Why a Foursquare Pastor Swam Upstream and Became Catholic

[Music] hello everyone welcome to this week's episode of catholic recon testimonies from reverts and converts i'm your host eddie trask thanks this week's guest i've been tracking down for a few months right kenny just yeah this stuff hey you got me finally finally yeah uh persistence paid off here so uh but anyway this week's guest is kenny burchard and it's a pleasure to finally have him on this program he's been on the journey home he's been on my friend gary machuda show and i when i read just a brief biography about kenny what struck me is so fascinating is that first of all we spent a lot of time so i'm from the central valley in california and he spent a lot of time there but also and i know we're going to get far into this the pentecostal um denomination and how i spent time at a big church that was you know not blatantly pentecostal but they had some baptist and pentecostal theologies and i just find that fascinating how we all start to uh see each other in these different areas and i interviewed someone else that spent time in the central valley that was connected to the pentecostal denomination but um anyway kenny thank you so much for for being here i cannot wait to hear the the journey good yeah thank you for the the invite eddie and i and i really appreciate uh you know just the opportunity to share and to get to know you a little bit and hopefully encourage people who are are listening and watching um about this incredible journey you want me to just jump in i would i would love for you to jump in and yeah whatever is relevant to those that that you know listen to this this um what do you call this channel yeah because we have a number of people that come from yeah as marcus as marcus grodi explained to you there are just so many uh different denominations out there and people love to hear similarities absolutely well you know it's and i think it's important for us to share our stories of conversion or as the case may be reversion for me it was conversion i didn't like using that word at first because i said well i'm already a christian so i don't want to talk about myself as being a convert that's how i initially felt about it when i became a catholic in 2019 i stayed away from the word convert initially now i've completely embraced it wrapped my arms around it and and completely integrated into the way i think and that's because i really do believe that the the mindsets that i had when i wasn't catholic when i was a christian but when i wasn't catholic in some ways the trajectory of those ideas is so different from the catholic mind and the catholic understanding of things that it really is a conversion that that goes on not that i finally became a christian when i became catholic but that the fullness of what's offered to followers of jesus becomes accessible to you completely and holy once you become catholic and there is a conversion that goes along with that um like probably a lot of the folks that you have interviewed i didn't grow up christian at all i didn't grow up in a religious home um my parents were my mom came from a catholic childhood but re but rejected it later when she was just a teenager and my my father also came from a catholic childhood but also rejected it so there wasn't any catholicism per se in our home there really wasn't any christianity in our home at all except to make fun of it you know in whatever form happened to you know cross our view we my my dad was kind of almost like prolific at making fun of christians for different reasons and so there wasn't really a religious um uh devotion in our family and so something interesting though happened when i was eight years old uh on easter sunday now like a lot of um kids back when i was growing up in in the early 70s um you would you know easter was about easter easter baskets and new clothes and going to grandma's house and toys and things like that it wasn't about church at all for us but we did lots of other eastery things and on easter sunday morning when i was eight years old i got an easter basket just like i did every year but inside of my easter basket was a white with gold lettering king james gift and award bible holy bible in gold letters on the front with a white cover which honestly you know not being from a religious family at all was kind of strange but i grabbed this bible and i i had heard about the bible you know the bible was you know a discussion we sometimes would go to neighborhood bible camps and things like that when we'd get invited by this or that church so i knew that i had now this important book this holy book in my hands and i just i i was astounded by it and i guess maybe it came from my parents um catholic upbringing sort of like like echoes of of the past maybe they thought well let's get him a bible you know something in them said let's get him a bible and i remember to this day and i used to joke about it when i was wasn't even catholic when i was a protestant pastor to this day i remember saying to my mom the bible what what is the what's the bible about you know and my mom said the bible is a religious book written by men that has been used throughout the ages to control the masses through religion that was her her description of the bible was that it was sort of like this this cool this this tool you know created by this dark ball of religious people in order to control the masses but she thought she'd drop one in my you know in my easter basket kind of a thing so there's that contradiction but that's how she explained it to me but still i was incredibly intrigued by this book i would take it in my room all growing up i would open this bible and i would try to read it and you know i thought it was like a book you start on the first page and you go to the end i didn't really realize what was in the bible um and so i would try to read at it i would get to about genesis 4 or 5 and get bored and put it on the shelf again different times i'd flip flip forward to see what was there and i'd see red ink and i would read some of that like these are the words of jesus but i didn't know how it fit together but i will say that i think that that event and just engaging with the bible and then having church experiences growing up really gave me a spiritual hunger and openness to god and to christianity and then when i was nine years old a year after i got the bible we moved over the rocky mountains from denver colorado to salt lake city utah where my dad took a job transfer and when that happened i got plunged down into a very religious culture anyone would know living here in the u.s that that utah is the seat of the headquarters of the latter-day saint or mormon religion and so in that culture i got i just got plunged into it and it became normal to have discussions with people about god and jesus and scripture and church in fact when i was growing up i would go to church dances at the mormon churches most of my girlfriends were mormons when i was growing up and and mormonism and the approach to christian um thinking that they took uh though that they're not properly understood as an orthodox uh faithfully biblical group of christians a lot of the nomenclature and terminology is infused with with christian words and so this started becoming something that i was interested in and when i was in high school when i was in my junior year of high school i started dating a mormon girl and um she was shocked to find out that i wasn't a mormon and started having me do discussions with the mormon missionaries to try to convert me to mormonism so i started collecting i had my little white you know gift and award bible and i had the book of mormon that they gave me and well all of my friends and different people in my life started finding out that i was in this kind of journey of discovery so people hand you things here read this here read that read so i'm collecting i've got a