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E283: Deep In History: Why This Reformed Pastor Left It All | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

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  The idea that I would ever be anything other than a reformed
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  pastor didn't exist to me. I started watching this Saint
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  Catherine said this and St. so and so did this, and it was just
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  too much. It was all too much, and it took
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  about 6 1/2 seconds to just get furious.
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  I started looking into this, of how they could have been so
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  wrong, and I ended up being convinced by the reformers we
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  didn't have to throw this baby out with the bathwater.
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  I've never experienced before that someone speaking Scripture
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  to me where it felt like it penetrated in a way nothing like
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  that ever had before. Tammy would basically cry an
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  hour and a half there and cry in an hour and a half back because
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  we're not with our friends anymore.
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  She knew we needed to be doing what we were doing.
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  It was just so hard. Thank you so much for joining us
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  for this new episode of the Lila ro Show.
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  Make sure that you hit that subscribe button if you haven't
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  already. Also leave this video a like and
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  a comment. I read all the comments.
• 0:53
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  And we're running a new special for the new year for 2026 where
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• 1:11
  Thank you so much for supporting the show and keeping us going.
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  I'm so excited for everything that we have planned for the new
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  year. Aaron Gonzalez, welcome to the
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  podcast. Thank you so much.
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  Thanks for having me. So excited to have you on.
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  We're excited to be here. Oh my goodness.
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  And I know your lovely wife here is off camera and she's part of
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  the story too. So I know she's like, I'm not
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  going to be on camera today, but we're going to do the whole
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  story. And I'm when I saw your ex post,
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  which went viral, I was very moved.
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  It reminded me in some ways of my own family's story.
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  It says it's been a wild ride. 15 years as a Reformed pastor,
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  resigned in 2024 due to burnout. My wife and I and two of our six
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  kids ended up coming into the Catholic Church.
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  This year at the Easter Vigil, concerns and objections from
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  several friends led to a conversations which led to their
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  own investigations. Now, seventeen of our closest
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  friends and their children are coming to the Catholic Church
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  tonight, and we're sponsoring many of them.
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  It's been a wild ride. If you have a second, leave a
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  welcome home for our friends. Yeah, it was a wild ride, and
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  that ended up being a wild tweet You.
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  Know. I, I, I posted that at about
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  10:00 in Iowa at that time where I'm from, everybody is in get
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  your yard work done mode before winter hits.
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  And that's what mode I was in. And so I posted that and then I
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  went outside and did a bunch of yard work before we were going
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  to go to the church that night. We were going early to go to
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  confession and so once I got there, I just turned my phone
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  off. I didn't know what was
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  happening. And when I, when I did that, my
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  thought was this is such an exciting night for our friends.
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  And it's an exciting night for us because when we made this
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  decision, we were hoping that we just still have our friends, you
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  know, and that our family wouldn't disown us.
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  So to get to that point was really exciting for us and I was
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  excited for them. And I, I, I posted that thinking
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  maybe I can get 50 to 100 people to say welcome home and then
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  I'll tell them later on afterwards at the meal.
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  But I wasn't paying any attention to just what happened.
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  And so by the time Mass is over, there is kind of a reception
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  time after Mass in this gathering space.
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  And then we move into the Center for the meal.
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  It's about 7:00 when I turn on my phone and the first thing I
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  see is a text from my friend who I know you know, Keith Nester.
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  Amazing guy. Telling Yeah, I'll, I'm going to
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  tell him that you didn't say that, but.
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  He'll hear. I mean, we'll clip it just for
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  him. I'll tweet it out.
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  No, but it's the first thing I see.
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  And he's saying your post went viral on X and maybe we need to
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  revisit when we do an interview because now you're out there,
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  buddy. You know, that's, that's what I
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  was saying. Yeah.
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  Well, we had talked because we've known each other for over
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  30 years and he's, you know, he's intertwined with with my
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  story, with our story. And but I didn't know that was
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  happening. How many welcome homes did you
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  get on that? I don't know, in the end it was
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  it was impossible to try to keep track of I don't I the fact is
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  1. .4000 right here just in the screenshot that we took, I don't
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  know how many sense so. Yeah, I and I don't know,
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  because some of the comments were, you know, there were a few
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  naysayers in the comments as well, but it just got
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  overwhelming trying to heap up and they just kept coming.
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  And you know, by the time that was at 7:00 when I saw that from
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  him, and I looked and it was at the low 100, thousands of
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  impressions, I think. And that just kept growing.
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  And when I didn't really have time to look closely when we got
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  home, maybe 9 or so after, that's when I started monitoring
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  it. And it was impossible to keep up
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  with. And it was somewhere in there
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  that I get Adm from you as well. And my first thought was there's
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  no way because all my DMS are spam.
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  This is just what happened. I might have been spam too.
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  No, no, no. I just, I thought it had to be
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  an imposter. You know that that my first
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  impression was that's an imposter because that's just
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  what I tend to get in my DMS. But obviously you were not an
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  imposter. And yeah, so that was just part,
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  that was just another part of how wild that I I started saying
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  it's been a wild year. That was a wild night.
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  So. In more ways than one.
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  It was it, yeah. I when I saw your post it
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  resonated because I was raised in a very beautiful non
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  denominational Bible based church.
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  I've have many friends who are Protestants and have many
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  friends who were Protestants and have become Catholic.
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  I have tremendous respect for our many, many Protestant
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  brothers and sisters out there are Orthodox brothers and
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  sisters and and many Protestants, by the way,
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  wouldn't say I'm a Protestant. They would just say I'm a
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  Christian. I love Jesus, right?
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  That's what we're here for. We love our Lord.
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  And so I'm so fascinated about your story, 15 years as a
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  Reformed pastor, and especially about what it meant to be
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  Reformed for you, because I think that word can be thrown
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  around sometimes. Some people really have a
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  theological understanding of what this means.
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  Others might have other impressions, but I want to trace
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  that history in the show today, if that's all right with you
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  understanding your theological transformation and just your
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  depth of falling more in love and closer, getting closer to
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  God. Because at the end of the day,
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  this isn't about theological spats as much as it is about
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  growing closer to God who is the truth, you know, and, and our
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  Lord Jesus Christ, who is the truth.
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  And that's really the goal here. It's not about I'm I have better
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  theology than you, ha ha. It's about God and love and
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  serving His Kingdom. Yeah, yeah.
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  Well, I suppose to start with talking about what it meant to
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  be reformed, I need to talk a little bit about what led up to
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  that. And so just briefly, I grew up
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  in church. I grew up in a Lutheran Church.
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  I liked it. I had friends there.
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  I had a good time there. I never, I never was really.
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  I wasn't unhappy to be at church, and yet I wouldn't say
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  that the gospel ever really took root in me there.
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  I would have given an ascent to the truths of it, but it was
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  mostly an intellectual ascent. Not it wasn't something I really
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  took ownership of myself, my the faith, you know, in Christ
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  there. So once I was done with high
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  school and in college and kind of on my own to make those
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  decisions about going to church or, you know, whether I was
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  going to or not, I just didn't and it became largely
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  unimportant to me. Where were you in college, by
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  the way? Where did you go?
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  Iowa State, it's where I started.
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  I ended up graduating from the University of Northern Iowa.
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  But yeah, so Ames, IA, Iowa State, not too far from hometown
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  for me, but far enough away that it was I'm making my own
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  decisions about everything that I do with my time up there.
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  And I wasn't making very good decisions.
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  That not going to church wasn't only the only bad decision that
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  I made repetitively. I made a string of bad
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  decisions. And it just it, I drifted and I
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  was living a, a largely irresponsible life, no real
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  direction. And I struggled with academics
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  as well because I've gone to college because that's what you
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  do. You graduate high school and
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  then you go to college whether you know what you want to do or
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  not. And I didn't know what I wanted
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  to do. So there came a point where I
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  felt pretty directionless when I was there.
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  And it was at that time that a friend of mine that I had spent
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  well in Pat in the past, We would spend loads of time
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  together throughout the year and especially in the summer, but I
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  didn't see him all summer long. And when we finally he was at
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  Iowa State too. And when we got back for fall
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  semester in 92, we got together and I went over to his
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  fraternity and I was, I was going over there to ask him,
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  where were you all summer? And he was having me come over
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  there to tell me the gospel, which I didn't know.
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  These weren't the things we talked about.
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  But unbeknownst to me, he had gotten involved with Campus
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  Crusade for Christ. And so he had spent the summer
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  on what he called a mission trip in Hawaii.
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  And I'm not sure how well those things go together.
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  Miserable place. To do, yes, exactly.
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  But he'd been on the beaches somewhere in Hawaii sharing the
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  gospel and, you know, for spiritual laws kind of a thing
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  with Campus Crusade for Christ. And he told me afterwards how
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  nervous he was to talk to me about that and even tell me
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  that's what he'd been doing. But once he told me what he'd
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  been doing, it was kind of like everything from my Lutheran
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  years up into my teens that in my mind wasn't even there
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  anymore, came flooding back in. And I kind of had a dramatic
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  conversion experience. And I ended up dropping out of
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  college the next day and moving back home with the sole purpose
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  of getting my life right with Jesus.
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  And I wasn't looking for that, he told me afterwards, he said.
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  I didn't even get to share the gospel with you.
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  You just, you know. And he just was like I was in
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  Hawaii this summer sharing the gospel on the beaches of God was
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  taught me to do this and you're and you're just like I have to.
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  And that was. Start my whole life here.
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  Yes, what I would have expected me to do is tell him.
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  Why would you have wasted your whole summer doing that?
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  But it's not what I did. You were convicted.
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  I was. And you were also just deeply
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  drawn, it sounds like. Yeah.
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  Wow, Yeah, yeah. Well, it was definitely that,
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  that opening salvo that God makes, you know, by the Holy
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  Spirit. And that's what happened to me.
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  I, I mean, I wouldn't been able to say that then, but looking
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  back on it, I can see it now that that's what was happening
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  because it, it just my life turned upside down, but in good
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  ways. I've got to ask you really quick
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  before you tell us what happens next.
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  When you say I didn't, I wouldn't have like interpreted
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  what was happening in the way that you do now looking back on
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  it in God's Providence. What how did you talk about
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  dropping out of school with friends and family?
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  Did you just say I, I, I need to go follow?
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  Did you, would you say I need to go follow Jesus and I can't do
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  it here? Like how did you communicate
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  that to yourself or other people?
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  Yeah, the, the, I think the only person initially that I remember
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  even communicating that to at all was my mom.
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  And by that point, my dad had been gone for about a year.
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  And but I, I needed to tell my mom that I was moving home
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  because moving home meant moving into her house.
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  And, you know, she, she wondered what in the world was going on
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  with, with her son. And and this is, this is a
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  Christian mom who loves Jesus, but what she's seeing in her son
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  is doesn't add up. It doesn't, it doesn't match
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  what she's seen in me for many years leading up to that.
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  So I think she was understandably skeptical about
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  me telling her I'm coming home because I need to get my life
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  straight with Jesus, which is what I told her.
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  But I didn't even know exactly what that meant.
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  I just knew that my friend had been telling me about what he
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  was doing in service of the Lord, the Lord whom I had
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  ignored for years. And I knew that I needed to not
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  be ignoring him anymore, and I knew that I needed to.
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  I didn't know exactly what it would mean because church for me
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  was always a fun thing to go to with my friends, but it didn't
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  penetrate into my heart. So what does that look like now?
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  I don't know. I don't know what that's going
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  to look like. But I knew I was going to need
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  help. And so I told my mom that on the
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  phone. It's probably not an
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  overstatement to say she thought I'd lost my mind a little bit,
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  but she was very supportive and she let me stay there and
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  everything ended up fine. I don't think it took her long
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  to see that. Now, this wasn't some trick or
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  some what I'm saying is exactly what I want to do because she
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  saw it happening. But the other thing that
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  happened was I, I got in touch with a friend that I'd met some
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  time before and just told him and his wife, this is what just
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  happened to me. And I know I need to get my life
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  straight with God. I know I need to get right with
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  my Lord. I just don't know what that
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  looks like. And so they kind of took me
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  under their wing and I started going to church with them, which
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  is also where Cammy, my now wife, was going to church and
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  that's where we met. But that all kind of got kicked
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  into gear that one night hearing my friend tell me that it'd been
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  on in Hawaii with Campus Crusade.
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  And so it just, it can't, it was, it was like being smacked
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  on the head with a sledgehammer. The, the very thing I ended up
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  doing was the probably the furthest thing from my radar of
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  wanting to do because while I was kind of directionless,
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  directionless in college, I was still having a good time, but I
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  was at the same time a little bit miserable because I was
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  directionless. And so it kind of bounced from
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  one fun thing to the next. And that's how you sustain
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  yourself, or at least that's how I sustained myself.
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  College became a place to have fun, not to look forward to a
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  career. But then God did something else
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  in the midst of that. And so that's what kind of
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  started me down a road of owning Christianity, owning my faith,
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  loving Jesus, not just believing that he exists, but loving him
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  and wanting to serve him. That's when that started.
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  So you're home for the summer. Are you seeking out a disciple
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  ship group of some kind? And then when do you end up
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  becoming reformed? And what does it mean to be
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  reformed? Yes.
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  So that was fall of 92. I dropped out, got involved in
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  church, the a pastor who was there saw, I started, I, I
• 15:41
  developed a real appetite for the Scriptures.
