07/12/21 Kenny Burchard

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home i'm marcus grodi your host for this program our guests every week those of you watch every week come from a great variety of backgrounds some of the backgrounds are more familiar than others as i said in a famous movie the usual suspects but we have a guest tonight that comes from a denomination that my guess is a lot of you haven't a clue what it is he is a former four square pastor and it's not the game you play with the ball which is my favorite game in element but it's a it's a church and it's a movement we'll find out more about it but our guest is kenny bouchard right perfect and he's also i want to mention a moderator on the coming home network's online community and i'm glad that we can mention that we don't talk about it very much on the program we will later kenny welcome to the program marcus thank you i'll just start right off and say thank you so much for what you do this has been a huge part of uh what's helped us you know make our journey so it's just a a privilege to be here talking with you today wonderful i'm excited that you're a moderator on our community audience doesn't know we don't talk about that very much but it's really a way of of allowing men and women who've gone through the journey right to stand beside those who are on the journey absolutely and often from the same denominational backgrounds although imagine you don't run in too many foursquare not too many folk underground not too many the closer you get to california the more the epicenter is there but east coast which is where we live now not so much all right well let me back away and invite you to take us back to the beginning and start your journey you bet absolutely well uh as you'll hear from my wife when she comes on she grew up in a christian family i didn't at all i don't come from a religious background um how did that happen i wasn't raised in a christian home i mean your parents just didn't never had it themselves my mother actually and i i was adopted i'll say that right up front i i was when i was eight months old i was adopted into a family where my mother grew up catholic interestingly until she was 12 or 13 converted to mormonism and then moved here from holland with her family my dad grew up the children of catholic grandparents and probably a catholic mom but they together were not religious people my dad was very much not religious underlined than not my mom i would say was very open to spiritual things but was more of let's say a spiritual eclectic i think she was attracted to different things in in different traditions or different ideologies and but they weren't together in that and so we weren't really raised in a religious home at all but when i was eight years old on easter of my eighth birthday in my easter basket among all the toys and candies was a little white gift and award bible king james bible with the gold you know letters on the front and i was eight and i got up and i ran out and opened my easter basket and pulled the bible out holy bible and my parents thought well we should give him a bible okay i was wondering yeah they they gave you easter bunny they actually gave you the easter bunny for whatever reason my parents thought we should all have bibles and it wasn't because they as i would find out about 10 minutes after i opened it it wasn't because they had a love for the bible but they just felt like we should have one and i remember and i've laughed about this a thousand times but i remember pulling it out and saying what is this you know like what's in here and my mom's saying like what what's the bible mom and mom said the bible is a religious book written by men to control the world through religion happy easter okay but i was like holy communist manifesto so i got a bible and i also got a an understanding of what the bible was supposed to be but i had this bible with me as a little kid and i'd keep it on the shelf and i knew it was special and i knew it was important and i'd try to take it off and read it you know like you think a book you go from start to finish and i'd get to about six or seven chapters into genesis and close it and and that would happen over and over and over again for the first few years that i had that and i was growing up in denver you know with my family and then when i was nine years old we moved from denver over the rocky mountains to salt lake city in salt lake city you know there's the epicenter of the lds latter-day saint mormont religion and so i'm i'm thrust into a very religious culture now everybody has bibles and other books conversations about god and jesus and church it's the most normal thing in the world my family not religious we we would make fun of religious people so that's kind of our our way of dealing with religious peoples to make fun of them but i was going to school with all these religious kids you know all these kids that would talk about their faith and their faith was normal to them and as i got into high school the little mormon girls became beautiful young women you know and i started dating one of them when i was a a junior in high school started dating a mormon girl and she found out i wasn't mormon and she couldn't believe it so she immediately had me over to talk to the mormon missionaries and um so there i you know i have my little white king james bible and i'm talking to the mormon missionaries and at the same time i was taking a martial arts class from my karate teacher was a born-again christian language i didn't really know at the time and he found out oh your mormon girlfriend's talking to you about mormonism i want to talk to you about jesus too so i have two people coming at me plus you'd learn martial arts so you were prepared i was i was prepared exactly but i've got people i've got people in my life talking to me about faith and religion and of course now all of my high school friends are starting to turn their minds toward going on their mormon mission and it's it's this intense kind of environment that started happening around me when i was in high school my faith curiosity just got awakened dramatically