bag of books and pamphlets and brochures and booklets that i'm collecting my girlfriends coming after me to try to get me to become a mormon a mormon my karate teacher was coming at me saying no that's not christianity he was a born-again christian i didn't really know what that meant he was coming at me friends at school and i just kind of got into this vortex this this swirl of religious hunger and discernment when i was 17 years old and i decided that i would sort of plunge myself into it uh in fact it was july 24th 1986. i remember it because in salt lake city it's a mormon holiday pioneer day i thought what a good day to go to the mormon temple and do a tour and ask questions and try to figure this out so i went there on the evening of july 24th 1986. and yeah 86 and i went on a tour and i started asking questions and i was really discouraged by the whole experience and i started walking off of temple square and saw as i came out at temple square this huge crowd of people parading down the street behind a cross they were doing in the 80s what was called a march for jesus down the streets of salt lake city and i was like wow what is that and i ran across the street got into this crowd i said what are you guys doing and they said well we're taking this city for god and we're doing a march for jesus and they said what are you doing out here and i opened my bag and i've got a bible and a book of mormon and every pamphlet you can imagine and i ended up talking to this guy david degrazia who's still a dear friend of of mine to this day didn't know him at the time but he was he was one of these guys out there he said well we're sharing jesus with people and i said well i'm looking for answers you know and it was just one of those i'm the guy that you witness to on the street that becomes a christian that's what happened to me i got i got evangelized by a street witnessing group you know in salt lake city and he took me aside and shared with me just some real basic biblical um texts john 3 16 uh john 3 3 you must be born again you know the romans road if you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart um that jesus is lord and that god raised him from the dead you'll be saved he shared with me all these verses he wrote him down on a little piece of paper and handed him to me and i stuck him in my bible and he said do you want to accept jesus that was the terminology that he used and i said yes but not right now and the reason that i said not right now is you know back to my mom giving me the bible my mom told me back then and all growing up your dad and i aren't going to decide for you you know what religion you are you can grow up and decide for yourself and maybe that was you know related to their own you know having grown up catholic and not getting to decide so they decided they weren't going to do that so when my friend david asked me on the street do you want to accept jesus i said yes but that was in the back of my mind and i said but i have to do it by myself i guess in my mind i thought this is a this is a solo act you know and so i went over the next two days after that event i went to all my friends i went to my girlfriend i went to my karate teacher to my family and everybody and i said i'm going to just be a christian i'm not going to be a mormon i'm not joining you know any of these groups i'm just going to be a born-again christian because i saw born again you know in the bible and i sat on the hood of my car as a 17 year old kid one one night in late july of 1986 and i just looked up and i prayed and i said god save me jesus save me come into my life help you know help me follow you it was just a real basic general prayer like that and there really was a an experience that i had a supernatural awakening experience that i had when i said that when i when i made that prayer when i opened up the lines of communication with god and something very real and and powerful happened to me that night and anish and i initially went home and told my parents um i need to get baptized and they refused to allow me to be baptized because they could see that i was you know really energetic about this newfound faith and they said no baptism you wait till you're 18 and then you can get baptized so they forbade me to be baptized and in fact my mom started taking my bible away and hiding it we went through kind of a war my senior year of high school because i was very ignorant but i was also very on fire in my ignorance and it created a lot of turmoil uh in my family but i was very serious uh i i alienated most of my mormon friends because i just you know i became kind of uh an apologist as it were against mormonism and for christianity which will be interesting when we come to the catholic thing um what i was doing in order to fight with mormons or you know are you with mormons was using catholic things now i was told in my evangelical churches that these were just christian things but history later told me that they were catholic things that it was the catholic church that essentially um helped in order to formulate and to you know to um solidify these big ideas about what is and what isn't christianity uh but at the time i just thought well this is christianity and i was i was i was um you know arguing with mormons and very soon after i became a christian the day before i went into boot camp in 1987 i got baptized i got baptized at the vineyard christian fellowship in salt lake city utah the day before i went to boot camp 1987 and on that and that was kind of it for me and i had another very dramatic very supernatural experience um in the waters of of baptism as well and that church the vineyard christian fellowship was instrumental in in bringing that group you know to salt lake to do the march for jesus and everyone said that's the church you need to go to so that's kind of how i found my way as a teenager into the charismatic and pentecostal uh holy spirit kinds of denominations and movements was because of the vineyard really early in my christian experience i was very open to supernatural things that'll also come up when i talk about the transition into catholicism but just very open to the holy spirit and the gifts of the holy spirit manifestations of the holy spirit and so very early in my christian experience i thought i want to serve god with my whole life i want to like how do you do that how could i how could i devote my whole life to serving god and and serving maybe in a church and and i felt very early on that maybe i should be a pastor and so even when i joined the navy in 1986 part of the reason that i did that was because i didn't come from a wealthy family and i wanted to go to bible college so that i could study the bible and be a pastor someday so i joined the navy got the gi bill i started taking courses from moody bible institute in in chicago you know when i was in the navy and i started working uh and volunteering in the churches that i was going to which is really funny you know moody bible institute and pentecostal those two things don't go true exactly at all yeah but but um um i still that was what i could find back then that would you know allow me to you know study scripture and get some credentialed coursework um and prepare for ministry and um and i and that's what i was doing i was very much focused on you know trying to get as much education and experience as i could so that someday when i got out of the navy i could go be a pastor somewhere that was kind of how i thought about it as a young you know 19 20 21 year old guy and that's what i was doing and that's what i was doing when i met my wife who was a missionary in japan she was actually with the same organization that brought the folks to salt lake city doing the march for jesus crazy and that's how i i kind of located them and found my wife there american girl and we started doing ministry together even while i was active duty in the navy and