[music] Well, good evening
and welcome back to 'The Journey
Home' program. I'm your host, JonMarc
Grodi, and once again, we have this great privilege
here on EWTN to sit down, kick back, have a cup of
coffee and hear a story. Tonight, we're joined
by Phillip Campbell, sharing his story. He's a revert from
Pentecostalism, and as with any times
we share these descriptions, these backgrounds
on the lower thirds, there's always
such a bigger story. It's always the
tip of the iceberg, but great to have you
here tonight. Very nice to be here.
Thank you. Thanks for coming
to share your story, and we'll make sure we
talk a little bit later; Your website is
phillipcampbell.net. You've written
a number of books, especially some great
books on Church history, one of which I
just read recently. The full title is...? 'Heroes and Heretics
of the Reformation'. It's a great book, 'The
History of the Reformation', and both what happened
in terms of the break, but the history
leading up to it, the saints and heroes and all the figures
of that time period, it's a really good book. Thank you.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. Absolutely. Well,
let's turn to your story. Take us way back. We'll start at
the beginning. Tell us a little bit
about your childhood, your background,
your family. Yeah, well, so
I was born into just a blue-collar family
in southern Michigan, probably metro Detroit area. On my dad's side, they
were all ethnic Sicilians. My Grandma spoke Sicilian. We had the papers of when
they came over on the boat and everything, so it was
very, very, very Sicilian. Then my mom's side, there
was Polish, there was Irish, so it was basically
all the passionate races of the Irish, Poles,
Italians, but very culturally Catholic
on all those sides. I had a pretty, what
I think was a normal, very secular upbringing. I've been fairly happy
with my upbringing. I had no gripes about my
parents or anything like that. They did a fine job. It was just very normal, 1980s secular
United States upbringing. Had no real
religious background, so to speak. Obviously, Catholicism
runs culturally in immigrant families from places like
Italy and whatnot, but that cultural Catholicism
has its pros and cons. Sometimes you get this
sense in which like, 'Well, yeah, we're Catholic. We have our picture of
Saint Joseph on the wall,' but there's no actual
practice of faith, and so I didn't grow up
with any practice of faith or anything like that. My parents didn't practice. I don't know what their
religious story was, but it had ceased to become
anything definitive in my family's life
by the time I was born. So, I didn't really
know much about it, but I had a fairly
happy childhood, and for me, a lot of
people have struggled with the notion
of belief in God or the spiritual world. For me, I never
struggled with that. Even from when
I was a child, without any formal
religious upbringing, I never really questioned that there was
another reality, a spiritual reality
behind the things I saw. It just seemed like the
spiritual world was bubbling up everywhere
in the being of things, just in the fact
that things existed and that they were so
beautiful and marvelous, and so I was always
very kind of interested, as a young man, not having
any formal direction, but growing up,
I would read about culture, read about other religions,
what they believed, what they thought
about the world, and I thought these things
were very, very interesting. I remember being in
Seventh Grade and reading a biography of Buddha just
because I was interested in spirituality. But I think in terms
of Christianity, like many people
who are raised in a culture like the United States, that is very informed
by a Christian past, but isn't
necessarily observing it, you're kind of aware of
the symbolism of like Christmas or crosses
or things like that, but don't really know
the context of it. I remember my mom had
a crucifix of Jesus in the hallway in my house, and I didn't really
know much about... I remember asking
my mom, "Did you know Jesus when you were little? Was He alive when
you were a kid?" I didn't even know the
basic chronology or anything, and she's like,
"No, He was a long time ago." I just knew that He was
a guy that got crucified, the Son of God or claimed
to be Son of God. So, I guess I just had this
vague spiritual receptivity, but beyond that, no really
definitive ideas. Sort of a
sacramental worldview. That's what kind
of comes to mind. We think about noticing
the ways that the supernatural sort of
permeates the natural. You sort of had that
sense from your Catholic cultural background. Yeah, perhaps,
or just, I don't know. Maybe just the way I was
created, I don't know. But I never seemed to doubt
that the physical world and the spiritual world kind of compenetrated
each other and that there was just more
than what we were aware of. So, I was always
sensitive to that. As I got older and began
to have more direction over the things that I
could study and look into, I got very interested in,
I guess, what we would now call like 'New Age'
or 'Neopagan Mysticism'. So, I would just check out
lots of books on these sorts of things, studying
both historical paganism, but also contemporary
expressions of it, which I thank God
that this happened before the Internet before, like today, there'd be all
these cringe websites and things that would
have been going on, and I'm just glad
that I was restricted to having to find
what was in my local small town library and
from the people I met. So, I kind of mishmashed
a spirituality together for myself based on things that I'd read
or things from history, and it was very pagan, and I'm talking
about like, I'm 12, 13, so little kid pagan. Many people when they are
going through adolescence, it's a dark time,
it's a challenging time, and like I said,
my family are good people, and they were
very supportive, I had a good childhood, but also, my family,
we were kind of reserved, we didn't really
talk to each other about things
that were going on, so I kind of dealt with a
lot of kind of adolescent growing pains, kind of in
silence, and then started wearing all black and
listening to heavy metal, and stuff like that, and kind
of making this my identity. And then at a certain point,
I had a green Mohawk and would just wear
black and combat boots, and I used to wear a bullet
on a chain around my neck, to show how edgy I was. [laughs] But yeah, there was a
growing, brooding kind of darkness where just kind
