Wednesday, 12 August 2009

• Damascus Road, where it all began. My journey into Catholicism

  (This is the opening chapter to my story, Damascus Road, detailing why I decided to become Catholic. After reading the opening chapter, and you decide you want to read on, visit PhillB.net and look for the Damascus Road tab and the chapters listed underneath it. Alot of you who have read my previous posts may remember me as an evangelical youth pastor and this story may come as a shock. Please read my whole story so you will know why I made the decision that I did. Thank you)

  I remember sitting at my desk at work with my head in my hands looking at the screen. I couldn’t believe what I had just read. There was no possible way that what I was reading was the truth. How could it be? I always thought that I was right and they were wrong. If this statement was true it would mean so much change. But, how could they be right? I mean, everyone knows their wrong. Heck, even they know their wrong. Surely there has got to be a way to explain this. I’m sure somebody has already disproven what they believe. Surely…

  This conversation I had, in my head, back in early 2008 was the start of what would ultimately change my life forever. A change that would be inward and outward; a change no one else could or wanted to believe in.

  At the time I had a very successful career as a youth/ associate pastor at a Non-Denominational/ Southern Baptist church in Poteau, Oklahoma. I had been there three years and was excited about what the future held for me. I was only twenty-two but saw so many possibilities before me. I loved being a youth pastor and watching teens grow in their faith, but my big dream was to be a senior pastor one day. I wanted to be the guy that God would use in a mighty way to reach those with broken and shattered lives. I wanted to open the Bible to people in new ways they had never seen before. I didn’t want to be mega-church pastor. I just wanted to be a pastor. However, there was a time the thought of even being a Christian was repulsive.

  I didn’t grow up in what you would call a “Christian home”. Don’t get me wrong; my parents raised me with the utmost respect, love, and care any child could ever hope to receive. Still, we didn’t go to church, and there was never any mention of God except when someone was mad. I went to church as a young child, but because of a move when I was eight years old I was unable to keep attending. It would be another five years before I would cross the doors of a church. A girl I was madly in love with invited me to come to her church for a special “youth night” involving a guest speaker, free pizza and basketball. All I knew was Brianna wanted me there, and that was a good enough reason to go.

  I went and enjoyed all the activities, and called later thanking her for the opportunity to go. After building up the courage I asked her out to a movie and she kindly agreed. As a thirteen year old I felt like I had the world in my hands. After our movie we continued to talk and I was convinced she liked me. What I never knew was that a friend of mine convinced her to invite me to the youth night at her church. She went to the movies with me out of kindness and friendship. I knew none the better.

  Weeks later, in total teenage awkwardness, I asked her out over a letter during science class. She passed the note back to me, and I kept it in my backpack until I could read it when I got home. I opened the neatly folded letter and read what seemed like a preverbal dagger through my heart, “I just want to be friends.” From then on I grew to hate her and everything about her; including her faith.

  It was over the following year that I began to ditch my preppy clothing for dark shirts. Country music was tossed aside for Rock and Metal. I even found myself trying to conjure demons. I wanted to be the antithesis of everything Brianna’s faith was. Because of my total anarchy against Christianity my soul paid dividends. During my freshman year in high school I grew increasingly depressed and even contemplated suicide. At one point I wrote, on the wall next to my bed, “I wish I could just die right now.” Death seemed like a very viable option; reaching but viable.

  Because of my depression I turned to pornography to feed the ever increasing void in my life. What started out with lusting after the girls I went to school with, became looking at photos of nude women, which eventually became watching porn on our satellite dish. What I thought was fixing my heartache was only making the emptiness inside of me deeper.

  During the middle of my sophomore year my best friend Derek invited me to attend church with him. Derek was part of the cool crowd. He always fit in. Maybe if I went to church I too could fit in. I started attending church with him that following weekend and started forming friendships immediately. I attended Fort Osage Church of the Nazarene for six or seven months, yet inwardly I was still the same porn addicted depressed teenager I was before I started attending church. Where was that change that was supposed to happen? Wasn’t I supposed to become a goody-goody? I just assumed it wasn’t for me, but to give up seeing the cheerleaders in cute skirts and tight shirts was asking too much.

  During March of 2001 my friend Bethany invited me to her church for a special “youth night” involving you guessed it, a speaker and pizza. My sole intention of going was to ask out Bethany; however, God had bigger plans for that evening. I listened to the speaker give an impassioned speech about how God had saved him from a life of drugs to one devoted to Christ. It impacted me, but I felt no need to make a change in my life. At the end of the evening he gave an altar call. I had never seen an altar call before. Seeing people go up to “ask Jesus into their hearts” was something new and dramatic. He asked if anyone wanted to become a Christian, and if they did to come down to the altar to pray the “sinner’s prayer”. I stood there in my self righteousness and thought, “Wow look at all those sinners.” After more people went up he asked the question that pierced my soul, “Those of you still standing, if you were to die tonight, do you know with full confidence that you would go to Heaven? If you don’t come on down here.” I reasoned with myself that I hadn’t killed anyone so surely God would let me into Heaven, yet that answer didn’t seem good enough. What if God didn’t let me into Heaven? I had to know for sure I was going to go to Heaven.