when it was time to get out i said let's get out of the navy after six years i was 23 years old so that i can get out and i can go figure out how to be a pastor and that's what we wanted to do and for the next couple of years my wife and i went headfirst into that trajectory we served and volunteered and got very invested uh in the churches that we were part of we moved back to salt lake city and went on staff when i was 24 almost 25 years old we went on staff at an assemblies of god church in salt lake city utah back to where it all kind of started and there um the questions of catholicism really started uh to germinate in in my mind in different ways not in it not in a positive way but in a very negative way my pastor was an ex-catholic he grew up uh in the catholicism of the the 60s and 70s left it you know watched a movie about the rapture or something and became a non-catholic christian and he would sprinkle anti-catholicism into his sermons into his teaching into his preaching and i was also listening a lot to the bible answer man excuse me yeah the bible answer man was um walter martin and he was helping me understand how to talk to mormons but people would call his program and ask him about catholicism as well and he would often share very anti-catholic conclusions so i was getting a steady diet in the groups i was part of the churches i was part of the media i was listening to the pastors that i respected and even some of the figures you know that that um that i came to appreciate like i like i used to listen to keith green a lot and he published this whole series of anti-catholic articles in his last days ministries newsletter so i got soaked in you know 1980s north american protestant evangelical anti-catholicism very early in my christian experience within the first five or six years of being a christian inside of that world i knew one thing i could never be catholic and i developed a very anti-catholic responses to things after going on staff at that church in salt lake city we experienced division and ecclesial failure uh the the pastor there just really traumatic um leadership failure and we move we're like we got to get out of here and i we moved my wife all the way to california from salt lake city to california to go to the church that i was going to out there when i was in the navy for a couple of years and within a couple of months of being there in california i was asked to come on staff at that church as well that was a word and remind me just so i understand you were assemblies of god in salt lake city but back in california that was vineyard connected so the church that i went to in um california yeah and i'm taking you all over the map i started in vineyard in salt lake that's right i went around the world went back to salt lake and went on staff at an assemblies of god church while i was stationed in california for a couple of years i went to an independent charismatic church there for a couple of years and i told my wife let's go there we were knew we were young marrieds we had no bills we had no kids we all we we just loaded up our stuff and we we chased churches basically so we went we we moved to california started going to this church that i was part of in the navy and within two months of being there or less the pastor said i want you to come on staff here and be our worship leader and our associate pastor he could see that i was just drilling down into being involved in ministry and so brought me on staff i was there for about four years at this church and then that church went through cataclysmic leadership failure in fact that pastor was the succeeding pastor to the founding pastor who was run out of that church and then became the pastor and then he had a dramatic um blowout basically a ministry failure and we went through trauma in that church and so we left we left that church kind of homeless and we went looking for a family and we found the four square denomination which is a big you know epicenter is is los angeles was started by a female preacher named amy simple mcpherson in the mid 1900s and we came to love one of these pastors that was um that was part of that movement he kind of was a mentor in some ways to us and we attached ourselves to that denomination and started a church in the same town as the one that we had just left and we had a church split basically and so a bunch of people came with us we started a four square church foursquare worked with us and i remember in fact i was sharing this with my wife last night because um you know there's lots of church splits we read about them every day i i have a google alert set to talk that tells me when there's church splits around the world because it's something that i'm interested in and we were talking about a church split that happened in in the vineyard denomination last week and i said remember when we left when we left the church in central california and we started our church i was in a room full of pastors in the city where we lived we were having one of those pastor meetings where all the pastors get together and the catholic priest in our town was at that meeting in 2001 and everyone was asking for input about us leaving a church that had gone through trauma and starting another church and there was this big discussion and the different pastors were chiming in i was just sitting there like in this meeting and one of the pastors said well this is a denominational issue and then they got to the catholic priest and said well what do you think his name is father dan what do you think father dan and he said well honestly i'm just a listener and i'm just an observer my input here is that this is just what you guys do i was like what he said it's just what you do i mean you guys are just doing what you do one group falls apart another group starts over here this guy doesn't like what that guy's doing calls him a name takes a bunch of people starts his own thing he said i've i've been watching this my whole life and church history it's been going on for hundreds of years he said i i don't have anything really to add except to say at some point you all need to figure out how to come to a place of of unity and he said i i would say that that's the catholic church but you know but his whole thing was that's just what you guys do and i remember being kind of offended by by that idea back in the day um but later that phrase became one of the levers that kind of popped me loose from evangelicalism because i spent the next 13 or 14 years watching this happen over and over and over and over and over again division division division division let me ask you this real quick um did you ever at any point ask okay you're you've got assemblies of god vineyard foursquare independent charismatic did you ever ask what are the differences there or did you just say as long as it has the gifts of the holy spirit baptized in the holy spirit yeah and it was kind of general right exactly it's it's kind of like flavor you know it's kind of like flavor it's like it's like uh how do it's like mint chocolate chip ice cream which is my favorite you know so i tell my son go get me some mint chocolate chip ice cream who knows what brand he's gonna come home with but it's gonna taste like mint chocolate chip ice cream so it's kind of a it's kind of a flavor that i was looking for and charismatics pentecostals non-denominational holy spirit churches they all have the flavor like you know close your eyes and what do you eat oh it's mint chocolate chip oh it's charismatic oh it's pentecostal it's kind of like that that's your tribe that's the family that i landed in because of that some of the key ideas that they held in common um what they what they never held in common what none of them ever held in common i was i was part of of the the fracturing and breaking of church life in my in my own experience what they never held was an internal capacity to unify which doesn't mean