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  I read a lot. I understood a lot.
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  It's another thing that I found came flooding back in from my
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  Lutheran years because in the Lutheran Church it follows A
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  lectionary. You hear all of these readings
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  and I thought I would have assumed those were nowhere in my
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  mind anymore, but they all came flooding back in as I, as I
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  read. It's like, I know this, I've
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  read this before. I've heard this before anyway,
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  in church. And that just kept happening
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  over and over. And I just, I kind of developed
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  a mind for the Scriptures, I guess.
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  And so the pastor of this church, the associate there saw
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  that, encouraged me to consider seminary.
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  And, you know, I needed to finish college if I was going to
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  do that. But my grades were not the best.
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  So I went back and I did a semester of basically just
• 16:32
  retakes to get my grade point up where I was transferable because
• 16:37
  I wanted to get out of Ames. Because all of my wheel spinning
• 16:40
  had been done at Iowa State. And it might have had something
• 16:45
  to do with my decision to go to you and I, that that's where my
• 16:48
  girlfriend, now wife, was going to go.
• 16:50
  How sweet. Yeah, so I ended up, that's how
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  I ended up at. Does this Sorry, was this
• 16:54
  girlfriend? Did you have her while you were
• 16:56
  spinning the wheels as you say before?
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  We'd never met. So did you meet her that summer
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  or how did you meet? I met her that fall when I
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  started going to church with our friends.
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  We had lived a block away from each other and didn't meet until
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  I was 21. Beautiful.
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  So yeah, that was serendipitous, I guess, but providential.
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  Providential. Yeah, but so I, I did the
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  coursework and I, I found that in my conversion, it's not just
• 17:23
  that my heart came alive, it's that my mind came alive.
• 17:28
  And where I've been a terrible student before, all of a sudden
• 17:31
  I was, I was enjoying college, I was enjoying my classes and I
• 17:36
  was doing very well in them. So I was a shoe in for the
• 17:39
  transfer. I finished with a pretty good
• 17:42
  grade point average at UNI. And all of this with a view to
• 17:45
  going to seminary. While I was at U and I, I met a
• 17:50
  pastor, a a Reformed Baptist pastor.
• 17:54
  That's where the Reformed part of this started.
• 17:56
  He introduced me to Reformed theology.
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  I resisted aspects of it that didn't make sense to me at the
• 18:04
  time, but over time, I did end up embracing it.
• 18:08
  And so we ended up when, when we were done with college, I
• 18:14
  finished first. She still had to do a semester
• 18:17
  and then student teaching. We ended up in a Reformed Church
• 18:20
  in one town about 30 miles from where we lived.
• 18:25
  And after some time there and I was kind of pursuing like a
• 18:29
  quasi ordination there, The church where I ended up being a
• 18:33
  pastor for 15 years, the pastor stepped down.
• 18:37
  The same friend that I came home and told I need help was on the
• 18:42
  leadership there and and through him the opportunity to serve
• 18:46
  interim for a year there. As a pastor, interim.
• 18:50
  Pastoral interim pastor Yes, while they.
• 18:54
  By the way, at this point. That was O 9 so I I can't do
• 19:00
  quick math like that. Born in 71, it was 2009.
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  How old was I then? Late 30s.
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  Yeah, late 30s. So younger guy, and you're going
• 19:08
  to be the pastor, interim pastor of this church.
• 19:10
  Yeah, just for a year, just for a year, that was the that was
• 19:13
  the thing. But three months into that year,
• 19:16
  the search committee came to the leaders and said we don't know
• 19:20
  that we really need to search anymore if there's a way for
• 19:23
  Aaron to be our pastor and if he's interested.
• 19:26
  And there on paper, there wasn't a way for that to happen because
• 19:31
  I didn't have an Mdiv. I hadn't gone to seminary yet,
• 19:34
  but there were a lot of creative minds in the area, in the the
• 19:39
  regional body of churches. You know, the unit in that
• 19:42
  denomination had a lot of help put a plan in place.
• 19:46
  And I ended up going to seminary while I was pastoring with
• 19:50
  permission to function in every way that a pastor does function,
• 19:55
  providing that I'm pursuing that ordination in that denomination.
• 19:59
  So part of my time as pastor there I was unordained.
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  Though I was the pastor, but then in 2019 I was fully
• 20:09
  ordained and that so it's 15 years, some of that in seminary,
• 20:14
  some of it after seminary, but all of it functioning as the
• 20:18
  pastor of that church. The best thing that we can do
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  year with Cozy Earth. To to finally get to your
• 22:01
  question, what does Reformed mean?
• 22:04
  Reformed in the In its basic sense, I think this will sound
• 22:09
  very familiar. To be Reformed is to believe
• 22:13
  that God is sovereign over the events that take place on earth
• 22:18
  among people and among in the whole world.
• 22:22
  So in in that sense, it's it's orthodox Christianity, yes, but
• 22:30
  there are emphasis within Reformed theology that I now
• 22:35
  disagree with and I disagreed with at first then because this
• 22:38
  pastor, I was giving push back to him, the one at this Reformed
• 22:43
  Baptist Church. So, for instance, if you're
• 22:48
  reformed in this sense, you you would believe, well, for one
• 22:55
  thing, you would believe that if you are saved, you could not
• 22:57
  walk away. And so what's?
• 23:00
  The term for that there's. A well, you could say eternal.
• 23:03
  Well, yeah, Tulip the the acrostic.
• 23:06
  Part of Tulip. Yeah, so that would be
• 23:08
  perseverance of the Saints in Tulip.
• 23:10
  But other people talk about something you'll hear once
• 23:14
  saved, always saved. Sometimes there's different ways
• 23:18
  of of saying that, but essentially it's the idea that
• 23:21
  once you have saving faith, you could never lose saving.
• 23:26
  You're one of the elect at that point and there's no damnation
• 23:29
  possible. For you and that and that choice
• 23:31
  is made by God such that if you're not chosen, you would
• 23:40
  never even have a chance to believe because it's not, it's
• 23:45
  not possible for you. I, I shouldn't say you should
• 23:47
  not. You would never have a chance
• 23:48
  because circumstantially in your life right you you could.
• 23:51
  But it's, it's, it's a predestination, right?
• 23:54
  You're either, you're either one of the elect or you're not.
• 23:56
  And you can't. You don't really have much to do
• 23:57
  with it. Yes.
• 23:58
  And it's a, it's a, it's a predestination that is sometimes
• 24:01
  referred to as double. Different people mean different
• 24:04
  things by that. So you can get in trouble really
• 24:06
  quick by throwing some of these terms around.
• 24:09
  But put it this way, we just mentioned Tulip, the L in Tulip.
• 24:14
  Tulip is an acrostic that is five different doctrines that
• 24:17
  are Reformed doctrines. They're often called the
• 24:20
  doctrines of grace because the emphasis is on the grace of God,
• 24:24
  the salvation through the grace of God.
• 24:27
  And the L in Tulip is limited atonement, which means Christ
• 24:32
  died only for the elect, not for all the people in the world, but
• 24:37
  only for the elect. That's the L in Tulip.
• 24:41
  And if you're if you're a black coffee Calvinist, if you're
• 24:45
  reformed all the way, then you believe that it's it's one of
• 24:48
  the doctrines that you ascent to.
• 24:50
  And I did and I believed it largely because it it it it had
• 24:55
  a logical flow within the system.
• 24:58
  Total depravity is the T And then you can go unconditional
• 25:02
  election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance
• 25:06
  of the Saints. Without getting into all the
• 25:08
  details of those, there is a there is a logic that flows
• 25:12
  through all that, especially if we start with total depravity
• 25:16
  and work our way down. Then these you can make the
• 25:19
  logical and I don't, I don't say logical at the exclusion of
• 25:22
  biblical because obviously there's verses that would say,
• 25:25
  well, here's how we see this in the Bible.
• 25:28
  But obviously this isn't the only view of of these things,
• 25:32
  and it's not even the majority view.
• 25:35
  Amongst it's not the majority review amongst Reformed Baptists
• 25:38
  or amongst just Christians. Obviously Christians
• 25:41
  historically and in general, at any given time in history, I
• 25:44
  would say it's not the majority. Tulip is not a majority view,
• 25:47
  Yes. And, and can you give us briefly
• 25:50
  the origin of Tulip And then is it something that you think is
• 25:53
  believed by most Reformed Baptists today or who sort of
• 25:57
  generally is about who generally abides by Tulip as you
• 26:00
  understand it? So this comes out of the
• 26:03
  Reformation. It largely gets associated with
• 26:06
  John Calvin. So Dutch Reformed is comes out
• 26:11
  of Calvinism is often Dutch Reformed, but it's broader than
• 26:15
  that. So Reformed you could be
• 26:18
  Reformed Baptist, you could be Presbyterian and Presbyterian is
• 26:22
  Reformed. Essentially it's Westminster
• 26:26
  standards as opposed to three forms of unity is what we talked
• 26:30
  about. It's confessional, but there's
• 26:33
  different flavors of reformed with.
• 26:35
  They all confess the same basic things.
• 26:38
  They all hold to the same basic doctrines.
• 26:41
  They have confessions that most people across denominations,
• 26:46
  those Reformed denominations would be fine with.
• 26:48
  It's just a Reformed Baptist isn't going to agree with Dutch
• 26:52
  Reformed people or Presbyterians that you can baptize infants.
• 26:56
  That's the main. The emphasis is going to be on
• 26:58
  the the way of salvation. That's the sense in which this
• 27:03
  Reformed is in common. But all these different
• 27:07
  denominations that you're referencing here, largely
• 27:10
  speaking, abide by Tulip. Yes, yes.
• 27:14
  And you did and you taught and you, you preached it for 15
• 27:17
  years, it sounds like as a, as the pastor of your church.
• 27:20
  Yep. I, I, yeah, Well, and longer
• 27:22
  than that because I was reformed just in my own theology before I
• 27:26
  was a pastor. So at least 20 years, probably
• 27:29
  more than that. I'm not sure exactly what year
• 27:32
  that was, but yeah, this was Christianity to me.
• 27:36
  This is where I I felt I had landed here and this was the
• 27:40
  best way to understand what the scriptures teach with respect
• 27:45
  to, you know, the order of salvation or how God works in
• 27:48
  salvation, how this comes about. It would you say Tulip is, is it
• 27:53
  fair to say Tulip is like a sort of Nicene Creed or Apostles
• 27:59
  Creed for Reformed, these different Reformed
• 28:03
  denominations? Or would you say Tulip is an
• 28:05
  element of a larger theological view, but it's maybe the the
• 28:10
  cornerstone element? Like, how would you, I mean, if
• 28:12
  it's about how we're saved, it seems like it's pretty, you
• 28:15
  know, central to whatever the the belief is.
• 28:18
  Yeah, it is. In that sense it is central for
• 28:22
  sure. Let me let me limit my answer
• 28:27
  right now to Presbyterian and like Dutch Reformed and leave
• 28:32
  out Reformed Baptist for now. Because I can't.
• 28:35
  I can't. Well, I just can't speak to that
• 28:37
  one as well as I can what was more my own world.
• 28:41
  And the reason why I want to separate that is because in any
• 28:45
  of these other churches, other denominations, you're going to
• 28:48
  have you're going to have the creeds.
• 28:51
  So we. Both of them.
• 28:54
  Yeah, well, three, the same three that the Catholic Church
• 28:57
  abide holds to the the Apostles, the Nicene and the Athanasian.
• 29:01
  Those were our creeds as well. So we would view the creeds as
• 29:04
  this locates us within historic Christianity.
• 29:08
  But the confessions, like the creeds say we're in.
• 29:12
  The confessions show us where we are within.
• 29:16
  They locate us within. And so the creeds are, you know,
• 29:21
  the the ecumenical creeds, the things that all Orthodox
• 29:23
  Christians should confess, should believe.
• 29:28
  Because there are a number I, I remember because we're growing
• 29:30
  up Protestant, my dad was an elder and there was a
• 29:32
  conversation of do we have a profession of faith?
• 29:34
  What is that? They were, you know, trying to
• 29:35
  create that in the archetype because we were loosely
• 29:37
  associated with some other denominations.
• 29:39
  But it was kind of its own thing with its own charter anyways.
• 29:43
  But I, I remember the Apostles Creed was, was that the Nicene
• 29:47
  Creed? That was a little bit too
• 29:49
  theologically specific in some areas, and I don't remember
• 29:52
  which ones exactly. I'm actually thinking about
• 29:53
  pulling it up, but it sounds like that was not an issue
• 29:56
  though at your church. Not in those that that would.
• 29:59
  You'd run into that with the Reformed Baptist.
• 30:01
  Maybe with some non denominational churches that
• 30:03
  were reformed. Maybe that was the influence,
• 30:04
  the Reformed Baptist influence in the churches they had.
• 30:08
  I think it had Presbyterian roots.
• 30:10
  It might have had some Baptist roots, too.
• 30:11
  The church that I was raised in, yeah.
• 30:14
  What would be the issue a Reformed Baptist might have with
• 30:16
  the Nicene Creed? You know, as opposed to
• 30:20
  apostles. Depending on the church, they
• 30:22
  may not even want to have the Apostles Creed.
