-like thing) and Wednesday night Bible Study and Family Night, but I rarely missed. This was where my friends were. I had friends in this church from both several surrounding schools and ultimately that is how I met the girl I would one day marry.
When I was in third grade an older friend was going through Lutheran confirmation and some concepts he related to me in his own words (a personal testimony) really turned on the light for me. The most influential of which was repentance. I thought I was doomed to be a goof off all my life and his explanation of repentance gave me hope that I could change.
I started to pay attention in my religious education, though we did not call it that. We thought religion was something invented by human beings and it was a personal relationship with Jesus Christ that we were after.
In fifth grade, as an individual (we did this when we were ready, not as a class), I stood before the governing board of laymen at our church, called the Consistory, and related my faith in Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. This allowed me to be a member and I could now receive communion.
As my testimony says, I tried to follow Christ but found many moral loopholes and ways to rationalize activities, attitudes and behaviors that contradicted my Christian testimony. I was a faith sharing hypocrite. I've heard it said that if your faith doesn't work at home don't export it. My faith was working but not visibly; not in the everyday but it really was in the long term.
In junior high I had another jump up in my spiritual growth. The catalyst was our youth advisor challenging us to learn to share our faith. He taught us how to walk someone through the plan of salvation as outlined by "The Four Spiritual Laws". We memorized verses that are still deeply imbedded in my subconscious and they come into my conscious when I need them at times such as temptation or when presenting or defending my faith.
In senior high I met my future wife through a Bible Study and together we got peripherally involved with a charismatic group. We both went through stages of begging God to give us the gift of speaking in tongues.
When we went to college our denominational ties pretty much vanished. Most Methodist churches we tried were lukewarm or non- spiritual. I was involved in Campus Crusade for Christ at two different campuses. My spouse was going to a nursing school (then a Catholic school) so it was not as easy for her to be as involved as I was.
During this time I had a roommate who I now consider my best friend. He was involved with me in Campus Crusade for Christ, but he was unique. He was the only Catholic I ever knew who was involved in Campus Crusade who stayed Catholic. He is also the only Campus Crusade person who has stayed in touch with me through all the years.
We went with different groups of friends to a Presbyterian church one year, a Evangelical Free church another year.
My Sophomore year, while my fiancé was taking a semester off in California, I had attended a fundamentalist, independent, Baptist church long enough to be baptized by full immersion. That, alone, made me a member of their local church and the pastor put me through a little inquisition when I stopped showing up and started attending the Evangelical Free Church. My spouse and I ended up at another Baptist church, less fundamentalist, before we got married. We continued attending there the next year while she finished school.
After My spouse finished school she started a job at Methodist Hospital. I had graduated with a BA degree with a double major in Anthropology and Sociology and I did not know what to do with them. I needed to go back to school to get another major. I went to school during the week and "visited" my wife on weekends.
In fall of 1981 I was offered a job. After a careful period of thought and prayer (about 5 seconds) I accepted the offer (I had no others). We first went to Covenant church. I taught junior high Sunday School until we moved again a year later. We continued to attend and teach Sunday School at the Covenant church but we usually like to be very involved with our church. This is easier if we are attending one close by. So rather than drive across town the Church of Christ close by and stayed there until they dumped the pastor the following fall.
I was attending a noon-time Bible study at this time and we bumped into a friend from that study at a restaurant one evening after we had all been shopping at the Christian Book Store. He and his wife invited us to try the Alliance Church. We attended, were impressed, attended longer, joined, taught junior and senior high Sunday School, served as deacon and deaconess, served as music coordinator, served as librarian, watched the pastor get black-balled by an overzealous minority, and we left.
From there we tried to put down roots at First Baptist where our kids had been attending Awanas and where I had spent so many Saturdays during the three years I coached Bible Quizzing for junior and senior high kids. But we wanted to send our kids to a Christian school and First Baptist didn't have one. We couldn't afford to send them to the Lutheran school unless we attended. After considering home schooling, and a couple fundamentalist schools, the Lutheran school seemed our best option. This was motivation enough to drive across town again.
