Journey Home - 2017-06-05 - Fr. Richard Rojas

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program once again I had this privilege to join you to hear a story of someone's journey following deeper in Christ and to a place that he didn't foresee at some point his life and our guest tonight his father Richard Rojas former Presbyterian pastor and Anglican priest so he's come a long way and it's good to have father Rojas with us hello father thank you is it Marcus Grodi it's good to have you here it's been a long time since you and I encountered each other more than 10 years ago and as I was telling one of my staff members who also remembered you that we remembered you as a really rambunctious flaming presbyterian we gathered together and I'm thinking here you are it's it's wonderful to have you here God has a very funny sense of humor and he is very gracious and patient and kind you know and I think I owe a lot to the staff that exhibited that to me especially I'm going to say a thank you to Jim Anderson you Jim I don't know how many books he sent me must be sending libraries to everyone I guess several of the books that he sent me I read and they were they were instrumental in making me raise questions about my own thinking and how people had embraced the family of the Catholic Church I also want to say that there was father Patrick Rowan who was with me has been a guest on the program he was an army chaplain and I was serving alongside of him at Fort Rucker Alabama I remember him saying it will rich let's pray about he was very patient and I said well no you have to answer these questions that I have and he said well I can I can put you in touch with people who can answer these questions and there was always somebody there that was willing to sit on the phone with me and talk there are other people too I'd like to thank bishop from the Diocese of Scranton Joseph Bamburgh who has be gracious enough to give me a parish to run and my moved into the rectory wife of 20 years beautiful Deborah Rojas and my four children and they're doing wonderfully and the church has embraced them the congregation the parish and so all of my friends and especially my lovely family I'm thankful to be here and you one of the fathers of this this program thanks for everything you've done and all of the guests you've had that have been instrumental in my conversion now we've cut to the chase you've kind of given the conclusion so we let's back let's put that aside now and let's back way to the beginning because back when I met you I don't think you were very close and a lot came between that but let's go way back the beginning of your spiritual journey when you're a child and did you have a faith life when you were brought up well I want to say that and and I and I say this with with joy that God gave me these experiences I was born and raised in Brooklyn New York you know it would probably be known to some people as an urban jungle it probably doesn't have not you know there's this beautiful Midwestern feel with the cornfields in nature and everything around you you know you're in the city and in particular I just want to say about cities I want to plug them and say we're all we all got in trouble in the Garden of Eden you know what I mean and that was a beautiful garden there right it was a beautiful lush garden and we're all going to the city of God God willing you know by His grace so cities we better get used to cities and I also want to say that the great policies the cities in the ancient world where where the church set up its headquarters we think about st. Paul who started you know out in Jerusalem this the center of his but then when he got the evangelistic fervor to move he had to get to Rome it was the city that he had to go and establish the headquarters of you know the Christian faith it's the same would say Peter we think of that great story where he goes to Rome and he sees the vision and Christ tells of go to Rome and and set up your headquarters there so for cities I love them quickly and I say cities themselves have something to offer they're essentially the epicenter of culture they help us in the sense to spread things in a very quick way you mentioned all the different opinions and philosophies and voices that were there yes so you you know you had communities from China your communities from the Middle East when I left you had communities from Cambodia you know different strata scurrying and I think that that you know it gave me a great taste for a lot of good food you know anybody religious religious oh I do my religious ideas began with being baptized Roman Catholic believe it or not okay and I at the age of one mom said she baptized me because at 1 year old you look very cute in a white suit and I thought I thought I was that was cute girl looking back and reminiscing about it so and and the Latino culture is very Catholic in that sense but I'm from Puerto Rico and it happens to be one of the most diverse Latino cultures with respect to Protestantism and other denominations so my mother said that she always remembered when she was in Puerto Rico walking by this sign of this Baptist Church that said all are welcome so when we got to New York it was probably more about a phenomenal istic commitment to God that she brought me to be baptized and then I didn't essentially go to a Catholic Church wasn't raised and confirmed in the Catholic Church didn't receive any of the other sacraments however when we were in Park Slope Brooklyn I remember she went and brought us to a Baptist Church down the corner and one of the things I think like Latino culture a very open to ideas and they embraced her and they read the Bible and you know I remember at the age of 9 my first encounter with personal faith I went to this Baptist Church is sitting in the pew and there was a visiting preacher and he preached and he said you must be born again