Posted on 11/18/2002 8:34:02 AM PST by pseudo-justin
Church Is Still Attracting Converts
By PAUL LIKOUDIS
A personal note: The phone rang the other day and the gentleman on the other end identified himself as Jim Anderson from the Coming Home Network. He said he had a message from an old high school friend. Who might that be, I asked, and he gave the name: Dion Berlowitz.
Anderson told me the Coming Home Network, with which I was not familiar, helped Protestants come into the Church, and that Dion was on his way in.
I hadn’t heard from Dion in more than a decade, even though we were best friends at Williamsville South High School, outside Buffalo, sharing several interests, including cartooning and comic books. Raised Jewish, Dion became a born-again Christian in his junior year of high school as his parents’ marriage broke up, and spent hours, days, weeks, and months trying to convert me into a Bible-believing Christian.
In 1971, Dion went on to the University of Buffalo to study literature and I went on to Eisenhower College to study history, and our paths never crossed again until a call out of the blue came from him around 1990, when he told me he was a Presbyterian. We have had no further contact since, though I suspect and hope that will change.
In this initial conversation, Anderson told me that so far, this year, the Coming Home Network has helped 94 Protestant ministers of various denominations, along with many other Protestants, come into the Church. Some, like Dion, are on their way in. This is the largest annual crop since the CHNetwork was founded nine years ago.
Here, in a year in which the Catholic Church in the United States and around the world has been wracked by scandals, we do have good news indeed.
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What would prompt a Protestant, especially a minister with a wife and family, to leave his tradition and often his livelihood to come into the Catholic Church, especially when there are so many broken-hearted Catholics embarrassed by the past ten months of sordid revelations involving clerical sexual abuse, bishops’ resignations, episcopal cover-ups and pay-outs? Not to mention the ongoing abuse of authority by bishops to hammer the lay faithful who object to dissidents and heretics speaking in parishes and education conferences.
"For Protestants," says Jim Anderson, "the scandals are a non-issue. Among the hundreds of people I have talked to who are thinking of coming into the Church, the scandals just aren’t an issue. Of all the people who have contacted me, only three or four have mentioned them, and that was only at my prompting.
"To a man, these men are intellectually convinced that the Church is a divine institution established by Christ, and bishops are only human — and, besides, they say, ‘These things are going on in our own denominations — only in our denomination they are not being addressed.’
"They see this as the Holy Spirit cleaning house. The judgment of the Lord begins with the family of God. They view the present scandals as a terrible tragedy; they want justice like everybody else. But as far as the truth of the Catholic faith is concerned, it is a non-issue. It’s sin; it needs to be addressed. And that’s it.
"These men," he continued, "are educated people. Most have master of divinity degrees and doctorates. They are aware of the problems, but once their hearts are converted and they see the Church as Jesus Christ’s, they know Christ will keep His promise. They have experienced troubles in their own denominations, but they know that when they are in the Church, God will prevail."
On average — based on the first ten months of this year — Anderson hears from a Protestant minister every three days who has made the decision to become Catholic.
Most, he says, are drawn to the Church for two reasons. Either they have come to understand the dead end to which the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura leads, and they want to settle, in their own minds, the issue of authority in the Church; or they have been led to the Church by its doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and they want to receive Jesus.
What many Protestants are coming to understand, even at a time when many Catholics and non-Catholics lament the apparent breakdown of authority in the Church, Anderson explained, is that the Church’s authority "is set by God."
"Those who take their faith and Scripture and God seriously," he said, "see the Catholic Church as being the answer to the chaos of the Protestant condition: Sola scriptura is a dead end, is unhistorical and unworkable. They understand this and so they have a crisis of faith and they enter the Catholic Church. And this is occurring across the Protestant spectrum. A lot of people contacting the Coming Home Network are ‘higher church’ Episcopalians or Lutherans, but we do get calls also from ‘low-end’ Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, and Assembly of God ministers.
