JOURNEY HOME - 2021-09-20 - Adam Crawford

[Music] well good evening and welcome to the journey home i'm marcus groede your host for this program once again as we've done for so many years we have this great opportunity to relax and to sit back and to listen to how the holy spirit opens someone's heart and mind to the beauty of our lord jesus christ and then to the beauty of a place that our guest never thought he'd end up and that is the catholic church our guest tonight is adam crawford he's a former non-denominational pastor that's a wide birth we'll find out in a moment specifically what that was and i also before i invite greet him i want to immediately let you know that his written conversion story is available on our website it's called delving deep in history brought me home and of course that's available at chnetwork.org adam welcome to the journey home thank you marcus yeah i appreciate it good to have you i'm excited i'm excited to be here yeah yeah i know the the thing that's funny to mention i think now uh people will will know because of the the time period we live in but we're finally flying people in yes yes we had began i i began talking to matt probably a year ago about this and and uh yeah all the airlines were closed down you couldn't fly you couldn't travel yeah so you come here from california i do i do i'm currently uh in northern california kind of sacramento area um up in the foothills of the beautiful sierra nevadas so great yeah we love it all right well it's good to have you here thank you very good thank you so let me back away if i would and invite you to get us started on the long journey sure sure so um i i was very fortunate to be raised in a christian home and by parents who took their christianity very seriously so for them they wanted their faith to shape and inform every aspect of their life and i think that's something they picked up from from a group called the navigators they're they're a para church organization that my my dad got involved with my mom and dad got involved with when he was serving in the air force and um and so um they they taught my parents i think how to live intentional christian lives how to take seriously the call to discipleship that we're all called to if we're following jesus um and also the importance of uh evangelizing and and so for my parents and one of the things i'm most grateful for um i'm grateful for a number of things i was exposed to the scriptures very early i was taught to memorize scripture we we constantly read bible stories we studied scripture as a family we talked about these things but one of the things i'm most grateful for is the way my parents took what they saw in the bible and they applied it to their life so if they read st james epistle where he says pure and undefiled religion in the sight of god our father is to care for widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world for my parents um that was a conversation of well maybe we need to consider adoption you know and i've got four adopted brothers and sisters um for for for them if if if they read the words of christ that said hey you need to welcome the stranger the alien the stranger if my dad saw someone broke down the side of the road you know he would stop try and help him out and i remember he encountered a young man who was broke down as he's trying to help him fix his vehicle it became clear we're going to need to get parts it's going to be a longer a longer situation and so he invited him to stay with us and the young man stayed with us for a week or two while my dad got parts and helped him fix his car and helped him get back on the road as an interesting side note to that i believe the young man was catholic and he was the one that introduced my parents to the music of john michael talbot and so i grew up listening to his album the lord's supper almost every sunday morning as we would get ready for church had no idea until decades later that that the entire album is essentially the mass right it begins with um you know a song that that deals with uh the confession and then the gloria and then uh the creed part one and two i mean it just walks you through all the prayers and parts of the mass and uh we had no idea that that was the case but it's that's beautiful still one of my favorite albums it bespeaks to the you know how firm here the ministry of john michael talbot because he he stretches over the boundaries he does yeah and people i got same thing i mean i remember singing some of his you know the the magnificat that he writes i remember singing that long before i ever thought about becoming a catholic right you know and so you can plant seeds into people as it did in your absolutely it's one of those interesting touch points right where you look back and you think oh eve even there i i was god was exposing me in certain ways to the catholic church so um and i've got i can't let this go by the navigators and programs like that were so good at disciplining discipleship you know and getting people to take scripture seriously and to know it and to live it i mean programs like that were really powerful yeah well it's certainly indirectly affect or perhaps directly affected my life and then also uh you know even the lives of my children right because i took what i learned from my parents about trying to make sure that the faith informs every aspect of life and i've tried to carry that on and so yeah it's been certainly very very influential in in my life so you've known christ for a long time i have i have i i i grew up one of the one of the things i i guess i find interesting when i look back is i as a young child i've always been fascinated with the faith i've been fascinated with with theology [Music] being in in scripture and and seeing just the miraculous and mysterious way that god is at work that's always that's always drawn me um but one of the things that was interesting i suppose is is i would talk to people who had this very intuitive sense that that