It was at this time that a couple who are among our best fiends suggested we give the Catholic Church another try and backed it up with Scott Hahn's conversion testimony on tape. Becoming Catholic was the real answer to the question of how to get our children into a Christian school. We wanted our kids to hear the same thing from us, from their church and from their school. We do not want to send them to a public school that will undermine, implicitly and, at times, explicitly, all that we are trying to instill in them at home and through our involvement in the Church. Now that our children are attending St. Francis School we have discovered that it is much easier to get them to church and keep them relatively well behaved during Mass because their classmates also attend, we have more motivated children because of the presence of their school mates.
What, you are wondering, does all this have to do with Faith Formation? Well, for us there was a constant thread running through our faith journey that we think made us committed to the point of Evangelical activism. It has followed us over to make us Roman Catholic activists. That constant thread is the belief that it is most important to be able to intelligently, lovingly, and effectively share your faith, not just by living your life but also in your words. And to effectively share your faith you have to know your faith, the whats, the hows, the whens, the whos and, most importantly, the whys.
Therefore, the change I would make would be to develop a Faith Formation program that combines a strong theological teaching with teaching that "we are called to lives of love and service."
What really brings this home comes out in specific instances in our lives and has been related in the
testimonies of Scott Hahn and other Evangelicals who have converted to the Roman Catholic faith. As Evangelicals I, and some of my associates, often tried to talk Catholics out of their loyalty to the Catholic Church by reasoning from the Bible, sometimes with no sensitivity. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. CCD-trained Catholics usually are unable to defend their faith from the Bible. So the first person to catch a Catholic kid away at college, stick a Bible in their face, and reason away the specifics of the Catholic faith with a Protestant Evangelical interpretation is going to run into little or no resistance. We did it, or at least tried.
Most of our victims couldn't defend their faith from the Bible nor were they really sure just exactly what the church really taught. They especially did not know why they should believe the way they do.
Every Catholic I have asked about this has been through it. They have been talked to by people who know their interpretation of the Bible and are excited and articulate about their faith but confused about what the Catholic Church teaches. We need to be as evangelical as they are. We need to prepare our teens so when their Catholic faith is challenged, they can clearly, concisely, lovingly, confidently, and zealously explain their faith and the Church. Maybe, as a result, they will be spared some of the confusion and doubt that comes from wanting to hang onto their Catholic faith but not able to articulate why they should.
This thread points out the problem and, in an unexpected way, the cure. The best defense is a good offense. Fight fire with fire. Need any other clichés? I learned, quite in a different context, that the best way to learn something is to know that, right after it is presented to you, you will have to teach it. This principle has proven itself in the context of our faith journey. The best way to defend your faith is to share it. The best way to learn the whats, whens, whos, and whys of your faith is to know you have to share it, defend it and explain it. The best way to learn to share your faith, like most anything, is to do it. On the job training. Go out, make mistakes, come home, lick your wounds, cure your doubts, go back out, share again, and get shot down, repeat, repeat, repeat.
This is not to say that all of our faith is reasoning, argument, facts, figures. Sharing of faith needs to be backed up with prayer. Studying the Bible needs to be backed up with prayer. And just as the best way to learn to share your faith is to share your faith, the best way to learn to love is to love, the best way to learn to serve is to serve, the best way learn to be humble is to do humble things. We share our faith verbally when we are sharing it in our service and love.
Can we motivate people to serve? Not without love. If they have any other motivation, even if the motive is that they want to go to heaven and don't want to go to hell, it won't stick. We can only teach them to love in the context of Christ's unconditional, sacrificial love, a love that comes to them as individuals but is lived out in the faith community, and I argue that the best way for them to catch a faith they will live out is require them to become contagious. The first sign that appears of an infected faith person is that it becomes their own, their own faith. Catch the faith here and go infect a few hundred others. I mean, "catch the faith" but don't stop there. "Catch the faith" with the full intention of infecting others.
