It’s been 2 years since my family left our wonderful Baptist Church to come home to the Catholic Church.  Now, as I look back on that journey, I say a prayer of thanks to God for everything that He’s done for us.  Although it was my parents who made the actual decision, I was impacted tremendously by it.  In this blog I hope to show the reasons why we left Protestantism to join the Catholic Church, and how my faith has been so enriched by it. 

Both of my parents grew up in faithful Baptist homes.  They met at a Baptist college where they were both Bible minors.  Not surprisingly, after they were married, they attended the Baptist Church across the street.  As I was growing up, my dad never fully agreed with everything our Church taught doctrinally (I’ll post more on this later).  Nevertheless, we didn’t want to leave because we didn’t want to cause any more splits in the church.  During the 12 years that we attended, our family was very involved in all of the ministry there.  Dad was a deacon and Mom was the Sparks director for AWANA.  I was part of the choir, played piano for the youth orchestra, helped in Childcare, volunteered in the library…we were all very much a part of the life there.  Because my siblings and I were homeschooled, most of the friends that we had were from church. 

In the summer of my 12^th birthday, my parents decided that they wanted to become Natural Family Planning (NFP) teachers.  Throughout most of their marriage, they had been using this method as a natural way to space births.  They believed that contraception was morally wrong and that it is a part of the culture of death.  Before this point, none of us had really been exposed to faithful Catholics who followed this teaching of the Church.  As for me, I viewed Catholics as just one more denomination that was way off the rocker.  I would have never dreamed that we would later leave all of our Baptist friends to become Catholic!  But I began to realize, along with the rest of my family, that the Catholic Church actually had some things right!  The Catholic view salvation was the same view that we had held all along.  See, our church taught something that my dad calls “moment salvation”.  In Sunday School I was constantly asked over and over, “When were you saved?”  As a young child, I didn’t know how to respond to that question.  I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t love Jesus.  My teachers kept prodding me to find a specific point in time when I had prayed a certain prayer asking Jesus into my life.  I didn’t know about any special prayer that I had said in the past, all I knew was that Jesus was my Lord and Savior NOW.  There’s an analogy that I heard a while ago that helped me understand it better.  When someone asks you if you have your socks on, you don’t rack your brain trying to remember how and when you put your socks on that morning, you know that you have your socks on because they’re right there on your feet.  It’s the same way with the question, “Are you saved?”  You don’t have to pin down a certain point in time when you “got saved” to know that you are saved now.  If you must have a specific “moment of salvation”, you should point to Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice on the cross.  That is a moment that transcends both time and space into eternity.    

As we became more and more familiar with Catholic teachings, our Baptist church became more and more worried!  My Sunday School lessons were suddenly focused on “different religions of the world”.  It was only when a classmate of mine made the comment, “Well, Catholics don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God” that I realized what a distorted view my friends and teachers had about what the Catholic Church really taught.  That’s one of the main reasons that I wanted to start this blog.  I like the way that Bishop Fulton Sheen described it:

 “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church— which is, of course, quite a different thing.”

In October 2004, we started attending Mass.  My Dad stepped down as a deacon and my parents weren’t permitted to be in any teaching roles.  We asked the pastor if he would allow the kids to finish their year in AWANA, but he didn’t think it was such a good idea.  Instead, he sent out a letter to the church saying that we believed things that were unbiblical, and that the congregation should refrain from having contact with us.

That was one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to go through.  There was a long period where I felt like I had no friends…but I think God allowed me to experience that because He wanted me to draw closer to Him.  Now, as a Catholic, I feel like the whole Christian faith has been opened up to me.  There are saints and history and sacraments and traditions and so many other things that I was missing out on as a Protestant.  What a gift the Church is! 

I hope you’ll continue reading as I go through some of the true teachings of the Church, and explain why I love them and why I believe them!  Feel free to leave comments and ask any questions that you may have. 

Pax Christi,

~the Catholic apologist

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