you have to come down the aisle if you're going to make this commitment and there was a sense in which God used that immediate call to conversion to give me taste buds for Christ and the church conscious ones you know I had it in my baptism but now it was I'm being called came Allah who went forward I remember mom and my brother sitting if you say what are you doing I said the man said we have to go to the front there make a commitment so we went to the front and he gave us a Bible I was happy to have my own Bible brought at home he said read the book of John my reading skills were less than they are now I was confused kept reading the first three verses and reading him again my older brother now we were trying to get into this but then there was a time where we sort of fell away from church we did a lot of moving I wasn't sure why but we went to Florida for a little while and then church became something and God was there we knew he was there but it didn't it wasn't the center of our social life you know needing a place to go and so I would call those kind of my Dark Age here probably leading up to age 12 then at age 12 we moved to a place I think was on 21st Street in Brooklyn New York and there was a second experience I had where a missionary's name was Bob San Pasquale is a good man and he came from this organization called the Church of Bible understanding it was a very unique who came out of the hippie era okay and they had these communes so this was hardcore and they had this one leader who read the scriptures to them and you know he said they essentially bought into the idea that his interpretation would be the best interpretation while we were loosely connected with them uh but one thing it did do for us and for me at that time I didn't I didn't become a part of their organization he would come around and he would say you should memorize these scriptures so I began to memorize certain scriptures as particularly John chapter 3 where Jesus talks to Nicodemus and tells them about conversion and the spirit and this was very helpful to me the memorization of Scripture at that time and it essentially kept me going the next conversion essentially our reversion I hadn't really become an official member of this little whatever it was but the Lord used that to put some of his word in your in your mind so you know I'm sorry he had a third conversion then it yeah it was that was sort of a sporadic experience there wasn't a specific church that we were going to at the time and then there was a missionary that essentially had these Bible clubs in Brooklyn New York he was it was part of the Billy Graham crusade Brandt Reed was a member of the Billy Graham crusade and he started these Bible clubs with high school students one of them was it was called high be a high school born-again errs and the point of these Bible clubs was to help the local high school students get together and fortify their faith and teach them how to share their faith with their other classmates so it was a pretty decent idea and how do how to essentially go in and be Bible literate articulate the faith and keep them essentially from you know caving in to the culture and helped helping them with their Christian faith so at the time at the age of sixteen I was living in New York City was a little rough and there were all these different groups that I could have become a part of some of them really bad some of them you know not so great mom bought me a skateboard okay and this is where skateboarding essentially was part of keeping me from some of these really bad influences and I you know thanks mom this skateboarding didn't only give me something to do day by day but I actually became a semi professional and I became a sponsored amateur with dog town skateboards venture trucks canine wheels I appeared in Thrasher Magazine Transworld magazine began to tour go to skateboard contests and there was a friend of mine who was visiting in New Mexico and there I lived in New York City and they asked the question who's your favorite skateboarder they named a professional then they said and Richard Rojas so I was like you know I was sort of coming in to start start people started well I don't know how this guy knows who I am out in New Mexico so this guy who was running these Bible clubs he got the vision because there was a big group of skateboarders now as a big movement in New York I'm going to start a Bible study for skateboarders and that's when he came and picked up me about six or seven other skateboard friends and I went to one of his high school born-again or clubs and I remember that he said again hey this is serious you need to take your faith seriously and presented the gospel I think in a very immediate way you you know have to do this so that night he dropped off everybody at their houses and because he had a van he would go pick everybody up and then drop them off and I was the last one to be dropped off and he said to me I remember this sitting across from in the van he said if you were to die tonight and you were to stand you you you were to stand before God do you think he would let you in heaven and I think that this still is you know their evangelism explosion questions actually get some money right right and I said wow that is that's crystal clear what what would you what do you think would happen and I said well I don't I don't know I answered him he said well let me ask you another question you know the second question if God were to say to you why should I let you into my heaven what would you say I said whoa I don't know he said well wouldn't you like to know and I said well I think so that's a good question and you know I say these not just joking and saying you know like this is essentially but this is these are not bad questions these are actually good question good question I think we should ask ourselves these questions you know often and I think