god existed there was no question in their mind about that they perhaps had very direct experiential types of relationships with him and for me that that was hard i i i'm a little more analytical and a little less emotional and i didn't i didn't have just this same intuitive sense that god was there i didn't not believe that he was there but i remember even as a fairly young child just kind of struggling with well maybe i'm not doing something right you know if i'm not experiencing god in the same way that others are maybe i haven't prayed the sinner's prayer right or maybe i need to you know maybe there's sin in my life that's keeping me i don't know what that would be as a grade schooler but um something that's keeping me from this experience and and so um i i i think even very early on part part of my journey was asking questions and trying to understand uh in a deeper more fuller way um the faith so my my parents um were were the churches they went to were evangelical churches i think we started off in an ev-free church we experienced different churches not so much because they would church hop so to speak but things would happen you know a pastor would leave to go minister somewhere else or perhaps unfortunately there'd be a church split you know there'd be an issue where there was argument um over different beliefs and the church would split and so we we did find ourselves at different churches as i as i grew up and and i got to experience and see um some of the different ways that the christians believed and practiced and and i got to see some of the differences there um part of my growing up experience my parents uh got into the homeschooling movement and and pretty early on um at least where we were in in oregon at the time um and many of the families that that were involved in that movement um were also involved with uh bill gothard and um i believe it's called uh his institutes for basic life principles and um they they he would do seminars it's another para church organization um very fundamentalist um a fair amount of of legalism a lot of rules to follow a lot of judgment calls on um [Music] the type of music you listen to how you dress you know what's okay what's not okay all of that and um i struggled with that and and not not necessarily um i i think with some of that it was rules that felt uh like they didn't necessarily have a good uh basis you know don't wear blue jeans dress a certain way you know he had a very where's that in the new testament yeah yeah he had a big thing uh with with music with any sort of uh syncopated beat and so even christian music even in fact my parents ultimately they had put in an application to be a part of um what he did with homeschool families it was ultimately rejected because in their application they said yeah we listened to contemporary christian music and and that that was a no-go you know and i think when they look back i think they were also kind of moving away from that and realizing some of the potential issues there i think i think my dad was probably uh pretty okay to see the application come back that no we're not gonna have you be a part of this our guest tonight is adam crawford you know adam when you look back on those days it wasn't just that you were non-denominational it was also that the assumption of the church which church is irrelevant right you know really it's not just not it's it's church right and that's that was a common boy you know i mean it's it's a proliferating idea even growing today which then opens people up to these para church groups to have influence on their life because it isn't what particular church you're just influential sure and there are tons of those and and not necessarily bad right right it's just how do you decide whether this particular leader who says you can't wear jeans and listen this kind of music whether he's right whether he's right or another group that comes down the pike you know that's kind of where you guys are experiencing that and i think in in terms of finding local church communities you know are the criteria that i saw my family using was well is there a good teacher there who's going to teach directly out of the bible is the worship uplifting is it going to help us to experience god and in worship is there a good community there where we can have fellowship and where we can encourage and exhort each other and all that but but what can happen is um when the leadership in that church changes for whatever reason the entire culture and the things that kind of drew that drew you to that place in the first place might also change really significantly oh yeah and and so you end up you know looking for another another place um one of the things i think that that was challenging for me with with the very fundamentalist uh approach to christianity was the the bible is read in a hyper-literalistic fashion a very very wooden very you know if if the bible says it i believe it and that's it and at a certain level faith was pitted against science you know science is out to disprove the bible and take the place of god and and so if there's any even perceived conflict there rather than trying to say well how do we come to an understanding that that what we're seeing here and what we're seeing here there could be no conflict rather it was no you just need to accept this on faith you need to not question you know questions are potentially a problem either with authority or a lack of faith on your part um and that was challenging for me because again my my the way i've come to know god better and better and draw closer to him is is what what saint and ansel might call faith seeking understanding right that's been kind of my path is as i've tried to understand god better i've also come to know him better i've also come to love him more i've also entered into a deeper relationship with him so that that was um perhaps a bit challenging in terms of my growing up years by the time my time i was um going into my high school years we