[music] Marcus Grodi: Good evening and welcome to
'The Journey Home'. I'm Marcus Grodi,
your host for this program, and once again, we have
this great opportunity to hear how the
Holy Spirit has touched a couple's life and drawing them to
a deeper walk with Christ, and then to His Church, and it really does amaze me,
after all these years, you kind of think
that the stories just repeat one another, and it's always
the same fingerprints of the Holy Spirit,
but people are so different in the way God
reaches out to us. Our guests tonight are
Doug and Dawn Doughan, former evangelical
youth ministers, and I'm going to say
right up front that Doug's story
is written on our website, if you want to go to that later
and get more details, 'Seeing the Church
With New Eyes', but, Doug and Dawn,
welcome to the program. Dawn: Thank you. It's great
to have you here. Thank you, Marcus.
Thank you for inviting us. And whenever I have two
on the program, I've got to
shut up real fast. So, I'm looking forward
to hearing your story. So, who's going to begin? - Doug.
- I'll probably start. First, I want to just say, I've seen a lot of different
people on this show. A few weeks ago,
you had a gentleman by the name
of Frank Cronin. - Yes.
- I mean, I tell you what, I watched that guy
as he sat here and just smiled the
whole time he was talking, and he's so smart,
and I was like, 'This guy is just perfect
for this show.' So, thanks for
inviting us. It's good to
have you both here. Appreciate it. You want to
hear our story, as far as like
being a kid, I was raised in a nice
Catholic family. There was eight
of us kids - three boys, three girls; or there's five boys,
three girls. Mom and dad were farmers. We had, I don't remember
how many acres they had. We raised cattle,
chickens, sheep, pigs, all the things you could probably think of
on a farm. That's what we had.
That's how I grew up. Going to church,
it wasn't an option. My folks were both,
my dad's Irish-German. My mom is Czech, 100%. We call her
100% Bohemian, and church was what
we just did. We just went to Mass. I can always
remember my mom, especially as a young boy,
my mom taking us, on a Saturday,
to confession. We would go into the church,
spend some time, and then we'd
go to confession. I think her hope was
always that we wouldn't, we would be good by
the time we went to Mass the next Sunday morning, which always
wasn't the case, but many times we were,
we did a pretty good job. So, I grew up that way,
young farm family. My dad worked hard,
taught us all how to work. God was in our life. There's no doubt
about it. Marcus: That's what
I was wondering. Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely. My folks were,
we did not miss Mass, and even the relations,
all the relations - I thought about this - all the relatives
that I had growing up, either on my mom's side
or my dad's side, they were all Catholic. I mean, I think my mom was from a family
of eight or nine, and my dad was from
a family of seven or five. What part
of the country? Iowa, Northwest Iowa. See, that's very
fascinating, because in the
history of America, a lot of the Catholics came
and stopped at the cities, but there were groups of
immigrants that went up, and so, you had these
Catholic enclaves of farmers. Yeah, and actually, we celebrated
our 100-year farm, I would say probably
15 years ago, so that farm's been in my
dad's family for 115 years. So, his dad had it, and I think his dad
before that had that. So, farm family.
Went to Mass. A large Catholic
Irish-Bohemian family. I can still remember us going to Mass
on Sunday mornings. Of course,
this was before seatbelts. They would pile us all
in the station wagon. Some of us, I was kidding
with someone earlier that they'd put us
in the back windows. Well, that's really
kind of true. My younger brother, we'd always kind of put
in the back window, and he would ride to Mass. I don't know how safe that
was, but we'd go to Mass, and it was just,
that's how everyone in the '60s and '70s, all of my friends
that I can remember, went to church, either
to Mass, as Catholics; or even my
Protestant friends, they all went and attended
a church somewhere, because on Sundays,
it wasn't, it was more like Mayberry, more like, Sundays,
everything was shut down. And so, we went to Mass, spent time with our families
and our cousins. Do you have a
similar upbringing? I was raised Methodist, went to church every Sunday. Went to Bible school
in the summer. My mom would, we had
five kids in one bedroom, so we had two sets
of bunk beds and a crib. My mom would sit in
the middle of the room and read us Bible
stories and pray. So, yeah,
great upbringing. Those were the days
when a family grew up in a small house and never
thought twice about it. - Exactly.
- We have these huge houses where every kid's
got to have a... Their own room. ...their own room, and yeah, that's the way, actually,
the family I grew up next to us
was the same way, five kids
and distributed amongst, actually two rooms,
but small little house. That's the way
it was then. We had five boys in one
bedroom, in two bunk beds. Me and my younger brother
sat feet to face and slept feet
to face forever. It was common. - The way things were.
- Very common. So, Methodist, did you know
Christ, growing up...? Well, growing up, we heard
a lot about Jesus, a lot of Bible stories. So, I would say, I mean, we prayed before meals
and before bed. So, but both of you
grew up with a... - Yeah.
- ...with an understanding that there is a God,
there is a Creator. Yeah, so that's, that sets
our understanding. You weren't atheist,
you weren't agnostic. You were brought up in a
good Christian environment. - Yeah.