"To speak, as some Catholics do, about a ‘crisis of authority’ in the Church doesn’t make a lot of sense," Anderson said. "There is a ‘crisis of obedience to authority,’ but that has always been the case, just as there has always been a ‘crisis of obedience to the authority of God’ on the part of many men and women. The authority is there, and it is working; it is just not obeyed."
The Coming Home Support Network
The Coming Home Network was founded in 1993 out of the experiences of several Protestant clergy and their spouses. Upon leaving their pastorates to enter the Catholic Church, these clergy and their families discovered they were not alone. To help others come into the Church — and to deal with some of the tremendous personal and professional obstacles they faced — they began the organization as a support network.
Catholics, Anderson suggested, should understand some of the challenges these ministers face once they have made the intellectual decision to "cross over" to Rome.
"They go through tremendous struggles. They think, ‘I’m losing my friends, my family, my community, my church, and people think I’m crazy and I’m apostatizing from Christianity.’ Often the most serious conflict is with spouses, who not only have to deal with the change of religion, but have practical problems as well, such as, ‘What about me and the children?’ ‘How are we going to survive?’ ‘What will our friends think?’ ‘Have I been following the wrong religion all my life?’
"Most of these people have M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees, and so they are not employable in the world. It’s a difficult decision for these men to give up their work, their careers, and their livelihoods. Nevertheless, 94 this year have entered, or are on their way into, the Church."
One former minister, Anderson recalled, gave up his role as a prominent, prestigious minister for his community to work as a greeter at WalMart. For him, the blessing of being able to receive the Eucharist more than compensated for what he had to give up.
Anderson is well-prepared for his work helping Protestants come into the Church. Reared as a Methodist, the 47-year-old Anderson became a Lutheran at 19. As a history major specializing in medieval Europe at Ohio University in Athens, he knew he was on his way into the Church.
Three years after graduating, he entered evangelical Ashland Seminary in 1980, interested in pursuing studies in ecumenical dialog. In his freshman year, he made the decision to join the Catholic Church, and on July 25, 1981, the Feast of St. James, he was confirmed. His wife, Lynn, who entered the Church in 1983, now teaches in a Catholic school.
Contrary to popular stereotypes, he said, the biggest roadblocks would-be converts confront are not such "hot-button" issues as contraception, papal infallibility, or women’s rights, but the Church’s doctrines concerning Mary.
But another obstacle, he said, is "liturgical craziness."
Many Protestants, he said, "are scandalized by the liturgical craziness. They try to get around it by seeking out a Byzantine rite, or seeking out orthodox parishes. And usually, if they come into the Church, having been good Protestants, they have church-hopped enough to have found a parish where they don’t have to deal with abuses."
But, he added, many look beyond the abuses, because "they are attracted to Christ in the liturgy. For a lot of the converts, there are many who have intellectually convinced themselves already that they must join the Church before they ever attended Mass. And when they finally start going to Mass, often there is a culture shock, especially if they come from a small, intimate, loving Baptist church, and go into a parish of 2,000 people who aren’t particularly friendly. So there is this bit of culture shock — and that doesn’t include the shock of liturgy."
Asked to name the leading intellectual sources Protestants are reading to find their way into the Church, Anderson named familiar names.
"The intellectual sources are, certainly, Cardinal Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Scott Hahn, and Catholic Answers.
"But most often, it is the fathers of the Church. When Protestant ministers encounter the fathers, they realize they were lied to and betrayed, because they were taught the Protestant Reformation cleansed Christianity of the barnacles on the Barque of Peter and the Reformers recovered ancient Christianity. Then they go back and read the apostolic fathers, especially Ignatius of Antioch who is preaching the Real Presence, the authority of bishops, and all these many Catholic things, and the conclusion is the words of Jesus, who says: ‘I will be with you always.’
"Either Jesus kept His promise, or the Church went to Hell in a hand basket after the death of St. John.