of everything's unfair and everything's stupid, and then when you have
a spirituality that's kind of
a pagan sort of view, it just plays into
whatever your emotional state already is. That's kind of
what paganism is. It's meant to draw on
human passions and it amplifies kind of
whatever your passions are, so if you're already angry,
it kind of can amplify that. If you're sad, whatever,
it can amplify your passions. And so, I got mixed up
into what I would call the darker side of
that sort of stuff, like the satanic sort of, and I didn't know if I;
I guess I thought the devil was real, but I didn't know
if I understood it in a Christian
context or not, just the dark powers. Maybe these will give me
control or some sort of, I don't know; that's important
when you're a young person, feeling like you
can access something that will help you make sense
of things or control them. So, I was reading very,
very bad material and had some very bad
ideas about things. So, I wasn't in a
very happy place. I was doing,
now we call it self-harm, but that word didn't
exist back then. I was just cutting myself
and doing things like that. But at any rate,
I started high school, and when you get into high
school, public school, your social world
expands considerably, and I congregated with
other folks like myself, but I also met some people
who were Christians, which I had no real
experience of. I think my mom saw
the way I was going. She would occasionally,
when I was growing up, try to be like "You should, here, go to
a vacation Bible school or do whatever," but we weren't affiliated
with anything, so it was very just
kind of hit and miss. So, I met some Christians
in my high school, in particularly,
a young man named John, who became a good friend
of mine, my best friend, as a matter of fact, and he was
a Pentecostal Christian, and I didn't really know
what Christianity was at all, really, much less what a
Pentecostal Christian was. I didn't even think
of him as that. He was just my
Christian friend. And he could see what I
was into, and we had some long conversations, and
he would speak very just sincerely about Jesus Christ. We're 14 or 15 years old. And at first, I rejected
this strongly, because Jesus Christ stood for kind of
a societal status quo that I didn't
affiliate with, I guess. But I noticed because
like I said, I was very spiritually sensitive to
things, there was some sort of reaction that
the name would provoke, even without having any
thought or understanding of what the name meant. When somebody would
just say to me, 'You need Jesus Christ,' there was some sort of
reaction on the inside, as our Protestant
friends say, 'There was power in the name.' Amen. There was power
in the name. It's true. It's not just a
Protestant thing. So, they could say the name, and it would pull me,
pull me, pull me, and I kind of got
into this turmoil where I could see
that I was in darkness. But anyhow, these sorts of
things seldom happen quickly. This went on for a long
time, for many years throughout my adolescence, and I'm kind of on
the one hand, I'm kind of, I guess what you could
say, dating Jesus, kind of
interested sometimes, but then not
committing to it, being like, okay,
I'd have a Bible, and I'd look at it or I'd look at the
pictures or whatever, because it was a
children's Bible. I'd look at the pictures, or I'd kind of pick
up little snippets, and I'd be like,
"That's interesting," but then I'd go back
to what I was doing, kind of just almost
the way we read in history, sometimes other,
like the Romans would like, "Oh, here's a new
God, Jesus, to put into my pantheon with all the other gods
that I already have." So, I kind of did that; I took Jesus and
kind of mixed Him in with what I was
already doing, and it was just a very
adolescent thing to do, we'll just say. And at any rate,
as I got older, you grow up a little bit,
you get into to be 16, 17, you get your
license, whatnot, gives you greater freedom, but also, greater possibility
to mess things up. And now that I was able
to have more freedom over what I was doing, sadly, many of
the things I got involved with were even worse than
what I'd done before, and I started using
drugs, whatnot; many of my friends were. I was kind of in a group
of people where there was a lot of drinking,
a lot of drug use. I managed somehow
to keep my external life together in terms of
doing well in school. I was very much
an anomaly. I was a guy who was
doing these things, but I was also getting A's
somehow, I don't know. So, I was doing these
things, and at the time, I was; now, I'm kind
of known as a writer and a teacher,
but at the time, I was a very good artist, and many people at the
time had me pegged as a future artist, because I was very,
very good at drawing. And as I wrapped up
high school, I got a scholarship
to go to the Center for Creative Studies
in Detroit, now the College
for Creative Studies, but it was a very
prestigious private art school, and I had people in my
family that had gone there, and I had a very
generous scholarship, and so I was like,
"That's it. I'm going to go do
this art program," and I was going to be an
animator and do illustration, and this was really exciting, this was '97, '98, on the cusp of, like
'Toy Story' had just come out, which was the first
digitally animated. It was the Golden Age to
be going into animation, so it was very exciting. And so, I was like, 'Great,
I've got this scholarship,' but I wasn't
ready to go yet, because I'd applied too late
or whatever, so they said, "You need to wait a year
and take a gap year, and then you can start." So, I moved out of
my parents' house a week after I turned 18
or something. I just packed all
my stuff in a bag and me and a buddy
got an apartment. And this year of my life,
waiting for college, was a very bad year. My drug use amplified. I was extremely depressive. I was becoming
just nihilistic. I'd kind of dropped
the paganism stuff and just become just kind of
nihilistic about life. My neighbor, the guy next
door was a drug dealer, and he was coming over
and doing his stuff in our apartment, and there's
all these things. The FBI came to the
apartment one time to ask questions about stuff, and it was a very
bad place to be. And I was just really
struggling, man. I was just beyond depressed. I was kind of the point
where I was like, 'Okay, I can go to this
art school and do what? Learn to do this thing
so I can get some money, so I can feed myself
to get up and do it again? Why?' And I kind of got down
this road of like, 'Why am I even alive?