- Yeah, I can remember even during Lent,
there was times, of course, you got all
the kids around the church. My dad would
always want us to say the rosary
periodically. So, we would sit around
and say the rosary. Of course, when you got
young kids, you start giggling, and I had a younger
brother that was, he was a card, and he
would start giggling, and before you knew it,
I would start laughing, and we'd feel
that quick tap on the back of our head to pay attention
to what's going on. So, but yeah, we were brought
up that way, both of us. Which was, actually,
to be honest, we only lived five
miles apart, as kids. And you can just tell the
story about our parents and grandparents, quick. Well, our
grandparents hung out, and then they had sons. Our dads were best friends, graduated from
high school together, and then, well,
we ended up together. I loved him
since Fourth Grade. Isn't that hard to believe, somebody like me could have somebody
love me for that long? Well, she knew
you young. Yeah, I did. Our families were
connected forever, yeah. But our families were,
and they were really close, and it was kind of neat. So, and I can remember
going over to their house as a young kid. I was a little more engaged
with her brother, Paul, who's a couple of
years older than her, and we'd play and stuff, but there was this
cute little blonde girl that'd be
sitting around there, kind of quiet and shy,
not saying too much. Didn't really pay
much attention to her until she got into about
the middle school ages, Eighth Grade,
somewhere around there. Eighth Grade on. So, how did you
guys get connected, then? How did the story
move on from there? From Eighth Grade. Yeah, so yeah,
from Eighth Grade on, we just started dating, and the thing that
I admired about him was that he would talk
about God, and he had great
reverence for God. In a good way. Yeah, in a good way, and we would, even on date
night, Saturday night, he'd go to confession before our date,
and I admired that. I'd take her to Mass
with me, and that's kind of strange, because I didn't
feel like I was, I didn't feel like I was any
different than anyone else. I just, there was always
this little urging to have God a part
of our life. I can even remember
driving through town, many times by myself, and just stop
at the Catholic church and just go
sit in the back. This is when churches
were still unlocked, which was awesome. Marcus:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would go sit
in the quiet, the church and just sit there, and just pray
and just think. What also strikes me
that your two families, who were friends
for so long, Catholic and Methodist, that you, they set the tone
for your lives. In other words,
you accepted one another. It wasn't an issue,
that it sounds like. When we got married, my dad wanted
to make sure that we got married
in the Methodist church, but we had a priest there. So, yeah,
it all worked out. So, we had a blessing
from the priest. And so, we honored that, and after we got married, she started kind
of kidding around that wanting to maybe
become Catholic. We would go to Mass. We attended a Catholic
church all the time. We wouldn't miss Mass
for either Saturday night or Sunday morning. And so, we made a couple
of good friends in some priests. One of them was Father; can I mention
Father's name? Father Tom Flanagan, who was at
the Wesley church in Britt, Iowa
at the time. We were pretty young, and so, we got
to meet him, and he was
an on-fire priest that just spoke the Word,
and it was good. Well, wait a second,
what are you two doing on this program? I mean, you were brought
up Catholic, good Catholic,
good Methodist. You met. You got married,
you're Catholics. I mean, what are you doing on 'The Journey
Home' program? - There's a gap.
- There's a gap. Okay, there's a gap. Like 30-year gap. There's a
gap in there, yeah. What happened? Well, why don't you
talk about our marriage, how that was working out? Okay, so we went
together all these years. Got married
when we were 20, 21, and you'd think
that you'd know each other really well,
right? But when Christ isn't at
the center of your marriage, it doesn't
always go smoothly. And so, there was
a rough period right after we got married. We had a son. We checked with the priest if it was okay
to name him Trinity. So, that's our son's name. Anyway, but Doug was still
not just channeled into being a father
and a husband. Most of his friends
were not married yet. And so, he wasn't
home a lot, and so, but I had
friends of ours that were a real
inspiration to me as far as their
marriage was really good. And so, I just got down
on the side of my bed, and I said, "Lord, I know that this is not how marriage
is supposed to be. So, please come into our life
and change our marriage." And started praying
with friends, this couple, and I brought home
a Christian comedian cassette tape, back then. Ages us.
Cassette tapes. So, he would listen
to that in the tractor when he was farming, and he could relate to that. I don't know,
the comic relief. Yeah, her view
of a husband/father was a lot different
than mine. I mean, I thought I was
doing everything right. I was playing softball,
I was in a bowling league, I was playing cards,
I was going hunting, I was going fishing,
and I was still working, and we were still
going to church. What more could
she ask for? But she's right. I mean, as you
hear that... For her anniversary,
you got a new fishing rod. - Yeah.
- Yeah. Yeah, very
self-centered, I was. I wasn't the husband
and the father that I needed to be. And she brought
this CD home, and we had some friends,
really good friends, and they had converted. They had had a Jesus
moment in their life, and they had both become
born-again Christians, and so, she started
to reach out to them, and they started praying
for me, and then it's like
she said, she brought that
cassette tape home, and I listened to it
for quite some time. Like two years. Yeah, I'm a slow learner. I'm not a very
quick learner. I listened to it... The tractor's
pretty loud out there. It is, exactly, but I listened to it
in my car. I had an old cassette
player in there as well. And at the end of
the tape, the guy goes, "I'm not talking about
religion or church." He's saying, he's saying,
"Just give Jesus a chance in your life. Just give Jesus a chance
in your life." Well, we had,
for those two years, things were
still pretty rocky. We never ever were abusive
or anything like that, but we just weren't
on the ways that we needed to be. And so, I can
remember one night sitting out
in the corn field, waiting for the,
it's in October of 1982, waiting for
the combine wagon to come to
unload the corn, and I got out
of my tractor, and I walked out
through the cornfield, and I looked up;
you know in the fall, how it's just crisp, and the sky is just
beautiful, and the stars
were just shining, and I - gulp - there was a time;
I had asked God, I had asked God
many times to help me, because I was always in
trouble doing certain things, and he always
kind of bailed me out, but this time, I think
the cry of my heart, I got down on my knees. I said, "Lord, I'm really
screwing my life up." I said, "Make me like
those Jesus freaks." It was a real prayer
of repentance. I mean, one of those, I don't even know
how to explain it, but it was one of those
times when I'm like, I really meant it. I needed him to change me,
because I couldn't do it. And so, I went home
that night, and I had an old Bible that a lady had given me
when I was at college, studying
'Heritage of the Bible'. It's a course. That's not a very easy
course, by the way, 'Heritage of the Bible', it's about things that
I didn't think it was. But I grabbed that Bible, and I opened it up
to Matthew Chapter 1, because I wanted
to know this Jesus that this guy had
been talking about. Now, Matthew Chapter 1
to a lot of people, they'd be like,
'Oh my goodness. They begot, begot.' It's the genealogy
of Jesus, but as I read through
that, it's like, this Jesus is real. I mean, He's real. He's not some far away,
He was real, and it just ignited
some things inside of me that had never been
ignited before, and I had a desire to learn
as much as I could about this Jesus. I shared this with my wife,
and of course, she shared it with
these friends of ours, these friends that had
this Jesus experience, and I mean, they were out
to our home with tracts and Bibles, and they were
sharing stuff with us, and they just
jumped into our lives, and we just
couldn't get enough of what we were learning. Our guests are
Doug and Dawn Doughan. I'm just wondering
if somebody's listening to what you just said
and said, "Wait a second,
you were Catholic from the time you were,
you're baptized and catechized
and confirmed and Mass and all the stuff
you talked about, and now you
discovered Jesus? I know. Isn't it crazy? I mean, I mean, it is,
because Marcus, I can remember us going
to Mass shortly thereafter, and we were sitting in Mass, and the priest
was going through it, and then it came
to the Gospel, and we all stood up
to read, and he started reading
from the Gospel, and I was like, 'He's
reading from the Bible. He's reading the Gospel
from the Bible,' I'm 23 years old, and I finally realized,
he's reading Scripture. I mean, and it set off, like, we couldn't
read enough. We couldn't get
enough to grow. We started attending
a Bible study. We continued
to go to Mass, and we started attending
a Bible study in the church service, at a local Evangelical
Free Church. And we had talked to the
priest about our experience. This young priest
that we had talked to. - And he was excited that...