"When they start studying the early Church fathers, they are blown out of the water."
Solid Apologetics
The Coming Home Network’s executive director is former Presbyterian minister Marcus Grodi, who, captured the feeling and beliefs of many fellow Protestants who came into the Church in his book, Journeys Home (Queenship Publishing 1997).
"[T]he biggest thing that opened my heart to the truth of the Catholic faith was not all the apologetic arguments that convinced me of the trustworthiness of Catholic truth, but the realization that the Catholic Church, with all of her saints and sinners, was exactly what Christ had promised.
"The majority of complaints against the Catholic Church over the centuries have been aimed at the decisions and actions of bad Popes, or immoral clergy, or ignorant laity, or corrupt Catholic nobility, and the correct answer to this is, ‘But, of course! The Church is made up of wheat and tares, from the bottom to the top, sinners in need of grace! This is no reason to leave and form a new church, for any church made up of human beings is made up of sinners.’
"All true conversions to the Catholic faith from any other starting point carry with them complications, primarily because this conversion must be rooted in and thereby an extension of one’s conversion and surrender to Christ. If becoming a Catholic does not involve this, I don’t believe it is a true conversion. It might be a change of convenience or even possibly for some sort of personal gain or aggrandizement.
"But only when one recognizes or painfully discovers that to be fully a follower of Jesus Christ, and thereby have the full potential of growing in union with Him, one must also be in union with the Church He established in and through His Apostles, can one be truly converted.
"These conversions by definition must involve some extent of leaving behind and rejecting part of what a person once held very dear. Some things can be joyfully brought along, others can be cautiously tolerated, but yet there are ideas, practices, and sometimes even relationships which must be severed.
"It of course never means that we cease to love those we may need to leave behind, or who choose to turn their backs on us. In fact, we are called all the more to shower our now confused or indignant friends and family with the all-forgiving, all-accepting love of Christ. However, we must not let the emotional trajectories of our loving glances turn our attention off of the fullness of truth found only in union with the Catholic Church."
For more information about the Coming Home Network, go to its web site, www.chnetwork.org, or call 740-450-1175.
see my reply to xzins in post #20 on this thread. it looks like we have finally come to some sort of agreement, namely, that there are extra-scriptural principles that inherently affect one's reading of scripture, and to the conclusions one will come to when reading scripture. these extra-scriptural principles, if true, lead to a true understanding of scripture, and, if false, lead to a false understanding of scripture. that there are extra-scriptural factors that affect one's reading of scripture is trivially obvious, but the principle of 'sola scriptura' does not account for these and thus leads its practitioner into crisis
I always thought that was the funniest part in that book.
Becky
And so are many others.
"Think about it. It's right there in the Bible."
SD
Notwithstanding whether "concern" is always a negative ("worry and fear") feeling, the point is that Mary and the saints want to know you. Like family. They would never say "Jesus never told me to get to know you."
SD
Are you sure you mean this? Most "Bible" Christians insist that Sola Scriptura is Biblical, not "extra-Scriptural."
It's not a crisis -- it's just the the lens through which a Protestant views the Bible.
The results of using that lens are crisis. For it leads the individual Christians always into disagreement.
SD
In a later reply, you say that the difference between an argument an a proof is the "open-and -shut" character of a proof. Proof leaves no possibility of the opposite conclusion's being true, I take it. But how does this change what I was saying earlier, that in order to follow a proof, one needs to be a practitioner of a tradition of exegesis that cultivates the capacity to see the "open-and-shut" character of a proof? You say that you are no longer an apprentice, because now you are a pastor. But neither the Pope nor any good Bishop of the Catholic Church would say such a thing. You never graduate from a state of apprenticeship in understanding Scripture. Even the Pope is still an apprentice in reading Scripture aright, an apprentice of the saints, popes, councils, etc. who have gone before. Even the Bishops of the Catholic Church consider themselves beholden to other Christians who have gone before. You do not so consider yourself. You have "graduated" and are now no longer an apprentice in a tradition, you need no further instruction. I guess you know it all. I am not saying this to be rude or nasty, but it is an implication of your self-understanding. This leads to the second point. You say:
We consider them decisively authoritative OVER the church. You consider the Church decisively authoritative OVER the scripture.