• 30:26
  And largely I think in this. So this is where I'm in
• 30:29
  dangerous waters because the reformed Baptist world isn't
• 30:32
  really my world as as much, but it's it's not uncommon in
• 30:38
  Baptist, the Baptist world or non denominational world.
• 30:43
  And it gets, it gets, it's kind of fuzzy because I often will
• 30:46
  talk about Big B Baptist and Little B Baptist.
• 30:50
  So Little B Baptist is a church that is baptistic in its view of
• 30:54
  baptism. You must be old enough to make a
• 30:57
  confession or a profession of faith.
• 30:59
  And you may not baptize infants. Well, that's Baptist.
• 31:02
  Even if the church isn't First Baptist Church, you know, it
• 31:07
  might be Covenant Church or something like that and still be
• 31:12
  Baptist in the small B sense of how they view the sacrament of
• 31:15
  baptism, Big B Baptist. Now you're dealing with all your
• 31:19
  actual Baptist Church in the different associations that they
• 31:22
  have and they're not all the same, you know.
• 31:25
  And so that's why it gets a little hard to to say, well,
• 31:28
  this is what it is like with Baptists because it's not always
• 31:32
  the same, but it tends to. One thing that tends to be there
• 31:35
  in my understanding is they don't really like to do a lot
• 31:39
  that's creedal, confessional, other than, you know, there'd be
• 31:43
  a statement of faith. God exists as Father, Son and
• 31:47
  Holy Spirit. 3 in person, one in essence, you know, Jesus is
• 31:51
  divine and man. He's the perfect union of God
• 31:54
  and man. All these orthodox doctrines
• 31:56
  that you would find in these creeds will be listed on a
• 32:00
  website of here's the non negotiables that we hold to we.
• 32:04
  We confess this, but it's not the actual creed and I think.
• 32:09
  I have noticed that. Yeah.
• 32:10
  And so I think the creed historically just kind of, I
• 32:15
  don't want to malign them and say it's too Catholic, but it's
• 32:18
  just a step too far I think for some in terms of kind of this is
• 32:24
  much more institutional than we want to be.
• 32:28
  You know, it, it's just we're just and it's it might be saying
• 32:32
  things in the way that. Feels uncomfortable.
• 32:35
  I mean, yeah, it is interesting though, that cause like the
• 32:38
  denominational church, non denominable church that I grew
• 32:40
  up in, they still had their creed that was on the website,
• 32:43
  you know, so they they they kind of created a creed effectively
• 32:46
  based off of in part some of maybe niceness or apostles or
• 32:50
  they would take it from Holy Scripture.
• 32:52
  I mean, I'm, I'm going to guess your church had a statement of
• 32:55
  faith as well. Like this is what we believe.
• 32:57
  Yeah, well, yes. And largely that was the, it was
• 33:00
  the three ecumenical creeds, apostles, Nicene and Athanasian,
• 33:04
  which are just fully Trinitarian and fully, you know, 2 natures
• 33:08
  of Christ and, and all of that. And then we had our three
• 33:13
  confessions, the Reformed confessions, the Heidelberg
• 33:16
  Catechism, the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort, all of
• 33:21
  which are, they don't all really hammer out like Tulip, for
• 33:26
  instance, that we just talked about the Canons of Dort do.
• 33:29
  That's, that's what they are. They, they lay out this
• 33:33
  particular view of salvation that you, you have in that
• 33:36
  acrostic Tulip. But the other ones are, they're
• 33:41
  kind of just, they're more, they're doctrinal statements,
• 33:43
  they're clarifications that, that drill a little bit deeper
• 33:47
  than the creeds might. I think most people, I've seen
• 33:51
  some people push back on this in my old circles, most people kind
• 33:55
  of view A3 tiered relationship in these, in these authorities
• 34:03
  that exist, Scripture being the highest, the creeds being the
• 34:07
  next and the confessions being the next.
• 34:10
  Because the confessions, at least in my world, they were
• 34:13
  actually amendable. You could, you could update
• 34:16
  them. And so to me that drops them, it
• 34:21
  drops them into a different tier than because nobody's saying,
• 34:24
  well, we need to amend at least again, in my circle, we don't
• 34:27
  need to amend the Bible. We don't need to amend the
• 34:29
  Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed, and we're not going to
• 34:31
  mess with the Athanasian Creed. But you can do that with the
• 34:35
  confessions. So there's this kind of three
• 34:37
  tiered the. Magisterium.
• 34:39
  Yes, exactly. So well, but part of it isn't
• 34:42
  magisterial. It's like, you know, like it's
• 34:45
  the Catechism or it's, you know, what would it be?
• 34:48
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• 34:52
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• 34:56
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• 35:48
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• 35:51
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  standard insurance. That's why I'm so excited to
• 35:56
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• 36:00
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• 36:02
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• 36:05
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• 36:11
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• 36:13
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• 36:20
  healthcare to the rest of the country.
• 36:22
  Go to presidiocare.com. So it's all very fascinating and
• 36:26
  people listening, you know, whether you're Protestant,
• 36:28
  Catholic, no Christian background, I think this is
• 36:30
  where you get into the meat of what does it mean to even have
• 36:33
  differences as Christians? Because we're supposed to all be
• 36:35
  one. Yes, we're supposed to all be 1.
• 36:38
  And So what, what is this that you have a different creed than
• 36:39
  me or a different statement of faith than me and different
• 36:42
  practice than me and different liturgy.
• 36:43
  Like what does it all mean? And I think that's a little bit
• 36:46
  of a side project of this show to explore all of this, which is
• 36:49
  why I'm so excited. Excited.
• 36:51
  You're on it to share obviously your story.
• 36:53
  You were very steeped in this from a young age as a Lutheran.
• 36:56
  And then you you pursue it personally in your study and
• 37:01
  your discipled and then you go to seminary.
• 37:04
  You're getting all of these, you're being educated and then
• 37:07
  you're educating others in it. During all of this time, I'm
• 37:10
  going to guess that you saw incredible conversions.
• 37:14
  You saw people change their life around.
• 37:16
  Meaning this is your world of theology and you're seeing the
• 37:19
  fruit of God, You're seeing fruit of the Holy Spirit.
• 37:21
  Yes, yeah, people's lives definitely get changed and you
• 37:26
  see the Holy Spirit at work, you know, I mean, there's no other,
• 37:29
  there's no other thing to say. Yes, the Holy Spirit is working
• 37:32
  through this and he definitely worked in my life.
• 37:35
  He worked in the lives of other people that I know.
• 37:37
  And you know, like any church, you, you kind of have your ebbs
• 37:42
  and flows of ministry and that. But people were people were
• 37:46
  being transformed by the Lord through all of this.
• 37:50
  And yeah, he was at work. And it was very much something I
• 37:54
  was invested in. There was the idea that, I mean,
• 37:59
  the idea that I would ever be anything other than a reformed
• 38:01
  pastor once I was didn't exist to me.
• 38:05
  The idea that I would be Catholic was in some other
• 38:07
  universe. It was not.
• 38:09
  It was the thing that was not, you know, it was a, it was like
• 38:12
  a logical contradiction. It couldn't happen.
• 38:17
  How how many how many people were in your church when you
• 38:20
  were pastoring? I would say from oldest to
• 38:24
  youngest, roughly at different times, maybe 125 to 150 at its
• 38:31
  peak. So you knew people intimately?
• 38:34
  Yeah, well, then again, this is a church in my hometown, so I've
• 38:37
  lived there all my life. So at what point it sounds like
• 38:40
  you have this beautiful church. You you it sounds like you're
• 38:44
  not searching to leave Reformed theology or leave the church.
• 38:49
  Got this beautiful wife. You have how many kids now?
• 38:51
  Six children. And things are going well.
• 38:55
  Yes, Yeah. No, this, this was the plan.
• 38:58
  And everybody there knew. I knew.
• 39:00
  And everybody else knew that we, we felt planted and rooted in
• 39:09
  our hometown. And it wasn't, it wasn't just
• 39:13
  that to what it what eventually came into the story to which we
• 39:16
  knew eventually would Cammy has an older sister, 11 years older,
• 39:20
  who has a mental disability. We knew that at some point Cammy
• 39:24
  was going to become her guardian and Newton is just where we were
• 39:28
  anchored to and it's where we wanted to be.
• 39:31
  But even if we had ever thought, well, what if we moved here or
• 39:35
  wanted to do that, it just wasn't part of what we were
• 39:38
  willing to even consider because of because of that commitment,
• 39:42
  for sure. But our kids were all close.
• 39:44
  They're growing up and moving away, but they're moving away
• 39:46
  like 30 miles away. So why would we want to leave
• 39:50
  there? It just wasn't part of the plan.
• 39:52
  So I was either going to retire eventually from that church or
• 39:57
  die if the Lord called me home or the church if they decided
• 40:02
  they could say, well, we think you've served your time here
• 40:05
  and. But you have to pastor.
• 40:06
  Yeah, we think maybe we're ready to move on to somebody else, but
• 40:09
  I told them if that ever happens, well, maybe not the the
• 40:13
  dying one, but if that happens, you're going to see me, you
• 40:17
  know, over here. Yeah.
• 40:19
  Yeah. It's funny you say that because
• 40:20
  that's where I worked as a high school kid and and some full
• 40:23
  time. So yeah, that's what I tell
• 40:24
  them. Shopping, meaning you go get a
• 40:26
  job. There, you're going to see me
• 40:27
  working there. That is too funny.
• 40:28
  Well, meaning, you're not leaving, you're not leaving and
• 40:30
  you're not and you're not leaving the faith either.
• 40:32
  This is this is a matter. So what I'm saying here is that
• 40:35
  it was certainly a a career for you, but it was your faith and
• 40:40
  you had no issues with it. It sounds like there was no sort
• 40:43
  of so I'll share briefly a story kind of where I'm going with
• 40:47
  this. So in college I became Catholic,
• 40:49
  was raised non denominational Christian, kind of explored
• 40:52
  different expressions of Christianity trying to
• 40:54
  understand where is I just want to get closer to God.
• 40:57
  When I was becoming Catholic after just it answering a lot of
• 41:00
  questions I had about faith and just having really an encounter
• 41:02
  with the Eucharist like this is Jesus's body, blood, soul and
• 41:04
  divinity. And I love Jesus and I want to
• 41:06
  receive Jesus in this very special way.
• 41:09
  I remember I had this very zealous and good friend who was
• 41:13
  involved with live action or pro-life group and very sweet
• 41:16
  guy and he had his own faith rediscovery.
• 41:19
  He was also raised Protestant, but he became passionately
• 41:23
  Calvinist like hard C Calvinist. And he actually defriended me
• 41:30
  not like in the Facebook way. He like actually sat me down and
• 41:33
  he said, I don't know if he sat me down, but he told me to my
• 41:36
  face because he stopped coming to the pro-life group and I was
• 41:39
  like, is everything OK? And he said, I, you're not one
• 41:42
  of the elect. And you know which, I, I kind of
• 41:46
  respected his honesty. He wasn't trying to say it in a
• 41:49
  mean way. Either he was sincere and he was
• 41:52
  basically saying it was like dangerous spiritually or I, I
• 41:55
  wasn't. Those weren't his words, but
• 41:57
  just like he didn't want to be part of it because how can God's
• 42:02
  Spirit be moving and me or the pro-life club when it's led by
• 42:06
  basically a heretic effectively, and not just a heretic, someone
• 42:10
  who's not one of the elect, as I guess you could technically
• 42:12
  maybe be a heretic and still be elect, right?
• 42:15
  Maybe kind of. I don't.
• 42:16
  Know how? I mean it depends on how far you
• 42:18
  want to push that. That's the IT gets complicated.
• 42:21
  But I just remember respecting his zeal.
• 42:24
  I was also like, come on, you're wrong.
• 42:26
  But you know, not that I, I'm so assured of my salvation that I'm
• 42:30
  like saying I'm going to heaven if I die right now.
• 42:32
  I just trusted in the Providence of God.
• 42:34
  And you know, but whether I have to go to purgatory first or
• 42:36
  whatever, I just know God's going to take care of it one way
• 42:38
  or another. But I'm curious if that was
• 42:43
  ever. And I know that's not all
• 42:45
  Reformed and it's not all Calvinists to have that very
• 42:47
  hard line, but that is where Tulip can take you.
• 42:51
  Yes, yeah. So I think I would say this,
• 42:56
  your friend misrepresented Calvinism and Tulip in at least
• 43:02
  one way, and that is in this if he if he said you're not elect,
• 43:09
  that's beyond what any of us could know and any any Calvinist
• 43:13
  who really knows his stuff. Maybe, he said.
• 43:16
  You may not be. Well, that, but that would be
• 43:17
  true of anybody that that would be true of anybody who's not a
• 43:20
  Christian. The the point is so it
• 43:22
  Deuteronomy 2929 overtime for different reasons, became one of
• 43:26
  my favorite verses in the Bible. And it says the secret things
• 43:30
  belong to the Lord, but the revealed things belong to us and
• 43:34
  to our children forever. The point that there are secret
• 43:38
  things and the decrees of God are mysterious and on some level
• 43:44
  unable to be looked into. And I'm speaking as a Calvinist
• 43:47
  now. This is the way a Calvinist
• 43:48
  would think about this. And the decree of who the elect
• 43:51
  are and who they are not is not something God has told us.