the church actually intentionally makes us ask some of these questions we can think of the liturgy how it reminds us of our need for repentance and for asking for God's grace and all that so that night I sat there and I said well I won't lead you in a prayer because you you know some scripture you I've heard you but you know I think that this really needs to be a real commitment so I led myself in a prayer I don't know what it was you know Lord take me please help you know if there's any way because I I know that my life had fallen away from God it wasn't clear that I was with God it was kind of a wet wasn't ending Church of it that night I went up to my room and I remember I said you know I was very very young you know I didn't know any that someone had given me and I just blocked it open and I said I'm just going to read and start understanding who you are God and I read Revelation chapter 9 it's not a good place to start and Revelation chapter 9 there are these I mean you look at it's a lot of imagery is very difficult these demons coming out of the abyss and smoke and all of this and they're tormenting for a period of time I said halt and at the end of it that chapter though you look at it it says and they still did not repent and then there's a long list of what they didn't repent from and I say rule I might be included in some of this so I remember getting down and saying lord have you saved me I'll do whatever you want I mean I just want to know that I that the demons coming out of the abyss aren't coming after me so I prayed again and I did feel a sense of peace that God you know there was nothing else I could do I was at the end of myself and he had to reach to me and give me grace I wasn't sure what that grace was how that came to me but I knew that personal faith was absolutely essential to my salvation and I still believe that you know it can't be someone else's faith right it has to be my faith and has to be expressed in a certain reality yeah the baptism that changes us that gives us Christ has to be our we have to respond to that we have to claim that we have to act on right I mean that's that's our teaching and though you weren't thinking about your baptism at that point but you knew you had to respond yeah it's a good question yeah if I if I want the prize I got to move towards it and and that that to me I think was very helpful and I would never take that away from any evangelical fervor that my brothers and sisters in the evangelical church had you know this is essentially the vision of Benedicta 16th he said any separation among the baptised hurts the church so we have to make an attempt to bring this thing together and and bring everyone as Christ prayed to one church one Lord one church one baptism st. Paul tells us that we share so that point I'm like okay this is great I'm had a conversion now what well I went to every Bible study I could find I was really I was really in love with the Scriptures I especially with the one who had led me through these questions I went to everything I went to church with him he became my mentor and friend and he still is a very good friend of mine he essentially he's a missionary Russia right now Wow so we got this idea and he said well I have the now I have these converts from or these reverts from skateboarders and we put together these skateboard contests okay where we would bring all throughout the city these skateboards to these contests and there would be a speaker at the contest that was me and I believe he would share his testimony with other people about what who Jesus is how he transforms lives and these things they took off we had like sometimes 250 skateboarders from all around the city coming to the skateboard contest he put on we had trophies we had deserts we had and we would skate all day he would break it down by divisions like if you were in age 16 to 14 you were in one and then if you were 13 to not you know ten you were another and everybody would compete against each other you know and at the end of it everybody had a great time and they were also exposed to an evangelistic message he also helped me and trained me on how to lead one of the Bible studies that we would bring them into once we had another person who wanted to come and be a part of these Bible studies /leading themselves I mean coming to Christ and usually these kinds of outreaches are not consciously in any way trying to pull some young man out of his tradition where he's at it's about bringing them to Jesus Christ right you guys weren't about pulling Catholics out of the Catholic Church or Methodists out of the met knew you were about bringing him to a deep faith in Jesus right it was very user friendly but it happened that we didn't have a lot of Catholics in these groups except I would count myself as one now I was a Catholic in those groups and one of the things that I remember asking and let's get back let's let's ask the questions about the Catholics I remember I going to this mentor in saying to him well what do we believe about Catholics are they Christians because they weren't many here from around it was obvious and it was a gracious answer it really was very gracious he said well we don't believe they're a cult or anything because they have the Scriptures thing and he said um you know they're good people and they intend to follow Christ and it sort of ended there there wasn't this anti Catholic and I was fascinated by that and I said well okay and I always proceeded with that kind of understanding there's some differences I don't know what they are but with we have some brothers and sisters there we have two and then I it kind of caused the curiosity about my Catholic baptism and what would I what would that look like in the future so there you are on fire for the Lord your evangelizing as a speaker did that lead you then into the pod to get into the Presbyterian minister twist