Who cares? Everything, no matter
what happens in my life, I'm going to die, and then
it's all going to; nobody's going
to even remember me in a hundred years
after I'm dead, and all of existence is just
completely meaningless.' So, I got very nihilistic,
and on top of this, I'm using drugs
and hallucinogenics and making me
kind of freak out, and so I'm just in the worst
possible place I can be. So, my old friend, John,
comes to visit me, at some point
during this year, and we were both
guitar players, so I said,
"Let's play guitar." So, we're playing guitar,
and we're singing, and he had this love for God
that I didn't have. And we're playing guitar,
and I just started weeping. I remember I collapsed
over my guitar, and I started weeping,
like a brokenness, and he didn't ask
what was wrong. I think he just knew what
was, and he leaned over, and I remember, he put his
hand on me, and he just prayed for me, a good kind
of Pentecostal deliverance prayer to be delivered
from darkness. Freedom, that's
what I needed, because I was bound, and I felt something tangibly
drop off of me. I felt it. And I'm not saying everybody
needs to feel something. It's like candy. Sometimes it's
good to have, sometimes you don't need it. I don't know, I
needed it in that moment. Something dropped
off of me, and I felt like
10 pounds lighter. Here's how literal
I mean this. When I got up, I jumped in
the air to see if I would jump higher, because I
felt like I'd lost 20 pounds, and I was jumping,
I was so happy. I thanked him,
and I hugged him. But it really, I don't
know what that meant, because I wasn't really
embracing anything. I wasn't converting
to something. I just felt like I'd been
delivered from something. But it was a moment, and
for the next several months, I wrestled with what this
meant, and I got to the point, and I'm sure you've heard
many converts describe this, where you feel like
you're on the cusp of about to fall
over something, fall into something, but you're not
over the edge yet. So, I started college,
and it was really hard. My mind was not
in it, man. I was having an
existential crisis. I was not in it. I was getting D's,
and I was so embarrassed. My parents had worked so
hard to walk me through the process of
getting there. They'd set up
an art room for me, and I was so embarrassed
that I was failing that I couldn't tell them, and eventually, I just stopped
going to college altogether, and I literally,
I don't mean I dropped out. I mean, I just
stopped going. I didn't bother
to drop out. In the morning, I would
get in my car and I would say, "Bye, Mom.
I'm going to school," and then I would
drive down the road and park in the cemetery and wait for them
to go to work, and then I would go back
home and go to bed. And then eventually,
they're like, "Phillip, your college
called and said you haven't been
there in three weeks. What's going on?" I'm like, "Oh,
I stopped going." They were so angry. I had missed the drop date and everything to
get the money back. But at any rate,
my parents were like, "What is going on with you?" So, I was going
through a crisis, and eventually,
I went to a party. My friend, John, was
there, and he asked, "How are you doing?" and I told him, and he's
talking about Jesus again, and I was just like,
"You know what? This is what I need. I got nothing else. Give me Jesus. Whatever this is,
I will take it." And so, he said, "You
need to be baptized." And so, it was 1 AM
on October 22, 1999, we went down to the local lake,
and we got in the water, I was freezing cold, and he gave me this
full immersion baptism, and I jumped up,
and I was so happy. I was shouting. I felt like I was
looking at the world for the first time, like I was Adam freshly
created by the hand of God, seeing creation
for the first time. I was so happy, and I felt
like I truly first time understood what born-again
meant, and I was telling God, "I'm on this ship now. I don't care
where it takes me. This is where I'm going." So, that's how I kind
of came to Christ. It was a big change. God bless, John. To pause there for a moment, just sometimes
I think when we; we have an obligation,
as baptized Christians, as Catholics, to evangelize, to share the faith, and sometimes I think
we overthink it, like, 'Oh, I have
to have all the answers. I need to think... But no, there's power
in the name. Yeah, he didn't;
I mean, we had theological disputes and stuff. But it really came down
to, he was just like, "You need Jesus. Jesus Christ loves you
and He will help you. Just call out." And every time he would
say things like that, it was like dominoes
in my heart would fall. And I'm shaking now just
thinking about it, the power of what
he said to me, even 24 years later,
it still rivets me. - Yeah.
- It was very simple. Yeah, wonderful, okay. So, you had this
baptism experience. What happened next? Well, I'd had a lot
of weird experiences as a kid. I had drug experiences,
so I was naturally worried, like, 'Is this
really a real change? Or was that just a crazy
thing I did last night?' Like, 'Whoa!