• 43:55
  So when someone, if someone doesn't believe, it doesn't mean
• 43:59
  they're not elect. They may just not have believed
• 44:02
  yet, you know, And so. But what if they seem to
• 44:05
  actively believe and then they become Catholic?
• 44:07
  You see what I'm saying? I think that was where.
• 44:09
  Yeah, OK. Well then.
• 44:10
  It looked like, I think it maybe looked to him like a rejection.
• 44:13
  Yeah, then the probably, yeah, OK, I get that.
• 44:15
  That would have been maybe sure you could say heretical, you
• 44:20
  apostatized or something like that, those types of things.
• 44:23
  But it doesn't mean that you wouldn't still come back,
• 44:28
  because the the Calvinist view is that you can fall into
• 44:31
  grievous sin, which heresy and apostasy would be and still be
• 44:38
  preserved. Pea and Tulip, perseverance of
• 44:41
  the faith. If you were a believer, you
• 44:43
  can't, you can't not be a believer.
• 44:47
  Meaning you would you would end up repenting, yes.
• 44:51
  So it wasn't that you would get into heaven without repenting,
• 44:54
  it would be that if you really are saved once, always saved,
• 44:57
  you will repent. Even if you don't say it right
• 45:00
  now, I repent. You're going to run up repenting
• 45:02
  because God's grace is irresistible.
• 45:03
  Yeah, yeah, You would repent, but I suppose you'd have to
• 45:06
  allow for the possibility that you didn't have time to because
• 45:09
  of some tragedy that took place. So David, King David is often an
• 45:13
  example that will be used for this because look at the sin
• 45:18
  that he committed with, you know, Uriah the Hittite and
• 45:22
  Bathsheba, his wife, and yet he was preserved.
• 45:27
  And so you can, that's an example of you can fall into
• 45:30
  heinous sin, but you will return if you're elect.
• 45:34
  The the option of walking away doesn't exist if you're elect.
• 45:41
  And So what happens if David before Nathan the prophet comes
• 45:45
  to him and confronts him with the parable of the the lamb?
• 45:48
  You know that what happens if David dies before that?
• 45:52
  Well, I think the consistent Calvinist would have to say,
• 45:54
  well, he was still elect. He just, and he would have
• 45:57
  repented. It's just Nathan didn't get the
• 45:58
  chance to throw that story at him and have him repent.
• 46:03
  So it's not Even so much about the act of repentance.
• 46:05
  It's about the preservation of Jesus will not let you go to the
• 46:10
  point where you could walk away from him.
• 46:11
  That would be the Calvinist view, even if you didn't repent,
• 46:15
  even if you didn't get the opportunity to repent.
• 46:18
  So, but, but not every Calvinist is going to be I, I, I think
• 46:23
  I'll say this. I don't think anyone I know
• 46:27
  that's a Calvinist would have said that to you.
• 46:32
  And I don't think they would either.
• 46:33
  I mean, I, I bring up that as example as an extreme, you know,
• 46:37
  you could do an extreme like that of a Catholic, by the way,
• 46:40
  you know, some Catholics say something that's not really a
• 46:42
  representation of what the Catholic faith teaches.
• 46:45
  And then it turns somebody off. So, and I wasn't even turned off
• 46:48
  actually. I was curious, you know, so,
• 46:50
  and, and when I learned more about Tulip and I did look at it
• 46:53
  and I, I just, I believe that the Catholic Church's
• 46:57
  explanation of salvation and, and how we are saved and
• 46:59
  everything else, it made more sense to me ultimately.
• 47:02
  So that's where, you know, that was sort of the extent of my
• 47:05
  theologically theological exploration before becoming
• 47:09
  Catholic. But I share that as maybe a
• 47:12
  caricature for you to debunk for us, which you did very well to
• 47:16
  help people understand that Reformed theology, Calvinism,
• 47:19
  these things, they're not, you know, you could, you could argue
• 47:22
  an extreme about them, but a lot, a lot of them.
• 47:24
  There's a lot of elements that you will find, of course, in
• 47:27
  Catholic teaching. And we're going to get into
• 47:29
  that. What are those nuances and
• 47:31
  differences? Because I think it's a
• 47:32
  fascinating thing. And you're very well positioned
• 47:34
  to walk us through that. But before that, you're, you
• 47:39
  become Catholic. So, so far in the story, you
• 47:42
  have a lovely wife, kids, beautiful church.
• 47:44
  You're have it. You're a pastor, you're in your
• 47:46
  hometown, you're happy. It doesn't seem like there's any
• 47:49
  reason for you to consider becoming Catholic.
• 47:51
  So what happened? Yeah, yeah.
• 47:53
  And you're and you're right, there wasn't.
• 47:55
  There wasn't. And it was the furthest thing
• 47:56
  from my mind. But what happened was kind of a
• 47:59
  cascade of events or I've described them as as waves of
• 48:04
  burnout. Like I said in that post,
• 48:05
  burnout, you know, led to me resigning.
• 48:09
  Started in 2020, which you know, isn't hard to figure out what
• 48:13
  I'm referring to there with COVID and everything it was and
• 48:17
  you know, it was, it was hard for everybody in one way or
• 48:20
  another. I've talked to one pastor, only
• 48:24
  one who told me that he felt like he and his church thrived
• 48:27
  in 2020 and there could be more too.
• 48:31
  But everyone that I know struggled in some way and some
• 48:36
  dramatically and that's how I would characterize my experience
• 48:40
  during 2020 and into 2021. I think just kind of in my mind
• 48:44
  I started asking the question, am I still called to this?
• 48:49
  To be a pastor. Yes, because I don't feel called
• 48:51
  to it as much as I did once, and I can envision a world where I'm
• 48:56
  not a pastor. I'm a normal dad, more normal
• 48:59
  husband and a non pastor. Yes, I'm someone who isn't.
• 49:04
  Like the grocery store job looks really good right now.
• 49:07
  Yeah, it did. It was a grass is greener kind
• 49:09
  of a thing. And I, and, but I was also very
• 49:11
  mindful of the fact that the way this came about me being a
• 49:14
  pastor, one thing I didn't say all of this came at a time where
• 49:19
  I had kind of given up on seminary and being a pastor
• 49:22
  because we had already made the, we being Cami and me had years
• 49:27
  before made the commitment to home school and she was going to
• 49:31
  be the one at home with them. And how do you pack up and go to
• 49:36
  seminary where I'm working full time, she's home raising the
• 49:41
  kids and being their teacher at home school.
• 49:44
  And I'm doing full time seminary, full time work.
• 49:47
  So we have an income and we just couldn't make the math work.
• 49:50
  It just, we just couldn't see it.
• 49:52
  And so we just kind of accepted, well, if God wanted to make it
• 49:55
  work, he could. But right now these are the,
• 49:57
  these are we're very much convicted about doing these
• 50:00
  things, living this kind of a life.
• 50:03
  And we just, we didn't see how seminary got added into that.
• 50:07
  So I was when when all that fell into place, for me it was it was
• 50:12
  a God thing. Meaning earlier on at the
• 50:15
  beginning of you pastoring. The church, yes, when I, when I
• 50:17
  became the interim pastor and then ended up being called as
• 50:21
  the pastor, that's another thing.
• 50:24
  I wasn't ever expecting that would happen, right?
• 50:26
  But it did, and God made that happen.
• 50:28
  So did you do seminary during the whole 15 years or how did
• 50:31
  you? No, it was about 8 or 9.
• 50:33
  Of it. And then you finished seminary?
• 50:35
  Yes. OK.
• 50:35
  Yes, it was online classes mostly.
• 50:38
  I would have to go to campus twice a year for a week.
• 50:41
  So you're in COVID now and and you're bringing up seminary
• 50:44
  because you got you saw God make it work.
• 50:47
  It sounds like you're saying you had that experience.
• 50:49
  Yeah. So it's, is it really my place
• 50:51
  to say, I think it's time for something else?
• 50:54
  God, it, it wasn't my, I didn't have the authority to do that.
• 50:56
  That's how I was feeling. If I'm going to be called out of
• 51:01
  vocational ministry, it's got to be an equal.
• 51:07
  It's got to be a God thing in that way too.
• 51:09
  Because otherwise it would have been, I would have viewed it as
• 51:11
  disobedient. Like quit just quitting.
• 51:13
  It got hard, so I quit. But I had, I'd had hard things
• 51:17
  before. You just do as a pastor, but not
• 51:20
  like this. And I hadn't felt like that
• 51:22
  before where it's like, yeah, I could, I could be OK not being a
• 51:25
  pastor anymore. But I just kind of committed
• 51:28
  that to prayer because I didn't want to make a knee jerk
• 51:31
  decision and really screw things up because I loved all the
• 51:34
  people at this church. There was never, you know, I
• 51:38
  never had a desire to leave the people or anything like that.
• 51:42
  But I was just struggling so much in in my own emotions with
• 51:47
  everything going on and connected with.
• 51:50
  That is what I would call the second wave is that during this
• 51:53
  time, there's a period of about maybe 14 to 16 months where 13
• 51:59
  people in our church died. And it's a lot for church that
• 52:03
  no, no, I think there were maybe three that COVID were tied to in
• 52:09
  some way, a couple of them directly.
• 52:11
  I think we all know that that's what happened.
• 52:13
  Some of it is just when you come in as the pastor and there are a
• 52:18
  lot of elderly people in the church, you know that in 10 to
• 52:21
  15 years there's some funerals you're going to be doing and
• 52:25
  that coincided. So at what point did even
• 52:29
  Catholicism come on to the radar?
• 52:32
  Not not until so that would be 20 and 20/20/20 and 2021.
• 52:38
  In 2021 at the end of the year in in October, Cammy's dad died,
• 52:43
  which is when Cammy's dad died and her mom went into the
• 52:47
  nursing home with kind of it was early onset dementia, but she
• 52:51
  had some other health problems too.
• 52:53
  That's the point at which the thing we knew would happen
• 52:56
  someday happened, where Cammy became the guardian of her
• 53:01
  sister, her older sister. And so that added a bunch of
• 53:06
  things into our lives, Complications with reporting.
• 53:10
  And all of a sudden, we're needing to talk with lawyers,
• 53:14
  we're needing to talk with the state, we're needing to talk
• 53:16
  with other advisors of different industries.
• 53:20
  And a lot of it having to do with her sister.
• 53:24
  And I was already feeling overwhelmed, but I'm trying to
• 53:27
  help her with a lot of this stuff.
• 53:29
  And now I'm feeling like, and she's going through the grief of
• 53:31
  her dad and hardly has time to grieve because she's now almost
• 53:36
  her sister's mom, you know, in a sense.
• 53:39
  And there was never a passing of the baton.
• 53:41
  We didn't know how to do any of this stuff.
• 53:43
  And so it was a trial and error thing.
• 53:45
  And at some point, the state's calling and saying if you can't
• 53:48
  prove that this account isn't an asset of your sister's, we're
• 53:54
  going to have to pull her health insurance, her Medicaid.
• 53:57
  And so we've got all this stuff, yes.
• 53:59
  And, and so it was one thing after another and at that point,
• 54:03
  so again, this is probably into 2022 now.
• 54:06
  I'm starting to feel like I have one parishioner to take care of
• 54:09
  and it's my wife and, and I, I, I am certain there are ways that
• 54:14
  I'm dropping the ball as a pastor, but we're both just so
• 54:17
  overwhelmed, you know? And by this time, my kind of the
• 54:22
  fleece I'm putting out is, are you calling me out of this God?
• 54:25
  I'm becoming more and more convinced that I am being called
• 54:29
  out of it, out of being a pastor, but I don't know how to
• 54:31
  do that. By this time, I'm, I'm really
• 54:35
  getting worn out and I, I've talked with Cammy about it and
• 54:39
  we're not on the same page. She does not want me to resign.
• 54:43
  She can't really envision envision a future where that's
• 54:47
  not our church family and and I'm not the pastor.
• 54:52
  And I think it probably she could, she could correct me on
• 54:56
  this, I suppose. I think the hardest thing about
• 54:59
  that would would would have been the idea of the church family
• 55:05
  not being our church family. If I could do something else and
• 55:08
  still have the church family, that would have been fine.
• 55:11
  But The thing is, once you've been a pastor someplace, if you
• 55:14
  were to resign and then stay there, that creates all kinds
• 55:17
  of. For the new pastor, maybe
• 55:18
  because people will still go to you.
• 55:20
  Yes, when they go to the new pastor.
• 55:21
  Yes, because by and large it was a good relationship still.
• 55:24
  It makes sense. And so that just wasn't going to
• 55:27
  be a possibility. A clean break.
• 55:28
  It it does, but this is your family.
• 55:30
  It's hard, but it's for the best.
• 55:32
  And so she wasn't on the same page, but I was, I was pretty
• 55:36
  worn down. I was, I didn't have a lot of
• 55:42
  fight left in me anymore. And I was just, I was, I was
• 55:46
  struggling. I was struggling in ways I don't
• 55:48
  think I ever had before. And it was in that time that
• 55:52
  somehow Keith Nestor came back on my radar, probably through a
• 55:58
  Facebook video that he he a link on Facebook to a video he'd made
• 56:02
  on YouTube or something. Keith Nestor and I had been
• 56:05
  friends for over 30 years. He was a groomsman in my
• 56:08
  wedding. He'd known Cammy for a little
• 56:11
  bit longer than than that. And you know, he's doing this
• 56:15
  whole Catholic thing, which I don't get at all.