Ciaran turns so I'm excited and I met it I met a summer intern that was with my mentor okay his he was a good still occurred friend's name is Charlie bail he's a Presbyterian minister now and I remember him saying to me you know I said I really want to go on and I want to do something with my life as far as you know because God had laid these things in front of me I began to do them and he said well you're gonna need an education you know and it so happened that he was going to Nyack college and there was a professor there called dr. neat his name was dr. Nilsen and they had a Turk they had a cute little term for him they called him the Kelvinator and there were there were newspapers that they the college produced with him Calvin dating people you know like and but you know I met him a sweet man very good man and Charlie Bell was one of his pupils and disciples and he said listen there's two ways to understand your salvation either God did it all or you did some of it and in that case you get some credit for it and he said let me introduce you to how I understand salvation and remember them taking a paper out and putting to Livan it yeah yeah our audience may not understand that but those are the five principles of Calvinism total depravity I'm trying to member Mawlana limited atonement and I think a total depravity unconditional election limit limited atonement irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints exactly clearly and I said Wow you know no one had really ever showed me this before I said and I remember it sending me into a tailspin for about two days because I thought deeply about what these with the implications of the teachings were so you know I thought about it thought about it and he said well I think you should go to now at college because you'll get a good reformed teaching there from one of the professors and it'll set you up for good ministry in the future all right let's pause there take our break father we've got you're going to Nyack college to be culminated right I'm going to tell people make it back for the break what that means but we'll come back to the site you see it a bit [Music] you [Music] [Music] you [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm your host Marcus Grodi and our guest his father Richard Rojas I've interrupted you in your journey getting ready to go to a school to get Calvin ated maybe Indies did yeah whoa well the John Calvin was a very rational thinker and I think magnificent I mean in as far as the implications of his thought some of them we don't know that we don't know this but he wrote thoughts about government how to structure them he wrote thoughts about I mean in his writings about how to apply a just interest rate for an economy I mean there's all these things and some of the teachings that he derived from Scripture were just had a matrix of applications and implications for even Western culture so that his Institutes of Christian religion were pretty influential in the direction of Western civilization for for time however these principles that I got these uh tulip you know they I said Wow you know the first one is I'm totally depraved I can't do anything to save myself their God had to come into my life and do some miracle work this is beautiful because that means I can give credit to God and then I said unconditional election what's that well that means that God elected me you know for the foundation of the world you know I must be pretty special you know little bit so you know and irresistible grace that I just found His grace so irresistible that that's why I I came to him limited atonement was a little difficult you know you think about it but if they said well that means that only those that God only died for the elect you know the limited amount of people I so where are they I've always had trouble figuring out who they are where they are yeah you are talking about revelation 9 or just before that he's talking about the 144,000 well he only died for the hundred and forty four thousand I mean that would be one way of interpreting that yes yeah what Bill is a and then the perseverance is it kind of made sense along with the scripture saying that those who got elected they persevere to the end and there is sort of a view here that there is sort of a Catholic understanding of salvation that you do have to on the one hand persevere but then who persevere to the end you know and how do you get there so you can still debate the mode of getting there okay and I think that that left that open now going to niya College presented a difficulty for me because Marcus to my embarrassment I didn't even have a high school diploma and I was eight I was 20 years old when I first had that born-again experience it was you know probably I'm using the terms that were familiar to me at the time I use born-again experience and familiar to me at the time I was 18 no high school diploma no way of getting into college okay so what I did was I started to go to night school and I and within two years I studied enough to get a GED okay affectionately known as good enough diploma so what I got I was 21 I remember it now this is the beauty of some of the experiences I had I remember that summer I went to Russia with my mentor he was just establishing the groundwork for starting these Bible clubs in Russia well I spent three months there had a fantastic time and I had taken the exam before I left and then when I got back I got the news of the mail your you now have a high school diploma and then I remember going go say wow you know I made it and now I have a gate and Avenue to go forward to study scripture and to do other things then I went into work I wasn't ready to go to college yet when my boss said you know you've been away a lot and we've kind of managed to get things going here I was working in an upholstery shop he said I really think it's time for you to move on yeah I