- Yes. ... we had this
awakening to Christ. And so, when we
would go to Mass, every once a while, he'd say
some certain things, and as we'd go out to say,
"Thanks, Father," he'd say, "Hey, did you
hear what I said today?" I'd say, "Yeah,
that's awesome." So, he was super excited
and real encouraging to us, but now you probably want
to get to that part, 'Well, how did you jump
away from the Church?' Marcus: Sure. Well, one
particular night, my dad and I were out
working on some equipment in the shed one night, and my dad had heard,
through the grapevine, from one of the guys that
was going to the churches that we were going
to our Bible study at, that Doug and Dawn were
coming there on Sunday nights to learn the Scripture,
and he thought, well, it's real exciting
to see them there. Well, you mentioned,
my dad Catholic. Back in those days, you just didn't
frequent other churches, and so, through
a series of discussions, my dad basically said, "Doug, I really don't want you going to that
Bible study out there and going to that church." And I said, "Well, Dad, you can't tell me
where to go to church." And now when I say it; back then I thought
I was a pretty; Matthew chapter,
I think it's 10 or 12, "If you acknowledge
Jesus in front of man, I'll acknowledge you
in front of the Father." I was like, "I'm going to;" He said, "Well, if you do, then you can't
work here anymore, with us on the farm." And I said, of course,
in my pride, big. "Okay, well,
I guess I'm gone." So, I drove home
that night, and the next couple of days,
I started looking for work. But we lived really
close to my family, and anyway, I met
with my family members, and they were all talking
to me about some stuff, and I promised I wouldn't
be evangelizing and, because I had a lot
of the zeal at the time, and ended up just
leaving the Church. You haven't lost
that zeal, my friend. I know, I'm sorry,
no, I haven't, but I mean,
I just left the Church, because I just, 'Okay, we're going to go here because they've got
good music. They've got great
kids' programs. All of our friends
are there, and they got
a good pastor. He's dynamic. I'm reading
from the Scriptures,' and we just started going, and we just started attending
a different church. Nothing against
the Catholic Church. I had never had any
quarrels with anything that was going on. We just left.
Just walked away. You hadn't joined the
Catholic Church, had you? No, you were attending
with him all this time. So, you were not hesitant
to follow Jesus. Right. That's exactly what
we were doing. Well, we felt like we were
learning and growing, and the church
was very inviting. And our marriage
was better. So, we thought we were
doing the right thing, because our marriage
was getting better, and we thought,
'Well, we want to be where they have active
youth programs so that our kids can grow up, and we want them to know
about Jesus, and...' And it wasn't too long
at that church that I started to, they started asking me
to do certain things, especially
speaking to youth, going around and involving
myself in youth and talking about
my conversion story and things like that, as far as what transformed
me to follow Jesus. Because by this time,
we had a daughter, Tatum, and you just want your kids
to be on fire for Jesus. I bet you I know
what at least one of your messages was, and that is
that you can go to church and not know Jesus. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, exactly. And that isn't a message
just to Catholics. No, that's
to everybody. Because we saw that
in every church that we were a part of. We saw that in young people
that could, and they thought,
because they're there, just by osmosis, Jesus is going
to come in and change it. So, spent a lot of time speaking to young kids
in the area, not just in our local town, but throughout
all North Iowa. I was invited to many
youth rallies and things like that,
started filling pulpits. I was elected an elder,
which was kind of funny. Which church was it, Doug? It was an
Evangelical Free church. - Okay, gotcha.
- We weren't church hoppers. <i>But that happened
to be one locally,</i> <i>that was the one that
touched your heart.</i> Yeah, it was the exciting
church in the area. It's the one that,
and there were some things, it was the one
that was drawing people from not just
the Catholic Church, but there was Lutherans
and Methodists. There were churches
or people from all different churches
coming to that church. So, it was growing
leaps and bounds. I can still remember,
I mean, there were some things
about the church I didn't quite grab onto
and follow along with. I mean, some of the,
some of the people, or some of the pastors
were really anti-Catholic and really wanted to see
Catholics get saved. That's kind of the path
that they were heading down. And you, it sounds
like you fairly quickly let the sacraments go... - Yeah, I know.
- Yeah, because we didn't know
what we had. Isn't that crazy?
I mean, seriously. It's so sad.
It's so sad. She never really
experienced them, because she never had
that opportunity yet. But me being raised in them,
I don't understand. I didn't understand it. Certainly didn't
understand why - they weren't a big deal. Well, that's interesting,
because you think of it, but looking back, not only, whatever reason, had you
not come to Christ, but you really hadn't
come to understand the sacraments either. Doug: I know. I know. In either way, being brought
up in the environment. And again,
this happens to Lutherans, as it did to me. It happens to
Episcopalians. It happens to any
mainline folk. It can happen to anybody, and so, that's why
we've got to make sure that in the process, as Mother Angelica
used to say before every one
of her shows "Tonight we're
talking about Jesus." Right.