What a night we had!' And then I go back
to my same old, same old. I went back to my
parents' house. I woke up the next
morning, and I was noticeably different. As soon as my eyes opened,
I was like, it's still here. Whatever it was,
it's still with me, and I noticed it. And so, I realized that, I was like, "I am
a Christian now. I'm a Christian." And so, I was ravenously
hungry for whatever Christianity was. So, I got a Bible. I had a Gideon's
hotel room Bible, and I just read it,
and I underlined it, and I didn't understand
what I was reading. I made flashcards. I practiced
memorizing passages. I went to the bookstore. I picked up
Christian books. I started talking to
John all the time. And I dove
headlong into it. I started just immediately
preaching to everybody, like Saint Paul, as soon
as he was converted, he was immediately in
Damascus talking to people, and I was immediately like,
"You need Jesus." I barely even knew what
had happened to me, but I knew that
I was different. I knew that I was one way
and now I was another way, and that I was happy. For the first time
in a long time, I was very, very happy. And God's power
seemed to be everywhere. It would be tedious to
recount all of what I saw, but things happened to me that
I consider were miraculous. I started praying for things,
and things started happening. My friend was ill with
this thing, and I was like, "I'm just going to fast
and pray for him." And then he was healed, and it was like I didn't
even understand. It was like the book said
to do it, and so I did it, and then it worked. The stuff happened the way
it was supposed to happen. And I was just enthralled,
and so I found a group; and what was really
enthralling was, it wasn't only me. Many of my friends had had
similar things happening to them around this time, so I wasn't the only one
that John was talking to and that other people
were talking to, and it seemed
like there was a way; I would hesitate to
use the word 'revival', - but it was like...
- That's what I was thinking. If we had
maybe 30 friends, maybe a third of them
had these dramatic conversions to Christian. I'll give you their names. - We'll get them on the show.
- That's right. - But maybe a third...
- Track them down. ...of my friends had
these dramatic conversions all at the same time. So it was like something that was
happening collectively. It felt like Jesus Christ was reaching into
my friend group and just taking people
out and being like, "You are Mine, you are Mine,
you are Mine," and we were all kind of
discovering this together. And so, we would
meet together. There was an old guy, an elder at a Presbyterian
church who somehow, through a friend
of a friend, he knew who we were, and he
let us come to his house. He and his wife, they were
retired, and they opened their house,
and they were like, "You guys can come here,
you can hang out, you can talk,
you can study, whatever." And we were still pretty
sketchy looking, man. We were still pretty
grungy looking. We were kind of these
crazy, grungy-looking punk rock people that were talking
about Jesus all the time. And God bless this guy
for letting us; his kids were grown
and out of the house, and he'd just say, "Come
on in, you guys can..." And he would kind of try
to guide us a little bit, but he would let us
discover our own way. And so, we were just
studying, but very quickly, and I was being
taken to; I wasn't really going to church
though, at all. We talked about church
as if it was us. So, I'd get together
with John and my friends, and we'd say, "Do you guys
want to have church?" And we'd say, "Yes, let's
have church," and that was a time where we'd get
together and talk about spiritual things. But over time,
it became clear that we had very different
opinions on what church; what having church was
or what God meant. Like I said, John was
Pentecostal, so he would say, "Let's go here or there," and we'd go to these places, and I'd see people doing things
like speaking in tongues or whatever, and I'm like,
"What's that? I don't do that.
Why do you do that?" They say, "Oh, that's
speaking in tongues." Or other discussions
like, "Do I need to...?" So, I was baptized, "What
does baptism even do?" I didn't know what it was. I just knew that it was
the rite of joining, like the initiation. I didn't know what
it did, if anything. "Or how do you
get baptized? It seems to say here in
this passage, I'm reading in Acts, it says, 'Be
baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ
for the forgiveness of sins, and you shall
receive the Holy Spirit.' But here, it seems to say,
'Go, baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit.' Does it matter what
specific words are used?" When I'm telling people,
"You need Jesus" and they say,
"Okay, I believe," what should we
expect of them? Is it okay if they're
still, "I love Jesus, but I'm still shacking up
with my girlfriend." Is that cool?" There's all these
kind of questions of what Christian life means that were very
difficult for someone in my position to reconcile. Well, that's probably
a good place for a break, but real quickly,
before we go there, just in all this time,
all these experiences, did you have any consciousness
of the Catholic Church, of kind of those roots? Did that resonate at all with
what you were discovering? No, I knew
Catholicism was out there as a historical reality,
but I kind of considered it as fake Christianity, because I imbibed
through the sources that I was reading, which were mainly
we would call "Low Church
Fundamentalists", kind of Pentecost stuff,
that this was a dead religion that was just kind
of this ritualistic, kind of crusty, they didn't
actually have faith. So, I knew they existed
as a historical reality, but I didn't really take
them seriously at all. All right, we'll come back
in just a couple of minutes and hear the rest
of Phillip's story. Again, I want to remind you,
if you go to CHNetwork.org, there's all sorts of stories
from every background. So, search your own background. You'll find someone
with a story like yours who discovered
