The following is Part I of a three-part conversion story

This story is my own. It is offered because a few individuals have requested it. I hope you find aspects of it interesting.


As a fairly young man, I came to believe in God. Being raised in the South in a family whose roots were quite religious, this would not have been surprising to anyone. It was not until high school, however, that I came to take Christianity seriously and treat it as something worth my time and interest. I first encountered God, the Bible, and prayer in the context of conservative Pentecostalism. I began to read the Bible intensely my senior year of high school and maintained a regular and devout prayer life. Subsequent to graduation, I even attended a large Pentecostal university in Tennessee for my freshman year of college. I further entrenched myself in Evangelicalism’s good characteristics during this time. My prayer life grew deeper. My learning of the Bible grew more thorough.

However, it was certainly a lonesome religious tradition I had entered into – as in, “every man for himself.” We were all doing our best to figure things out, whether these things were God himself or what spiritual gifts amounted to or whether it was OK to drink alcohol and/or listen to “secular” music. Ultimately, of course, as it was every man for himself in the search, so it was for the end of the journey. That is to say, how those questions above (and many others besides) were resolved was dependent on little more than how the individual believer cared to resolve them, with the possible exception of who and what God is.

At this time of the journey along the very ‘flexible’ path of Evangelicalism, there were probably only two instances worth mentioning. And they both involved my marriage to a very spiritually-minded girl of all of 19 years of age. As all good Evangelicals did, we read the Bible with great fervor and intensity. We began reading through the Old Testament and the New simultaneously, trying our hand at a ‘through the Bible in a year’ program, and we did complete it.

One thing that leapt off the pages of Scripture, which, though not surprising theologically, yet still startling in its incessantness, was this overall love of new life and the attributing to God of all new life that comes. Whether the life in question was vegetable, animal, or rational animal (i.e., human) all was seen to equally come from God. And in the case of humans and the conception of babies, there was such constancy of joy among the Hebrew women in God giving them children. After combining this growing understanding with our own theological reflections on the legitimacy of spouses to decide for themselves whether human life was coming or not (i.e., whether birth prevention or “control” was morally licit), my wife and I, in our first year of marriage, gave up the birth control pill she was taking. This was an interesting way of becoming a little Catholic without even knowing it. We adopted a moral and theological position against the usage of birth control. It was simplistic, but it was not irrational.

The second major understanding that jumped off the pages of the Bible lead to a great veneration of Holy Communion. Through reading the Gospel passages of the Lord’s Supper and more especially the writings of St. Paul on this issue (cf. 1 Cor. 11), we came to have enormous amounts of veneration for this…, we hardly knew what. We wouldn’t have called it a sacrament, perhaps just a holy experience. One of the most solemn experiences a Christian could have. I still recall with what singular devotion my wife would go to take the bread or the cup. She would actually kneel down before it in prayer and prostrate herself. This was done in a downtown community fellowship in Athens, GA (a college town), so it was a very laid back worship environment. Still, her devotion to the (not quite) Eucharistic Lord was amazing, even at such a stage of Christian infancy for both of us. I also recall at one time rebuking (!) a fellow member of this congregation for his beginning to merely eat the bread (from which we had had Communion) after the service had ended. I dually informed him that this was forbidden, according to the words of the Apostle Paul himself. We are not to simply sit around snacking on the hosts of the Lord. Again, this was all fascinating stuff: for a young Evangelical couple to come to appreciate these very “Catholic” aspects of Christianity without even knowing it or trying to do so.

But, now it’s time to turn to aspects of frustration we had with Evangelicalism. After we left the fellowship in college, for about the next three to four years (before we regularly began attending mass as observers) we did what many young Evangelicals do – we jumped in and out of churches and in and out of denominations. We would always find ourselves unfulfilled, no matter where we were. It was difficult to put a finger on just what was missing. It might be easier to do so now, but then it was some vague idea (brought to the forefronts of our minds by not-so-vague denominational peculiarities) that things just weren’t as they were meant to be. In the end, before we simply began attending mass at the Cathedral of St. Patrick in Charlotte, NC, we were a part of just about the most opposite extreme of Catholic liturgy. It was a church in Charlotte called Warehouse 242. It met (and worshipped!) over Starbucks coffee, young adults dressed like they were out on a date, and loud rock music coming from the “stage” in what was, literally, an old basketball gymnasium. But, prior to that we had given every mainstream Protestant denomination a serious try or at least had attended a few services at each. Episcopalian was nice, Orthodox was better, and Catholic was home – finally home. Not a home that made you perfectly comfortable necessarily. The mass is hardly comforting to an adult who has no family or background in Catholicism and is a first-time attendee. But, there was definitely a sense that this had a correspondence with what my wife and I had always been after.

But, that’s the end of the story. Before we get there, my time at graduate school must be explored as it was also key to my family’s conversion.