- Oh, exactly. <i>So, there you are, you're
filling pulpits, though.</i> Yeah, I started
filling pulpits. Marcus: Which seminary
did you go to? I didn't. No, I know,
that's the crazy. And that's later on
in the story, because I didn't,
but because of the zeal and the love for Jesus,
'Bring him in. He'll talk to
people about things that we know and we want.' So, it was a great time, I mean, for me,
especially. I enjoyed doing
what I was doing. It was a good time, and it fills that void
sometimes for guys that you have this, you want to feel that you've
got this pride thing that kind of needs to have, it's a feeling
every once in a while, and I think
that's kind of; when you're asked
to come speak or you're asked
to go do something, it's like, 'Ah,
they want me there.' So... Well, again, it reminds me
of 'Screwtape Letters', where the under-demon
gets chewed out because the guy
became Christian. Right. That's not supposed
to happen, right? You had him all,
he was content, and now he found Jesus. But then okay, now, how
can we screw up his life? And so, you look
for his weaknesses, and pride is one of those. Oh, oh, man. It was a great weakness, because you start to look
at things differently. - Okay.
- You know. We were both growing, and I mean,
she stayed here; I kind of
substituted softball, bowling, fishing,
and all this other stuff with speaking at pulpits,
talking at youth rallies, doing a lot of different
things that was good stuff, but I filled
my time with; I mean, it was all
good things, but sometimes
you get yourself... That could be a tension,
too, in a marriage. Yeah, it is.
It isn't always good. So, we continue to
go to this church. We actually moved
for a while, but when we moved, we still attended
an Evangelical Free church, and then after
a few years, we decided to move back into
the North Iowa, Britt area, and we went back,
and went back into the church
that we were at. Like I said,
I'd become an elder, and I guess the people there
saw something in me, down the road. And so, they came to us
in about 2004 and basically said, "Doug, we want to
start this ministry, youth ministry,
small groups, and we'd like for you
to come on staff as an associate pastor." Well, we had to stop
and think about that for a little while
and pray about it, because there were some things
I didn't want to give up. I loved going
to other communities and other denominations
and filling pulpits. I loved going to speak
at other youth rallies. I didn't want to be
funneled into just speaking
at one church's kids. I wanted to speak to
as many kids as I could and as many people
as I could. So, through some prayers, through some things
that we did, I basically kind of said,
"You know what? I think we need
to make this jump, and I need to leave the job
I'm currently doing," because I was working for an automotive
company at the time. I was a purchasing
manager. It was a pretty decent job, "and we need to take
this very low paying associate pastor's job," and start that ministry
work, which we did. Now, you say, 'we.' So, you were involved
with it, too? Well, I would go
to youth group and help him with that
and try to be supportive, but being a pastor's wife,
I was hesitant. When you work with,
when you work with youth, when does most
of that stuff happen? After school. It happens at night, and so, a lot
of my nights, a lot of my evenings
were taken up. And the youth world
has changed a lot in our lifetime... - Yeah.
- ...with the Internet and how do you do youth
ministry with kids that are, got their faces
buried into whatever? - Exactly.
- It's a whole different world. Even to get them
to pay attention. And I was pretty
good at getting; I mean, I was jumping
around, moving. I was very creative on some
of the things that we did, and one of the things
that we did is, we started looking
ecumenically, what can we do
as a community, with all the churches? And so, we started
this place, what we called
the Teen Center, it's called
The EDGE actually, Every Day God Experience, and after Friday night
football games. In our community,
football's a big deal. Okay, it's huge. It's almost like, if we win,
we're really high. If they lose
a football game, man, it's really quiet
on Saturday. And so,
we started this ministry where we would,
all the football players and their parents and everyone who
was involved in it, where they'd come,
we'd show the game. We'd get them involved
in the youth ministry, which was nice. We also started
the Fellowship of Christian
Athletes program, which ministered
to a lot of the athletes. So, good things going on. So, it sounds like
you two are all feet into, you're not looking back. - Exactly.
- Not looking back, right? And marriage is doing better,
and all's good. So again, why are you on
'The Journey Home' program? In fact, why don't
we take a break now? Sure. And we'll come
back and find that out. It's good to have you
on the program. I'm not joking about that. Once again, let me mention
that Doug's story called 'Seeing the Church
with New Eyes' is available on the
chnetwork.org website. So we'll come back
in a moment, pick up where we left off. See you in a bit. [music] [music] Welcome back
to 'The Journey Home'. I'm Marcus Grodi, your host, and our guests are Doug
and Dawn Doughan, and I've rudely
interrupted them in the middle of
their journey, and they've, I mean,
their life is great. They're serving Jesus, and you've got the job
you always wanted, which was a pastor's wife, and you're preaching. You're no
longer out there shoveling cow manure, like I do once
in a while at my farm, but everything's
going great. So, our question is,
what are you doing on 'The Journey Home'
program? Yeah. Well, she didn't love
being a pastor's wife, but I mean, it's a
difficult task, right? One of the things
that we did within our, because there was three
of us pastors on staff, so we took turns preaching. So, once a month, roughly, I would preach
at our church, and I was also
given the freedom to go preach at other churches, and I really had this
desire to understand all churches'
statements of faith, because ecumenically,
I was trying to bring the community
together best I could. And so, through my studies and a lot of things
that I was looking at, I started to realize
that there's a lot of things that are common, but there's some things
that are very different. It just so happened
that during that time, it was my turn to preach
on Sunday morning, and the topic was 'Unity'. As a pastor, when you
have, it's topographical. You're given a topic, go find some
Scripture verses that go with that topic. That's what you do. And so, I'm looking at
this unity and I'm thinking, 'Okay, the first thing
I want to know is, I don't want to just
unify the church. I mean, our local church. I want to unify the Church,
Christ's Church.' It is funny how
you guys, I mean, it's the wrong way
to say it - when we were Protestants, we used this idea
of "The Church..." - Right.
- Right. - The Church...