had really kind of moved on from from that group and and uh we were involved with a four square church throughout my high school years so i got a little taste of uh charismatic christianity uh met my wife uh or my now wife at youth group uh there she grew up assemblies of god and and i went to her church a couple times and they were very charismatic and i thought oh maybe that's not for me those are the real holy rollers um but we had a great experience um our our youth leader was fantastic the church was fantastic we had a great experience we we both um we went to uh western baptist uh bible college for a year out of high school um it's now corbin college i think um and then we decided to get married and at that point uh we couldn't continue to finance uh as a newly married young couple you know ongoing schooling and so we we kind of stepped back from that but but i think where where things started i think perhaps where the path began for me was in my late teens early 20s where i began to look at my experience with these different churches and see that like like you said um there are different things that are put forward as being necessary to the faith or unnecessary to the faith there's different things that are emphasized there's different doctrinal disputes and yet the one constant that i had through all the churches i went through was this idea that it was the bible and the bible alone right this idea that the bible was the sole authority for the christian that it should inform all matters of of our faith our morals our life and yet pragmatically um there was a wide variance in in how different churches under understood the bible yeah you know you're reminding me another thing adam and you as a parent now right yes um is that there's a a cyclical phenomenon that seems to happen between generations you see it in the old testament you know a good king has bad kids yep and then those bad kids might have good kids right and those good kids might have bad kids you know there's a cyclical thing and maricopa it happens sometimes because if by grace we become excited about our faith in a really big part of our life we sometimes pass it on to our kids but maybe they don't get the whole package right because we assume too much sure and so then our kids have to struggle in ways that that's what you're talking about your parents are on fire for the faith right right right and one of the things that i thought about as you were thinking about that you took this book as authoritative yes because it was to your parents right but why right right why why did we decide that this is the sole authority yeah and and so that's i i think that's where i i began to struggle a little bit if this is the sole authority if this is the rule book um how come everyone understands it differently um and and it's commonly said that um that that on the protestant side we we agree about all the essentials but on some of the non-essentials there's disagreement that doesn't so much matter that that wasn't my experience though i mean churches disagree on whether or not baptism is necessary for salvation whether or not you can lose your salvation those seem like pretty essential things to me like like what is the process for how we are saved and and do we remain in that state regardless of how we live our lives or can salvation be lost that that seems very essential and there was an agreement on that um so i i think at a certain point i said well i need to revisit that i'm very familiar with the bible i'm very familiar with scripture my parents had done a great job of of giving me that but i think at a certain point i said i need to go to where it says in the bible that it's the bible the bible alone or the bible's the source of all authority and i need to study that study that contextually and see what i'm missing here so i went to that spot in the bible and i i couldn't find it and i said i know it's here i i i know at this point you're not a pastor yet are you no no no this is my late teenage year okay this got you got you got you guys yeah this is yeah no you're fine this is this is my late teenage years and and uh and i was really trying to find okay where do we get this idea of the bible and the bible alone and i i couldn't find it in there like i i i said i know it's in paul's letter somewhere i know it and i couldn't find it i asked my dad and he couldn't find it and the closest perhaps um you can get is in paul's i believe it's the second letter to timothy where it says all of scripture is god breathed it's inspired it's useful for teaching and correcting and reproof that the man of god may be thoroughly equipped for every good work fully agree but that doesn't speak to scripture being the soul authority or the soul rule for faith or that only that which we see in the bible ought to inform our worship or our lives it it it it's not what i was looking for and so i took those questions with me some of those difficulties with me when i went to um bible college and began to talk to professors about that i also saw issues the the other common thread that i saw in all these churches was this idea of faith alone you know it's by faith alone that we are saved not by works and and yet as i studied the bible there are passages that that actually say the exact opposite you know again if you go back to the uh the epistle james epistle um it specifically says that faith without works is dead you know and so i i began to see that some of these things that that were very common to the christianity i experienced regardless of denomination regardless of church were issues that that i really couldn't substantiate from scripture um and so that that that was hard and and i i think um i mean the irony of it is that on the one hand you were brought up to take this very literally but there were so many verses in new testament that said we'll be held accountable for what we do yeah so what do you do with those verses absolutely right i mean correct cri all of christ's teaching