by the way that i think um that the catholic church is you know this perfectly unified uh church there there are there are things that are happening but but the trajectory is toward unity not away from it and so when you're a protestant and you do something that ends up like being a church split or a division or hiving off what you're doing is toward the trajectory of your value system it's the dna when you do that in a catholic context it's away from the trajectory of what what's attempting to be done there and it's just you know there's there's disunity everywhere but what's the trajectory what's the dna that's making you do that and so i saw this dna this this constant repeated over and over fracturing breaking fracturing breaking fracturing breaking hiving off dividing and everybody's saying they're going to do it right this time and i've got the pure doctrine and i've got the good teaching and i've got the good morals and i've got the good heart you know i'm not going to do it the bad way and this is just the story that i'm watching my whole uh ecclesial life you know my whole life as a christian and as a pastor for 20 years in three different churches the last church i was the senior pastor i was the founding pastor for 13 years teaching through the bible and trying to hold a church together and i you know i tell people i would make fun of catholic ideas in my sermons you know um i preached against catholicism in some ways some catholic ideas that i didn't understand or didn't appreciate i railed against them um and so i had the shape of of my relationship toward catholicism was one of aversion and protest you know this is this is the body language of protest right here some people say what what's protestantism it's this it's not this hey it's this and that was my orientation toward catholicism even though i might drive by a catholic church and say yeah there's probably some christians in there maybe accidentally some people became catholics somehow they they were they became christian in there i don't know how but but maybe i was willing to concede that that was possible but i generally didn't think of catholicism as christianity um i thought of what i was doing as christianity and what they were doing as something else and so i wasn't open to being catholic at that time we finished pastoring our church at the same time i finished seminary toward the end of my pastor at my 13 12 13 years at our church i was going to seminary got invited to go to seminary at a mennonite brethren biblical seminary in central california at no cost because my wife worked for the college there and i took a master's degree in new testament and so for three years from from 2010 to 2013 around that time frame i was studying the new testament i was studying early christianity and the formation of the biblical canon i was studying the gospels i was studying the book of acts and i was studying the formation of the early church and you know you think about things when you're a christian but sometimes um the thought comes in and you go oh i i can't think about that and you and you kick it out and you just kind of go on with business and one of the things that i had thought about earlier as a christian which semin an event in seminary caused me to stop and think was the statement by my new testament professor when we were talking about the church and the bible and the relationship between the two and he made this comment sort of this passing comment uh during during the course lecture he said now we know that um that before the bible is canonized in fact we know that before all of the texts of the bible are even written that there's already a church jesus started a church and the church got on with being a church and eventually wrote things down because i'm studying the new testament right and i'm studying the dates of all the documents in the new testament and who wrote when first and why and how long things have been and my professor says there's a church before there's a word of new testament written down did i know that of course i did i thought about it i'm sure it entered into my mind and then i pushed it out but in my mind i thought it's kind of what i call one of my protestant paradigms my shocking protestant paradigms i thought that you had to base the church on the bible build the church with the bible shape the church with the bible but the fact that there was a church before there was a word of the new testament written forces me or forced me to ask the question how do you start a church without the new testament how how did that work how could they get anything done if they don't have the whole bible written and they're not following the bible the way that we think now of following the bible and then when i realized that you know over the course of 300 years though the new testament documents and the old testament were all being used in different ways along with some other books you know in liturgy and in catechesis and all these other ways um for hundreds of years there wasn't uniform agreement on which books were and were not canonical so some congregations and groups of churches we're using books that aren't in the bible now as we think of the canon of scripture and others not using some books that are and it just wasn't uniform and in my mind how how is that how does that work i mean everything has to be based on the bible alone the bible alone and what i realized and i gave i gave up this belief when i was in my mennonite seminary sola scriptura and i had to you know keep it a secret before i was ever catholic before i ever thought of being catholic i remember writing in a journal writing in a paper and even telling my wife i i don't agree with sola scriptura it's it's an unsustainable idea church history proves that the church was never sola scriptura it would be impossible to even come up with a bible if you were so the scriptura like if the if the the apostles and the people doing ministry and even their immediate successors in the book of acts and beyond believed in sola scriptura none of them ever would have thought any of their writings were scripture um and and so just though the whole trajectory uh of the logic that i was following came into crisis and came into question and i had to kick it out but i didn't have anywhere to go because i couldn't be catholic and um so we left pastoral ministry um partly because we felt like we were just done doing that we'd done it for 20 years but also because my wife and i both felt like we needed to figure out church without leading one at the same time like we had big questions my wife did her phd uh in organizational leadership here at regent university in virginia and her emphasis was on ecclesial or church leadership so she had done a lot of reading and writing on church history and she was in the same place as me she was like the way we've told the story the way we've heard the story about church and how it works and why it is the way it is was only from inside of a protestant mindset and she's reading all these early you know catholics in order to get her ecclesiology solid so both of us felt like we got to let go of doing pastoral work and we're just going to go on an ecclesial journey and for from 2014 to 2018 about four years we were living here in virginia we moved across countries to get away from all of it we started visiting dozens of churches we started a house church in our house we got connected to all kinds of different groups and we were just trying to you know kind of scope it all out who's doing what who believes what we ended up in an anglican church for a couple of years and fell in love with liturgy we didn't know anything about that really but that experience helped us to appreciate the logic of liturgy and how it shapes you um how it shapes a community um and and how it even shapes your experience of following jesus over the course of a year you know all those kinds of big ideas