the Catholic Church and would love to share
their testimony with you. In the meantime, we'll be
back in just a couple of minutes to hear the rest
of Phillip's story. See you then. [music] [music] Welcome back to
'The Journey Home' program. We're entering the second
half of our hour tonight, speaking with Phillip Campbell. He's a revert the
Catholic faith. Those roots in your
childhood, Phillip, with a foray into sort of a Pentecostal Fundamentalist
Christianity, through these experiences
and powerful experiences of being called out of darkness
by the witness of a friend. Yeah. So, we're going
to right back to that. I wanted to make sure
to mention, though, before we get back
in the narrative, that phillipcampbell.net is Phillip's website,
phillipcampbell.net. Phillip with two L's. Two L's in Phillip
and two L's in Campbell. I tried to type
it in earlier. I had to get both those
double L's in there. You can find out more
about his work, his books, and all that, and we'll talk
about those more later, but take us back
into the story, Phillip. Yeah, so I'd
embraced Christianity, but now, as far
as me and my friends, we're starting to really dig
into the meat of the Bible and try to live
Christian life, all these questions arose about understanding
biblical passages, about different practices,
about what was allowed. I can't tell you the
amount of debates we had about whether we were
allowed to smoke cigarettes or not, things like that. Just like, what does it
mean to be a Christian, and what is this book
actually telling us? Now, we all had kind of
taken a kind of as an axiom that we just go by
what this says, and I think we also
were leaving room for the Spirit to prompt you and personally kind of
give you some guidance, but it was very much
a Sola Scriptura approach, but I didn't know
what Sola Scriptura was. It's just because of,
like I said, the context that I imbibed this faith in was through a sort of particular Protestant
vision of it, and not just, but a particular
American Protestant vision of it. So, I was very skeptical
of churches, because my conversion
had taken place entirely outside the context
of any church whatsoever. It was very, what I
would say, supernatural. It wasn't highly
intellectual. It was supernatural. It was emotional. It was about a total
escape from darkness into light, from being released
from bondage into freedom, and I was skeptical that
any institutional that like, that all the old
people sitting down at the Methodist Church
would be able to add anything to the powerful
experience that I'd had. It was very arrogant to
think, in retrospect, but I was very
much thinking like, very kind of myopically focused
on what had happened to me, because it was so
staggering in my life. So, we're working through
these things, and we start going to what I would
call 'house churches', kind of looking
for loose associations of the faithful that are not affiliated
with denominations. Or if we do go to churches, I'm going to places that are
very off the radar. So, I'm going to; and I
usually find out about these through John
or various friends, because like I said, John's
been Christian his whole life, so he's more plugged in
with people than I am. So, I kind of went
where he told me to go. And so, we're going
to various places. We're hanging out
at this house with this old
Presbyterian couple, and then for a while, I went to this place up north in Michigan where there
was these people who were more
prepper Christians, where they're like,
"The apocalypse is coming, and we have to bury food,"
and stuff like that, and we went up there
and checked that out, and I was like,
"No, that's weird," and did various things. I went down to an
all-African-American church in Inkster, which
is a suburb of Detroit, which is known as a place
of, it's kind of a more impoverished area,
and I went down to an all-African-American
church where it was, me and John were the only white
people in the congregation, and it was held
in an old school, in the gym of an old school, and these were people that, you have to speak in
tongues or you don't have the Holy Spirit,
and you're not saved, and I went there
for a little while, because I was
trying to sort out, this thing of tongues
was really bothering me, because many people
I was reading, I was listening to teaching
tapes by Benny Hinn, and kind of
people in that broader charismatic Pentecostal
movement in Protestantism. John spoke in tongues. People I knew
spoke in tongues. I was really trying to
sort this out, and I went to this church in Inkster
called the Bethlehem Temple, and it's not there
anymore, and they told me, "Yeah, unless you
speak in tongues, you're not even saved,"
and I was like, "But I had this experience," and they're like,
"It doesn't matter. Unless you speak in
tongues, you don't have the Holy Spirit." So, they took me
back in a room, and they all sat in chairs
around me in a circle, and then they spoke in tongues
at me for 20 minutes, trying to get me
to speak in tongues. They were putting their
hands on me, and there was a person there being like,
"Come on, do it, do it, do it." And I just wasn't doing
it, and then the pastor was angry with me, and he
took me into his office, and his office was; this was an old
elementary school, the office was the
old lunch lady room, and I remember
it was after the service, and I remember, he was
a very venerable old gentleman that'd been
around for a long time, and I remember him leaning
back in the chair, and he was mopping
the sweat of his face, and he's like, "Don't
let the devil steal this gift that God's
trying to give you." It was really kind
of traumatizing. It was the first time that
I had had a situation where somebody had
told me that my kind of Christianity wasn't right,
where I had been sincerely trying to follow what
I knew to be the truth, and someone was telling
me, "No, no, no, you're doing it wrong. You're not actually saved. You think you are,
but you're not." It was very troubling. And I yelled at John
for bringing me there when we got in the car. "Why'd you take me
to that place?" Sorry, John.