yeah those who persevere till the end will be saved you know if you remain in me and bear much fruit right even how he separates the sheep from the goats and it's based on the corporal works of mercy right and so um yes i mean it's unavoidable in the text and so i i think at a certain level i got to the point where um and i don't know that i ever walked away from the faith but i got to the point where i said i i really need to make sure that what i'm being told is is the truth right i had experienced um with with uh some of the fundamentalism um some some issues i had experienced um things that that i was being taught were foundational to the faith that i couldn't substantiate in the scripture and and going into my early 20s i i essentially said well i need to just deconstruct christianity take it down to the basics and ask you know is there even a god if so has he revealed himself if so in what ways can i trust the the scriptures um and it was an effort to resolve some of these questions i had excuse me and so that's exactly what i did and i began to look at cosmological arguments for the existence of god i i began to look at philosophical proofs for the existence of god i i started reading um dr william lane craig i don't know if you're familiar with him but he's he's a fantastic evangelical apologist and philosopher so i began considering all these things i decided yes it's far more reasonable to believe that god exists and that he doesn't um i began looking at scripture and textual reliability and historical questions all this and i walked away just amazed amazed by by scripture as as the text right i mean we have more extant copies than any other ancient manuscript and they're far more accurate and there's just nothing else that even compares right and and i looked at the life of christ and and and him as a historical figure and and the accounts of his resurrection and even walked away saying yes the surprisingly perhaps but the resurrection is the best explanation for what happened right so in any number of ways and and this took i mean from my late teens probably through my late 20s like i i really kind of just turned through all these things kind of one one step at a time and i walked away with my faith having been incredibly strengthened um i i felt very confident in god in the scriptures and the person of christ and i wasn't able to resolve these other questions at all i still had no idea you know the scripture and the bible in the bible alone still didn't make sense faith alone still didn't make sense i still didn't understand why we see we saw all this division and disagreement uh amongst all these different churches well when you were doing those research uh examinations of all these really foundational issues it seems to me it had been hard to avoid the historic church at that point i didn't if i could be honest i did not um history depending i think on um your your protestant background history can be a little bit sparse right my impression of church history was christ founded a church and um and the apostles go forth and constantine gets involved and there's lots of rules and man-made traditions and all of a sudden it becomes not just the church but the empire and the church and things go off the rails and there's vague interludes of crusades and and uh inquisitions and then thankfully things get back on track with the reformers i mean my my my exposure to church history was literally about that vague until the time of the reformers and then and then i had studied um and again with my parents even um the the the lives of the reformers and church history kind of from that point forward and the great awakenings in in in here in america and all that but um but but no i did i did not have a good grasp on on church history and so i came to the end of kind of wrestling through all this on the one hand i was very encouraged my faith had been built up uh incredibly through the process on the other hand it was very disheartening to come to the end of that and say i still can't resolve these fundamental issues and i thought i would be able to and i can't and i i guess i'm just going to have to let that go and so the good side of that i think was surrendering surrendering myself to god and saying god i've done my best i've tried to resolve this i can't i don't know where else to go so you know i throw myself on the mercy of the court so to speak but and so that's kind of where i left it um we we continued to be very involved with various churches and different ministries in those churches and small groups and bible studies and all this um around around the time i turned 30 we moved to idaho so i could so i could take a job there and we began getting involved with a with a non-denominational church where we were in idaho and it was fantastic it was very very good the the the church was associated with um i don't know if associated with is the right word but one of the founding pastors there was a professor at boise bible college um the the adult education the faith formation that was going on was fantastic um for the first time in years i felt like rather than all my studies being self-directed that i had others to kind of come alongside me and help me grow in my faith and helped me see things that i hadn't hadn't seen before the church was non-denominational but but many of them had kind of come out of a church of christ background i believe and so uh the church of christ comes out of the restoration movement and there's this there's a sense that we want to get back to what what was the early church and what what did that look like and how can we do life that way there's also a sense that we we don't want to major on these things that create division in the church we want there to be unity and um so you hear some of some some of these statements like no creed but christ right and i can appreciate that i can appreciate the desire for unity um but no creed but christ leaves a lot on the table right a lot of really essential