didn't have any take place to go oh so I took this Jeanne I said well what am I going to do now and I remember Charlie Bale had said you probably ought to consider going to nya college so I applied to nya College and I was accepted I was there ready to get Calvin ated so with being a high school dropout wasn't easy to get through college I studied I was nervous you know I was say lord help me my first semester I took Greek and I don't know why I signed up for Greek my first semester but it was probably part of the curriculum for a Bible major right I was a Bible major so I went through my flashcards learning all these Greek terms and all that and I differ it fairly well I push to be average my first semester not even having had you know the high school experience but I was determined to do you know well because I wanted to go out and serve God and I knew that I need to know my Bible needed to know what God said who he was to help other people understand that so I'm in I'm in college and I mean I meet wonderful wonderful people very godly men one of them I remembered I took a course with and this this really set me um into this Calvinist kind of reformed mold for a little while it was called Reformation thought okay now in this class we had to read some of the primary texts of the great reformers among them were Lutheran loser Martin Luther I remember reading it I said this guy sounds a little angry you know what's he angry about the 95 theses otherwise known as the dissertation of the sales of indulgences you know there's that long titles and in a psych you got the you know we have to fix this church there's something wrong here and I said what's wrong and so I kept reading and one of the works that came across that really kind of definitively pointed out what he had as an issue was the Babylonian captivity and in it that's his famous work where he disputes and he says well we have to rework the sacramental system you know there's some problems here confirmation marriage extreme unction some of these dogmas they need to go we need to fix this he boiled it down to we could we could live with penance perhaps Lord's Supper and baptism I thought well that's that's a good emphasis you know these are kind of they're pretty straightforward these things Jesus gave himself for us and we're baptized but I don't remember being completely convinced that this is everything because I was told I was there to be Calvin ated Luther wasn't counted right so I took another class and one of the things that stood out to me was we need to protect the glory of God we need to protect the glory of God this is a really emphasis thing because because I came across these five SOLAS Sola scriptura Sola fidei Sola gratia Sola Christi and Sola Deo Gloria but the last one it came really important so how are we going to protect these you know we need to be Calvinists you know this is what was just because it's the best way of preserving you know the glory of God and I want to say that that overall end is a good one why not protect the glory of God who's not who's going to fight against that as a Christian you know it seems a real major theme in Scripture however some of the other teachings is that I was being supposed to especially at the college I kind of had a little bit of a different understanding of them in particular most of the professors at night in college at the time were adult baptism only teachers like they said well you can't baptize children it was only one that really said that you could baptize infants and at the time I even read these some of these texts and Calvin's argument some of the other ones and I was convinced that with that one professor that was there that that this was a true expression of Christian faith and that many of the Magisterial reformers had that issue correct in my mind I adopted it right away so he graduated and became a Presbyterian pastor from from my Iqaluit don't wander seminary yeah yeah well then I then when I when I when I walked the aisle file it was amazing you know I was thinking to myself well I got to do something with my life now and I thought maybe I'd go off and be a missionary but then when I was on at night college I ran to this Dean of Students who was an army chaplain retired and the chaplaincy became something I said wow that's a beautiful ministry I looked at looked into it but he said if you want to be a chaplain you have to have a Masters of Divinity so it's a more school you've got to be kidding me so I left God when I left college I signed up in this chaplain Canada program it was with the idea that I was going to go to seminary married my beautiful wife now of 19 years could be 20 this August and settled put in an application to Westminster Theological Seminary because I was told that's a good 7 they say you have three choices if you really want to be reformed I had Gordon Conwell I had Westminster and I forget there's another one the one out the PCA one in in st. Louis well Westminster was appealing because it was close in my my wife had family from there so I was accepted to Westminster Uno's pretty pretty happy and proud as a while I can't believe they took me went to Westminster and just fantastic really I'm not I'm sorry I'm not putting a plug for them but I really appreciated the education they gave me a lot of biblical scholarship the studies were in the original language you had to pass competency exams in order to get by Hebrew Greek theology professors were great at the end of it I get ordained a Presbyterian minister so here's what happens okay I finish up and I'm still pretty much committed because it's what I know the Reformed faith there's some questions about the Catholic faith but I don't really have the practical time settleable I'm on ego and I need a job now okay I'm married is she Presbyterian also why she she is yes okay at the time to the time we joined 10 Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and dr. James Montgomery Boyce was the past oh yeah so I was with you really guiding lights of that whole movement in America of course yeah and he was on the radio 40 books great mentorship and they had some great guys there even the Reverend Phil Ryan was there he's now the president of Wheaton College and he was very compassionate kind and they he helped me with his mentorship he said I was considering different churches at the time you know because there were different Presbyterian churches he said well no I think you need to go to 10th Presbyterian Church because we have some really good preaching here and it was you know it was hard to debate but there were four you know so I'm there and something happens my last year of seminary that really convinces me that I need to look and study further at the end of seminary um I get hired as a Christian education director of st. Paul's Episcopal Church in elkins park PA okay and it was more angle Catholic okay and but they they had the 39 articles so I thought we can they have some reformed teaching within their thing so I could work here so I was teaching the children that let me do whatever like they were very compassionate and kind people to me and I still think it was it was a great time but I was exposed to historic beauty of liturgy and they put in there uh what they called Eucharist daily Icarus the Eucharist at the center and they had the smells and bells and it was beautiful and I said this is just really beautiful honoring to God I see how it points me to Jesus and I may want to consider this as an option and I looked at issues of polity how their church ecclesiology was set up and I said you you know it actually makes sense because this could this could fit because the Presbyterian reformed has a wide gambit of high liturgy low liturgy but often the more conservative Calvinists Calvin Aidid folk are as little liturgy as possible very Bible centered some prayer but mostly preaching that was what you had been trained right yeah little liturgy at all yes and one of the fact one of them said well the the Lord's Supper is basically like a great sermon you know that was the equivalent of a great sermon you know so and I thought about it and honestly Marcus I never really believed that and I and I silly when I when I probed and I looked at John Calvin and I looked at Luther and I looked at some of these on the issue of velour supper seemed a lot more than just a sermon to them you know it really was and I think that one of the things I became convinced about and this was even near in the end of seminary the John K even John Calvin argued more the mode than the reality of what the Supper was the mode how we got there you know essentially I'm taking this route you take that route and so there was there was a lot of Catholic elements in his teachings and in Luther as well and that drew me I think and then when I went to I said well this is great I could have my Calvin I gavel Luther I had this beautiful liturgy there was an issue though at the time a lot of controversy broke out in the Episcopal Church over the ordination of a bishop and think you know what I'm talking about and I had a friend who was accurate and actually at a church his name good friend of mine name's al char Bach okay and he got caught up in the middle of that as a young priest with you know and things weren't going so well so I thought to myself well I'm not sure I want to get involved in some of this and at the time I was under the care of the presbytery okay so I said well I'll prepare for ordination with the Presbyterian Church in America PCA okay so I prepared for them they were tough exams church history Westminster Confession of faith theology the book of church order the sacraments Holy Scripture you know you had to know all of that and the panel that examined me for ordination was a PhD in history PhD in theology PhD a New Testament a shape okay if PhD an Old Testament and these came in in your skateboard right yeah yeah right I'm coming in on my skateboard like how am I gonna make it past this I mean it just seemed like Mount Everest how am I going to get over this mountain you know but they by the skin of my teeth I made it through I wrote my theology paper I wrote my exegetical paper sat before the panel I said fathers and brothers this is the best I can do you know and they ordained me they let me come through and get ordained so went off to the army as an army chaplain okay and as I was an army chaplain that's when I met some of the people from the journey home network Jim Anderson came across some other people and they began to help me particularly I mean I made friends right away with father Patrick Rowan was a good friend of mine and I remember setting up my makeshift half Presbyterian half Anglican service and I had I wore clerics it was all the stuff I really loved gravitated towards the higher church experience of of worship now in the in the military chaplaincy would you have one worship service for Protestants and then someone else would a priest would do one for Catholics so you you a lot of freedom in your particular worship setting to do exactly what you're talking about Presbyterian pastor but you know you can do an awful like like add Episcopalian yes that that is true depending upon the need because you're there to serve you could set up one that's a little bit more high church but it was a small one you know wasn't one of the big ones then they had a large general Protestant service and then I had a smaller one that was more liturgical too you know and appealing to kind of Lutheran's higher church Wesley ends or and Presbyterians and and and that was that was good for a time and then some things just didn't seem like they were right and that's where I began to ask questions you know about the Catholic faith particularly to father patch growing and he