- So different. But we never
really defined what we meant by that. Like you
just described it. Not the church,
but the Church. Well, you just used
the Church. The Church. Yeah, well, I knew
that not everybody, if they weren't
of my denomination, I knew they weren't
going to hell. I knew that everybody
wasn't a pagan, running around sinning
all the time. And so, I tried to do
this ecumenically. Well, the first thing
I did was, of course, with the Internet, I Googled "How many
Christian churches are there in the world?" Expecting to come up with
some 100, 200, 400, 600. At that time,
it was 33,000, and just 8,000 alone
in the United States. And then I started
to find out that every time someone
goes to Bible school or comes out and starts
a nondenominational church, it's basically
a new denomination, because it's
non-denominational. You can kind of make up, 'These are the things
that we focus on. These are the teachings
of our Church.' I thought that was crazy. So, I got up, and I started
speaking about this. I'm like, 'That cannot be
what Jesus wants, that we have,'
and we can't get along. I can remember sitting
in the cafeteria area of our local church,
having a conversation about Mother Teresa
and Princess Di, I think they both died
the same year, 1997. We were talking about this
with some people, and I said, "Yeah,
Mother Teresa passed away." And the one lady says,
"Yeah, what a nice lady. Did a lot of great things, but it's too bad
she's in hell." And I'm like, I had to stop
there for just a moment. It just really, it just,
"No, how can you say that? How can you say that
Mother Teresa...?" "Well, because
she was Catholic, and the things
that they practiced, and she probably didn't
say the sinner's prayer, as we knew it." So, that sermon of unity really started getting me
to start thinking about some things. How can we do
things differently? Well, I just
so happened to be, sometimes I can't
sleep at night, when you're always
thinking about stuff? So, I went downstairs,
and I flipped the TV on. I don't know
what time it was, it was fairly late for us, and I'm flipping
through the channels, and TBN, which is the
Trinity Broadcasting Network. That's us Protestants. That's what we
like to watch. Okay, and I flipped past, and I flipped
to the next one, and it just so
happened to be EWTN. Okay, and here's this guy,
Marcus Grodi, talking to this other guy
by the name of John Bergsma, and at the bottom
of it, it says 'Former Christian Reformed
Pastor Turned Catholic', and I'm like, 'I've never
heard of that before. I've never heard
of a pastor wanting to go back
to the Catholic Church, or becoming Catholic,
or not even be a Catholic and wanting
to be Catholic.' And so, I sat there and I
watched this program with Dr Bergsma
and you, and at the end
of the program, I think at the end
of the program, you announced whenever 'Rome
Sweet Home' had come out. There's certain books, and 'Rome Sweet Home'
was one of the books that you guys
had recommended. So, here's what I did. As a pastor, you're given
an allotment of money that you can go ahead
and use to spend. So, the first thing I did
is I went back to our church secretary. I said, "Hey, I need
to order this book. I'm doing some studying." So, she ordered me the book
'Rome Sweet Home'. And of course,
I got the book and... And a Catholic Bible. And I ordered
a Catholic Bible, the Navarre Study Bible. I don't know if you're
familiar with it, and it's about that thick, and she didn't ask
any questions. She knows that I was kind
of off on some tangent, studying things. So, anyway, I grabbed
the book when it came. I started to read it, and I read a couple
chapters, and I'm like, "I need
to read this with my wife. This is important, because
here's some questions..." Well, it was
written by a couple. Yeah, here's some
questions that I have, because what is
keeping us separated? What's separated us, and what's drawing us
apart as Christians? Because that's what I
wanted to be, a Christian. So, I started
reading this book. Her and I started reading
it at night, and we would look,
and I'd read it to her, and then we'd just kind
of look at each other and say, "Uh-oh. There's some things in
here that are answering these questions
that we have," and we continued to read
through the book, and finished that book. And so, I actually
took the book and gave it to our other
associate pastor, and I said, "Would you
read this book with me so we can see what's wrong
or right in this book?" Because as a pastor,
your job, it says in James 3 that, "Those who teach will be
judged more severely." That's the last
thing I needed was to be judged
more severely. So, you need to teach
the right thing, and multiple times,
through my pastorate, I'd have people come
in my office and challenge some of the, which it wasn't
a bad thing, but I mean, Scripture
against Scripture. You're bouncing
off each other. So, he started looking
at this with me, and then one day, he actually
came back in and said, "Doug, you can't read, if you keep
reading this book, you won't be able to be
a pastor here any longer." Well, I had already
read the book. And so I took it from him
and put it on my shelf, and then I started looking at those things
that separated us, remembering some
of the stuff. We were sitting in a
ministerial meeting one time, which is where
all the pastors of the community
get together. I don't know how many were
there that particular day, and we were studying,
'What are we going to do as a community?' And the one pastor looks
over to me and says, "Doug, we don't have any
Catholic representation here. What do Catholics
focus on?" And instantly, I said,
"The Eucharist. It's not about the sermon. They focus on Communion
and the Eucharist." And I mean, why would I
say that, Marcus? I mean, it just spit out, and her and I
started talking about where we
should go on a sabbatical, and so, we had seen
this commercial on TV about Franciscan
University, 'Academically excellent,
passionately Catholic', whatever that
conversation was. So, I'd seen this John
Bergsma on your show. So, we, I made a phone call
out to Steubenville, Franciscan, to say,
"Hey, can we, I want to meet
with somebody. I want to meet this Scott
Hahn who wrote this book. Or I want to meet
with this John Bergsma, and my wife and I
want to come out, because we have questions." And they arranged
that we could go ahead and meet with
Dr John Bergsma. And we wanted to find
some on-fire Catholics, that loved the Lord, and we wanted to
witness it ourselves. Because when you see
the word 'passionately', passionately, in my head,
means you're... - On fire.
- You are on fire for Jesus. Yeah. So, we
wanted to see this. And we weren't
disappointed. About the Friday
before we were supposed to leave
on a Monday, Dawn stopped out
to my office to see me, and I said, "You know what?