It is just simply false to say that Catholics think of the Church as authoritative over Scripture. The Church is not authoritative over the Scripture (I'll take up the canonicity question below). It is authoritative over ME and MY UNDERSTANDING of Scripture. There is a tremendous difference. Without recognizing such a distinction between Scripture in itself and me and my understanding of Scripture, I would need to hold the following: Scripture means exactly what I think it means and nothing more and nothing less. Now, I do not know about you, but I find Scripture in itself to be rich, complex, baffling and an opening to an infinite mystery to us. I am not so self-overestimating of my current cognitive condition that I think the following to be true: If Scripture seems to me to say that A, then necessarily, Scripture says that A, and if it does not seem to me that Scripture says that A, then Scripture does not say that A. Rather, I honestly admit that there is, and always will be so long as I am in this body, more to understand of what Scripture is saying than I realize at any one point. I also admit that what I shall discover in the future can drastically alter how I think of the Scripture I currently think I understand. Finally, I do not think of myself as having some guarantee of tracking the Scriptural truth with perfect accuracy. If all believers had such a guarantee, why do some believers sometimes make mistakes in understanding Scripture. So the Church is authoritative over me and my understanding of Scripture, and not over Scripture itself. Rather, the Church uses Scripture to correct my and my understanding of Scripture,and the Church is in a position to do so because it has, prior to me, a right understanding of Scripture. That right understanding is embodied in the sacred tradition, which we believe also proceeds from the VERBUM DEI -- Jesus Christ. The Church uses Scripture to correct me, and correct my fellow believers. But the Church does not, and cannot, correct Scripture. That would be stupid.
Some Catholics may want to argue that the Church is authoritative over Scripture because the Church drew up the canon. But the Church's drawing up of the canon is the cause of my knowledge of the canon, it is not the cause of the texts of the canon being inspired. The Church selected those texts because they are inspired, it is not that they are inspired because the Church says so. However, when it comes to my knowledge of which texts are canonical, I know that theese texts are inspired because the Church says so. God is the cause of the inspiration, the Church is the cause of my knowledge that these are the inspired texts. That the Church is the cause of my knowledge does not imply that the Church has authority over the Scriptures, but only that it has authority over me and my understanding. I heed to this authority over me and my understanding for a cumulation of reasons. Here are two. First,I believe it to be the revealed truth that I should do so, and that in doing so, I shall come to know all the things I do not yet know, but want to know, especially about how to read Scripture aright, what Scripture really means in its infinite depths. Second, without heeding to this authority, I will end up, like Protestants, with a whole bundle of false dichotomies: either Scripture or tradition, either follow Christ or follow the Church, either faith or works, either justification or sanctification, either the Church is auhtoritative over Scripture or the Scriptures are authoritative over the Church. What I do, instead, is simulataneously affirm that these three -- Scripure, Sacred Tradition, and Magisterium -- are inseparble, mutually requiring each other for the sake of the perfect transmission of the whole VERBUM DEI to the human race, and therefore to me. Tear these three apart and the result is a never ending conflict about the very foundations of Christianity. This is what Protestants look like. There is disagreement in the Catholic Church about different doctrines, but it is disagreement constrained by and argued out in terms of shared standards (except in recent years when the Protestant mentality has taken root in teh Church and so damaged its unity). In Protestantism , there are shared beliefs, but the foundations themselves are permanently in question -- shot through with dilemma after dilemma where there need be no dilemma at all.
So when did these paths diverge and what is your source for this statement?
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