and um i'm reading the bible i'm reading the stuff mormons would give to me i'm reading tracts i'm trying to learn everything i can about christianity of course my parents are talking to me about their perspective everybody has a voice and when i was 17 years old on the 24th of july and i remember this because it's a it's a mormon holiday in utah it's a pioneer day i said to a friend i'm going to go to the mormon temple and do a tour and ask questions i'm just i just got to figure this out so i go there 24th of july i'm 17 i walk around i do the tour i'm a little discouraged didn't feel like i got my questions answered and i start walking off the grounds of temple square in downtown salt lake city start crossing the street and i see this huge group of people carrying a cross down the streets of salt lake city and they're singing and they're carrying the cross and i i couldn't believe it i ran into the middle of this crowd what are you doing here they said we're claiming this state for jesus you know what are you doing here and i open my bag i'm trying to find god you know so i'm one of these strange people that you witness to on the street that becomes a christian i'm one of those guys and so one of the guys in the crowd took me aside and he starts sharing jesus with me these are not a group of mormons no these are mis these are and as you'll hear from my wife she went she went with a group called youth with a mission well this was a youth with a mission summer mission outreach to salt lake city and they were witnessing on the streets and here i was a 17 year old kid looking for god talking to everybody and i land smack dab in the middle and my friend david he later become a became a friend of mine this is a touch from from catholicism if you will he was a former catholic or someone who had left the catholic church and gotten very involved in the calvary chapel movement and all that ended up as a missionary in salt lake and there he was witnessing to me on the streets of salt lake city and he's sharing john 3 16 and john 14 6 and john 3 3 and the romans road and scribbling them all down and sticking them in my bible and my my parents would tell me when i was growing up you decide for yourself when you grow up what religion you you want to be we're not going to you know force that on you so my friend david asks me while we're sitting there do you want to pray and accept jesus into your heart whatever the language was and i said i do but i need to do it by myself because that was what my parents told me i needed to do it by myself so two nights later the 26th of july 1986 i believe i'm sitting on the hood of my car across the street from my karate teacher's house who had been witnessing to me i said i'm going to become a born-again christian oh do you want to come in and pray i said no i'm going to do it right out here i sat on the hood of my car with my bible and my little verses that the guy shared with me and i just prayed i just said god come into my life you know save me you know be lord of my life whatever the prayer was and this like what i'm feeling right now just just hit me as i'm sitting there as a 17 year old kid and this really radical transformation began happening in my life and at that moment even as i'm sitting there as a 17 year old on the hood of my little purple maverick i felt this call you know in catholic lingo would say vocation you know i felt this call didn't know what to do with it but into ministry of some kind and again i have no religious background not a purple maverick it's ecclesiastical colors that's some royal some royal imagery there but i felt it you know even from that moment that god wanted to do something special with my life i needed to devote myself completely to god and um so i spent my whole senior year you know that summer and then my whole senior year kind of trying to wrap my head around being a christian and i'm doing that inside of my latter-day saint you know mormon context and i start fighting you know with my mormon girlfriend and with all of my friends at school and i'm trying to figure it all out and um and and so my senior year is kind of colored by this and i know we'll talk about you know the journey into catholicism but those those first months and even the first couple of years were in you know part and parcel a journey away from catholicism initially even though i didn't have any sort of prejudice about catholicism early on when i started trying to learn how to witness to my mormon friends and share about my my faith with them i started listening to a radio program called the bible answer man with walter martin it was like my it was like my diet walter martin the bible answer man our guess is kenny burchard i want to be clear here so you were already right away on the one hand as you accepted christ and and really changed that there's a difference between that group of people with the cross in that big mormon church 100 right away you realize this isn't it's they're not struggling anymore which of these two churches gonna be a part of you're gonna be part of this but it was a non-denominational gathering yeah it was it was people from all different kinds of groups and they were the real christians um now and many of them were from from different churches but i trusted them uh i trusted them because what they were saying made more sense to me and i started as i said you're being fed by the bible answer exactly who was very anti-catholic he was and that's why i said my trajectory away from catholicism happened very quickly even though i didn't have any prejudice against it that i was raised with any more than you would have toward anything but i'd go i'd go listen to walter martin because i wanted his help with talking to my mormon friends but then people would call in and say hey you know dr martin i am talking to a roman catholic and they say this that and the other and and walter martin would say oh it's this way that way and the other way with the catholics and so then i immediately said okay the catholics are wrong too so not mormons not catholics so i kind of checked them off my list pretty early and then i bought his