good morning and welcome to another day
in vlent today we're going to be talking about what it means when a Protestant
pastor wants to become Catholic. Good morning, I'm that nerdy Catholic, I'm
an evangelical Catholic trying to help Evangelicals understand Catholics. Today
we have a special guest with us. Marcus Grodi is the president and founder of
the Coming Home Network. I'm going to ask him to share a little bit about what the
coming up network is all about. Oh, this is our 25th year and about 25
years ago or so my wife Marilyn I entered the church, and
I had been a Presbyterian pastor for 10 years about 10 years, and so it was tough
coming in on the journey when we knew a very few other Protestant ministers who
had ever had the craziness to consider becoming Catholic and we couldn't talk
with our Protestant friends about what we were studying and learning and we
didn't know very many Catholics so we felt very much alone on the journey. We
just had a few Protestant converts that we had come to know along the way, Father
Ray Ryland and Scott Hahn and so after coming into the church the idea
was to form a network of converts to help others on the journey so that
whether their clergy laity wherever they were they have a place to connect to ask
the difficult questions without being pushed or prodded into the church but to
feel very comforting and welcomed to talk about what they were going through
and so we've been doing that now for 25 years. So in just rough numbers how many
pastors do you think have come in to the church because of working with the
Coming Home Network? Well we have, again rough numbers, we we have about 2,300 to 2,400 non-
Catholic clergy who have one way or the other
contacted the Coming Home Network or we've been told about them on the
journey. About half of those have come into the church and the other half are
still somewhere along on the journey. So what was, maybe recall one or
two stories that you can remember of a pastor the contact at the Coming Home Network, we walked through them the whole part of the journey, and then and then
they came in to the Catholic Church. Yeah well, I can talk in generalities of
mostly men that we've worked with. For example I can think of one man who in
the process of his doing his weekly sermon preparation in checking out
commentaries for his sermon encountered an interpretation of Scripture that he
had never encountered before and that awakened him both of the fact that there
were other ideas out there and also that his own idea wasn't the even the the
best interpretation of Scripture. That began him on a journey of studying
scripture deeper which led him to the early church fathers and eventually led
him to the to contact us through the internet because now he was finding the
struggle of every week putting together his sermons when he realized that what
he had been teaching all along didn't connect with what the early church
taught and so that eventually led to the long journey of him resigning from his
pastorate and coming into the church. I know some men also in that same situation
where they've they come along that process, become convicted that they ought
to consider entering the church but their wife is not on the same page as
they are and don't want to make the journey so they get stalled in the
process of deciding should they stay in the pastorate or should they resign but
but not coming to the church yet because of their wife or come into the church
anyway hopefully with the wife's permission. other issues sometimes they
watch the journey home program sometimes they're browsing the internet and
they'll become involved in a debate and find themselves awakened by grace to a
new way of looking at scripture a new way of looking at
church history new way of looking at Authority and sometimes it can be led
both by discovering that there's a problem of Protestantism, a problem a
Sola Scriptura, while at the same time discovering the
beauty of the church. One of the things that I've talked about in a few of my
recent videos is the the complexity of the Catholic understanding of salvation
compared to a very simple understanding a lot of Protestants have of salvation
and especially thinking about it in terms of a pastor and all the the real
struggles that he would go through and and even thinking about becoming
Catholic. Just talked a little bit about, you know about that, about his
understanding of salvation to say you know it's not a I need to be Catholic
right now or I'm not saved and it's not a well I can be wherever I am and I'm
saved you know but it's it's always somewhere in the middle. yeah obviously
Seth that's a more complicated subject to be covering your little vlog right
here. Simply our work is standing
beside men and women to help them discern what God's calling them to do
because our bottom line is about a deeper walk with Jesus Christ I mean
that's that's what our work is about and certainly people can look at documents
from hundreds of years ago where the relationship between the Catholic Church
and non Catholic churches was much more polemical and the way they talk to one
another wasn't often very charitable but the church particularly in the last
hundred years particularly since vatican ii as a result of i think many of the
experiences as a result of world war ii has come to appreciate that yes the
fullness of the church that our lord established is most completely present
in the catholic church it's fully present in the catholic church but there
are elements of that that are shared with our separated
brethren and as the church herself teaches that all these elements of
authentic Christianity at one time or other came from the Catholic Church and
so that's why we are united but not perfectly with those outside the church.
we don't stand in and judgment of someone's salvation and in may in many
ways what I've come to discover more importantly is that even when we focus
our attention on the issue of salvation for ourselves, am I saved, that can become
a very inward self-centered focus, that really the call is not to be self
focused but to be outward focused as our Lord teaches loving the Lord God and our
neighbor as herself, that our focus is not to be on our salvation but on loving
one another, and trusting salvation to God. I mean that's really what it's
about and if he's calling us to do something beyond our imagination we
believe that's what he calls us to do we're called to do it and for some people
that's becoming Catholic so that's where we are to help you on
the journey. yeah I think for me one of the most encouraging things in the work
at the coming Network is that we can both at the same time affirm someone's
faith, affirm their relationship with Jesus, and at the same time call them to
- what we see as a deeper relationship with Jesus in the Catholic Church. yeah
recently we many of us mourned as well as felt at peace about the passing of, for
example, Dr. Billy Graham and he's had such a great impact on so many of us, he
has me. You know he was, I know that the very first time I accepted Christ as my
Lord and Savior was a response to Billy Graham, and so I owe him a lot, and I
recognize he is him as a brother and pray for him and his family. If I had a
chance to sit with Billy I would gladly have shared him more about the beauty of
the Catholic Church, as i know John Paul ii did with billy, but we also recognize
How God has used Billy Graham in the
millions of people's lives and that his work was a response to grace, we know
that it was, a great love for Jesus Christ, and so we consider him a brother
and we would hope that he would consider us would, have considered us brothers.
That's just a little bit into the work at the Coming Home Network and and to see how
we work to to help our brothers and sisters to affirm that they are indeed
our brothers and sisters in Christ and to help them see the beauty of the
Catholic Church and do what we can to to help draw them in and to work as as
Marcus said in those moments of grace that God puts in their lives to draw
them into the Catholic Church see if I have any questions please leave them in
the comments below I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow,
God bless. You can watch another video up here if you like what I'm doing on this
channel and you want to join this community click that subscribe button
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and God bless