John knows this, though. Yeah. I went to various
house churches. There's a place in Toronto
called 'The Toronto Blessing', which is kind of, now we
would call it a megachurch. It was this huge church
where miracles were supposed to be happening,
and I went there, and people were falling
on the floor and shouting and crying
and all these things, and I was just kind of
trying to sort out like, 'Is this what Christianity
is supposed to be?' Because I didn't really
think of myself as an intellectual at the time,
but what I was noticing was that I wasn't happy; even though I was
converted through an emotional experience,
you can't stop there. It was like, 'What? Am I just supposed to exist
in this state forever now? I had this very
emotional experience, am I just supposed
to perpetually live in that experience forever?' For me, that wasn't
viable, and I wanted actual answers, like, 'No,
when Paul wrote this text, he meant something
objectively, and I want to know
what he meant, not kind of listening
to Benny Hinn. He would read passages
from Hosea or whatever and be like, "This is
what the Holy Spirit is telling me,"
and I'd be like, "Well, I don't want to
know just what you think. I want to know what Hosea
meant when he said that." So, this was really
bothering me about these questions, and I didn't
consider Catholicism at all. I just didn't consider
it real Christianity. So, at one point, I started
going to a trailer, in a trailer park, where there was these two
bachelor guys living, who were a little
bit older than us. We were maybe in our early
20s, these guys were maybe in their 40s. Ed and Derek
were their names. If you're out there, Ed
and Derek, God bless you wherever you're at. And they would have Bible
studies, but they were very eclectic. They drew from
every source. So, they'd be reading
Protestant literature, and then they'd be like,
"Here's John of the Cross, and here's Brother
Lawrence, here's..." They had Anglican,
Pentecostal, Catholic. They had all these
sources, and these guys were super eclectic. They kind of didn't care where
the source was coming from. They were just looking for
nourishment, and I got exposed to Catholic
books through them. They gave me copies of
'The Mystical Ascent to Mount Carmel'
['Ascent of Mount Carmel'], I think that's the
name of the book, by John of the Cross, and boy, I
understood none of that, but I loved it, because
it was rich spirituality, and I was like, "Wow! This Catholic author is
very serious about this." And around this time,
other Catholic elements started in, because you go
around Christians enough, you're going to run
into Catholicism. I started running into
other Christians who loved Jesus very much,
and they were Catholic, and I was like, 'Wow,
that's very interesting.' So, around this time, John went away to
live with basically a community of
"The Jesus People", I don't know if you
know who they are. Yeah. They're kind of
Protestant hippies that live in the cities, and they run soup
kitchens and whatnot. John went out to California
to work with them for a while, and he
came back, and he brought a movie, and the movie was
'Brother Sun, Sister Moon' by Franco Zeffirelli, about the life of
Saint Francis of Assisi; it was made in 1971,
and he was like, "You've got to watch this
movie," and like, "Okay," so I watched the movie. The movie's very dated. It's very much permeated
by a hippie ethos, but it's the life of
Saint Francis of Assisi told in 1971,
by 1971 people. But man, did that movie
resonate with me. Here's this guy who's
raised kind of secular. He has this powerful
experience. He loses his friends, and then he turns it
all over to Christ. And I watch this movie, and it just shook me
to my core, and I cried watching
it, and I was like, "That's what I want, this." But it couldn't connect with me that
this guy was Catholic. It couldn't connect
with me, but he was so
different from every, I'm going to these
Protestant churches where it's people in suits
and this and that, and here's this guy
wearing these grungy rags with a tonsure, and he's
walking around barefoot in the rain and singing about
how much he likes being poor. I was like, 'What
even is this?' It was a whole
world of Christianity that I didn't
even know existed. So, I start kind of
studying Catholicism, and I start wrestling with
the various aspects of it. At the time, I signed up
for a... But at the time, I was thinking I wanted
to go into ministry, like Protestant ministry, so
I signed up a training course at a local church
that was training people for the pastorate. So, I was training for
this, but I was also wrestling with
Catholicism, and I just loved Saint Francis,
and my mom saw that I was wrestling with some of
this Catholic stuff, and she's like, "Did you
know you're Catholic?" I was like, "Excuse me?" She was like, "Yeah, you
were baptized at St John the Baptist Church
when you were a baby." I never even knew I was
baptized when I was a child. She was like,
"Yeah, you are Catholic, at least canonically." So, I was like, "Oh my
goodness, that's insane. I had no idea." So, I started to very much
respect Catholicism's intellectual tradition. I was like, they try to
have answers, and they really try to work out
what the theology means, and I started reading
Catholic books and sources. But at the same time,
I'm practicing to be a Protestant
minister at this; Conversion isn't always
in a straight line. So, the pastor who
was running the class, he was going to let us all
preach a practice sermon to his congregation, and he hears that
I'm studying Catholicism. And he pulls me
aside, and he says, "Phillip, I want
you to tell me about what you've been doing." And I tell him, "Well, I've
been studying Catholicism. I've been talking
to Catholics." And I hadn't really gone
to Mass or anything yet, but I was hanging around
Catholics and going to, talking to people in RCIA
and stuff like that, and he just kind
of shuts it down. He says, "Answer me one
question, do you believe that the Communion is the Body
and Blood of Jesus Christ?" And I said, "Yes, I do." And he said, "Why?" And I was like,
"I don't know." And he said, "Can you back
that up from the Bible?" And I said, "No." And he's like, "That's
what I thought." And then he said, "You're
not going to be preaching anything here. You can stay in the class,