book the kingdom of the cults and in the early editions he has a section in there on catholicism and i was like i can never be catholic and um so he was kind of one of the early influences away from catholicism because i didn't want to be wrong i didn't want to believe in the wrong stuff and part of that has to do with you know the difference between historic christianity and mormonism i i saw i didn't want to be part of the wrong group and then i got more and more into kind of the north american evangelical protestant subculture christian radio music books got really into keith greene and he had written when he was still alive he had written a series in his last days newsletters about all the things that he thought was wrong with the catholic church and i read that i devoured it so you know walter martin tells me it's wrong keith green tells me it's wrong these are people i trust there they have some authority and so very early i use this joke um we in my house we like hint of lime tortilla chips that my early exposure to christianity was hint of anti-catholic you know it's it's it's just in there everything's kind of sprinkled with it and so i knew very early i whatever i am i'm not going to be you know a mormon i'm not going to be all the things walter martin says it can't be and i'm not going to be catholic and i very early fell into community with the the charismatics and the pentecostals and in fact the people who brought these wyoming missionaries to salt lake i went to them and said where can i get baptized and they said you need to go to the vineyard church in salt lake city utah that's your church so i trusted them and and and that's and it was great it was a great initial experience for me but i went to the vineyard church and the day before i went to boot camp in 1987 i got baptized in the vineyard church in salt lake city and the next day i jumped on an airplane and flew to san diego and went to boot camp and i'd been a christian one year and um and when i was in the navy part of the reason i joined the navy was because i didn't come from a wealthy family and i wanted to go to bible college and i was going to use my gi bill to pay for bible college so that i could go be a pastor someday that was my my grand scheme so the whole time i was in the navy from the time i was 18 until i was 23 almost i was getting much more involved in church much more involved in studying my faith i started a couple of years in i started taking courses from moody bible institute and i learned how to study the bible i learned basic christian theology i started kind of getting my my feet wet in this trajectory toward being a pastor and um you know it's kenny is still i think back about all these years for myself yeah it still kind of blows my mind to think about you were a christian for one year you're baptized you're going into the service specifically so that you can use the gi bill so you can go to a bible college to become a pastor exactly but you're not connecting with the church right i was gone you know there's no there's no concept you need to be it's just about being a pastor for jesus right and you could kind of pick your flavor pick your pick your tribe pick your group you know and so very early that that became kind of fun for me in a sense you know i would be like oh there's all these different choices and so when i finally left home and i'm in san diego i started visiting all these great you know uh evangelical churches that are down in san diego and uh horizon fellowship the vineyard down there and john maxwell was was the pastor of um skyline at the time and i went right and i heard him preach and i'm just kind of like soaking in this um this epicenter of of of north american evangelical protestant uh christianity and dreaming about how i was going to do it you know when i when i'm a pastor someday and just getting very involved in churches getting very involved in ministry and worship ministry and and studying the bible and um and that was the path that i was on and i was there in california for three years and then got stationed on okinawa uh where i was for three years and that's where i just went headfirst into my trajectory toward pastoring i devoted a lot of time to just like learning how to teach bible studies in the church that i was going to which was a pentecostal church and listening to uh theology constantly reading books and i knew i wanted to be a bible teacher you're kind of making up you're you're kind of making up the shape of well i like this guy and i like that guy and i like this church and like that and you're it's it's it's like um like legos you know i'm gonna build my own model of what this is gonna look like and i'm gonna take the best of the things that i've seen and create this ideal church you know where i'm the the leader of this ideal church of course and um and that was the path that i was on and when i'm when i'm in japan that's where i met my wife you know she was a missionary there on okinawa with y wham youth with a mission which was the group that brought this youth with this missionary group to salt lake city i said oh i have to get to know these people and my wife and i before we were even married we just started doing ministry together with wyoming we started helping churches doing worship helping a korean-american church with their american speaking service and we just felt like okay we're wired to be together this girl wants to marry a pastor i want to be a pastor hey you know it's a match made in heaven and we just started serving jesus together there on okinawa i kept you know taking courses and um that was our trajectory and we were we'd been married for a few months toward the end of my time on okinawa and we both looked at each other and said let's get out of the navy and let's follow our dream to go and and become somehow pastors you know of a church and the way that we did that is we we left you know my time in the military and we went back to her hometown at the time clovis new mexico to serve at the church that sent her out as a missionary and we said we they gave her so much we want to just give them a year we went back there