things [Music] so we began getting involved with that church and and we began getting involved in ministry there and over time over several years as we got more involved eventually the other pastors there came and said we'd like you to consider maybe being on the pastoral team and i told my wife and she laughed at me and and then we talked about a little bit and um i i decided yeah i'd like to do that and so i spent some time with them i spent probably a year or so kind of sitting in and and kind of getting up to speed on on how they were pastoring the church and and and then uh came on uh the pastoral team and i i was largely uh helping with adult education i was running um our our men's ministry and helping with our small group ministry and all that one of the things and this returns to what you're saying about church history one of the things i decided to do at that point was teach an adult education class over the course of 16 weeks kind of going through church history and partly because i realized that my own understanding was deficit that there was a lot of gaps in my understanding of church history from the time of christ forward and i thought boy wouldn't it be great to kind of go through this and draw out certain heroes of the faith and in certain ways that their lives have have influenced us all these many years later and i was generally aware you know of of people like aquinas or augustine or or even saint benedict a little bit one of the other pastors at the church as we had talked together and stuff he had he had begun encouraging me to put into place certain spiritual disciplines that come out of the monastic movement and even to draft a rule of life and some of some of these various things so i've become aware of some of these different uh threads i thought how cool would it be to to walk through that and to look at that and to be able to present that to others as here's some here's some heroes of the faith in in more modern times that have influenced christians even to our day and here's some of the things we can learn from them i wouldn't have thought of them as saints at that point but um well something tells me this this study is going to be a key point in your journey here it it was so why don't we pause there sure take our break and then we'll pick you up right when you're starting to teach this adult class on church history very interesting let's go back in a moment hear more of adam's story [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home i'm your host marcus grodi and our guest tonight is adam crawford and as i mentioned earlier in the program his full conversion story written version is on our website called delving deep in history brought me home and you can check that out at chnetwork.org okay so we we paused you you're just getting ready to teach this class yeah so um so as i began to study so that i could then present this information um i was reading through protestant history books i wasn't obviously studying catholic history books but even in the protestant history books it it slowly kind of became inescapable to me that the faith was passed on by the catholic church to the time of the reformation and i i know that may sound very basic um but i remember encountering a chapter in one of these books that i believe was titled or maybe subtitled when we were all catholic that just hit me like a ton of bricks i'm like what do you mean when we were all catholic but but but again what it drove home to me is well that's the way the faith was handed down we didn't have these denominations prior to the reformation we didn't have all these different churches yes there was orthodoxy but when you look at orthodoxy and catholicism they're so so similar in terms of the sacraments in terms of being apostolic churches in terms of even liturgy and um so that really struck me and as i began to study the lives of these different characters and as i began to look into this all of a sudden um some of my prior misconceptions about catholicism were starting to kind of fall away and it was hard for me because one of one of the things i don't think i mentioned earlier is is from that fundamentalist side i was exposed to a lot of very kind of anti-catholic belief you know there's a lot of people that that would have said catholics are absolutely not christians uh catholicism is absolutely a cult uh it's our job to evangelize and get these people saved so they can just experience freedom in christ because right now they're in bondage they don't even know it so i had a lot of really anti-catholic feelings throughout my life and not against individual catholics but just in terms of the church in terms of the institution in terms of what i saw as being something that wasn't bringing people closer to god but was instead taking them farther away so as i began to teach these the this class i i also began to encounter certain certain situations where all of a sudden i'd run into something and i'd say well how did that look right from the beginning i realized that obviously constantine wasn't the person that changed the church right he made christianity legal thanks be to god but but it wasn't like the church took a 90 degree turn at that point and as i began looking at the writings of some of the fathers of the church what stood out to me starkly was how many of early christian practice belief was very catholic in nature and right from the beginning so it's like if if they got it wrong they got it wrong immediately like right after the apostles and and that didn't really make sense to me either um and and and most of most of what i would have considered perhaps catholic catholic peculiar peculiar yeah you can't even say the word uh things that are peculiarly catholic uh come about in the first 200 years they're they're not later inventions um we we see um reverence for the saints and the martyrs we see infant baptism we see uh a belief in the real pres presence of christ and the eucharist we see even the hierarchy of