started flooding into my mind and that's what we were doing sort of that ecclesial journey post ministry from 2014 to 2018 we were just kind of in the world of well what you know what what's going on and i remember driving by all these churches in our town here in virginia beach one day and i pointed out i said man look at all the churches this one after the other i said i don't know if i can ever go back to one of those again and my wife said i know i know how you feel and i said after a pause i said unless it's catholic and i'm looking out the window and i'm wondering what she's gonna say because we had never talked like that before she said yeah i know what you mean and i was like what what so we both started kind of comparing notes and you know it just became a discussion we had different friends who were going to trying catholic churches and asking us what we thought and but it was still like i don't know how i would do that you know what would my friends say yeah and so now now we'll get to the gas pedal moment here um june 3rd 2018. i was going to turn 49 years old on june 4th the next day so the day before my 49th birthday in 2018 we went to the beach here in virginia beach to sand bridge hung out we weren't fasting and praying we weren't asking for a sign from god nothing like that we just went to the beach but as we were coming home from the beach looking for food you know where should we go eat we drove by a church in our neighborhood probably i've driven by it dozens of times but we drove by this church and i remember kind of driving and looking over and oh that's a church there and then i looked for the sign what kind of church is that it looks really nice and pretty and we drive by the sign and it says saint john the apostle catholic church and i was like i thought to myself oh it's a catholic church and then i turn my head back to the front of the steering wheel you know to the to the window and at that exact moment that i do this i have this idea come flying into my brain go to that church you know talk about openness to the holy spirit openness to the voice of god you know my charismatic pentecostal years sort of prepped me for those moments where in in catholic parlance or catholic language we call it a locution you know we're in protestant pentecostals we call it a word from the lord and that's what happened i got a word from the lord a locution while we're driving by the catholic church in our neighborhood go to that church and it shocked me like i knew that that was a thing and i didn't say anything and we just we went and we got food and the whole time i'm sitting there and i'm like man that was god that was god that's you that's you what what you know so i get home i start googling this church saint john the apostle catholic church i look at their website and that's what you do when you're you know when you're you're church shopping as a as an evangelical you go to the website you know what's this church like not understanding that not exactly the same you know there's the catholic church is the catholic church and i know not all parishes are created equal but still i thought i could learn all about it from their website um and i tried i did i did the best i can all like and the but the big question was well when's the mass you know you go what's your doctrinal statement yeah exactly that's what i was just gonna say let me see if you do the faith i need to understand do you believe in the trinity and that the bible is the infallible word of god word of god yep that's right we invented that word anyway uh where did the word trinity even come from it's a mystery anyway so we um decided we would go to mass the next saturday the following saturday which would be june 9th i believe it was we would go to mass on saturday night to the vigil mass and so we um pack up we go drive you know it's a five minute drive from our house we go in and we go to the mass and you know i was a protestant evangelical for 33 years-ish and a pastor for 20 of those years had led hundreds of worship gatherings and services so i had my mind sort of shaped by how protestants look at church services i did have a couple of years with the anglicans to help me understand liturgy but for the most part for the average protestant evangelical a liturgical movement through a worship experience is awkward and bumpy if you don't know what you're doing it's kind of like a line dance have you ever seen those line dances like the western the western bar where everyone's got their cowboy hat and they all know how to kick and how to twirl and do the thing and then they start you know it's like i i'm like i can't keep up i can't keep up i don't know what i'm doing i was the guy that had never done the dance before that was me too yeah yeah so so i'm trying to do you know the line trying to do all the moves you know and i didn't know what any of it meant um partly because you know someone would say well you were going to an anglican church yeah but the liturgy there was not um as locked down as the catholic church that we were going to in terms of just having a real sense of how this flows and how it fits and why why are we moving to this now um so i did my best but i really honestly felt like why am i here what are we doing in a catholic church why did you tell me to come here i was intrigued by it because our church happens to be beautiful um and not all catholic parish like someone watches this they're like maybe i'll go visit my catholic parish not all parishes think about beauty and integrating the visual pieces and the aesthetic into their worship space but ours does and so i'm paying attention to all these things going around on around me and what's on the walls and what's in the ceiling and what's you know everywhere and what we're experiencing and i felt kind of lost you know like i don't exactly know why i'm doing this but god said to come here so i say on facebook after going to mass at night i went to catholic mass tonight you know boom tell the world and one of my friends from hanford from the town where i was pastoring for for those years had become a catholic he was my neighbor across the street he was a lutheran he had become a catholic he and i did pro-life work together in hanford he says on my facebook wall read this book by scott hahn it's called the lamb supper don't go back to mass until after you've read it so i was like great another book so i buy this book by scott hahn the lamb supper which is a journey through the book of revelation but with liturgical lenses and scott han takes you through the mass and through the book of revelation as almost two layers laid on on top of each other and shows you the liturgy and the significance of the liturgy as revealed in the apocalypse as a liturgical text the apocalypse as a liturgical text it was one of my favorite books in seminary but i'd never seen the liturgical view of the book of revelation and all of a sudden i just it it woke me up i was i couldn't wait to go back to mass to see if what scott hahn was saying about what you see in the apocalypse was what we saw in the shape of the mass and i cried my way through the mass the second time that i went because i could see it i could see it was like someone said here put these on and you know those have you ever seen those youtube videos where the guy's color blind and his family gives him a little box he's like what's this and he puts it on and he can see color for the first time in his life there's youtube videos all over about people putting colorblind glasses on and they start crying and their family starts crying well that's what scott hans book the lamb supper it was someone going here put these on and i put the lamb supper lenses on and went back to mass and i could see i could see the colors i could see how this fits that and why we're doing this right now and why are we kneeling why are we standing why do we say amen right there why are