• 56:18
  And in fact, at some point when he when he first told me he was
• 56:21
  considering the Catholic Church, I kind of read him the riot act.
• 56:26
  And I don't think I told him he wasn't elect, but I was.
• 56:29
  I, I was, I would say I was pretty hard on him.
• 56:33
  He kind of softens that sometimes.
• 56:35
  But I think I'm right in that I think I was hard on him.
• 56:38
  I really do. And I threw all the ammo that I
• 56:41
  knew to threw to throw at him about why he was wrong, about
• 56:44
  why he shouldn't be Catholic. Yeah.
• 56:45
  Because he was seriously considering it.
• 56:47
  And I was like, how? How in the world could you be?
• 56:51
  But by that time, we weren't as much a part of each other's
• 56:56
  lives anymore. I had a young family.
• 56:59
  He had a young family. We were living about two hours
• 57:02
  apart. And so it's hard, you know, to
• 57:04
  bundle up the kids and go hang out together the way you used
• 57:08
  to. Life is just different.
• 57:09
  So we're not seeing each other as much anymore.
• 57:11
  But we were at the same event for something.
• 57:14
  And. And he told me about this.
• 57:15
  And. Yeah, so I was, I I gave it my
• 57:18
  best to make sure that he didn't become Catholic.
• 57:21
  Well, as you know, eventually he did Yes.
• 57:24
  And so it's sometime after that. He's doing all these videos now
• 57:27
  and I'm and I haven't even really tried to understand his
• 57:30
  world. We don't see each other that
• 57:31
  much at that point anyway. But at some point I think just
• 57:35
  in my exhaustion as like I can see Keith doing what he's doing
• 57:42
  and not feel like I need to correct him.
• 57:44
  I don't want to fight with anybody about anything right
• 57:46
  now, but I miss my friend, you know, and so I started watching
• 57:52
  some of his videos and I started commenting on some of those in a
• 57:55
  friendly way and I. Just good job, Keith.
• 57:59
  No. No, no, no.
• 58:00
  I mean, except the part about Mary.
• 58:02
  You know, he had he had this video that he made and the title
• 58:05
  of it was once saved, always saved his garbage.
• 58:09
  I think that was the title. So me being the that.
• 58:12
  That got you looking at it, huh? So I watched it and I commented
• 58:16
  on it and I think in an amicable way.
• 58:18
  And I think he thought that too, because he didn't know why I was
• 58:22
  being amicable because the last time we talked about these
• 58:25
  things, I was anything but. But we started, he would comment
• 58:31
  back and it was all kind of YouTube centric.
• 58:33
  Well, eventually I texted him and I just said, you know, we
• 58:36
  should get together for lunch sometime and just meet halfway.
• 58:39
  And by this point, he's a little closer.
• 58:41
  Now we're about an hour and a half apart.
• 58:43
  So we picked a town halfway and went out for lunch and he came
• 58:49
  prepared to have the argument and I didn't know that at the
• 58:52
  time. He told me afterwards I didn't
• 58:55
  want to do that, I just wanted to reconnect as friends.
• 58:58
  And I told him that right away in the conversation.
• 59:00
  And that kind of made him wonder what was going on because that's
• 59:06
  not the errand he knew last we talked about anything church
• 59:09
  related. But it was good and it was so
• 59:12
  good to reconnect. And on the drive home, I had
• 59:15
  about 45 minutes home. I was thinking to myself how
• 59:18
  silly it is that we have kind of lost contact to the degree that
• 59:23
  we had. We weren't, you know, we were
• 59:26
  still friends, but functionally we were more like acquaintances
• 59:29
  at best. Even though he'd been in your
• 59:31
  wedding. Yeah, yeah.
• 59:33
  And part of that was distance. Part of that is family
• 59:35
  situations with kids. It just, you know, he was living
• 59:38
  in the same town for a while. We were living in the, he was in
• 59:40
  my hometown for a while. That was easy to hang out.
• 59:43
  Then this was different life situations, but still we should
• 59:48
  have been in better contact than we have been and we should have
• 59:51
  known what was going on in each other's lives better than we
• 59:54
  did. So I thought, well he
• 59:57
  understands my world but I don't understand his at all.
• 1:00:02
  And he did this video where he said if you want to understand
• 1:00:04
  what the Catholic Church teaches and he held up a catechism and
• 1:00:08
  he said you need to read this. Don't listen to what this guy
• 1:00:11
  says or what someone posts online or whatever.
• 1:00:14
  Just. That's a.
• 1:00:16
  Good point. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:18
  If you're listening, you're like someone's Catholic, curious,
• 1:00:21
  listening to this show. Obviously listen to the rest of
• 1:00:22
  this episode, please. But.
• 1:00:24
  But also, yeah, read the Catechism more than you listen
• 1:00:27
  to podcasts. Read the Catechism.
• 1:00:28
  That's such a great point. Yeah.
• 1:00:30
  And so it turns out I had a catechism of the Catholic Church
• 1:00:34
  on in my office at church. Someone had given me a bunch of
• 1:00:37
  books. This happens sometimes when
• 1:00:39
  you're a pastor. I've got all these books I don't
• 1:00:41
  know what to do with. Do you want them?
• 1:00:42
  And some of them look worth, like they're worth having.
• 1:00:45
  So I just take them all. And I had this catechism that I
• 1:00:48
  never opened before, but I thought, OK, challenge accepted.
• 1:00:52
  I'll read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
• 1:00:55
  And so I did cover to cover over, I don't know, a period of
• 1:00:59
  months. I'm not sure how long it took
• 1:01:00
  me, but I just started marking every article in it.
• 1:01:04
  Whether I agreed with it, whether I disagreed with it, or
• 1:01:06
  whether I was even. Maybe I didn't understand
• 1:01:08
  exactly what it was saying. I don't know.
• 1:01:10
  I'd have to think about that. Like with a pen, like a check
• 1:01:12
  mark or an X or circle. Rectangle.
• 1:01:16
  Triangle. Those were my marks.
• 1:01:17
  Circle, yes. Triangle.
• 1:01:19
  No way. Rectangle was kind of yeah.
• 1:01:23
  Maybe I might need to study this a little bit more to understand
• 1:01:26
  what this term means. Interesting.
• 1:01:28
  Or maybe I'm just not sure. Yes.
• 1:01:30
  So I got through the whole thing.
• 1:01:32
  And in the meantime, I'm also, I'm reading some other things.
• 1:01:36
  I'm listening to some videos, and by the time I get done with
• 1:01:40
  it, whenever that was probably into 2024 at some point, I know
• 1:01:45
  that I've softened on some things.
• 1:01:47
  I still have some disagreements, but to me, they're surprisingly
• 1:01:53
  fewer than what they would have been.
• 1:01:56
  But the other thing that's happening is because of all
• 1:01:58
  these other things, because of the burnout in my mind, I'm
• 1:02:02
  already running scenarios, even though Cami's not on the same
• 1:02:05
  page with me of, of me resigning.
• 1:02:07
  I'm running scenarios of, well, if I did resign, where would we
• 1:02:11
  go? What would be our church?
• 1:02:13
  Because it would eventually anyway need to be in our
• 1:02:15
  hometown, even if it wasn't at first to give kind of a, a
• 1:02:19
  cushion to our former church family.
• 1:02:23
  Well, I felt like it would add insult to injury if I was my
• 1:02:26
  last Sunday there and then the next Sunday they find out that
• 1:02:29
  I'm three blocks down the road at this other church.
• 1:02:32
  So I didn't want to do that to them.
• 1:02:33
  But I'm thinking, well, where would I go?
• 1:02:34
  What, what kind of a, what denomination would would I be a
• 1:02:37
  part of? I was already running those
• 1:02:39
  scenarios. But as I went through the
• 1:02:41
  catechism and and then started going back through and reading
• 1:02:45
  my disagreements and seeing if they'd upgraded or whatever, the
• 1:02:51
  Catholic Church became a viable possibility because the because
• 1:02:55
  the the triangles were fewer and far between.
• 1:02:57
  Yes, and, and, and just for clarity too, if you're looking
• 1:03:00
  and considering other church in your hometown, you could
• 1:03:04
  consider, let's say the Episcopal Church, if there was
• 1:03:06
  one, or the Baptist Church and you might do the same process
• 1:03:08
  and be like, well, there's two triangles with this one, but
• 1:03:11
  they are sort of like minor doctor, not major.
• 1:03:14
  So it's fine. Is that the, is that kind of
• 1:03:16
  the, the thought process too? It's a little bit like that,
• 1:03:18
  except that I knew all those other denominations.
• 1:03:21
  I knew those. And were you 100% with all of
• 1:03:23
  them? No.
• 1:03:24
  Are you? So you had.
• 1:03:25
  So you had triangles, disagreements with other
• 1:03:28
  denominations in town and you had a few with the Catholics
• 1:03:30
  where you're like, actually the Catholics are pretty much.
• 1:03:33
  I had deal Breakers with many of the churches in town.
• 1:03:35
  Oh. Interesting there there were
• 1:03:37
  most of them wouldn't have been in my consideration.
• 1:03:39
  What are what were your deal Breakers at that time?
• 1:03:42
  Some of them would be ways that. They've caved to cultural issues
• 1:03:48
  like promoting LGBT or promoting abortion.
• 1:03:50
  Never, never. Ever, ever could have done that.
• 1:03:52
  It is crazy. Another.
• 1:03:53
  Quick experience I had. That was just very fascinating.
• 1:03:56
  I went through the Midwest and parts of the country when I was
• 1:03:58
  doing investigative reporting of Planned Parenthood.
• 1:04:01
  We'd literally go on these Rd. trips and just stop at the
• 1:04:03
  abortion clinics and do undercover stuff so that we do
• 1:04:05
  that, you know, multiple weeks at a time.
• 1:04:07
  Sometimes over the summers during college, I'd take the
• 1:04:10
  summers and do these projects. We would stop sometimes at the
• 1:04:14
  different churches and it was very interesting because some of
• 1:04:17
  them had like, you know, torture is a, is a, you know, what is
• 1:04:21
  the sign outside of a lot of these Episcopal churches, but
• 1:04:24
  something against torture. Excuse me.
• 1:04:26
  There was some sign. It was very popular around this
• 1:04:28
  time. This was back in 2000 and eight,
• 1:04:30
  2007 because of the reports coming out of Guantanamo Bay of
• 1:04:35
  the torture that was being done. And anyways, I've been bringing
• 1:04:38
  that up because we'd look at that and I, I oppose torture.
• 1:04:41
  It's horrible. But then you'd look at this
• 1:04:43
  church and they would have on their website or you would talk
• 1:04:46
  to I would go and actually interview the pastors and they
• 1:04:48
  would support abortion in some cases.
• 1:04:51
  And so it's just very interesting to see how there are
• 1:04:54
  all these Christian denominations that were waffling
• 1:04:56
  on these hot bun cultural issues that were also, by the way,
• 1:04:59
  foundational to faith, but they just had done away with them.
• 1:05:03
  So it's AI. Guess what I'm saying It's a lot
• 1:05:05
  more people maybe don't realize that there are a lot of
• 1:05:07
  Christian churches today that have given up the ghost on
• 1:05:10
  standing true on sex and marriage and life for sure.
• 1:05:13
  Yeah, and and it's rampant in. Protestantism and many
• 1:05:19
  denominations have caved on this and I knew that none of those
• 1:05:23
  could ever be an option for me, which limited things quite a
• 1:05:27
  bit. Then take into consideration
• 1:05:30
  things like I I am. I am convinced that baptizing
• 1:05:35
  the infant children of believers is a good and right thing to be
• 1:05:39
  doing. So that limits that.
• 1:05:42
  That also excludes a lot of churches.
• 1:05:44
  Then at that point, honestly, what I what I assumed before the
• 1:05:49
  Catholic Church became a viable option to me, I assumed I would
• 1:05:53
  end up back in the Lutheran Church, but not the not the one
• 1:05:58
  that I was in before. I would be in a conservative
• 1:06:01
  wing denomination of the Lutheran Church known as the
• 1:06:05
  Missouri Synod. That's where I figured I would
• 1:06:08
  end up. But all of that's if all that's
• 1:06:12
  if I ever actually resign, if, if, if that call gets confirmed
• 1:06:17
  in some way. So that's why.
• 1:06:20
  And, and by the way, I did enter into those disputes and kind of
• 1:06:23
  battles denominationally in my own denomination about LGBTQ and
• 1:06:27
  about not so much abortion at the time, but it was, it was
• 1:06:31
  about, it was about gay marriage and things like that.
• 1:06:35
  And I, you know, I, I, I worked alongside a lot of really good
• 1:06:40
  people who I love to this day. And in my denomination, we
• 1:06:45
  didn't go the way that so many of them are.
• 1:06:47
  And we were also very pleased with that and gave God the glory
• 1:06:51
  for that. And it was a beautiful thing for
• 1:06:54
  that labor to be taking place at the denominational level at our
• 1:06:58
  annual meetings and that. But I got involved in that in
• 1:07:01
  the midst of all this other stuff going on.
• 1:07:03
  And I thought it was energizing me, 'cause I'm a guy who can be
• 1:07:06
  energized by a fight, but it was just exhausting me more and
• 1:07:10
  more. I, I, I just, I shouldn't have
• 1:07:12
  thrown my hat into that ring. I wasn't prepared for it.