but I'm not going to let you have an audience." So, I was like, "Fine." So, I was really
frustrated with myself. I'm like, 'I'm just going
to put this Catholic stuff aside and just focus on
what I'm doing here, because this can wait. I can take my time and
study this over the next decade or whatever.' But I'm still kind of
sorting out these questions, and what's really
drawing me to Catholicism is the history, because what really bothered me about
the Protestant interpretation, I was starting to see how
culturally bound they were, how what I was getting was a late 20th-century
United States interpretation of
Christianity, and I was really coming to
understand that, and it really bothered me
the notion that Jesus Christ would come, die on the
cross, found a Church, and then kind of,
everything would just kind of go to pot, until maybe,
depending on who you ask, 1517, 1860, the Azusa
Street Revival. Really, did Jesus just
kind of let it go astray for that? So, this historical
question really bothered me. The presence of
people in history like Francis of
Assisi bothered me, bothered meaning agitated me. I couldn't account
for these things. Right. And what really I
thought this hinged on was the question of, 'Did Jesus Christ
pass on His authority to the apostles
and their successors through the bishops?' Because if that was the case, and that was really
what Jesus intended, that it seemed like the
Catholic Church's position was obvious,
if that was true, but I couldn't
really find in the Bible that apostolic
succession was a thing. So, I'm going to my
leadership class and I'm just decided
I'm not going to think about this anymore, and the pastor
puts up a PowerPoint, and we're talking
about something, and the PowerPoint has
a verse from 2 Timothy that I wanted to read,
2 Timothy 2:2, and on the PowerPoint
in front of my face, it says, "What you've heard from me before many witnesses
entrust to faithful men who will be able
to teach others also." And it really hit me that,
I saw that, and I was like, 'That's
apostolic succession.' Paul is saying,
'I received something. What you've heard from
me, I handed it to you. You're going to entrust it
to other faithful men, who are going
to teach others.' And I was just
blown away by that, and it was the last kind of
drip of doubt melted away. So now I'm kind of
reaching that point where I'm kind of like, 'I know I have
to become Catholic, but I don't want to, because this is going
to be a big shakeup.' So, I'm going to this
service where this Protestant pastor that's
kind of been mentoring me, is preaching,
and it's a summer night, it's raining,
it's hot, it's muggy, and I'm just in agony, and I can't listen
to his sermon. So, I go out of the
church, and I start walking around the
building in the rain, and I'm just getting rained
on, like Saint Francis, just getting rained on, and I'm walking around
the church building, literally doing a lap, and I'm like in kind of
in this mental agony about this conversion thing, and I walk around the
corner of the building, it was the northwest
corner of the building, and when I walked
around the building, in front of me,
there was a giant chalice with a monstrance
floating in the air in front of me,
and it was huge, it was the size of my body. Like when you see
on holy cards, like the host, and I fell to my knees
in the mud right there, and I was just
like, I didn't know, I mean, I knew what it was,
and I just sat there. I don't know how
to explain it. I don't know if the
cars driving by saw it. I explain it like I saw it
in my mind's eye, as clear as day. I can remember
exactly where it was. I remember how tall it was,
where on the building it was. I don't know how long I
sat there, but eventually, I came to, and it was gone,
and I walked in the church, and the service was over. I must have been
out there a long time, because pastor
preached an hour. I walked in, and he was
in the vestibule greeting people leaving,
and I walked in. I was covered in mud,
and I was in rain, and he looked at me, and he
was like, "What happened?" I was filled with some
sort of zeal, and I went up to him and I said,
"Pastor, you remember when you asked me
where in the Bible it teaches the
Real Presence?" He said, "Yes." I said, "It's in John 6,
verses blah, blah, blah," and I started rattling off
the Bread of Life discourse. "He who eats My Flesh
and drinks My Blood has eternal life,
and I will dwell..." And I rattled it off,
and he was like... You should have seen. I was covered in,
I was so filthy and wet, and I'm here rattling
off passages about the Eucharist
in this guy's own church. Well, anyhow, I entered
RCIA, and they said to me, "Look, you were
baptized Catholic. You don't need to go
through the whole thing. You just got to
make a confession, and you can come
into the Church in October. You don't even got
to wait till Easter." And they said, "Why don't
you flip open the calendar in October and see
if there's a date that speaks to you?" So, I flipped open
the calendar, and I looked at the
first week in October, the Feast of
Francis of Assisi, and I was received
in the Church then. And on his feast day, and I took his name
when I was confirmed, later that Easter. And then,
a few years later, when John Paul II died and they established
his feast day, his feast day
was put on the date that I found Christ
on that day on the lake, October 22nd. That was his feast day. Wow. And so, that was how
I came into the Church, and it's been
difficult at times, but as I look back, I don't think of myself
as a revert or a convert. I just look back and I
see God was always there. It was always me and Him. He was always
looking at me. He was always calling me. Everything that ever
happened to me was Him trying to move me
in a certain way, and He still does, and if we just had the;
just recognize it. So, thank you, John. Thank you for and thank
the Lord for His grace and Saint Francis. - Yeah, what mercy.
- Yeah. Sometimes it's
not until, looking back, you see that the innumerable
ways that God prepares us and plants those seeds. - Yeah.
- In the ways that we need. That's amazing how every
story is sort of custom... Giving me what I needed, a word in due season,
as the Bible says. Yes. He gave me just
what I needed when I needed it. Not when I thought
I needed it, but when I needed it,
and what I needed. - And He's trustworthy.