we what you know all the questions that you have that you think oh this is just dead ritual what are we doing we're just moving around no no there's a reason for every move every gesture every word every posture everything you do i just didn't know what it was so it was foreign to me and once i got the the code you know um which isn't a secret you know it's just you just don't know yeah but once i got the mass decoded for me i went back i cried all the way through it and on the way home i said i don't know how i'm going to do this but i have to become catholic and i don't i don't know how i don't know what i'm what am i gonna do and um we started an intentional journey of discernment as a family my wife my son who was 16 at the time and i all decided we're going to figure this out we're going to read everything we can read we're going to talk to everyone we can talk to we went through our rcia course at church i started a cluster of um accountability cluster around myself of people who were catholic and non-catholics included in that was an anglican priest and i told them all i think god's calling me to be catholic but i need people to talk to yeah um and i need to sort this stuff out and we went on a one-year journey of discernment um and it was morning noon and night eating drinking sleeping uh i i it just was like feed with a fire hose over the course of a year and what i had to do um the biggest challenge that i had was that i had anti-catholic ideas and theology and perspectives so i got myself one of a stack of those um what do they call notebooks the composition notebooks the cheapy little composition notebooks and i wrote down all of my deal breakers for being a catholic if i can't figure out this doctrine i can't be catholic no matter how beautiful the mass was no matter how awesome that liturgy was if i can't figure out how i could ever believe you know blank fill in the blank i can't be catholic and i came up with 13 13 deal breakers 13 things if i can't deal if i can't reconcile with this idea i will not become catholic and so that was it for me i mean i put everything on the list i felt like it could i didn't put everything on the list that to me didn't seem like it mattered i put only my deal breakers and then i went to work i bought hundreds i have bought so many books since i've listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of lectures and videos and dvds and every everything you can imagine by catholic thinkers catholic authorities um people who um who have um i'll say it a place to speak to these things with some authority and i listened and i read and i saturated myself in content because you know part of it like i said eddie was i was listening to anti-catholics tell me what catholicism was about for my whole christian experience and and then joe catholic you know a guy i might know at work i'm like hey why you pray to mary i always learn how to pray to mary my mom told me to pray i just do it i just you know like the guy the guys that tell you why they do what they do and i just didn't feel like i had i had good answers yeah so i couldn't i couldn't ask joe catholic and i wasn't gonna ask protestants because i already knew what all their answers were and had echoed them and and parroted them from my pulpit so i decided i'm only going to ask the catholic church what the catholic church means by what it says and i'm going to be fair and i'm going to listen and i'm going to try to understand um which i had never really done before and i started just one thing at a time click click click click click click click click click putting things together um but there were there were two things that for me it's kind of like it's kind of like when you put the edges on a puzzle first right you get a puzzle and you say i'm gonna find all the pieces with the the straight edges and you put those down first yeah and once you get those down then it's easier to it's like things speed up really fast when you start putting the other pieces together so for me the edges were the question of authority who says oh yeah who says that question had to be answered for me which christian which group of christians has the authority for instance to say something like if you don't believe in the trinity you're not a christian like like who gets to say that you know or i'm looking at the table the contents of my bible and in my bible there's 66 titles here who's who says who says those are the 66 but find me the group where are they where are those guys so i wanted the answer to the question of authority and to the question of scripture and interpretation interpreting scripture and so i started with that who has authority and um that's the edges of the puzzle for me like once you answer that question then everything else gets put into place and i was taught like so many protestant non-catholics that the bible has the authority well you and i both know that if you lock five evangelical protestants in a room with the bible they will come up with some things that are the same and they'll also come up with some things that are very different if you just put them in there with a bible and in areas where there's a dispute or a difference of opinion about two ideas or three or five ideas who says which one of these is closest to or is the way that the first generation of christians would have answered that question um you're not going to get total agreement from from protestant evangelicals so once i started dealing with the question of authority and why and how and what scripture is and what it means and how to interpret it in disputes and things like that but to me it was like well it's all over now i mean there has to and there was a verse i remember in in paul's letter to timothy he says i want to come to you but i'm writing to you now so that you'll know how people ought to behave themselves in the house of god which is the church of god which is the pillar and support of the truth if you had run up to me you know like i'm at the shopping mall eating an ice cream cone or eating a pretzel or a cinnabon and you know you walk up to me and you say hey you hey you what's the pillar and support of truth for all christians just like right out of my mouth would have come but the bible the bible is the pillar and support of truth that's not what the bible says the bible doesn't say that the bible is the pillar it says the church is so i started seeing things that i had never seen before verses that i had even preached on myself that i didn't interpret through the lens of authority for instance and i s so i came to the place where i said the catholic church is the church that jesus started it is it is and it's the church that has authority well then i could go into all my other subjects as a learner i wasn't on equal footing like here i'm gonna tell the catholic church what i think it was like i'm going and i use this phrase i'm going to stand under until i understand and that was the posture that i took because i realized i needed to be taught what the catholic church teaches and once i started kind of adjusting adjusting my posture and my orientation toward the catholic church then it became easier to listen but i had to sort out some of those things so that's kind of how it happened for me it took a year we came into the church easter vigil 2019 so this will be three years now that we've been um you know fully you know uh confirmed in full communion with the church and um you know for me i haven't stopped with this journey not i'm not still trying to decide whether or not i believe what the catholic church teaches what i'm doing now is oh my goodness i've been i'm i'm 52 years old i've been a christian for over 30 years i haven't spent that time learning really what the heritage of my christian faith really is and i'm trying to find the deep end of the pool you know like so it's it's just a constant journey of reading and learning and listening and