and again they knew like that this couple wants to go into full-time ministry we start serving i start helping with worship start teaching a young adult fellowship and preaching on wednesday nights working you know in as much ministry as we can because we know that someday we're gonna have our own church we're gonna be pastors and and everything that we did as a couple from from the time that we met going forward was all about this pursuit of devoting our whole lives to jesus in the context of of a local church and uh and that was it let me uh insert the question here yeah good ken as you look back on those days when both you and your wife mary jo were so involved everything was ministry right did you have even as you look back now do you do you sense that that was not just because you and your wife wanted to do this but that this was an authentic call yeah from god absolutely yeah i mean in in in the catholic parlance in the catholic language we would say it was a sense of vocation and a calling that we both had um that we felt like our lives were meant to be devoted to jesus and his people and as i reflected back you know a lot over the years one of the things well what we wanted was to be the most sold-out version of christians that we could be and so in our context when you close your eyes and you imagine well what is that what's the most sold-out version of a christian you can come up with it's either a pastor or a missionary of course my wife had been a missionary her parents had been pastors and missionaries and bible college professors so for us we wanted to epitomize our christian faith in the way that we lived and we just couldn't imagine outside of those two boxes what that would look like we've either got to be pastors or we've got to be missionaries and so that's what we did and um and you believed that this wasn't just i've read it here in scripture and boy that seemed like that'd be a neat thing to do i think i'm going to do that right that you also believed that the very idea of it right was grace the very idea that you wanted to dedicate your lives to this as opposed to that you had been changed within by christ yes to want to do that exactly yeah i go back to when i first prayed that little prayer on the hood of my car i immediately felt a sense that oh this isn't just about becoming a christian this is about giving your whole life devoting your whole self to god's call whatever that looks like and in my mind i'm looking for the christians that are the most um sold out that i could find and it was pastors and so for me i said well that's what i've got to do then and so we when we got out of the navy we served at um my wife's church for a year and then her parents went to africa to the mission field and we looked at each other and said why are we still here let's move back to my hometown salt lake city and we moved there and we said well where are we going to go to church and i said i know we're going to go to the church that sent the wyom team out on the streets back when i became a christian and that's where we ended up going to church was an assembly of god church and we went there and we said hey you know years ago you brought this missionary team here and they witnessed to people on the streets and i became a christian as a result of their work and and we started going to church there and within a few months the pastor of of that church there who saw that i was serious about ministry i was taking courses from moody i started asking him to be my proctor in some of those classes he said why don't you come on staff to do what helped us with our worship ministry help us with our young adult ministry help fill in for preaching and i thought i'm 24 years old and i've arrived i'm a pastor i've finally done it you know i haven't even finished bible college yet and i'm a pastor you know so so there we were on staff at this assemblies of god church in salt lake city and it was like a dream and again remember hint of lyme hint of anti-catholic our pastor was someone who grew up in the catholic church and who left when he was a teenager and he would say he left it because he wanted relationship with jesus instead of religion and so and there it was that that antithesis now i call it the protestant dialectic either or either relationship with jesus or the catholic church and he he provided that for me over and over and over again and would teach against you know catholic things and so i said okay i now i know i know i can't be catholic again but that church was where i really kind of solidified my sense of yeah this is what i want to do at some point i want to pastor my own my own church and we went through kind of a terrible time in that congregation that congregation went through a terrible time the pastor of that church left we left a little before that and moved to california and where did we go in california well we went to the church where i went when i was stationed in california and within a few months of just being members of that church the pastor said kenny why don't you come on staff at the church so there i was again on staff at a church doing worship preaching continuing to be you know passionate about honing my own gifts honing my own sense of calling and then in that congregation after four years of being there we went through trauma again you know failure human failure human conflict and we left that congregation along with multiple other people who left at the time and in the protestant way of thinking about it when you see when you see someone fail when you see a pastoral leader fail you say or some some will say aha he's a bad guy i'm a good guy the good guys leave and they start their own church and that's what we did we left that congregation and we went over here and we started our own fellowship but i said i don't want to be alone i don't i don't want us to be independent and over the years you know you collect heroes um preachers and pastors and people that you love and one of the people that i came to love a great deal was jack hayford who was he's a father in the in the four square church and it was like nate it was like nature like human nature