  I ran to the front with tears streaming from my face, and a man led me in the sinner’s prayer. I had no idea what I had just prayed, but he told me that I was a Christian. I went to school the next day and sought out my Christian friends and told them what happened the night before. During lunch they helped me sort out my new faith. Who would have ever thought my first discipleship would have came from some ninth grade girls?

  Over the next months I began to embrace my new faith and fought hand in hand with my pornography addiction. After six months I was porn free, and was truly living a life sold out to God. The years went on, and my pursuit of God increased. I loved reading the Bible, and sharing what I had learned with others. After struggling with months about my future I accepted the call into the ministry. I felt so blessed that God had given me the gift to share with others what I loved so much.

  Later that year in the winter of 2004 I received a phone call from a Southern Baptist Church in southeast Oklahoma. I was only nineteen and in my first semester at Bible College, but the pastor was laying the opportunity for me to accept a salary paying position as their youth pastor/ associate pastor. It seemed like so much so soon, but it was an opportunity to start doing what I wanted to do all along. Teach and preach the Word of God. My first day was January 2^nd, 2005; however, it would only be four years later in January of 2009 I was at Immaculate Conception Parish in Poteau. What was I, an evangelical pastor, doing at a Catholic Church on a Sunday morning? Before I explain why I was there let me explain why I wasn’t there. When word got around, as it so easily does in a small town, that I was attending a Catholic church many rumors and theories started popping up like impatient buds after a summer rain.

  Most assume I did it in order to marry Jordan Reeves, my fiancée, who happened to be Catholic. Her Catholicity had a role in my conversion; however, it wasn’t out of love for her that I converted (My original intent on studying Catholic doctrine was to argue back with her Catholic parents. I had no idea it would lead to this). Before my decision we had made plans to wed in the summer of 2009, and she would serve alongside me in my ministry. We had already received pre-marital counseling a year before, when I had asked for her hand, from my pastor. We had the reception hall picked out. I was calling area churches to see how many people their auditoriums could hold. Her parents hadn’t placed a pre-nuptial agreement on the table that demanded I convert if I planned on marrying their daughter. Jordan didn’t ask me to become a Catholic for her; in fact she was looking forward to being a pastor’s wife. Thus, don’t assume my journey into the Catholic Church was in an attempt to get married; the wedding was going to happen, with or without my conversion.

  Others might believe it was in an attempt to leave my old church, Grace Fellowship, over some issues such as leadership or direction. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the deacons and elders I had older men to look up to who raised their families in the fear of God, and loved their wives as Christ loved the church. Men I could quite honestly pattern my life after. In my pastor I had a man who wasn’t afraid to work in order to provide for his own family. A man who wasn’t afraid to take a chance on something new, ministry wise, even if it went against the status quo.

  Direction wise, we were in the midst of building a church that, when lit at night, could be seen from the surrounding towns. Who wouldn’t want to belong to the church that is going to get great, and might I add free, publicity like that. People can’t help but see a city on a hill shining like that.

  Some may argue I was looking for a way out of ministry and just wanted to live a normal parishioner’s life. Perhaps, after four years of being a youth pastor I was tired of church work and wanted a break. Still, that couldn’t be any further from the truth as well. Before I left Grace Fellowship I had felt God calling me into a new ministry of writing and speaking events. This was the announcement I made to the church when I told them my intentions of leaving. Doing speaking engagements wasn’t a clever attempt to hide my desire to leave so I could just go to church like most Americans. Don’t believe me? Ask the seventy or so churches around Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas that I contacted about my direction and my willingness to speak to their congregations, on whatever issue, for absolutely no cost what so ever. Besides years of sermons, outlines, messages, games, events, and ministry tools I made available for free via my ministry’s website. I wasn’t trying to escape ministry; I was entering a new realm of it.

  A few others might think that I was tired of being a Christian and wanted a way out. Maybe, after living as a Christian for the majority of my teen and early adult years I was ready to go “have some fun” and “live a little”. Besides, aren’t all Catholics just flaming hypocrites anyways? Understand, as a Catholic I am called to a higher ethical and moral code then I was as an evangelical. It amazes me how I never heard any evangelical pastor have any definitive answer why they believed abortion was a sin, yet using a contraceptive and preventing/killing a human life was somehow ethically higher? We can trust that a man we have never seen before, whom we also believe is God’s son, 2,000 years ago died on a cross for our salvation, but we can’t have the same faith to trust God with our sexuality and reproductive cycles. We can trust God with the direction of our lives, but we can’t on how many kids we’ll have?

  Thus, this leaves me at the context of why I am a Catholic. Not because of any of the excuses I listed above, but because I believe that the Catholic Church is the living, breathing Church that Christ established 2,000 years ago on Pentecost.

  I believe it’s very important you see why I reached such a conclusion as this. In sequential order is the issues that brought me to the realization that evangelical is not enough. I had to become Catholic.

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