immersing and because i do come from a you know some protestant formation of comparing yeah and contrasting which is nor it's just what you do now you know it's part of what i do but that's i mean that's really a high level kind of flyover of my life story my faith journey and you know some of the big pieces that kind of pushed me uh over toward um should i be catholic so i'll pause there wow wow now that was exceptional something that's fascinating to me so i'm assuming as a pastor you led altar calls absolutely absolutely right it was it's a very pentecostal thing yeah exactly evangelical you know um how would you compare what you know and what you've experienced in the sacrament of reconciliation compared to what you saw in those believers that were approaching if if you can draw a comparison because i've always wanted to ask that question it just came to me a second ago yeah i mean i think that there that there's let me start with this i think something very real is happening to people who go to altar call to go forward for an altar call alter call typically at least in my context was do you want to accept jesus as your personal lord and savior if so come forward and you say a prayer that's one approach to altar call another is do you want to either rededicate your life or deal with some problem issue like anyone who's struggling with an addiction you come forward right now we're going to have the prayer team lay hands on so coming forward quote unquote coming forward is language that we would have used regularly in our worship context and coming forward was the way that at least we pentecostals and charismatics dealt publicly and congregationally um and i would say maybe even liturgically if you want to use that word with how to get the holy spirit involved in what's going on in our lives from salvation to whatever my problem is you know and we talk about the altar and people kneeling down and having somebody pray over you or with you i think god's really in involved in that because uh the people that do it want god's help you know they they they want to believe in jesus they want to follow jesus they want to devote their lives to jesus and i think that the holy spirit reaches people in those places and and gets a hold of them and works in their lives but there is something missing from those there there's i tell people being catholic is the difference between something and everything whatever the difference is between those two words something everything you know what's in there what's in the middle there so something real something of god is happening in those altar calls but everything can happen in the sacrament for instance of reconciliation or the sacrament of the eucharist which is by the way coming forward to receive jesus like do you have altar calls as a catholic yeah every time we get together great point great point come forward and accept jesus yes you know okay um and so so what happens in this in the sacraments is is grace in the sense that god himself jesus himself comes to us through the grace of god through the mediation of the holy spirit through that sacrament jesus comes to us in a way that's tangible i'll say in a way that's even sensory in in a in a way that's just not possible without the sacrament and so in the sacrament of the eucharist for instance i can taste i can chew i can swallow i can touch i can feel jesus okay in the sacrament of healing or the sacrament of confession or penance i can hear the voice of jesus on the vocal cords of a priest who yields his own voice and his own body to jesus so that that priest's voice is is in a sense hidden in the voice of jesus and i can hear jesus himself saying i absolve you of your sins which by the way is one of the reasons why i wanted when i thought about my reasons for why i wanted to be catholic that was one of the reasons was the confessional and i remember my anglican priest friend saying that's really one of your reasons i said yeah because i think god hears us when we pray and we say oh god forgive me i can't believe i did that please forgive me like i think the lord the lord hears those prayers but what i wanted to hear was more than words on a page um god god will forgive you and that's good like the the but i wanted to hear and we do hear in the sacraments the voice of jesus saying to us you are forgiven you are forgiven now my christian friend can say that to me but it's not sacramental yeah he's not he's not lying to me that god forgives me of my sin but he can't be in the person of jesus in the person of jesus or in the name of jesus in persona christi in the name of jesus this is what happens in the sacrament jesus himself steps into that space and is with us and it's his voice it's his voice on the vocal cords of the priest saying you're forgiven you're absolved go and sin no more you know god forgives you and um i think that you know like in an altar call you can say those kinds of things i would have said you know if you've accepted jesus he forgives you of your sins it's it's not wrong um to say that but it's something but it isn't everything there's a there's a difference so i i mean that's just kind of my initial response that response by the way will make a lot of evangelicals really really mad oh of course but it's yeah but that's what i wanted to get yeah i wanted to get your take on that because when i when my wife and i were at a non-denominational church i responded to several altar calls whether it was the initial altar call rededication are you struggling with addiction and at one point i go i went up and i was just i couldn't stop crying i mean people were handing me kleenexes and i'd have hands all over me you know um and that was that was therapeutic right absolutely and i would never deny that experience that was very real i was responding from a very deep part of my soul but fast forward several years and i'm finally back in the confessional that was a different stratosphere and you're saying the difference between something and and everything and i would never take that away from those real experiences that are happening because i do believe god is working through that uh imagine someone that knows nothing about the catholic faith and this is their understanding of what a christian does and they're emotional and they're saying i'm so sick of this bondage that's another word that came up constantly if you are in bondage you know come forward and that's what the sacrament offers if you are in chains one of the most difficult things to do and i've said this before and i have to keep saying it is to open your mouth and actually say it to another person yeah and i'm just in an accountability group where everyone is doing the same things and we're all like okay you can do it that there's a place for that as well but to just say i'm taking a risk here and i believe in the forgiveness of my lord and his grace and so i am in all humility going to open my mouth about everything basically amen yeah it's it's true i'm right there with you it's one of the reasons why i like i personally do um confession when i go to confession i do it face to face um i sit across and part of that i think comes from maybe having been a pastor people would often call me and say pastor kenny i need to talk to you and then they'd come to my office and tell me the worst thing they'd ever done in their whole life oh wow and cry okay say do you hate me do you think i'm a terrible person and i would say no and i would pray with them and mister to them so i i came to appreciate how helpful it was to talk to somebody and i think i was able to offer comfort and counsel and peace to those people but what i wasn't ever able to say to them because i had no authority and that's that's a fact i would say to any um christian watching this now that i had and no no one has any authority to pronounce uh in the name of jesus or as jesus that someone is forgiven who hasn't entered in