to say i want to be in whatever church jack hayford is um in and it was the four square denomination so we instantly ran to foursquare with our new little church that we started and we said we want to be part of this family and they took us through a process of you know sorting through what had happened to us and eventually brought us into foursquare and we were there for 12 years as the founding senior teaching pastors of our church in central california for 12 years okay kenny we're going to pause there for the break that we need to go to but when i come back i want you to say what's foursquare sure you know in other words what what did you guys have to do to fit in when we were around pegs in a foursquare church you know i heard you've heard that joke before but we'll come back and we'll find out about [Music] that [Music] welcome back to the journey home i'm your host marcus grodi and our guest is kenny brachard and i have paused you you just said that you had your little group of folk renegades right a little group of renegades good protestants that started your own little church um as a breakaway and uh but then you had who are you gonna latch on to right so it involved which is interesting because again from a catholic perspective the idea of i'm going to go and become a pastor and then find out what church i'm going to become it's kind of backwards but right so you're trying to figure out what flavor are we exactly and and you picked four four squares so a lot of people that aren't familiar with foursquare yeah i mean if if you know the name jack hayford uh or you know google jack hayford it's it's he's kind of the uh the face of foursquare at least especially when i was younger and doing this before square was a pentecostal denomination um started in the um the mid 1900s by or the early 1900s by amy simple mcpherson it was really around four elements of the ministry of jesus the four square gospels you would call it jesus is our savior jesus is our healer jesus is our baptizer with the holy spirit so there's where you get the pentecostal angle and jesus is our soon-coming king so there's this focus on eschatology and the return of jesus and that was really the focus that we had as a church was jesus jesus jesus jesus and these four ways that we would talk about jesus and and we we did all that as pentecostals people that were open to in pentecostal language the fullness of of the holy spirit and the present operation of the gifts of the holy spirit and that was some something that i was very much um [Music] sold out to i really believed in those things and wanted to be part of a movement or a denomination that believed like me imagine that i wanted to be part of something that believed like me and and so we connected to foursquare and they they took us in and helped us you know for those 12 years that we were pastoring that church we were in pastoral work for 20 eight of those in two churches on the front end and then 12 as the lead founding senior pastors on the back end and when i was when i was pastoring i wanted to teach the bible i just believed in that this is you know god's word was it it was the standard it was the thing that everything else was about the bible the bible the bible and you know moody bible institute and the first class i ever took at moody was what how to study the bible because that's what i was going to be doing for the rest of my life and i wanted to teach the bible and so while i was a teaching pastor i taught through multiple books of the bible verse by verse it took me just just the gospel of luke took me two and a half years to get through the gospel of luke and so that's what i was doing i was teaching the bible but as i was teaching the bible of course i was also studying the bible and i would come up with things that i didn't have a place for this in any of the stuff that i had known and just to pick an example when i was teaching through first corinthians where where paul says if you've built you know on wood hay and stubble or or you've built with you know gold and precious jewels fire will come and reveal what sort of work you have that the day will reveal it you know and i'm i'm reading this and i taught on that text in our church um in the early i think 2005 or 2006 i taught on that text in first corinthians that fire would come and reveal what sort of work my life was built on and when we went home that day from church sat down at the lunch table with my wife and my son and her parents who were part of our church at the time i said i think i taught on purgatory today and everybody looked at me i said i i did i think i taught on purgatory today and i can see the catholic idea of purgatory makes a lot of sense and you know i didn't have a shelf for it so what do you do i just put it wherever it could fit and i would go on and i keep teaching through the bible and i'm learning and i'm learning and i'm learning and at some point about midway through my tenure at our church my wife was working at a christian university at the time that also had a seminary it's the mennonite brethren biblical seminary in central california and they said kenny if you want to come to seminary here you can just come for free and we'll pay for your degree and you can take a master's degree here and i said that's what i want to do and i wanted to get better at teaching the bible so i started a new testament program at mennonite brethren biblical seminary studying the new testament the language of the new testament the world of the new testament the central figure of the new testament the church that emerges up out of the new testament and all of that and that's when i started questioning a lot of the assumptions that were given to me back here in my mennonite seminary that i went to and there's this kind of there's these moments as you know on this journey where lights come on and you go whoa uh uh i just seen something that i've never really i always knew but i've never paused long enough to think about it and it's in my new testament program we're studying the formation of the biblical canon and especially the new testament and the question is where did these