Well, Father, there is my answer. Show kids how to defend their faith, give them practice in the context of service and love for others, back them up with practice in prayer, Bible Study, teach them to give their testimonies and have them listen to lots of them. And then there is the resource we never had before, THE SACRAMENTS. Show them the POWER they get when they receive absolution, the blessed sacrament, confirmation, marriage and Holy Orders, added to their baptism. To live the Christian life is humanly impossible. Only God can do it through us. It has to be lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. As Protestants we begged God for what is guaranteed to Catholics through just participating with a clean heart in the Sacraments, no matter how "filled with the Holy Spirit" we feel.
What about drugs, sex, abortion, etc? How will these topics be covered in my program? As I went through my training in faith my teachers never addressed these things as a topic in themselves. All those questions were answered in the context of the definition of our faith. I could choose to buy in or not. If I rejected the faith I would have to get my answers to how to live somewhere else; my parents or the public school. Without a context of faith to back the reasoning on these issues it is just another behavior modification technique. In other words, the Church needs to set the standards in its own context and not bend to conform to the world's context. She only has to be aware of the world's standards, not conform to them.
I realize that there are at least two sets of "customers" in a CCD program. There are families where the children get lots of instruction in the faith at home, and families where the kids are only grudgingly allowed by their parents to be involved. Two problems come out of this. One is that the existing program gets down to the level of those who are not being catechized at home to teach them all the basics so consequently the children who are being catechized at home are bored. But the existing program is acknowledged to not teach them everything since the rule is, and rightly so, that it is the parents' primary responsibility to catechize their children. So the kids who know little are left with gaps and the kids who are being catechized at home are unchallenged. So we have a situation where we are serving neither group effectively.
The second problem is that the existing homogenized program tries to be all things to all people at the least common denominator. This does not fulfill the need that most people feel to make a difference. People want to be given a challenge to win the world for Christ and then backed up with encouragement, enthusiasm, and resources to live out that challenge, to "come and help change the world" as the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ said.
Believe me, if they get hooked up with any non-Catholic Evangelicals like we were they will get challenged and be invited to get charged up at the nearest Evangelical church. As Evangelicals, we were trained on how to share our faith many times over and we considered Catholics as prime targets for evangelization. We really thought Catholics would be better Christians if they would get involved in a church "where the Bible is preached." Some even thought Catholics could not be called Christians in the sense of what we meant when we said "Christian." Some of us thought Catholics were "un-saved."
One of the reasons I expressed an interest in adult education is because I know that parents need to catechize their children but if they don't know the faith themselves, how can they teach their kids? I was thinking maybe I could help teach the teachers (in this case the parents) to teach. We are either going to have to train them to teach their children or do it for them.
A challenge we see is finding teachers who have a background that can relate to all this. Maybe my program is for the "honors class". We can't lay out for you right now a step by step implementation. This is more of an attitude. The biggest part of that attitude is another principle I learned in the same class, "Begin with the end in mind." In my experience the people who hang onto their faith as their most prized possession and make living it and sharing it their number one priority are the ones who have been trained to share it. But that is not really the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to build Saints. But in the more immediate picture I think we need to begin with the end in mind that we want our kids to be able to be evangelical, to be able to present the Catholic faith from the Bible better than the Bible Christians can attack it. We need to clearly articulate this goal so that when children enter the program at preschool the parents will know that every activity along the way, even beyond confirmation, has no wasted effort. The parents and the kids will know that everything is geared toward making solid Catholic Christians who not only won't abandon their faith.
We need to be fed from the Bible, fed by the Eucharist, and get challenged to "win the world for Christ."
One optimistic note is that no one has to know, right now, how to do this. What should happen is the people with vision should get together and share the vision together. If someone wants something strongly enough they will find a way to get it. If the "what to do" is convicting, the "how to do" will come. If it is really what should be done, the how to do it will come when the people with the vision get together and synergize.
Another major motivator for us now, why we really want to make a difference, is because we want to see our old Evangelical crowd understand the Catholic Church. But they think they see, as we thought we saw, a luke-warmness, most evident in the youth and in the lack of vocations (as many as half the kids in our old youth group were looking to go into some form of missionary work). This is something that often makes our old crowd reason "you can tell a tree by its fruit". We have ex-Catholic friends who say the Church is dead. "You can't hatch a live chick from an egg under a dead chicken," one told me once.