the church even when it comes to follow your bishop as if you were following christ where the bishop is there the church is you know those those are things that i had to grapple with and say well what does that mean you know and especially if we're trying to get back to the way the early church was well the early church looks very catholic so so that was that was quite quite an eye-opener for me and i found myself as i was teaching these classes in many many cases kind of almost um you know trying to explain the catholic position on certain things and i i still didn't fully know the catholic position but trying to say well listen they got a lot of this right here and and they weren't completely wrong here and it's because of this that we got here and so i i think there's just a gradual gradual softening in my attitude throughout that process the other thing that happened and and perhaps coming out of this study i was doing but at some point i was driving down the road and i thought i wonder if there's a catholic radio station like i there's all sorts of christian radio stations and contemporary christian music and and you can turn to the station and listen to you know a pastor preaching i wonder if catholics have something like that so i just started flipping the dial and i don't know how i i don't know how i'd even recognize a catholic station if i found it but i was i was looking for one and um and all of a sudden i turned to the station and it's the rosary the hail mary full of grace and they're going through this i thought oh this is this is clearly the catholic station so i thought i'm gonna listen i'm going to see what goes on well this prayer just kept going marcus it just kept going and going and going i thought is that all it is here i mean just say hail mary's all day and so i spun the dial went on about a week later i thought well i'm going to check again and uh as i go back there same thing i must have been on at the same time i must have been on the same time but again it was it was the rosary and and you know i listened for another 15 minutes or something they're still going i thought well this is ridiculous and so i i moved on and and about a week later i thought well i'm gonna give it one more try and i think i was on a different time and i turned on the radio and it was catholic answers and there was all these protestants calling in saying why does the church teach that's not us about this i thought yeah it's a great one why do you guys believe that then there'd be this beautiful answer i'm like oh oh that's really good that really makes sense that really so i think that really jump started as well um my my my journey i i really began to say okay i need to study seriously the catholic faith not just what i've heard about catholicism not just all the half truths or misconceptions that i'm bringing to this i need to study what does the church teach because a lot of these answers i was hearing started really making sense to me and as i began to do that i started you know i started ordering all sorts of books and uh and getting on on the internet and i'm reading the fathers of the church and i'm reading through these books and i mean there's times where i'd spend several hours a night you know just going through this and it was it was such um it was such a mixed feeling for me because for the first time you know after all these years of searching for answers to certain questions difficulties that i had that i thought were difficulties fundamentally with christianity christianity as i knew it all of a sudden i was getting answers to those questions and at the same time there was this thing deep inside me that was saying but i can't be catholic like there's no way i i can become catholic and so it was very it's very weird i mean i was i was intensely excited i was intensely uh i i mean just overcome with joy to be getting these answers after all these years and yet i was also like absolutely terrified of what this might mean where this might take me dear i ask uh where your wife was in all this no it's a great question so she um she was not interested in having conversations about catholicism right she was at this point a pastor's wife she was very happy where we're at we're in a great church we have a great community um she wasn't interested in talking about this i should say too at the same time i had been admitted into fuller theological seminary i was going to move down to california with my family and start a new job and begin school and start moving towards full-time work in ministry so she wasn't thrilled about talking about all this like like we're getting ready to take these steps and um i don't think she had the same anti-catholic sentiment that i did um but she just had no desire really to to she was comfortable where things were at she was happy where things were at she hadn't had these same questions that i did um so it was i wasn't able to really have any deep conversations with her she changed the subject i think she thought well he'll look into this and then he'll move on and things will go back to normal [Music] so so i i kept kind of progressing down that road because you know i think the truth compels us at a certain level when you encounter truth when you encounter answers to questions especially when they're there are questions that you've been looking for answers to you're kind of compelled to keep following that that that path we moved to california i i had about six months before classes were going we're going to start and as i kept investigating the faith i finally came to a point where i said well and i sat down i told my wife this i said i need to start going to mass i i've seen all this from the outside i've looked at all this from the outside i need to experience this i need to see if this is where god god is calling me and at that point and to her credit she said well if you're that serious about it um then we're going to come with you because we had started attending a nondenominational