books come from and how do we know they're the bible how do we know that these books are the bible and my professor who's somebody that i love to this day my professor there says almost kind of off the cuff but for me it froze me i didn't hear anything else he said he says so we know that there's a fully functioning church fully invested in the mission of jesus fully forging ahead in the world as the church of jesus for years and years and years and years and years before there's ever something that you and i would ever call a bible and i i think i always knew that was true but i had never paused to think about it so here's me bible teacher wanting to be a bible teacher sitting in seminary trying to imagine what church would be like without the bible the way that i understood the bible and i thought how how did they do that because in our church when we started our little congregation out of the other congregation people were saying we should do it this way and we should do it that way and i would say we're going to do church the way the bible says to do church well as i'm sitting in my seminary class i have to question that presupposition is there a bible way to do church if they were doing church before the bible and is isn't it more true that the bible emerges up and grows up out of the soil of the church whereas in my mind i thought well a church grows up out of the soil of the bible and so it flipped me and i started while i was still a protestant while i was still pastoring our church i started questioning my own teaching my own presuppositions and one of the things that i called into question long before i ever became a catholic was the doctrine of sola scriptura because i was forced by the reality of history but i was forced by the reality of church history to imagine a church before there's a new testament um in the in the scripture and it and then i start looking at other things um you know the whole way the the church operated and functioned i'm starting to read church history i'm starting to read christology i'm starting to now read catholic authors uh that i'd never read before and it's throwing me into you know a tailspin in a sense you aren't in the process losing you're not losing your love for christ nope and nor are you losing your love for scripture right it it's still there even more than ever is this what's happening and i i want to make this clarification because some i know that you know our mixed audience that we have solar scriptura has a different layers right there are those folks when they mean solar scripture they mean only this and not anything else at all that's the and the truth is there aren't no christians in the world that live that way but in fact because you have tradition and then you have a thing scripture in a thing called tradition right which is the accumulation of the all the other things you know what kind of robe did you wear on a sunday and all these you know when do you go to church and for solo scriptura folk not just the ones that it's only this book and nothing else right that that really doesn't exist but what's the importance right of this book right and these other things and you're talking about a time when this is all there was yeah i had to this this was in the process of being written and floating around and people had copies but there's this other thing it's going full steam down the tracks you know ministering to the world evangelizing bringing jesus to the nations and it's not doing that with the bible out in front of it the way that that i imagined it had to be done and so you know i called all those things into question but the other thing at the same time was that i i couldn't be catholic you know um so i i'm what my family basically decided to do in 2013 was to let go of it all i was finishing my master's degree my wife's finished during her phd and we both we came to this place where we said let's try to imagine our lives outside of this context that we've spent so much time trying to get into and we let go we let go we went to our denomination and we said it's time for us to step out of this and we went through a transition period of that church being turned over to know the pastor and us stepping away and me turning my sights on uh how can i put all the things that jesus has put into me into other meaningful work and started working you know raising money for nonprofits and and trying to be a missionary in that way and um and that seems like such a major decision a huge decision huge decision but what happened to us is it took us to virginia we left our church in central california and i ended up getting a job at a children's medical charity that serves children that had the birth defect that my son had and i went to work for them to raise money and while we as we moved to virginia we felt like okay we have a chance to start over here with our church stuff and so we started visiting churches in virginia beach not to pick one but just to understand and we visited probably close to 30 churches and we would go we called it exegeting the service we would go and we would just listen and learn and we would have these questions we would ask like what's at the middle what's at the center what was the theme what is everything moving towards and anytime we would go to a lutheran church a catholic church an anglican church where we actually attended for quite a while we noticed that what was in the middle was the altar was the table of the eucharist and that was interesting to us and so we started to become attracted to that reorientation because like i said everything for me in my tradition was bible bible bible but in these liturgical churches it was the bible is there and it's informing so much of what you're doing but it's really there's this this bread and wine that's where things are being drawn up and into the center and we started becoming very curious about what it would look like if we were in a tradition that was more aligned that way and we couldn't be catholic we thought so we started hanging out with the anglicans and then one day it was actually june 3rd 2018 the day before my 49th birthday we were coming home