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.
Just as I thought, you have no source other than your own infallible interpretation of scripture. And you have the nerve to call others arrogant.
I apologize if I attacked you because of a poor choice of words.
That doesn't change the facts of the matter, however. You retreated, to your credit, from the harshness of your words. If more of your Christian brothers and sisters did the same, we would be better off.
DF
For the record, when Protestants show their selfishness, I call a spade a spade.
You generalize and consistently deny so. Is this part of your character?
The Word is my authoritative doctrine. I don't try to interpret it too deeply, I just read what it says. If I don't understand, I seek instruction from those who understand the history behind the text. But whatever those teachers say must be weighed against the rest of the Word. I do not trust men blindly.
Except yourself, of course.
In the end, I will answer to God for the way I followed or failed to follow His Word. I choose not to place my salvation in the hands of sinners like myself. I put it squarely in the Lord's hands.
You at first admitted to having a lens through which you viewed Scripture. no you seem to be backing off from this. Which is it? Do you have a lens, or do you "just read what it says?"
Why does this "I don't try to interpret it too deeply" and "I choose not to place my salvation in the hands of sinners like myself." sound to me like the servant who buried the talent, in fear of losing it?
In order for the Written Word to have any impact on you, you must rely on a sinful man --- yourself. I thought you realized that.
The question then becomes if you are the best sinful man to rely on, or if there is evidence of other men being placed in charge.
SD
SD
You are now generalizing, and you consistently do this. Is this part of your character?
I repeat: Protestants show selfishness, I point it out. A Protestant did it today, but it seems to have been in error. Protestants have done it yesterday, two weeks ago, last year, and will do so tomorrow. When Protestants do such, I point it out.
SD
How about providing the documentation I requested in post 179 so we can discuss how the paths of Protestantism and Catholicism have diverged at various points in history, but not all at once.
How about asking for something which is possible? The paths of Christianity began diverging from day one and continue to this day.
If you are serious about discussion, fine. If not, so be it.
Why is it disingenuos? Scripture does not say that Scripture alone contains all that is necessary to be belived. As you yourself admitted this is an extra-scriptural principle. And I never understood how people can say that Scripture is perspicuous. Clearly, the necessity of Baptism, the Eucharist, and many other such issues are issues of what is necessary for salvation, and this so-called perspicuous text has generated rival and incompatible positions on whether the Scripture says they are necessary for salvation or not. It is hardly clear to me. And I think someone like Forrest Gump would have an even harder time figuring it out. What is Forrest to do or believe?
I believe in the Reformation and Sola Scriptura because I believe the men who led the Catholic Church during that time were corrupted by their incredible sociopolitical power and perverted the message of Christ for their own personal gain. What do you do then, when a Protestant Minister turns out to be a rather corrupt joe, unbeknowst to you? Do you leave the church? Where does it say in Scripture that when things get tough in the Church, you should just leave and set up a different Church? To dismiss an authority on account of the human's sinfulness alone would render all authorites invalid, unless I want to apply double standards or draw arbitrary lines. Why do you think that God cannot use a complete sinner as a perfect instrument for His teaching purposes? Is this impossible for God? OUr faith is not in men, as if their natural talents, virtues, and good character merited our assent. THey are established by God, despite all their wretchedness, and the Holy Spirit never fails to provide for the needs of the Church. At those crisis moments when the Chruch needs the truth from her teachers, the Holy Spirit does not fail to speak through them. Why is that IMPOSSIBLE? Why can't God use a sinful wretch to teach truth? Why wouldn't God use a sinful wretch to teach? If He had to choose between not teaching us the truth or teaching through a sinner, why would God opt for the former? Where is the divine goodness in that course?
I am just surprised, and always have been, indeed am seeking an explanation, as to why so many Protestants expect God's action to be limited to the saintliness of saintly Christians, as if God were not powerful enough to use even a sinner to achieve His goals. Why do you expect every Church leader to be a saint? Why do they need to be? It forms a much stronger motive of credibility to see that the Church survives with such jackasses at the helm than it would if all the Bishops were angels. For if they were all angels, then the world could easily respond that the Church survives because of the dynamism and good character of men. Rather, His power is made perfect is weakness. His power is manifested perfectly in their wretchedness, like St. Paul. And the time of the Reformation was not a special time when things were especially corrupt. It was probably worse during St. Francis of Assisi's time. Why react like Luther as opposed to the way of St. Francis, who used to kiss the hands of adulterous priests. It is not like the Reformation made corruption in the Church go away...it is still with us.
Please do not reply with the typical Protestant saying "Well, if things get that bad I can always leave". That is an unscriptural practice -- the practice of running away when it is time to get sanctified by righteous combat with sinners. And pelase do not reply that you do not rely upon your minister for authrotiy in interpreting the word of God. You know that is false. As Nehaus said about growing up a Lutheran " We had a Magisterium too, it was the faculty of theology at Concordia Seminary."
Matthew 23:
9 Call no one on earth your father; you have but one Father in heaven.
10 Do not be called 'Master'; you have but one master, the Messiah.
That was your statement not mine. I was asking for your sources. Or better yet, how you arrived at this conclusion. Your answer of “From day one. My first source is Scripture.” doesn’t prove anything except you believe your interpretations to be authoritative. I don’t buy it. Cite for me any historical record you rely on and any writings of any Protestants prior to the Reformation and we can have a meaningful discussion. And yes, I am serious about discussing this.
Maybe we should quit while we're in agreement:-)
True in theory. In practice, we know that the Jews then and now do not always follow the Torah.
Another fine straddle. I give it a 6. ;-)
SD
Let me put it this way. If Mary had other children, and if they were not taking care of her, then they were sinning by not doing so.
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