• 1:07:14
  I just didn't realize it at the time.
• 1:07:17
  But there came a point where I just crashed from all of that
• 1:07:20
  work of being engaged in that battle.
• 1:07:23
  I didn't have the energy for it. I was, I was drawing out of
• 1:07:26
  reserves I didn't have. And so at that point, that's why
• 1:07:31
  I have no fight left in me anymore and why I'm why I'm
• 1:07:37
  considering this in the 1st place.
• 1:07:39
  You know, running these scenarios about what church what
• 1:07:43
  if you know, and if Cammy would come along in this idea of
• 1:07:46
  resigning and it and then the Catholic Church, much to my
• 1:07:49
  surprise, becomes an option for me.
• 1:07:54
  Me resigning still is isn't even an option for Cammy at that
• 1:07:57
  point. But that's in 2023 into 4 after
• 1:08:01
  all this with the Catechism goes on and reconnecting with Keith.
• 1:08:05
  OK, so I've got to ask though, because reformed.
• 1:08:08
  Your typical reformed Christian to a Catholic to your average
• 1:08:13
  person looks who has any knowledge of these things looks
• 1:08:15
  very different. You go to the church, one
• 1:08:17
  church, the experience is totally different than going to
• 1:08:20
  a Catholic mass. And so when you're saying, well,
• 1:08:23
  they're actually triangles were pretty few and far between.
• 1:08:25
  So I I would be open actually to going to the Catholic Church.
• 1:08:29
  What about Mary, What about the Eucharist?
• 1:08:31
  I mean, these are doctrines, you know, the part of the Saints
• 1:08:34
  purgatory that are not Reformed doctrines, correct?
• 1:08:38
  Yeah, well, God had been. Working on me in those areas.
• 1:08:42
  And again, it, it was a process and it was over time and, and,
• 1:08:47
  you know, remember I started reading the catechism just so
• 1:08:50
  that I could understand Keith's world from Keith's perspective.
• 1:08:55
  Because everything I knew about the Catholic Church, I'd heard
• 1:08:57
  from people who didn't like the Catholic Church.
• 1:08:59
  And I just took what they said for granted.
• 1:09:01
  I trusted what they were saying, but as I was reading and
• 1:09:04
  studying, I found out there's some inaccuracies and there's
• 1:09:08
  some distortions in what they're saying.
• 1:09:10
  And, and at the very least, if we're going to be critical of
• 1:09:15
  the Catholic Church, we need to play fair with the Catholic
• 1:09:17
  Church and at least not straw man, you know, like, oh,
• 1:09:21
  Catholics worship Mary or whatever, you know, whatever it
• 1:09:24
  may be. And so I started discovering
• 1:09:29
  that a lot of things that I thought were true about the
• 1:09:32
  Catholic Church weren't true. And the other thing that
• 1:09:36
  happened was there were different things, different
• 1:09:38
  situations in life and different actually different passages I
• 1:09:42
  ended up preaching on too, which pushed me even as a reformed
• 1:09:46
  pastor in some areas where it made me a little uncomfortable
• 1:09:51
  about certain things. For instance, whether or not you
• 1:09:53
  could walk away from the Lord as a believer.
• 1:09:57
  So the once saved, always saved issue, but the Saints from
• 1:10:03
  Hebrews 12 before, I think probably before I was even
• 1:10:07
  reading the catechism, I was preaching on that once.
• 1:10:11
  And the, the, the line about where there's a section in that
• 1:10:15
  chapter where Mount Zion or excuse me, Mount Sinai is being
• 1:10:20
  compared with Mount Zion and Mount Zion being the heavenly
• 1:10:23
  Jerusalem. And the author's saying you've
• 1:10:26
  come to this to the heavenly to Mount Zion, to the heavenly
• 1:10:28
  Jerusalem, to the Father. You've come to the myriads of
• 1:10:31
  angels, you've come to the Son and you've also come to the
• 1:10:37
  first born of the assembly and you've come to the spirits of
• 1:10:41
  the righteous made perfect. And he's saying this is who
• 1:10:45
  you've come to by virtue of being in Christ, by virtue of
• 1:10:48
  being in the church. Now, if that isn't the
• 1:10:51
  fellowship of the Saints, the communion of the Saints, then I
• 1:10:55
  don't know what that is. It was very clear to me that
• 1:10:57
  that's what he was talking about.
• 1:10:59
  And I I got to thinking about one of my favorite hymns is for
• 1:11:03
  all the Saints. And there's me too.
• 1:11:06
  And there's verse in it that says, O blessed communion,
• 1:11:09
  fellowship, divine, we feebly struggle.
• 1:11:12
  They in glory shine, yet all are one for all are thine or for
• 1:11:17
  all, yet all are one within your grand design.
• 1:11:20
  Or different hymns have different.
• 1:11:21
  But the point being, yeah, they're dead in that sense.
• 1:11:25
  But we're still one with them. And we sing that in that hymn.
• 1:11:29
  It isn't the Bible, but we sing it and we all agree with it.
• 1:11:32
  But it occurred to me there are ways that that is true and
• 1:11:36
  historically has been true. That's why that's in the creed
• 1:11:40
  that Protestants have kicked to the curb.
• 1:11:44
  And I found that actually one of the first things that happened
• 1:11:46
  with it was Mary's perpetual virginity, because almost
• 1:11:50
  universally the Reformers maintained that doctrine.
• 1:11:54
  And that staggered me when I learned that I didn't know that.
• 1:11:58
  And and I was it was Advent 2023 and I was going through Luke
• 1:12:03
  chapter 1 and I was looking at some commentaries and wait a
• 1:12:07
  minute, Luther agrees with this, you know, and on down the line
• 1:12:10
  is how could they? Because brothers of the Lord,
• 1:12:14
  you know, how could they because of the word until in Matthew 1.
• 1:12:18
  And so I started looking into this of how they could have been
• 1:12:20
  so wrong. And I ended up being convinced
• 1:12:22
  by the reformers that Mary's Mary remained a a virgin.
• 1:12:27
  I was just talking about this with someone. 01 of the we did a
• 1:12:30
  call. In show earlier today and it was
• 1:12:32
  a Catholic gentleman dating a Protestant girl and we were
• 1:12:34
  talking about this very point. But did you discover that the
• 1:12:38
  your understanding of those terms was wrong because of the
• 1:12:41
  the the translation or what How did you change your mind on the
• 1:12:45
  understanding of those terms? Well, with the brothers, they're
• 1:12:47
  just things I hadn't seen before.
• 1:12:49
  I. Hadn't seen that.
• 1:12:50
  Later on two of them are explicitly said to be the sons
• 1:12:56
  of that Mary. The wife of Clopas is their
• 1:12:58
  mother, which can't be obviously the Virgin Mary.
• 1:13:02
  And there's three Marys at the cross, Mary the wife of Clopas,
• 1:13:05
  the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene.
• 1:13:08
  And that becomes clear through all of that.
• 1:13:10
  And and yet it's Mary, the wife of Clopas, who is the mother of
• 1:13:14
  James and Joseph who were mentioned in Matthew 13, I think
• 1:13:17
  it is as brothers of Jesus. Well, they're cousins or some
• 1:13:22
  other relationship. I think the biggest one for me
• 1:13:25
  on that was John 19 at the cross.
• 1:13:29
  Behold your son, behold your mother.
• 1:13:31
  I actually did a sermon with that title and the whole point
• 1:13:36
  of it was, look, this is something that is actually been
• 1:13:39
  believed throughout history in the church.
• 1:13:41
  And we didn't have to throw this baby out with the bathwater.
• 1:13:44
  And so it, it, I, I kind of taught on it in passing at
• 1:13:47
  first, but then I got a lot of feedback, some good, some push
• 1:13:51
  back. But a lot of summers I would do
• 1:13:54
  a sermon series where I would take questions from the
• 1:13:56
  congregation. I mean, it had to be about
• 1:13:58
  doctrinal things or whatever. I don't understand what the
• 1:14:01
  Bible means here. And that became like the most
• 1:14:04
  requested topic to to revisit because I had kind of talked
• 1:14:08
  about it in passing going through Advent.
• 1:14:12
  So I did a, a, a whole sermon just on that issue from John 19.
• 1:14:16
  And the sermon was called Behold your mother, Behold your son.
• 1:14:19
  Some people who had objections still had them.
• 1:14:23
  But it, it was, it was good to have worked through that for me,
• 1:14:29
  but it also good for other people because to me it was, it
• 1:14:33
  was, it was introducing a little bit more unity within the church
• 1:14:39
  as Protestants, if we have our differences, you know, with the
• 1:14:42
  Catholic Church or any other church for that matter, that's
• 1:14:46
  fine. But can we just not divide where
• 1:14:49
  we don't need to? I was becoming, I was getting
• 1:14:52
  wired more and more ecumenically and seeing some of the trends in
• 1:14:55
  our culture and thinking we're going to have to stand together
• 1:14:59
  on these things before or if and when persecution comes, we're
• 1:15:04
  not going to have the strength to stand.
• 1:15:05
  I'm starting to get wired that way.
• 1:15:07
  And and so this was kind of in that spirit that that I preached
• 1:15:11
  on that. Yes, yes, so IA few.
• 1:15:14
  Places I want to go here and ask you about what but one, what you
• 1:15:17
  were saying earlier about the communion of the Saints and how
• 1:15:20
  this was an understanding throughout Christian history.
• 1:15:23
  And it was even an understanding among many Protestants until
• 1:15:27
  it's kind of curious when it became so objectionable to ask
• 1:15:32
  for the intercession of the Saints or to even consider them
• 1:15:35
  as like very much alive, our brethren today as much as they
• 1:15:38
  were when they were on earth and even more in heaven.
• 1:15:41
  I do think with the the death of Charlie Kirk for many people
• 1:15:44
  there has I've noticed among Protestants, there's a sense
• 1:15:47
  that Charlie's looking down on us because if he was martyred,
• 1:15:50
  you know, even as Catholics, we would believe he would go
• 1:15:52
  straight to heaven. And I think that was that's been
• 1:15:55
  interesting for me to watch in real time.
• 1:15:56
  This is the response of Protestants to someone they see
• 1:15:59
  as a brother and an over an older brother in faith because
• 1:16:02
  he had such strong faith and now this kind of openness to sort of
• 1:16:06
  heavenly protection or guidance with his intercession.
• 1:16:10
  Perhaps. What were the sort of, I guess,
• 1:16:14
  differences that perhaps Luther or Calvin had, or I mean, you
• 1:16:21
  had, I guess ultimately when you were deciding these are still
• 1:16:26
  triangles. These are still disagreements.
• 1:16:28
  I have, but I I'm very much softening and all this other
• 1:16:31
  stuff softening on Mary, softening on the Saints.
• 1:16:34
  I'm going to guess you softened on purgatory.
• 1:16:35
  Feel like that's an easy one actually to soften on.
• 1:16:37
  It was for me. So what was left, I guess, and
• 1:16:42
  what and what was it for? And, and I'm sorry, I'm double
• 1:16:44
  asking here. That's fine.
• 1:16:45
  Was there something you discovered?
• 1:16:46
  Oh, this was really the contention that Luther had or
• 1:16:50
  this was really the contention that John had and it's mine too.
• 1:16:52
  Did you ever have that sort of process?
• 1:16:55
  Not so much that, but a softening on.
• 1:17:01
  On a lot of these other doctrines, it's funny you
• 1:17:03
  mentioned purgatory, because that was actually one of the
• 1:17:05
  last ones for me. It's not the last one and which
• 1:17:08
  I don't know, I look back on it. I'm not sure why now, but I
• 1:17:11
  think I actually I do. I do know why, because one of
• 1:17:15
  the things that was going to have to happen for me is I was
• 1:17:21
  going to have to, if, if I were going to come to believe
• 1:17:24
  something different about any doctrine, I would have to be
• 1:17:27
  able to show it from the scriptures, 'cause I'm still
• 1:17:29
  very much steeped in sola scriptura and, and I need, I
• 1:17:34
  need to be convinced by scripture if I'm going to be.
• 1:17:37
  And I just hadn't seen what I felt was a great argument from
• 1:17:41
  Scripture yet. Now, maybe that's just 'cause I
• 1:17:43
  hadn't read the right thing or heard the right thing.
• 1:17:46
  But Purgatory was the last one I think that I really heard, you
• 1:17:52
  know, a, you know, the bell ring and oh, this is the thing.
• 1:17:56
  This is where you can clearly see it in Scripture and you know
• 1:18:00
  it. It's funny because Scripture
• 1:18:02
  itself is an issue because there's a different Canon, you
• 1:18:05
  know, from the Catholic Church to any Protestant church.
• 1:18:09
  And that one was another another one that was looking back on it
• 1:18:14
  when I learned something about the history of the Canon that I
• 1:18:18
  didn't know before. I think that might have been the
• 1:18:20
  first domino that fell for me. I just didn't realize it at the
• 1:18:23
  time. But kind of underpinning all of
• 1:18:26
  this is this famous statement by by Newman, John Henry Newman.
• 1:18:33
  He said to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.