from the beach in sand bridge virginia beach and we drive by this church in our neighborhood probably driven by it a hundred times never looked at it but i look over at it and it says saint john the apostle catholic church and i look over at it and i think oh there's a catholic church there huh and i turn back and then i have this thing happen to me like to use the catholic word a locution pentecostal word word from the lord right and it's pretty simple it says go to that church what go to that church i'm not catholic yeah go to that church and so we had been you know we'd been visit we'd visited catholic churches but it seemed in a moment that this was different this wasn't my decision this was god in a sense directing me and giving me some kind of impression that this is what i needed to do so i went home googled the church came out into the living room and told my wife did you see that church we passed by st john yeah i said i think i'm supposed to go there next sunday or but they have a mass on saturday so she says i want to go okay so we went to mass the following saturday night and i'm in there and i'm you know the the language pulled in and pulled up but i didn't know what to do with it i didn't have a logic for it i didn't have a map i'm just in it and i'm saying god what are we doing at mass at st john the apostle you asked me to come here and i shared with a friend online hey i just went to a catholic mass it was pretty amazing and he said before you go back you need to read scott hahn's book the lamb's supper okay so i buy this book in four days i devour this book and he gave me and i take off my glasses he gave me lenses this book was like putting on lenses and i went back to mass and if you've ever seen those those youtube videos where a family member gives their parent who has color blindness these glasses and they put them on and the person starts crying because they can see color for the first time scott hahn's book was my color blind lenses i read that book i put the lenses on i went back to mass a second time i couldn't stop crying i was like i get it i see what's happening here and i start thinking oh no [Laughter] i've got to be catholic how am i going to do this i don't believe all this stuff that the catholic church teaches because walter martin and keith greene and everybody else i've ever listened to told me you can't be catholic it's bad it's wrong but this is the best thing i've ever seen in my life my guess is one or two people out there that haven't read scott hahn's book yet what specifically is he saying in that book about that mass you said yeah well what are the what's the little lens if you want so what the lens is as a as a foursquare pastor i saw the book of revelation as a map of the end times as a as a map to to learn like what's going to happen in the future and what scott han does with the book of revelation is he shows that that book is is a liturgy or it's a liturgical picture it's a picture of heavenly worship so he he changed my orientation toward the book of revelation so that i would read the book of revelation and see that on earth as it is in heaven and the mass is a mirror image of what's happening in the heavenly places so when i went back to our parish and i went into the sanctuary into the church and i saw the way even the way that it was decorated all the imagery that's in the book of revelation painted into the walls into the scenery four living creatures well they're they're up there on the roof of the church we're mirroring what's happening in the heavenly places and and and it's it was just all there for me and i said i have to be catholic but i don't know how and so i started a journey my own journey my wife started hers she was on it all ready to some degree and we brought our son with us and i sat down at my kitchen table i said if i'm going to be catholic i've got to sort through the theological issues you know and so i made a list i have a no i still have it at home of 14 things if i can't solve these if i can't get clarity on these then no matter how awesome that was i can never be catholic and i wrote down all of those 14 things and then i started a process i had to read i had to listen i had to go through a an intense journey of discernment and go through those those 14 for me those 14 deal breakers and sort through all of them and um and i would say the one because because you know people want to know like what was the one the one that pushed me over the edge goes back to that moment in seminary where my past where my professor said there's a fully functioning church before there's a canonized and agreed upon new testament well what's behind the ability to do that is authority it's the commission of jesus to be that church not because of what a book says but because of what jesus said to some people so for me the issue of authority was the thing that pushed me over the edge i had to ask well who were these people that not only brought the you know church forward who led the church forward but who knew in this entire collection of literature that had emerged in the first centuries of the church who knew these 27 books and none of the others our scripture that's the church that i have to be part of and the answer to that question is it's the catholic church and so i had to recognize that the question of authority and i come back to that over and over in my discussions with people for me it's the church that knew what the bible was in the first place if they know that if they know the answer to that then they have other insight information grace from god to be able to continue to lead the church not only before there was a bible but when there was and in into the days that we're in right now so that question of authority really was the tipping point for me and once you accept that authority then the the more difficult doctrines take on a different right perspective because you're trusting a trusting trustworthy i don't know if i ever heard this phrase from someone and if they'd if i did credit to them but if they didn't i'll just make it my own but i i adopted a posture when i settled that question of authority that i