helped me he gave me I remember he gave me a Catholic catechism day that was the first day and I read through it I looked at it and I said wow I agree with about ninety eight point nine percent what's my issue you know that was one of the first things that happened to me then I had to probe a little bit further you know and when I did I remember he was quick to put me in touch with another friend of his Deacon Trevor Fernandez and he got on the phone with me and he said rich what are your questions and I put him out there what about the kingdom of God they were very technical I don't want to believe her them here how is the kingdom of the church equated with Jesus you know you know and he answered that question and then I said well what about the Lord's Supper then he answered that question and then I kind of got annoyed because he had good answers to the questions and then I started to say to myself we'll wait a minute maybe my issues are that I just don't really know I don't understand some of the real good answers that are there but there were practical issues as you would imagine work is I have a family down I have three children you know I don't have a way to to come and so when you get these questions and I think you're bombarded with the practical questions how do I get out of this you know tied to a social network I'm tied to a deployment I'm tied to all these your sons I say and you gotta say let's just put this on the shelf for a little bit you know we it's not it's not that he's going to going to grab everything and and Ron and I think that there were very kind and compassionate people who said I think that's a good idea keep praying and thinking one of them was even father Patrick growing yeah himself as a convert minister priest so he'd gone to Moody Bible Institute right yeah and then he said you know he he was one of the other things is he was active in what I would call social justice on the on the base he I remember him saying we really need to keep the Hispanic mass open and there were a few people there and that was impressive to me he went spoke with the lead chaplain basin and I I said wow this this is really kind and compassion and I think that we under cell sometimes the compassion of an evangelist that how that is so persuasive when someone's really concerned about another person and I think that's because we have obvious signs from our Lord that that's a very powerful way to do it to evangelize when he says they will know that you are Christians by your love so so father's opening your heart you at this point you're still presbyterian I mean did you make the job still presbyterian okay alright and I put it on the shelf for a little bit and I decide it was you know the war was opening up there were a lot of things going on you know what I'm going to drop back and punt I'm going to get out of the military maybe it's the stress maybe my brain is going a little crazy here and I'm just going to go to the parish experience and just see what that is like maybe the these questions will be answered when I go there so I left the military and I went to Pastor a Presbyterian Church now what was in divine providence this presbyterian churches liturgy was exactly like the liturgy that I had felt comfortable with every Sunday we had the Lord's Supper and we it was liturgical and the people there loved liturgy and it was it was done well and I remembered saying to myself well this this is ideal now at the time though I still was struggling with some of these questions and I didn't give up my Calvinistic convictions one of the one of the experiences I had I remember you right you probably remember this was I was invited to a journey home Network coming home Dover all right party yeah coming home Network luncheon or dinner and I sat there with other ministers who you know developed an affinity for the show and for people that were on there because I was curious about it I watched the program several times and Jana Anderson was was there and I saw you come in too I remember looking over and saying boy he's taller than I thought he was you know when people meet me they say well boy shorter than I thought he was and I had a tough question it was like well how do we know that the interpretation of the Scriptures is the right interpretation of the Scriptures and there was a real Calvinistic answer that I was given at Westminster and I struggled with that and it was that the Holy Spirit reveals to the heart of the individual whose elect that this is true and I struggle I did struggle with that pretty subjective because then yeah because then the next question is well why doesn't the Holy Spirit work with larger groups like the Catholic Church to interpret things and to come to proper conclusions and because in scriptures essentially said that when jesus promised his Holy Spirit that would guided it the church into all truth and why is my interpretation the right one and someone else's not the right one so your Presbyterian are you to cut to the chase a little bit here you didn't just become Catholic right you had an Episcopalian time in there right yes so when I when I was still at that stage and you know I came to the end of about a couple years and I really wanted to go and see if I could serve out some time in the military again so I went back on active duty okay and you know it was part of my initial phase of development I thought this would be a great ministry and maybe if I'm in the Air Force I won't deploy as much you know be away from my family so I went into the Air Force and while I was on active duty and you know I the Air Force was a little bit more challenging than the Army was because the chaplains had less people and they had to come up with services for these less people all together and there was a sense in which we all had to agree on what these services would look like so I remember putting together some of these