church there in california and i told her i said i'll keep going to church with you and the kids and she said no if if we're going to look at this we're going to look at this as a family and and so we we went to mass together um our our first experience was a little rough um the the the the priest was very hard to understand the music was very somber uh we were very out of place all together in terms of when do you stand and when do you kneel and what are the responses and it was hard it wasn't at all what we were used to and partly because of some of the things i studied i i saw i had a a a deep resonance with what was going on and what it meant but in terms of a worship experience it was a it was a tough experience so we went to another parish and that was a lot better um the the the musical director there um the the songs were more upbeat we could understand the priests there was other young people there it was a it was a much much different experience and we thought okay well maybe you know and we um we began going to rcia classes and that's when um her and i began to have lots of conversations lots of conversations and we began to discuss things and her and i were both received into the church together my oldest son i went through rcia with him the following year he had he had seen all this going on but he you know he was still considering himself and i didn't want to he was at a age where i didn't want to just say well you need to do this i wanted it to be his process and so i went through rcia with him the following year and he was received in and then my two younger sons basically experienced a normal religious education and confirmation and all that so if if a non-catholic christian was to was to ask you uh what was the one thing that convinced you this was something you had to do yeah yeah that that's a great question as soon as you ask that i'm reminded of gk chesterton who right who said i there's not one thing there's 10 000 things and they all amount to the one thing which is it's true right um that's a bit of a paraphrase but that's essentially what he said uh i think that was the thing for me right i think it was trying it was faith seeking understanding and trying to come to what is true no matter where that leads me and it didn't lead me where i thought it was going to um but but it was such a joy to come to that place and all of a sudden finally have have the puzzle go together the way it's supposed to right i i felt like previously uh my christianity was different components of a puzzle but there was pieces missing um there was pieces i was trying to jam in that weren't a part of that puzzle that weren't intended to fit i couldn't make the picture on this side connect to the picture on this side and all of a sudden i i i come to the catholic faith and i've got the pieces i need to complete the puzzle and the big picture comes out and it's beautiful it's beautiful to see that so so when you come home to the the church church of truth and you walk through those gates did you find perfection no no certainly certainly how did you and your wife go with what you found um i i was aware of that i think going into it right i had seen the abuse scandals i'd seen um even as i studied history i'd seen the church at its best and i'd seen the church at its worst right and one of the compelling things is in spite of all we do to mess it up the church has continued for 2000 years because it's not fundamentally um it's fundamentally the promise of christ right that he will preserve his church that the gates of hell will not prevail against it right um and and i think that's a compelling thing when you look at how much um has been not done in the name of the catholic church that's that's both both beautiful and horrific and yet the church has endured because christ has preserved it so i i think i had wrestled with some of that prior to coming in and for me and again i could look at my own background i could look at all the protestant denominations and churches i'd been involved in and i i'd seen failure there um it's not fundamentally a catholic issue it's fundamentally a human issue right we we uh we fail and and um thanks be to god he's there to pick us back up and and his grace is sufficient to move forward so yeah there's there's probably just about as many sinners on this side of the tiger as there was on the other yeah and that's you and me yeah right i mean here we are you know all trying to grow uh by the mercy of god growing grace and and become more like him right that's our concept step by step journey we have an email evan from minnesota he writes i have a christian co-worker who seems to think that it doesn't matter what church you belong to as long as you love jesus and that the differences between denominations aren't really that important what led you to believe that it mattered which church you were a part of that's a good question um fundamentally i think part of the answer to that question we encounter this not even amongst denominations but we encounter this with people that say it doesn't really matter what religion you're a part of right what faith you're part of all paths lead to god and and fundamentally i think that that that that's not a true statement right um the direction we had um determines where we're going to end up right if i want to get to mexico i can't head north to canada um and so what i experienced was there's there's much in the different denominations that we share in terms of in terms of truth in terms of our understanding of god but there's also um and and we we have to recognize this as well there are differences there are things um that that christ taught um that that lead us to say okay i either need to follow christ on this and a lot of this comes down to some of the moral issues that we see in today's world right the the catholic church her teaching on divorce and remarriage most protestants don't don't share that perspective anymore um unfortunately um our society is