- Yeah. Well, we have about
six minutes left. Let's just take a few
minutes and talk about some of the continuing
journey and some of the work that you've
done in the Church. What was funny is, right
after I became Catholic, I was like, "I need
to learn about this." So, I enrolled in Ave
Maria College when it was up in Michigan. Yeah. And I just went
here and I'm like, I wasn't even
confirmed yet, but I was like,
'I need to learn about this,' so I enrolled in their
liberal arts program. The day we, I went to
college for orientation, they handed me a copy of
Josef Pieper, 'Leisure, The Basis of Culture'. Oh, good book, yeah. Yeah, they're
like, "Read this," and Ave Maria opened me up to the beautiful world
of the liberal arts that I'd never been
exposed to before. It was such a
good experience. I met so many good people, and I got immersed
in Catholic culture, and it filled in all the gaps
in what I was missing and what I wanted out of; it was just such
a good experience. But eventually, I
went into education. I was just filled with
a zeal to teach, and especially history, since it was so
important to me. So I became
a history teacher, first teaching
in Catholic co-ops, and then I was
brought on board with Homeschool Connections, which is an online Catholic
curriculum provider. Shout out to some of
my students: Evan, Kai, Marley, Rafael, Ian,
all you guys. Love you. So, I teach online, and then kind of
built up a reputation as a history teacher there, and then I was
eventually approached by Tan Books to write some
books on Catholic history to help make it
more accessible to a younger audience. There's lots of historical
resources out there that are very good, but they're
looking for something that would appeal to kids
who are eight years old and would be able to
give them the history, give it to them solid, but also, in a way that
they could understand. And so, that's kind of
what I specialize in, I guess, is explaining
these things to kids in a way that
gives them all the facts and communicates
the truth to them, but at their level, without kind of talking down
or pandering to them. And some of the great
feedback I get about the books
is people will say, "This is written for kids, but it's not a
children's book. It's something that
anybody can benefit from." And I try to appeal
to everyone with that. So I've been very
blessed the past decade to be making a living as a teacher and author
in the Catholic world. Very good. And the book I mentioned
at the beginning, too, 'The Heroes and
Heretics' book, one thing I appreciate
about that book is it certainly, it's sharing the history
of the Reformation, what led up to it
and the fallout, but it's really
told through, in a sense,
people's stories. - Biography.
- Biography. The spiritual journey,
like so much of history, it all comes down
to the little decisions in people's lives. And so, reading
that can be a very, it's a very fruitful
thing for people. Yeah, story is powerful. It is, as you know. Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess with just
a few minutes left, if there's a
person out there who's in some of the
places that you were along your journey
in terms of, whether they have
Catholic roots or not, but in a very dark place,
grasping for something, a word of encouragement
you might offer them. Yeah, don't worry so much
about; just take a step. Just take that step out. The end is the journey in
a way, like the prodigal son. The prodigal son has
to turn to come home, but in a sense, he's home
as soon as he turns. That's how God is. As soon as we turn,
we are home. And I would say just
call out to Him. You don't need to
have the answers. Faith is always, there's
always going to be an aspect of struggling. Saint Paul says, "We see
in a mirror darkly." There's always going to
be a sense of wrestling. You don't need to
work everything out. Just call out to God. Call out to Christ,
and take that first step, and let Him do the rest. - He's faithful.
- Yeah. I think we can translate
that also to the people out there who are going to
have those in their lives, that are lost,
that are in darkness, and they don't know
what to do about them, and again, like we
mentioned earlier, it's easy to overthink that, rather than to simply
share Jesus with them. Everything
that's happened to me and everyone that I've
touched in my life through my teaching, it only happened
because I had a friend who told me I needed Jesus, and he wasn't a theologian, he was just
a 14-year-old kid who started telling me,
"You need Christ." All we need to do
is love people and tell them the truth. We really don't need
to overcomplicate it. Tell them what they need,
and do it in love, because I never doubted
that John loved me for a moment. And John, I love
you, brother. I never doubted
his love for me. And when he said
these things in love, it meant something. So, if we just had
childlike faith but like, "Let's go back
to the Beatitudes." Yeah, and just
being able to, and I guess
another thing, too, as just a final
part is just, I appreciate so much that
you share your testimony, Phillip, and even the
difficult parts of it. People out there need to
discover their own testimony. Yeah, and it doesn't need
to look like mine or anyone else's. You're going to
have your own story. What difference has
Christ made in your life? And sometimes,
until we tell it, we don't really
appreciate it, even if we kind of
know it intellectually. We have to hear
ourselves saying it, our friends, our family. They all need to
hear it as well. Yes, they do. Well, again,
thank you so much for sharing your
story, brother, and thank you
for your work. Yeah. People can find out
more about your work at phillipcampbell.net. There's two double
L's in there. - Two L's.
- Phillip and Campbell. Your books and your work
in sharing the history. - Thank you for that.
- Thank you. Thank you for joining us
for this episode of 'The Journey Home' program. I pray that Phillip's story
is an inspiration to you, and again, what
a great reminder of the power in the name,
the name of Jesus, and the power in the simple
sharing of the Gospel, and certainly, we are
so blessed as Catholics to have the rich treasury
of the deposit of faith, the prayer, the devotion
, the sacraments, it's all wonderful, but<b> </b>never forget
in the midst of that, that it begins
with sharing Jesus with your friends and family. And so, discover
your own testimony. Share it with others, and trust Jesus to bring
about the fruit in that. We'll be back again next week
to share another story. In the meantime,
God bless you. [music]