would stand under until i understand in other words once i once i said the catholic church is the church that jesus started founded and that's still here in the world today i don't understand everything that the catholic church teaches but i need to stand under i'm new i'm new i'm at the time 49 year old guy you know so i'm new everyone's new this thing has been here for 2000 years i'm going to stand under until i understand and i just took that posture as i worked through these big questions and it really helped me you know again i didn't know your story before our time here but did i hear that you were connected with the coming home network at all during that time one of the first things that i did when i started this journey was try to find out are there any people like me out there pastors seminary trained you know people have been in vocation vocational ministry their whole lives and you know google is your friend and found the coming home network immediately got connected on online networks one of your amazing staff guys who's been here ken hensley ended up becoming um a voice for me initially pointed me in some really neat directions got me involved in the online community and there i found oh i'm not alone i'm not alone there are people like me who care about all of these different pieces and they want to think it through and process it and sort it out and the the the network there especially the the community network the online um platform gave me a chance to do that but also having people to email back and forth when you needed longer conversations incredibly helpful and which i'm very grateful that you got involved in now and you're on this side of the right right yourself exactly answering those questions for people yeah we you know in that network you have people that they show up kind of like we did god's doing something in me i didn't think i would ever be asking these questions but i am i don't think the door swings that way i think i'm on a i'm i'm inside of something where i can never go back but i don't know how to go forward and the nice thing about that platform and the content and the people that are there is you discover yeah there's a way forward and the the language of journey is really the perfect language for it well in another part of the community which i've insisted it from the beginning which the the staffing shares with me is built on the idea and i talked to you about this earlier when you look back to your early days you didn't begin knowing jesus when you became catholic right yeah i was already a christian you knew that and you're gonna we're gonna hear your wife's story next week on the journey home right and how the the missionaries had just a big impact on her coming to christ right and to me that's an important part of the way you do your work on the community you're standing beside people you're not push pulling or prodding them into the church they need to be hearing it from god and you're there to answer their questions encourage them uh give them good connection to resources absolutely but it's got to be their decision just as it was for you and for your wife mary jo and helping them to recognize god's hand has been in everything they've been involved in up to this point but it's in this too it's in this too and you never maybe imagined you could do it but god's in this piece of your journey as well what was the hardest thing for you to get over in becoming god you know a lot of people will point to a theological thing i think i and i could do that but i'll point to an identity thing my remember what i said at the beginning i wanted to be a pastor i wanted to go be a pastor in a church so i would say the hardest thing for me and probably the best thing for me has been letting go of that need to be that guy and just being okay with the what the catholic church is trying to do with me isn't make me a pastor what the catholic church wants for my life is what jesus wants for my life and that's for me to be with him forever to be a saint to be a holy one so my focus now as a christian as a catholic christian isn't about what i'm going to do for the church it's about what kind of person am i becoming as a result of my faith and it's not about my job it's not about my position my title it's about my relationship with jesus that was hard though because i had to let go of that you know one of the most beautiful powerful prayers in the church it's called the litany of humility and if any of you on on listening i've ever seen that you can get it on ewtn.com you can find it i've had to pray it a few times but what's powerful about it and so many things but one over this is was written by a cardinal of the church right who's is about as high as you can get in the church in terms of attention sure but recognizing the important thing right is cutting through all that and we need to do that exactly you know in our own journeys you said that that's what happened for you when you had to step aside from being a pastor to say i'm just going to be me and jesus and understand what you want me to be lord what does it mean to be a follower of jesus and now i do that not picking and choosing what i want it to be but listening to the church and jesus as he works through the church to help me so all right my friend marcus thank you so much thank you for watching the program and sharing your journey with us and our prayers are with you and and mary jo thank you and uh thanks again and all of you for for joining us thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home i do pray that ken's journey is encouragement to you and those of you especially who are on the journey and you're wondering if there's a place you can connect with go to chnetwork.org that's the coming home network's website and you can get connected with this community that ken helps a monitor that can answer your questions about the church so god bless you look forward to being with you again next [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 10,310

Rating: 4.9581881 out of 5

Keywords: jht, jht01739, ytsync-en

Id: 0SEFPa2CF6s

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021