Let's get some evidence out to the surface! We believe Jesus wants to see all his followers united to present a united front to all the worldly cultures, cultures that seem to be determined to destroy themselves by intentionally violating every principle that Jesus, the Bible and the Church have been teaching us for two thousand years.
What did we mean by "look beyond the surface"? The first time we looked into the Roman Catholic Church (after we had left Marion Church of Christ and before we started attending the Alliance Church) we only knew about 3 resources to learn from: the priest, attending Mass, and a book Father gave us. From the surface Mass appeared to us to be people going through the motions and not knowing or caring why they did. But when we looked into the church in 1991 we looked beyond the surface to the people who deeply loved their faith, and deeply knew their faith. We read some writings of Popes, especially Pope John Paul II, parts of documents from Vatican II, looked at lots of catechisms and read lots of books about the faith, many written by converts. We got a copy of the new Catechism. It did not take long before life-long Catholics were telling us that we knew more about their church than they did, and we were busy defending the Church to a few of our old non-Catholic friends and relatives who wondered what we were up to. We found that to get below the surface and find the real faith, we need to go to the source, to the official teachings of the church, straight from Rome, before they get filtered through the American Mind-set.
What the Church really teaches is not designed to make everyone immediately pleased. Mirrors that show us clearly what we are, that show us reality, rarely leave us immediately pleased. But if our mirrors do their job they will make us repent. make us change our behaviors and attitudes. Our old denomination used to preach that the Bible should make us uncomfortable and I believe that the same is true of the Church's teachings.
Thank you for reading this. We hope somewhere in here you can find some good food for thought.
*** Resurrection and a small town ***
Between the time we left Parish #1 and moved to A small town we attended Resurrection Catholic Church. I got to know Father Schmitz very well. We even had a Saturday morning men's group fashioned after Promise Keepers.
In 1998 we moved to A small town because My spouse found the Victorian house she for which she had been hunting for years. We started attending the small town parish.
It took us over a year to know much of anyone in the parish by name. It was only when our family got involved in the town musical that we started to match names to faces. For a few weeks I only knew the parts in the play to attach to the faces. I knew my fellow parishioners by the parts they played in *Guys and Dolls*.
I really got to know who was who when I quit my job in 2001 to become the religious education coordinator for grades 5 to 10. For almost 4 years I tried to implement the vision I explained to Father T. I was a dismal failure. I put everything I could into it. I was even working on a Certificate in Catholic Youth Ministry, investing my own time and money to attend the weekend-long classes.
During this time my Son began to profess his lack of belief in God. He now believes there is a god but he is still struggling with exactly what is the truth.
But it was during this time that I met a Franciscan Father from Chicago who was "into" the Apostolic movement. I went to a seminar he taught called "Casting a Vision for Catholic Youth Ministry." It was like being back in Campus Crusade for Christ. He was able to show us through Catholic Church documents that we need to be Born Again and be Filled with the Holy Spirit. He outlined for us the 5 conditions of the new covenant. These were concepts I never expected to hear from a Catholic and certainly never expected to see backed up by Catholic documentation. He also took me through a discernment of my spiritual gifts (what the Catholic Church calls Charisms).
To make a long story short, Father D. is as close to a spiritual advisor and mentor as I have ever had. I have attended several of his series of classes. He is very strict about us having a disciplined advancement in spiritual development. He also has introduced me to the teachings of C. Peter Wagner, Chuck Pierce, Lou Engle and Mike Bickle. With his encouragement I have linked up with a network of folks, including the local New Wine Fellowship. I joined a couple guys on a trip to the International House of Prayer in Kansas City.
My spouse would love to be able to raise her hands in worship and be a bit "charismatic."
Last spring, after leaving the small town parish, our youngest daughterwanted to attend the Baptist church because her friends from Choir attend there. A few times I would go to church with her at the Baptist church and then go on over to Resurrection for Mass. Made for a very long Sunday morning.
Shortly after quitting as religious education coordinator at the small town parish and starting back to work at my old job our 19 year old daughter was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. We began looking for a house in town with at least 2 bedrooms on the ground floor, a minimum of steps and easy-access bathtubs and showers. We found one and moved there in November. She is has not got mobility problems yet but we want to be ready if she ever does.