I can't go. I don't want to go. I don't want to go
out there." I didn't want
to go out there. You know why? I was afraid
if I went out there and we saw what we
were wanting to see, it would change everything
that I was doing, and she said, "Doug,
if we don't go, we'll never know the truth." So, here's my wife, and that's why she's so
important in this story. I said, "All right,
we're going to go." So, we drove out
to Steubenville. We spent three
days out there. We met with Dr Bergsma
and his wife, Dawn, and their family. They had us
over for supper, and we ate supper
with them and talked
and had a good night. And then Dawn and Dawn
went some place to visit, and John and I went
in the living room somewhere to sit down
and start talking, and I shared
my ministry with him, what's going on, and he
shared his story with me, and I said, "So, okay,
we're both Christians. We both have
the same goal. We want to get to Heaven. We want to take other
people to Heaven as well. Why do I need to
become Catholic?" And he looked right at me
without even a blink and said, "Because
of the Eucharist." I had just got done telling
him the ministerial because of the Eucharist, and he says the same thing,
'The Eucharist'. And so, I prayed
and I thought about that, and he gave us tapes
and books, and we started
heading back to Iowa. The next day, we left, and we actually went
to Notre Dame University and spent some time
in the cathedral. You could have stopped at
my farm and done some work. We could have. If I had known,
I'd have had you... You should've
told us where you lived. I had a couple of
calves that need to be made into steers...
Anyway... It's such an easy
place to get to, out here in the middle
of nowhere. There isn't a straight
road in this whole state, I don't think.
It curves around. So anyway, we stopped, we listened to a lot of
his stuff on the way home, and we got home, and this was probably
in June, July, sometime in there. June, I think it was, and we didn't,
we wrestled with some stuff, but I didn't want to
give up my ministry. I mean, I really wrestled
with what was going on. I loved what was going
on in the community. I loved what I
was able to do. I knew that God
was using me, but this thing
just kept haunting me. So then it came my Sunday
to do communion in our church,
because we rotated, and we pull out
the oyster crackers and the little glasses
of grape juice... Marcus: Little shot
glasses of juice, yeah. We passed around. And I stand up
at the front, and I take the
oyster cracker, and I say, "Jesus says,
'This is My Body. Take and eat.'" And I do the same thing
with the cup, "Jesus says,
'This is My Blood. Take and drink.'" I didn't say, 'Jesus says,
this represents,' or, 'This is a symbol,' or 'This is His Body
broken for us,' or, 'This is Blood
shed for us.' I said,
"This is His Body. This is His Blood." And when we were done, I walked back in my office
after we left, and Dawn comes in and says, "Doug, you sounded
really Catholic." I said, "I know I did." I said, "We're still
in trouble." I never
served communion again, from the time
until I left in October, but every time
I would get it, I'd go to
the back of the church, and I knew it wasn't, because we weren't going
through the Consecration. You weren't
claiming it was. No, no, no,
no, no, no, no. But I believed. That God wanted
you to do something. And so, as the
summer continued on, we hadn't made
the transition yet, and then one Sunday,
or one day, I was driving my bicycle, I rode my bike back
and forth a lot. A gentleman that wasn't
even in our church pulled up alongside
of me and said, "Pastor Doug, great job what you're doing
in this community." I said, "Thanks a lot." And I can tell you
exactly where I was, and I heard, -
this is the craziest - I heard like a voice say, "You love your job
more than you love Me." I stopped my bike right there,
and it was like, 'I know the Shema, and I know that we're
to love the Lord God with all of our heart,
soul and mind,' and I knew that was true. I loved what I was doing
more than I loved Jesus. I went home and cried
like a little baby in my living room floor,
went back, and basically said, "Lord,
I can't give this up unless You take it
away from me, because I can't do it. I'm too weak. I love what I'm doing." And I told her
what was going on, and anyway - go ahead. I was going to say,
in our work, we call that
'The No Man's Land'. When your heart is
almost all the way, but then you start realizing
the ramification. Yeah. And I was wondering where you're at
in all this thing? I mean, this is what's
happening to him. What's happening with you? Because in some ways, you're returning
to your roots. You aren't. I was excited. Oh, okay.
Okay, very good. Yeah, I was
really excited, because everything
that he would read, then I would read,
and I was like, I was excited. Because we were
seeking truth, and we were finding truth. So... I was, I was ready
to make that step. - Okay.
- Yeah. It was harder for him. Yeah, because
for you, it was... He was
giving up more. And it isn't,
and I'm assuming that it isn't just occupation
that you're holding onto, it's vocation. Doug: Yeah. Yeah. - Because this was a call.
- I felt called. Yeah, I felt,
seriously felt called. And in the meantime,
while he's a youth minister, I feel compelled, I mean, really compelled
to go to RCIA. So... And she's
asking me questions. ...I was taking
classes 10 miles away. So, you're laying
on your living room floor, and you're going to RCIA. Yeah. And the first night
I came home from class, I'm like, "I loved it. We are in
so much trouble." - Because I...
- It was awesome. RCIA was the same night
that I'm over here teaching youth group, and my wife's off learning
about Catholicism. Hey, here's the,
we wanted to know truth. I wanted to know
the complete truth. I just didn't want
to know partials and bits and pieces. And so, came August,
September timeframe. I went to, in June,
up to Steubenville. August, September,
she had started RCIA. I had gone to a football
game with my son, and I had prayed to God, "Lord, if You want me
out of this ministry, You've got to
bring me a job." And I'll be darned if a guy that I knew comes
and sits next to me at the football game,
and just says, "Hey, we got a couple
of wind parks that we're going to be
building in Minnesota. One's in Minnesota,
one's in Nebraska. Would you be interested
in applying for those?" And Marcus, my son's
sitting next to me, and I look over
at this guy. I said, "Are
you kidding me?" He goes,
"No, I'm serious." He didn't know what
I was talking about. I'm like, "I know nothing
at all about wind, but God, You're wanting
me to leave." And so, I interviewed
for this position, and the first time I talked
to these two guys, I'm like, "Nah, no way. There ain't no way
they're going to hire me. I'm not an engineer. I got a business degree,
and I'm a preacher." Okay, and then
they called us up to come up to an area
and visit with them personally. So, I went up there,
and we, she went off to
some place, the cafe, and I sat and interviewed
with these two guys, and I said,
"You know what? I don't know anything
about renewable energy." I said, "I'm not
an engineer." I said, "I got
a business degree. I'm a pastor.
I know people." And we left, and when
I hopped in the car, she said, "Well,
how do you think it go?" I said,
They'll never hire me. They're not going
to hire me." I didn't intentionally. I was just being honest. "They'll never hire me." About three weeks later, or maybe two weeks later, I was, had an FCA meeting
in the morning. I always fed the kids, and we had
a short devotional, then they'd go
off to school. I got a phone call, and it was from the guy
that interviewed me, and he said,
"Is this Doug?" I said, "Yeah."