experiencing a lot of different issues today where people say well you know maybe it doesn't really matter so much what you believe so long as you know you just love god so long as you just love jesus that's not what jesus said jesus said those who love me will obey me right he sent the disciples out he said teach them to obey all i have commanded you and fundamentally christ established the church he gave those apostles his authority and and he commissioned them to go out and to teach others to to obey his teachings so for me i think the compelling thing about the church when i look at these other denominations is i can see the consistency of of her teaching her doctrine throughout the centuries doctrine has developed but it hasn't changed and in so many other churches i i saw i i saw positions change over the years yeah yeah well you know the core of that idea that you know all religions lead to what the core of the idea is the truth and that is that god placed within the conscience of every human being that's ever lived uh if you will a desire sure for creator creator we know that's true sure but uh but when people push too hard on that they forget the fact of the spiritual battle sure you know right we're weak we're sinners and there's the world the flesh and the devil and so out there we need that's why we need the community we need the church we need the truth we need the graces we need we need that authority in our lives uh we we cannot be our our own authority um and and that that can be hard i think for people but but it's so necessary we have another email monique from north carolina i feel like i'm at a crossroads with the bible i'm coming across so many different interpretations which all seem like they could possibly work right now i'm stuck because i'm wondering either if there really is one authoritative way to understand the bible or if maybe there's just no authoritative way to understand the bible did you deal with this on your journey i did i did so surprisingly um one of the things that got me thinking about this was i came across a quote from the orthodox church actually um and and uh i don't remember it exactly but but in essence it said no individual has the definitive right of interpretation when it comes to the bible but rather the church to whom the bible was given is able to help guide our interpretation so as a church right as a as as um the body of christ we can interpret this but when we try and approach it with our own individual perspective what does what does the bible say to you what does it say to me what do i think this means i i don't have the ability to definitively interpret the bible and and part of the um beautiful thing i think about the catholic church is we have 2 000 years of tradition where that church has said this is the proper way to understand these these scriptures as a community as a body as a magisterium and i think we can trust that where we can't trust our own individual interpretations a couple minutes left adam you came into the church with a deep faith in christ after becoming a catholic what is it that's helped you grow in christ any number of things most recently for the last uh four years i i've been um in formation towards the permanent diaconate and so that's been incredibly formative in my in my ongoing growth as a believer but but i think again i think this sense of participating in my personal growth within the community of christ right within his church um has opened up uh areas of growth that i never would have reached on my own that i just never would have seen so let's assume now as we're sitting here that there's somebody watching who's right now where you were right what would you say to that person we ought to consider making the same jury yeah i would say don't be afraid to follow the truth where it leads you don't be afraid to follow jesus where he takes you be willing to take a look at these things be willing to consider them and pray for them and i i would invite them to come home it was such a joy for me and my family to come into the church and realize we're home this is where god wants us to be and i would invite them to make to make that same journey um to it to at least consider those things and be willing to take those steps where would you say the first steps like someone might want to go because you know there's a lot of voices out there today especially today it's crazy out there where where do you begin right there there are a lot of voices uh thankfully there's there's voices like yours you know this show what was so influential for me as i'm listening to other people's paths as i'm listening to their journeys the questions they asked um for me also of course and i think i'd mentioned this catholic answers helped me answer a lot of questions because the questions can be very diverse and our background could be very diverse and and so i appreciated um hearing all those different aspects through through some of those programs all right adam yeah well thank you for joining us thank you marcus the journey hopefully you know we have a special prayer for you as you enter the diaconate right you're you're still in the process right i'm still in the process i'm a year out god willings all right well our prayers go with you and all that and your family thank you i appreciate it thank you again for your witness on the program thank you very much for the third time i'll remind the audience if you want to read adam's full story you can go to chnetwork.org and you can read his conversion story called a delving deep in history brought me home so again thank you adam thank you and thank all of you for watching this episode of the journey home i do pray that adam's journey is an encouragement to you god bless you see you again next week [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 4,416

Rating: 4.9272728 out of 5

Keywords: jht, jht01744, ytsync-en

Id: OZsi_VVLG8s

Length: 55min 58sec (3358 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021