• 1:18:38
  And along with looking at these different doctrines, reading the
• 1:18:41
  Catechism, looking at history and what the church believed
• 1:18:45
  here and what the church looked like here at this point in time,
• 1:18:49
  you know, much, much further back.
• 1:18:52
  And seeing that this is consistent throughout all of
• 1:18:55
  church history, Well, for 1500 years of church history, and
• 1:18:58
  that even when you get to the Reformation, some of these
• 1:19:02
  things remain, but somewhere along the line, they get
• 1:19:05
  jettisoned, like the the Deutero Canon, for example, which
• 1:19:10
  ultimately gets removed from the scriptures completely by Bible
• 1:19:14
  societies. And so it's it's learning some
• 1:19:18
  history, but learning like for instance, I read in a history
• 1:19:21
  book written by I believe in Anglican that the reason why the
• 1:19:26
  communion of Saints is in the Apostles Creed is that the
• 1:19:31
  church really held to this, that he just historically talks about
• 1:19:34
  this is what the church meant. It wasn't about the fact that we
• 1:19:38
  on earth have fellowship with one another, a communion with
• 1:19:40
  each other that wouldn't have made the creed.
• 1:19:43
  They were talking about something more significant than
• 1:19:47
  Christians have, you know, we have a communion together as
• 1:19:50
  fellow Christians. It was something else.
• 1:19:52
  So a lot of it, the softening, a lot of it is because it's not
• 1:19:56
  just reading different takes on doctrines or or scriptural
• 1:20:00
  passages. It's seeing it in the context of
• 1:20:04
  what the church held to historically and why certain
• 1:20:08
  things made certain creeds or why certain council.
• 1:20:10
  For instance councils in the late 4 hundreds are saying
• 1:20:14
  here's the Canon of scripture and includes 7 books that aren't
• 1:20:18
  in my Bible. And these types of types of
• 1:20:21
  things happen where I'm not just bumping up against, you know,
• 1:20:24
  the Baptist say this about this, but I say this.
• 1:20:28
  It's the church historically said this or held to this.
• 1:20:33
  And it's not, it's not aberrant that after the 1500s, you know,
• 1:20:40
  the Roman Catholic Church didn't all of a sudden put seven books
• 1:20:43
  in the Bible that weren't there before.
• 1:20:45
  It's the exact opposite. They got removed, you know,
• 1:20:48
  eventually. So a lot of history is bumping
• 1:20:52
  up against doctrine for me. And it's it's creating this
• 1:20:57
  rather uncomfortable pattern where I'm having to rethink some
• 1:21:01
  things that I never thought I would rethink.
• 1:21:03
  But eventually it just became, you know, something topples, the
• 1:21:07
  next one topples, the next one topples.
• 1:21:08
  And then at some point it's out of control.
• 1:21:11
  And, you know, eventually they're all going to fall, even
• 1:21:13
  if they haven't yet. And I just kind of got to the
• 1:21:15
  point, scary a little bit. It was to see the.
• 1:21:18
  All your kind of theological. Framework and it.
• 1:21:21
  It was toppling in a sense. The objections were toppling to
• 1:21:24
  be clear, as you, as you said, but the framework is like what's
• 1:21:28
  so amazing about and I was not as developed in my Protestantism
• 1:21:32
  as you were in yours because you were, you know, a pastor, you
• 1:21:35
  went to seminary, graduated. But I, I, you have this
• 1:21:38
  framework. And for me it would felt very
• 1:21:41
  natural to just like put the bigger framework around the
• 1:21:43
  framework I had because it wasn't like I was actively
• 1:21:46
  believing error so much. But you, I would say was was
• 1:21:50
  actively believing some error in some of the theological like
• 1:21:54
  Tulip, elements of Tulip I believe are error.
• 1:21:57
  So how did that and then you have to also have you these
• 1:21:59
  objections to what seemed maybe before, like zany Catholic
• 1:22:02
  teachings. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:05
  It's, you know, I'm reminded. I'm reminded briefly, maybe a
• 1:22:11
  bit of an aside. GK Chesterton has identified
• 1:22:14
  what he calls his three stages of conversion to the Catholic
• 1:22:17
  Church. And the first one.
• 1:22:20
  The first one is where a person decides to treat the Catholic
• 1:22:24
  Church fairly and just let the Catholic Church speak for
• 1:22:28
  itself. Here's what we believe.
• 1:22:30
  And to be against false accusations against the Catholic
• 1:22:35
  Church because that's not fair. Let let the Catholic Church say
• 1:22:38
  what it believes and don't accuse them falsely.
• 1:22:41
  The willingness to do that is step one.
• 1:22:44
  Step 2 is when you study more and you find that there's a lot
• 1:22:48
  more truth there than you thought there was that you ever
• 1:22:51
  expected there to be, but you're actually kind of delighted about
• 1:22:54
  it and you're enjoying discovering that the Catholic
• 1:22:57
  Church has a lot of truth in what it teaches.
• 1:23:01
  This. I was very much planted in that
• 1:23:03
  because I'm realizing I don't have to be at Keith's throat or
• 1:23:06
  anybody else that's Catholic about what they believe.
• 1:23:09
  We have so much in common. There's differences, obviously,
• 1:23:13
  but so I was actually enjoying learning that the Catholic
• 1:23:17
  Church isn't the boogeyman that I had once thought it might be.
• 1:23:20
  But then the third step of conversion is when you're
• 1:23:22
  desperately trying not to be converted.
• 1:23:24
  And it's. So yes.
• 1:23:25
  To your point about was it scary?
• 1:23:28
  Yeah, it was actually. And it was scary for two
• 1:23:30
  reasons, because my paradigm was starting to crumble.
• 1:23:34
  And I realized that, and that was scary, my theological
• 1:23:37
  paradigm. The other one was because I not
• 1:23:41
  only wanted, but by this time I feel like I needed Cami to be on
• 1:23:46
  the same page with me with respect, just to resigning.
• 1:23:50
  But then what? Oh, you want to be a Catholic on
• 1:23:52
  top of it? Yeah.
• 1:23:53
  And it's so it's not just, you know.
• 1:23:55
  And the Catholic churches? What happened to my?
• 1:23:57
  Husband, you have no idea. Yes, she thought it was a.
• 1:24:02
  Midlife crisis, huh? Well, I don't know what she
• 1:24:04
  thought if it, if she thought that.
• 1:24:06
  But she thought I was losing my mind.
• 1:24:08
  Probably that may be saying it just slightly too strongly, but
• 1:24:13
  we had, I'll just put it this way, we had many times occasions
• 1:24:19
  where we just couldn't talk about any of this stuff at all.
• 1:24:24
  Now during this time, she and I are actually growing much closer
• 1:24:28
  together. In some ways, our marriage has
• 1:24:30
  never been better because all of these crises are pushing us
• 1:24:34
  together. We're having to be together on
• 1:24:36
  her taking care of her sister. We're going through a lot of the
• 1:24:39
  same struggles, deaths in in her family as her mom ended up
• 1:24:42
  passing away in 2024, her sister, her mom, deaths in the
• 1:24:48
  church. You know, that's another aspect
• 1:24:49
  of deaths in the church. You have a job to do when you're
• 1:24:52
  a pastor, when someone dies in the church, but you're also
• 1:24:55
  going through your own grieving process and you kind of have to
• 1:24:58
  put that on hold to be there as the pastor.
• 1:25:02
  But you're you're in a church our size.
• 1:25:05
  Every time someone dies, I'm losing a friend.
• 1:25:08
  But I can't give that my attention when I'm just needing
• 1:25:12
  to be the pastor for now. And so it's it, there's a lot of
• 1:25:15
  stress involved in that. And she's seeing me go through
• 1:25:17
  all of this. She, you know, the calls come.
• 1:25:20
  There was a time there where maybe every three weeks for a
• 1:25:23
  short time, someone else had died in the church.
• 1:25:26
  And it was just and so she saw what I was going through.
• 1:25:29
  This was pulling us closer together.
• 1:25:31
  The stuff with her sister was pulling us closer together.
• 1:25:34
  But whenever I would even tiptoe around the idea of resigning and
• 1:25:40
  then what's next, that became that became the untouchable and
• 1:25:44
  a big picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging in the wall.
• 1:25:47
  Surprise. Well, you know what's funny?
• 1:25:50
  We didn't have that. You know one of the things that.
• 1:25:53
  Happened I by the way. Really.
• 1:25:55
  There was a friend in High. School I had he hated.
• 1:25:59
  He hated Catholicism. I ended up becoming Catholic.
• 1:26:01
  We were, we were still friends. And so I remember I gave him an
• 1:26:04
  icon for Christmas one year, and he burned it.
• 1:26:08
  He either burned it or threw it away.
• 1:26:09
  He did something dramatic with it to get rid of it.
• 1:26:11
  Later on, he would become Catholic, too.
• 1:26:13
  Well, of course, it's always the haters that really.
• 1:26:16
  Yeah, but. I'm sorry, you were going to
• 1:26:18
  share. Yeah, that's right.
• 1:26:19
  That's. A great story, not.
• 1:26:22
  Our Lady of Guadalupe. But in, in my reading the
• 1:26:26
  catechism process, there came times where on some of these
• 1:26:29
  rectangles, which were my uncertains, I really didn't
• 1:26:33
  understand what I even meant. And so Keith had introduced me
• 1:26:37
  to his priest who I connected with immediately because we're
• 1:26:41
  both Lord of the Rings fans. And when you meet another Lord
• 1:26:44
  of the Rings fan, you're brothers for life.
• 1:26:47
  So I asked him, I, I think I emailed him and just said, Hey,
• 1:26:50
  I'm reading the catechism right now and is there, could I just
• 1:26:55
  log some questions? And then every now and then you
• 1:26:58
  clarify some things for me. And so I'd already gone through
• 1:27:01
  this process with him, but in the end of he was kind of
• 1:27:04
  coaching me on some things I didn't understand just to help
• 1:27:07
  understand the, some of the language, some of the, there's
• 1:27:10
  different verbiage, you know, Catholic to my Protestant world.
• 1:27:15
  But through those conversations, he also he came to know I told
• 1:27:21
  him just about some of these struggles with wanting to really
• 1:27:24
  feeling like I wanted and needed to resign at some point, but I
• 1:27:28
  didn't know how to do it. And Cami wasn't on the same
• 1:27:31
  page. And at some point in all of
• 1:27:33
  that, he was kind of counseling me as well.
• 1:27:35
  And and he said to me one time he said, I'm reminded of what
• 1:27:40
  Moses says to Israel when they're the Red Sea says the
• 1:27:43
  Lord will fight for you. You need only be still.
• 1:27:47
  And that verse when he said that I've never experienced before
• 1:27:51
  that someone speaking Scripture to me where it felt like it
• 1:27:55
  penetrated like that did, like if it was a movie, a gust of
• 1:27:59
  wind would have rushed through the room.
• 1:28:01
  You know, where I was. It just, I don't know.
• 1:28:03
  It hit me in my heart in a way nothing like that ever had
• 1:28:06
  before. And I knew that he was right.
• 1:28:09
  And I knew that that's I needed to trust God on this in my
• 1:28:13
  prayers. I'd been very controlling, you
• 1:28:16
  know, God hears what. I wouldn't have said it this
• 1:28:18
  crassly, but I was praying with such specifics that in essence,
• 1:28:22
  I was trying to control the outcome.
• 1:28:24
  Here's what I here's what I really need to happen and here's
• 1:28:27
  how it should happen. And I realized I need to stop
• 1:28:31
  doing that. I just need to.
• 1:28:33
  And I started praying. Lord, Cammy was your daughter
• 1:28:36
  long before she was my wife. And I just want to entrust your
• 1:28:40
  daughter to you, 'cause I know you love her more than I do.
• 1:28:43
  And I started praying that way. But that verse became so central
• 1:28:47
  to me in my own ability to just bear through this and kind of
• 1:28:51
  exist in the Crucible that I was in.
• 1:28:54
  One day there was a, there was a like a craft store in our town
• 1:28:58
  that was going out of business. And she had gone there with a
• 1:29:01
  friend to, you know, to clearance sale stuff.
• 1:29:05
  And she came home and showed me some of the things she got.
• 1:29:08
  And then she pulled out this metal wall hanging that I was to
• 1:29:12
  put up in our house. And it was the Lord will fight
• 1:29:15
  for you. You need only be still.
• 1:29:18
  And I was like, no way. And this is months after Father
• 1:29:22
  Aaron had spoken that to me. And I said to her, I said, you
• 1:29:25
  don't. I said, you don't know quite
• 1:29:28
  what that means to me, that you brought that home.
• 1:29:30
  And Lila, I made the mistake of telling her what it meant to me
• 1:29:35
  because we were still in that phase where we couldn't talk
• 1:29:37
  about these things. And what was what I thought was
• 1:29:40
  going to be this wonderful conversation just devolved.
• 1:29:43
  It's like I'm throwing it out. Fortunately, it's still on the.
• 1:29:47
  Wall it. It it made it to the wall,
• 1:29:49
  you're. Like you're going to become
• 1:29:50
  Catholic now. Yeah, I know.
• 1:29:52
  It was. It was.
• 1:29:54
  It was. It was what I needed.
• 1:29:58
  It was what I needed at that moment.
• 1:30:00
  Even even though, even though it probably the night would have
• 1:30:04
  gone better if I hadn't played all my cards, you know, which I
• 1:30:07
  did that night. But but it became very important
• 1:30:10
  and very special. And now she can say Amen to that
• 1:30:12
  as well, even if she couldn't at the time.