He said, "Well, hey. This is such-and-such. We'd like to offer
you that job. We sent you an email." I said, "Well,
I never got the email." Well, they sent it
to the wrong email address. They left the 'A'
out of my last name. How can that be? It's such
an easy name to spell. They left an 'A' out,
and so, he sent me this, and I knew right then when I shut
my little flip phone, 'I'm leaving this ministry.' And one of my best friends
was there at me. He helped me with FCA. He was there, and he
looked right at me, and he says, "You're
leaving, aren't you?" I said, "Yeah, I am." And I sat down,
and I shared with him all that God had
been doing on my heart, that I might be going across the street
over here again, which is where
the Catholic church was. And so, went back that day,
actually that particular day, wrote my resignation
letter, explained to everybody
that I'd be leaving. I didn't say anything about leaving
to go become Catholic. I wrote it so
that it was more, I don't know what
you would call it. I just basically said, "I hadn't been listening to what God's been
telling me to do. I'll be leaving
October 18th, starting a new job
October 19th." I wanted to wait
until October 18th, because my last
football game was October 16th or 15th. I wanted to finish
coaching, because I coached football
and track and high school wrestling. So, did my last sermon. They actually, the church
was going to miss me. Everybody was sad. They actually gave me
this picture back here of the Prodigal Son,
which was awesome. Gave me that picture. I left, and I moved up
to Spirit Lake, Iowa, into a little place, and I took my Bible and the Catholic
Catechism with me, because I wanted to read. And so, for the next five
months, I spent time from, October
until March, reading, and during that time, I would go to the
Catholic church in a little town
called Milford, Iowa. There's a Saint Joseph's. It's a beautiful
church there. I'd go to this
church to pray. I can remember walking in
the first time and asking the church secretary, "Hey, do you mind if
I come in here and pray?" And she just looks
at me like, "What?" "I just want to spend
some time in prayer." Well, about the second
or third time that I walked in
this little church - I shouldn't say little, because it's a
good size church - I was walking out,
and here comes the priest walking towards me,
and I said, "Hello, Father."
He said, "Hello." I said, he goes,
"What's your name?" I said, "My name's
Doug Doughan." And he goes, "Doughan.
That's a Wesley name." Well, yes, there are
some Doughans in Wesley. There's Doughans in;
he was, yeah, I said,
"How would you know that?" He said, "Well, I used to
be the pastor in Wesley in the early '80s." And I look at this guy,
and I go, "I know you." He goes, "My name's
Father Tom Flanagan." He said, "I've just been
assigned to Milford." I said,
"I'm Doug Doughan. You've been out
to my house." And so, he became
the person that I started bouncing,
"Okay, what about this? What about this?
What about..." And I started bouncing
things off of Father Tom, and he had just been
assigned to this church, and I was just kind of; so he helped us get through all the
questions and the answers. She in the meantime,
finished doing RCIA, or kept working on RCIA, and I was getting
closer and closer to becoming Catholic. Sounds like you were
working towards Easter. I actually... Yeah, and Easter
was in April that year. I was so disappointed. I had to wait
that much longer. March 25th of 2011,
I did my confession and came in, and she came
in that following Easter. It was pretty exciting. I mean, I can remember
going to Mass, not being able to go up
and take the Eucharist, and I would just
sit there and cry. I can just remember
going to these churches. I also remember one other
thing that I knew that was different about
the Catholic Church, was that we were
invited at times to go with our brothers
and sisters, like my sister
had some kids, and the church people
were holding hands, saying the 'Our Father,'
doing stuff. I felt the unity. I felt the unity
that Christ wanted, and I also felt the love and the need
for the Eucharist, and I also knew, Marcus,
as well as we both did, is if we were going to be
obedient Christians, then we needed to follow
what Christ set up, and He set up a Church. In Matthew Chapter 16,
it's very clear, and He set up some
things on how people were supposed to do stuff, in John 20, "If you
forgive them their sins, they're forgiven." So... Well, sometimes
it seems that, for certain people, God's got to let
us go away somewhere to get our head together to come back and appreciate
what we always had, because you're
talking about, and now you
appreciate the Eucharist. Now, you appreciate
confession. - Oh, man.
- I'm assuming. Yes, all
the sacraments. - Yeah.
- Yeah, I mean, for... Or even those
statues and the things that are on the wall...
- Oh, we appreciate those. The beauty and the history,
yeah, great. - Yeah.
- Yeah. The funny thing was,
even my parents, like when I was
an evangelical pastor, associate pastor, my parents were as proud
as could be of me. I mean, they loved
what I was doing, and when I told my dad, "Dad, I think I might
be coming back to the Church," he didn't jump up
and down and hug me, but I could tell,
and then since that time, I've had multiple people
talk to me about, 'Well, my parents
were praying for us.' I had a friend
that his; his dad passed away
a number of months ago, a great friend of ours, good prayer warrior,
Rick Fangman. His dad passed away, and I went up and talked
to his wife later on, and she's this little
bitty lady, Rosie, and I said, "Rosie,
how are you doing?" She says, "Great." She said,
"Doug, do you know when you came back to
the Church, I cried?" I go, "Well, thanks,
Rosie." She goes, "Also,
I want to tell you, when you left the Church,
I cried." And it was just, I was
like, "You know what? You don't think about the
people that are praying for you and the things
that you're doing." But God's brought us back,
and here we are. Well, to me, it touches
a lot of things. One of them is, it touches
the mystery of God's grace. You guys picked up
that book, and it was the spark
that changed your life. You passed that book
onto somebody else, and it didn't
change his life. So, it's not the book. There's something more
mysterious going on here. And as you said,
different things happening like you're walking
along the road, and that person,
or sitting there - God has this mysterious; God is no respecter
of persons. Doug: No, no. But He works in
our lives differently. And I do believe it's what
you're asking here. You're asking in the heart,
and He's going to respond. Like I said,
we were away 30 years. 30 years we thought we
were doing; and we were. We were doing what Christ
wanted us to do, I believe, but I always say,
"Lord, why did You wait for 30 years to
bring me back to this? Why wait that long?" Because now,
we love the Church, and we love the things
the Church teaches. Well again,
it wasn't about you, because you were changing
people's lives. You were being a vessel
during those 30 years of God's grace
to others, right? - I hope so.