services that it was like well my tradition does this and your tradition does this their justice does it we're putting together all these liturgies and there was a little dissonance to the developed over that you know and when you put forth these liturgies it was almost like we put forth the first deformed liturgy rather than the first reformed letter and because it was so up and then I you know that was when I kind of thought back to well we had a beautiful liturgy when we used the Book of Common Prayer then one LAT one last thing that kind of convinced me that I needed that I needed to go someplace where there was liturgy that was consistent and dependable was I went on a deployment you know to Iraq okay I was in the desert and it was not an easy deployment it was rather rough and some of the issues had to deal with you know differences with other chaplains over theology differences of the chaplains with perhaps how do we how are we going to do this how we're going to minister with services and I remember thinking myself well there there has to be a way to really kind of do this but it so happened that the people I had differences with were in power in control okay and I there was actually some conflict I remember coming home from deployment that was really really difficult besides the the war just the idea of fatigue and really struggling you know with this now got back went to this chaplain recovery retreat where they talked to people who had difficult deployments and I ran into a friend who was a former PCA who was now an Anglican priest and I said this is the answer you know I talked with him and I said you know I really had a rough deployment I explained some of the things that I'd gone through and thought about and I said how is your experience and he said it's great so I talked with his bishop and they put me through a formation program that lasted about a year and a half it was intensive still it was study at home write papers and I did this while I was on active duty still okay when I started reading and studying Anglican history I realized that Anglicanism is very charitable in its approach to theology okay and even some liturgy more than I had thought initially there were people who were way are many and there were people who were Calvinists there were people who were Wesley and there were people who were you know and I realized that there is some beauty to being charitable and allowing different expressions but then there also is some difficulty in maintaining the whole how does the center hole now I known for my Westminster days that the church had a way of holding things together and it was called the Magisterium and I knew that that would there was a glaring hole there but I tried to fall back constantly on well the elect know that God spoke to them because he spoke to them okay rather than an objective Magisterium that puts together a liturgy and puts together also a theology and says you know this is where Christ has led us so to make a long story short when I finished the end of the study course I thought to myself I think a more anglo-catholic we really need a center and the way the anglo-catholics which is it's beautiful how they can hold us with humility many times is that they still look to Rome and they say that the Pope is the first among equals you know maybe there's just an issue of the power you know whether the ecclesiology is really fine-tuned or not and I think along with John Henry Newman before he was converted I said I will adopt this model and this is kind of how I'll proceed in the middle way as he was trying to find out right a middle way yeah well it didn't really last that long because I realized that since I was really passionately concerned with some of these issues Magisterium etc that I needed to see about the prospects of joining the Catholic Church and at that point I started to talk seriously with people and just ask questions and the question I asked was to I now mere I had moved all the way to Guam I was on the other side of the earth and in an assignment there and I asked a Catholic priest to help me and how he helped me was he hit print button on the New Apostolic Constitution Anglican Oram che tu vas written by benedict xvi inviting Anglicans it's a full communion with the Catholic Church who felt God was leading them to do so read the Apostolic Constitution and started following the steps and it was amazing it really was and how warm and welcoming the church was when I took the step of faith there was a little point there where I kind of fell into limbo now I'm an active duty a lot of there not a lot of people going from the Protestant camp to the Catholic camp so I was kind of going a nun tread water he I mean you know her you know go a nun tread path so to speak so I filled out the paperwork and then I was graciously invited to a formation weekend with other people considering coming into the Catholic Church at fort party Houston Texas the principal Church of the Ordinariate and I'm at Monsignor Steenson and other brothers and sisters there and they welcomed me with open arms they put me through a rigorous program lasted about a year and a half and thank God they accepted me because there was a period there where I didn't know whether I was going to be accepted or not as a priest and they I was ordained a Catholic priest 17 August 2013 I'm sorry we've run out of time Father's Day marks good father Scott you're awesome and I love you you're great that's all I got all right thank you very much and thank you for watching this episode of the journey home I I do pray there father Ross's journey is an encouragement to you god bless you my friend see next [Music] you you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 14,379

Rating: 4.7740111 out of 5

Keywords: JHT, JHT01572

Id: jdCLhK-2rR4

Length: 56min 40sec (3400 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2017