She was planning on going to college at a Christian school. She was finally able to go to college but got a late start. It's tough to be in this position. If she doesn't go to college full time she loses medical insurance, but it could aggravate her MS to have the stress of college. I have suggested to her to consider transferring to a closer school she loves the school she is at.
Other things have come up since I put most of this together early in 2006. I think the whole thing should be rewritten. I guess I’ll add it to my todo list. A lot has changed in the last few weeks.
*** Summing it up ***
We are struggling Christians with unique perspectives. We knew our Evangelical background well, gave the Catholic Church every chance. I can imagine God using us in several ways but God rarely does what we "expect" but seems to always surprise us.
A) Help Christians learn how Catholics "think" and, therefore, how to help Catholics develop a more dynamic faith.
B) Music, all three of our children play piano, our oldest daughter plays harp, our youngest drums and our son guitar. My spouse and all the kids sing well.
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I'm going to try to introduce myself again by taking my 10 page introduction and smash it down to the Reader's Digest Condensed Version.
I like Bilbo Baggin's title for his story, *There and Back Again*. But our story might be *In and Out Again*; in and out of the world's largest Christian "church".
One side of my Dad's family was Catholic and the other was 7th Day Adventist. It made for interesting arguments about religion when I was young. I ended up being baptized at 7 years old in the Lutheran church, but I attended the Reformed Church in America until I went to college.
I was a bit of a brat when I was very young but started behaving myself and taking Christianity more and more seriously fairly early on. It was gradual. I learned to share my faith in junior high and met my future spouse through a Bible study when we were about 16. We hung out with Charismatics. It was the early 1970s. We were youngsters hooked into the Jesus People movement as best we could since we lived in the middle of no-where. We both went through stages of begging God to give us the gift of speaking in tongues. In college I was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ. I was also a member of a partying fraternity. My roommate who was also my best friend is Catholic.
While in college my future spouse and I attended Presbyterian, Evangelical Free, independent-fundamentalist Baptist, and less fundamentalist Baptist churches.
After college we attended a Covenant church, then moved across town and attended a Church of Christ. Next we joined a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. We stayed there through one pastor moving on and the next pastor getting black-balled by an overzealous minority. Our 1st 2 children were born during this time. We wanted them to go to a Christian school so we went looking for a church that had one.
We attended a Missouri Synod Lutheran for a while but while we were there our Catholic friends had us listen to some Scott Hahn tapes. We became Catholic. Our children all attended Catholic Parochial school until we moved to a small town. Our 3rd child was born a week after we were confirmed in the Catholic Church.
I had taught Sunday school for ages from 13 to 18 verious times at the Alliance church and the Covenant church. Before we moved to the small town I had served on religious education committees in two parishes and I taught confirmation class in one. After we attended the small town parish for about 3 years there was an opening for a director of religious education (DRE). I applied and got the job. I sacrificed a good paying job to work part-time for only enough to make what we gave to the church as a tithe of what my spouse was making.
I put my heart into it. I paid out of my own pocket for training in youth ministry, paid my way to World Youth Day in Toronto with our oldest daughter and chaperoned, usually at my own expense, several youth conferences.
I loved the work but some of the parishioners didn't love how I was changing their parish's religious education. I had a pretty nasty exit from the parish and the small town. We might not have left the small town but our oldest was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis so we thought we should move back near the medical center and to a house that would be less work for all of us.
I had a hard time getting excited again about the Catholic Church. For about 6 months I attended small-group worship at a friend’s home on Thursday nights. I also started having a prayer breakfast on Saturdays with another small group.
My family tried attending one of the largest non-denominational churches in town for a while but we never really had the feeling that anyone really cared if we were there or not.
Several hints came our way about home-church starting even before I quit being a DRE. I started paying attention a little more when I started to seriously read books by David W. Dyer.
Now the 5 of us are discussion together David Dyer’s book *From Glory to Glory – The Salvation of the Soul* as our house-church.
I try to read a great deal. I am now finishing up David W. Dyer’s books and starting into John Eldredge.
-------------------- Christ has set us free...Do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. (Galatians 5:1)
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