to to that authority through the sacrament of holy orders so i could never say as jesus or in the person of jesus well you're forgiven i could say the bible says god forgives you and you know i could say a lot of things sure but i couldn't go that far so there you go again something yeah everything and um i could say a lot of some things but i couldn't say everything that needed to be said now some people try to do that but they have they have no authority uh to do it and so so it's it's it's not uh it isn't that god isn't at work but it's about you can't you can't plug that in there's no current there there's no there's no power there to do that um and so i go face to face when i when i go to the sacrament of uh of confession and i want to look into the eyes of the priest when i tell him and i cry like i always cry in in confession because i'm saying out loud how i have offended god and his church that's part of the reason that i go to confession face to face is that i haven't just defended god um if one member suffers all members suffer with it you know like i've caused pain to the body of christ so i want to talk to the body of christ and i want to talk to jesus and it's all there and i always so i always cry when i make my confession and i always cry when i hear the words of absolution because no matter whether that priest is speaking to me with a very heavy indian or african or american or southern or you know uh spanish accent no matter what the accent is or the relative pitch of the voice of the priest always i'm hearing the voice of jesus the the actual voice of jesus through the sacrament coming to me and telling me that i am absolved of my sins and i just love that so i cry every time every time i do it thank you for sharing that yeah is there anything what are you working on now what what can you share with uh the audience um what what you're doing we didn't even get into you for full-time work and everything well now i work for uh a catholic apostolate it's the coming home network uh most of your um people who you know look at conversion stories will know that organization marcus grodi the coming home network and he's the host of the journey home program on ewtn we talk about protestant pastors who are primarily protestant pastors who convert to the catholic church so i'm i'm the director of development for that organization which means i'm the fundraiser so i go around um the united states basically uh mostly like this i don't fly around but i go around the united states like this talking to people about our mission and asking them to help us bring more guys like me who are protestant evangelical seminary trained ministry guys and and women into communion with the catholic church and there's just every day people reach out to us and and um and are looking for help and looking for answers so i went i went uh when i got out of pastoring i went into fundraising i figured i knew how to ask for money right i've been doing it for 20 years but um so i i went into fundraising and i met the guys at the coming home network and marcus in november of last year said won't you come and help us you know so that's what i do for work now um now that i'm not pastoring um you know i'm still uh i'm i'm studying i'm learning uh right now i'm you know my work is that i'm in terms of what i'm engaged in uh content-wise is scripture as a catholic again i i spent i spent 33 years in scripture as a non-catholic including taking a seminary degree in the new testament as a non-catholic and what i'm doing now is i'm going back through scripture from front to back from genesis to revelation all 73 books and i am taking my journey through the scriptures with my catholic lenses on and i'm discovering so much that i had missed before that i didn't ever see before little things little bread crumbs that were always right there that i never knew what to do with this or that thing in the bible so that's the bible's been kind of my my thing from the very beginning so now i'm going through the bible as a catholic and i just really really really love it it's just terrific so i was going to add you just mentioned um now you have the catholic lens in my reversion video i talk about that that you can put on all kinds of different glasses yes ultimately the protestant could say yeah well great you just are wearing catholic glasses what what's your point i can choose to wear my pentecostal glasses my presbyterian glasses what is it to you and then i i tried to compare it to okay who manufactured the glasses right at what point if you follow the supply chain when were those glasses put together which basically is who founded your church exactly so and once you start reading church history and you start reading the you know the writings of um the commentators the scholars the theologians the bishops the guys who are leading the catholic church you know um once the bible becomes more available to the general population this question of who says starts coming up over and over and over again and what you hear in the writings of of um people with authority is well the catholic church says that's who says um and it's proven to be true in history that when there is a massive dispute you know go all the way back to the jerusalem council in acts 15 which is the dispute about how um non-jewish people become christians um that's the first council in and it's the catholic church especially it says the apostles and the presbyters it says and they decided they listened to everybody but they decided and when i wasn't a catholic i didn't think that that church still existed now i believe it does the church in acts 15 still exists in the world and so my lenses are the lenses of that church whatever whatever that church for the church that jesus founded that's been moving through history and that is that has the authority to teach especially when there's a dispute which there are there always will be oh of course and there will always be people when they when the church says definitively on any matter they're going to leave at that moment there are many people at every moment where something has to be dogmatically declared people will leave and they'll say much like what you dealt with much like what you dealt with hey you know what we were cool with them until they made this statement and i just don't think it works with scripture okay well you've got to understand that is just the beginning of yet another wildfire and it's in no way unifying you know what i mean and it's certainly not like you said love it standing under in order to understand it's i understand and you catholic church yeah you're out of line now i'm going to go over here and i was just meeting jesus or it's me and a few other people and it's all going to hey look hey look catholic church i got my king james bible when i was eight and now i'm 49 and i know i know you're cute you're so yeah no it's it's true though that's exactly what's happening and and uh anyway we could go on and on and on i just want to thank you for that great story and all your time and your passion and the fact that you are as you mentioned you're able to go back to scripture and re-read it and understand technology i'm sure in a way that you never understood and it's just a beautiful thing so um everyone yeah thanks again everyone please share the video like comment subscribe until next time take care and god bless bye

Channel: Catholic ReCon

Views: 10,387

Keywords: Catholic Testimony, Catholic Conversion, Protestant Testimony, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Holy Eucharist, Roman Catholic Church, Born Again Catholic, Catholic Revert, Catholic Reversion, John 20:23, John 6, Catholic Testimony Video, Crossing the Tiber, Conversion of Heart, Grace, Faith, Charity, Hope, St Augustine, Confessions, Catholic ReCon, Catholic Re.Con.

Id: JM9o3vsZEfw

Length: 77min 35sec (4655 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022