- I mean, to young people. I sure hope so. You know what I'm saying.
It's not you're claiming that, but you were, you wanted
to serve the Lord during that time, and so, you were doing it
for that time. And then God... But I will tell you
this, too, from my own perspective
for me. Being Catholic is
a humbling faith. The difference between
that and what I was before, an evangelical, a zealous
Evangelical Protestant, I was out evangelizing
and I was full of fire, and a lot of it
was my own pride, and I've learned
an awful lot about what humility means. Sirach 3, that's 17-20, if you ever have a chance
to read stuff like that, anybody that's listening, that is such
a beautiful verse, and basically,
it paraphrases, it says, "God is glorified
through the humility of His servants." Humility, and I have
learned that. My first confession, I had to go back
and re-confess again, because my first
confession was, "I'm a
pretty good guy here. I haven't cheated
on my wife. I love Jesus." And I thought, over the years,
I thought back, 'Boy, I was so me,
and it's not about me. It's about Christ.' And we needed
the authority. Yes, I love the authority
of the Church. We needed someone
to tell us, back to the discussion
we had earlier, who tells us what's truth? Yeah, yeah,
well, there's that part of the Sermon on the Mount that I think so many of us,
when we were Protestants, kind of ignored,
and that's that Jesus says, "Not everybody
that says, 'Lord, Lord' is going to enter
in the Kingdom." Because we were more into, 'Once you accept Jesus,
you're going to arrive.' Well, at the end,
when the people say, "But we did this.
I did youth ministry. I did all this stuff." And Jesus said,
"But I didn't know you." And to me,
that's one of the key things about our Catholic faith is our faith
has to change us. - Yeah.
- Yeah. We're not
hiding from Jesus. He sees everything.
Does He know us? And then the part
that He knows about us, but I'm not
too happy about, but maybe I need
to change a little bit... Exactly. ...so I can stand
before Him without embarrassment. We've got an email here,
Conrad from Minneapolis. He says... And I'm seeing you're
getting your coat ready. I've got to be
honest with you, and maybe you;
my fear is, I don't want us
to become like them. I don't want us to do the
things that attract them. You can bring in pizza.
You can play games. You can do all the stuff
that keeps your depth and love 'surfacy.' I mean, it's a trap; we would
take kids from all churches to these youth
rallies and things, and we had a lot of
great things going on. For me, now it's
show the crucifix and have them come to
understand, is this real? Because that's what
it took for me in that Matthew Chapter 1. When I understood that
Jesus Christ was real, and this is what
He did for me, do I want to believe that? That circumcision of
the heart has to happen, even for a youth. And so, we can
bring them in, feed them food,
give them Twinkies. They'll come in. Well, and it is
harder and harder today with the Internet. I mean, there's
so many distractions. How do you; this is
a big issue, but... But when they understand
what the Eucharist is, I think they
would only know that Heaven comes down
and kisses the earth. Right. And He feeds us Himself, because He doesn't want
to leave us alone until He gets us Home. He's always going
to be there for us, food from Heaven. Well, you refer
to the crucifix, and you refer
to the Eucharist, and so, I mean, the uniting
point there is Jesus. - Exactly.
- Yeah. Once we can get them through all that
the Church offers to truly
have that experience of surrendering to Christ as a reality,
then the Eucharist all of a sudden
comes alive, and then the
crucifix reminds us of how we share
in His suffering and what He's done for us. Discipleship, finding men
that love the Lord, love their faith. Pick a kid, disciple them. Yeah. Sharon from Detroit
writes, another email... Part of it was the, when we
go to the Catholic Church, we just went in
and we'd leave. And then I think, when we went to
the Protestant church, people would invite us
over for lunch and they took us in,
we felt more like a family. I think we need to get
better at that, as Catholics, being a family, reaching out to people's
needs where they're at. And for this
person, prayer. The intercession for
them people, constantly, because apparently someone
was praying for me for 30 years. Okay, and I'm sure I know
who the groups were, but they were
praying for me. Don't give up on it.
Continue to pray for them. Yeah, I think,
as Catholics, one of the hard things, and I know I've mentioned
this on the program that one of the
differences between Catholic churches and
the Protestant churches where this fellowship
is going. Because the Catholic Church
has got 5,000 members. And so, in any given Mass,
you see a stranger. I don't know if
they're a stranger or they just went to another
Mass for the last 40 years. Dawn: True. So, as a Catholics,
it's hard to; so it's a challenge. In a little
Protestant church, you kind of know
that's a visitor. So, you bring them in, but that doesn't mean
that we sacrifice the reverence of the Mass. - Exactly.
- I love the reverence. I do, too. We don't want
to sacrifice that. That's part of the draw. But we look for
ways to make sure we're sharing that love
with one other. All right. We've got
a minute left. Just quickly, let's say
somebody's watching, and they are now
where you were, why should they come Home? I would say, first off,
for the authority, mostly from the Eucharist, and then to be obedient
to what Christ wants. I mean, there is a Church
that He created, and if you'd go back
into the Church Fathers, you can read through
the Church Fathers what the Church was like and what's the things
they practiced. The Church didn't
start in the 1500s. It was way before that, and there was
Godly men and women scattered
throughout the Church. If a person really truly
wants to seek truth, they need to go
back further. Find out what was taught
about the Eucharist, because that
was the battle. It couldn't be a symbol
and it couldn't be Jesus. It had to be one
or the other. I knew that, and when I found
out that it was Jesus, it totally changed
everything for us. - All right.
- Amen. Thank you both.
Thank you both. God bless you both. - Thank you, Marcus.
- Thank you for your witness for Our Lord Jesus
and His Church. We hope so. And thank you for
joining us on this episode of 'The Journey Home'. I hope that Doug
and Dawn's witness is an encouragement to you. Let's not take for granted
the great gifts that we've been given. God bless.
See you again next week. [music]