• 1:30:14
  So I know it's her story to tell him anyways.
• 1:30:16
  But you're her husband, so it's also.
• 1:30:18
  Yours, What was the So you're like on your way, You're like
• 1:30:23
  going down the slide and she's like, what's going on?
• 1:30:27
  But it sounds like you had spent so much time already studying
• 1:30:30
  and praying about the Catholic faith.
• 1:30:33
  She. I don't know if she's done that
• 1:30:34
  alongside you or how much she's been involved alongside you.
• 1:30:37
  So what? I mean, you're Catholic, right,
• 1:30:39
  Tammy? You came into the church, too.
• 1:30:41
  So what happened? Yeah.
• 1:30:43
  You know, I think, I mean, this wasn't that long ago.
• 1:30:46
  I think we still. Puzzle over that a little bit
• 1:30:48
  together. Don't we?
• 1:30:49
  I can talk situationally about it.
• 1:30:52
  We Tammy is a reader and her stack of books that she reads
• 1:31:00
  every morning for devotionals is like, don't stand on that and
• 1:31:04
  jump off 'cause you're going to injure yourself.
• 1:31:06
  That's that's, that's her. And I would occasionally just
• 1:31:11
  slip a book into her stack that I thought I'd like if you read
• 1:31:15
  this. And that book would regularly
• 1:31:18
  disappear And and she wasn't reading them Catholic books, you
• 1:31:22
  know, Oh, she wouldn't read it. No, no, not for a long time.
• 1:31:26
  Resistant. Like for instance, Rome sweet
• 1:31:29
  home made made the made the stack and I think there was some
• 1:31:34
  other things too. But there was a period of time
• 1:31:39
  where there was Matthew 6 right in the middle of the Sermon on
• 1:31:43
  the Mount Jesus. 3 when you statements, when you give to the
• 1:31:48
  poor, when you give alms, when you fast and when you pray.
• 1:31:52
  These are actually part of that sermon series I mentioned to you
• 1:31:55
  where I would take questions. I got questions about one in one
• 1:31:58
  summer. I got how do, how do we fast?
• 1:32:01
  How should we fast? What is fasting and how do we do
• 1:32:04
  it? And then another one was how do
• 1:32:07
  we, what's it look like to pray without ceasing?
• 1:32:10
  And I went to Matthew 6 for both of those and I really got
• 1:32:14
  convicted over the fact that Jesus saying is saying when you
• 1:32:17
  not if you and I just I started evaluating how well am I doing
• 1:32:22
  these? And my self evaluation wasn't
• 1:32:26
  terribly glowing on at least a couple of them.
• 1:32:29
  But at one point in that an e-mail comes across my radar and
• 1:32:32
  there's a resource called When you pray that's out there, a
• 1:32:36
  video and like a DVD and a book. And I thought, I have to get
• 1:32:40
  this. I, I know I need to get this.
• 1:32:43
  And I did. It's Catholic.
• 1:32:46
  And I asked her if she would watch it with me.
• 1:32:49
  And Cammy is very much has a heart for prayer.
• 1:32:54
  And I, and I thought, this is good.
• 1:32:57
  This will be good for both of us.
• 1:32:58
  It's right up your alley because you're so devoted to prayer.
• 1:33:01
  It's up my alley because it's an area where I know I need to grow
• 1:33:05
  and want to grow. And so we started watching this
• 1:33:09
  and it took about 6 1/2 seconds for her to just get furious with
• 1:33:15
  it as it was as as he was talking about the Saints and
• 1:33:19
  Saint Catherine said this and St.
• 1:33:21
  So and so did this. And it was just too much.
• 1:33:23
  It was all too much. And at one point she said, I
• 1:33:26
  don't know if it was on the 1st or the second one, but she said
• 1:33:29
  I cannot watch this anymore. I'm just angry about this.
• 1:33:33
  But she could read the book and reading that book did something
• 1:33:39
  to her. And I don't think either one of
• 1:33:41
  us quite understands how it happened.
• 1:33:43
  But it coincided with we were about ready to go on vacation to
• 1:33:50
  Florida. And I became aware of something
• 1:33:54
  two days before we left for vacation, something church
• 1:33:58
  related that was definitely going to be on my radar when I
• 1:34:01
  got back that I was going to have to deal with.
• 1:34:04
  And I knew I didn't have the emotional energy to do it.
• 1:34:06
  I knew I could not handle what this was.
• 1:34:10
  And she had been outside when I got the phone call about this.
• 1:34:13
  And she came in and I told her it was something I could say.
• 1:34:16
  It wasn't confidential, but it was something that was, it was
• 1:34:19
  going to be a big deal for me anyway.
• 1:34:22
  And she said, well, what does that do for you?
• 1:34:25
  I said, well, it doesn't do anything good for me based on
• 1:34:27
  how, you know, I already feel. And she said, maybe this is your
• 1:34:33
  off ramp. And I'd been describing my
• 1:34:35
  desire to resign as being on an Interstate at night and it's
• 1:34:38
  foggy and you're just looking for the exit ramp.
• 1:34:41
  It's somewhere. It's there.
• 1:34:43
  You can't see it because you only see 40 yards ahead of you,
• 1:34:46
  but it's there. And when it comes, God, if you
• 1:34:48
  give me that exit ramp, I will take it.
• 1:34:50
  I just don't know how to do this.
• 1:34:52
  And she said maybe that's your exit ramp.
• 1:34:54
  And it's the first time she ever gave voice to anything at all
• 1:34:56
  like that. She gave you permission.
• 1:34:58
  She did. And not only permission, but.
• 1:35:01
  She saw it, too. She saw that it was something
• 1:35:04
  that was probably needed. So we said, OK, well then let's
• 1:35:08
  talk about this on vacation. So we kind of did half vacation
• 1:35:12
  for a week. You know, half the week was
• 1:35:14
  vacation. Half of it was just connecting
• 1:35:17
  and praying and talking and deciding.
• 1:35:19
  And we came back from that vacation having decided that I
• 1:35:24
  would resign. And so I think reading that I
• 1:35:29
  don't know something about seeing what I was going through,
• 1:35:31
  knowing what I was going to have to face when we got back from
• 1:35:34
  vacation. But I think also something
• 1:35:37
  within reading the book. She couldn't watch the videos,
• 1:35:39
  but she could read the book for some reason, even though it was
• 1:35:42
  the same basic material. That's what we puzzle over, I
• 1:35:44
  think. And she she changed the Lord
• 1:35:48
  changed her in that process. And so once we got through the
• 1:35:54
  kind of the emotional anguish of actually speaking the words I
• 1:35:58
  need to resign, me telling the leaders that us telling the
• 1:36:02
  church that that I was going to resign.
• 1:36:05
  That was in October when we made the announcement and I finished
• 1:36:08
  out the year 2024. But once we kind of got through
• 1:36:13
  the, the initial kind of shock and grief of making it official
• 1:36:18
  that I was going to resign, then we could start having the
• 1:36:22
  conversation together that I'd wanted to have all along the
• 1:36:25
  what's next conversation. And it took a lot longer for me
• 1:36:31
  for this to happen. In a very short time.
• 1:36:34
  She also saw that the Catholic Church was not just a viable
• 1:36:38
  option, but the preferred option.
• 1:36:40
  And we both knew that that's where we wanted to go, not right
• 1:36:43
  away, but as we talked and could actually talk openly about this
• 1:36:46
  without kind of being a, you know, an, an argument of some
• 1:36:50
  sort or something. Just so it was a difficult
• 1:36:53
  conversation. It stopped being difficult.
• 1:36:55
  We could actually talk openly about it.
• 1:36:57
  And once that started happening and time marched on, then by the
• 1:37:01
  time I was done, we knew that's what we were going to do.
• 1:37:04
  And so after the new Year, when I felt when we felt free to talk
• 1:37:09
  about it if people asked, I didn't want to go out there and
• 1:37:12
  hey, everyone, we're going to be Catholic.
• 1:37:14
  You know, we've decided this. I didn't want to give people
• 1:37:16
  whiplash. I didn't want to be, I, I didn't
• 1:37:21
  want to be aggressive and I didn't want to be obstinate, you
• 1:37:24
  know, because I still have a, a church that's not my church
• 1:37:27
  anymore, but I've got people that I don't want to hurt and I
• 1:37:30
  know they're not going to understand.
• 1:37:32
  And so we just tried to operate a little bit on the down low,
• 1:37:35
  knowing that when our good friends invariably came and
• 1:37:38
  asked us, we would go ahead and tell them now that I was no
• 1:37:41
  longer their pastor. And that's in that post.
• 1:37:46
  That's what I was referring to, that objections that came from
• 1:37:48
  friends, they came afterwards when we decided we were free to
• 1:37:53
  talk about this. But that was kind of the process
• 1:37:56
  of Cami and and Cami and me getting on the same page.
• 1:38:00
  But it's still a bit of a mystery to us of exactly how it
• 1:38:03
  happened. We just know that something
• 1:38:06
  about her reading that book converged with what she saw I
• 1:38:10
  was going to have to deal with. And it softened her to both
• 1:38:12
  things, me resigning. And it softened her to the
• 1:38:15
  Catholic Church too. I do.
• 1:38:17
  I do feel like, I mean, I think about Kimberly Hahn and.
• 1:38:20
  Her story, in part, told in Rome's Sweet Home.
• 1:38:23
  And then I also think about just my own mother, who was raised
• 1:38:27
  Catholic but never really understood the gospel or
• 1:38:29
  internalized it. And so became born again at 20,
• 1:38:33
  was Protestant for decades with my dad.
• 1:38:35
  And then my dad was coming back to the Catholic Church or coming
• 1:38:38
  to the Catholic Church. He he never been confirmed or
• 1:38:40
  anything. And my mother was at first just
• 1:38:43
  very like theology and and there was this sort of just barrier.
• 1:38:47
  And I remember getting to watch it just sort of dissolve.
• 1:38:51
  Yeah, and it was a bit of a mystery, but it was also very
• 1:38:55
  beautiful because you just saw this trust and this love and the
• 1:38:59
  grace. I mean, I think it was in part
• 1:39:01
  the grace of their marriage, the sacrament of marriage and the
• 1:39:04
  grace of your marriage and your prayer for your wife.
• 1:39:06
  Yeah, Yeah, that was definitely a part of it too.
• 1:39:09
  And there's there's a lot of that.
• 1:39:11
  The other. Thing I think that happened to
• 1:39:13
  that I should add is just the work.
• 1:39:15
  You know, I said that Matthew 6 became a big deal for me.
• 1:39:19
  Well, this I I was kind of working on my own spiritual life
• 1:39:24
  in ways. I mean, it sounds really bad to
• 1:39:27
  say it, I guess, since I had been a pastor, but I just had
• 1:39:30
  some different doors open to me for pursuing the Lord and
• 1:39:35
  pursuing sanctification and for trying to grow in holiness and
• 1:39:38
  for taking seriously Jesus call to be perfect as your heavenly
• 1:39:42
  Father is perfect and really striving after the Lord in a way
• 1:39:45
  that I hadn't before, not to that degree anyway.
• 1:39:48
  And there were there were occasions where she would look
• 1:39:51
  at me and say, who are you? And so she saw these changes
• 1:39:55
  taking place in me and it for good.
• 1:39:58
  And I think that softened her too.
• 1:39:59
  And I think that at least initially, probably my changed
• 1:40:06
  life was a much stronger apologetic than any book I could
• 1:40:09
  have given her. And I should have just focused
• 1:40:12
  on that anyway. And and not with a view to not
• 1:40:14
  as a means to an end, because the end was my relationship with
• 1:40:17
  Christ, right? But I didn't realize how it
• 1:40:21
  would affect her seeing that even though she didn't like the
• 1:40:25
  source of it, still she couldn't deny the reality of it.
• 1:40:29
  And I think that was part of the softening process too, because
• 1:40:32
  she saw what this was doing to to her husband.
• 1:40:37
  I have to ask, were there were there times?
• 1:40:40
  Especially now you're getting closer and closer to getting
• 1:40:42
  confirmed. And you were confirmed on Easter
• 1:40:44
  of this past year along with Cami.
• 1:40:46
  And you have any other friends or family join at that point or
• 1:40:49
  not till later? No, at that point it was just,
• 1:40:52
  yeah, it was just Cami and me. And our two youngest, the two
• 1:40:56
  youngest came in at the same time.
• 1:40:59
  Beautiful with with you. Congratulations.
• 1:41:01
  Thank you. Welcome.
• 1:41:03
  Were there some specific doctrines that you had professed
• 1:41:10
  and believed as a pastor of your Reformed Church that you
• 1:41:15
  rejected that you felt I have to reject these definitively now
• 1:41:19
  that I'm becoming Catholic? Because a lot of this was an add
• 1:41:21
  on of things, a bigger picture of the fullness of the faith.
• 1:41:24
  But were there specific things were like, eh, this was this was
• 1:41:27
  in this was wrong. Or maybe it maybe it was just
• 1:41:30
  incomplete. I basically had to jettison all
• 1:41:34
  of Tulip. For the most part.
• 1:41:36
  I mean, look that right up. Look.
• 1:41:39
  Yeah, exactly one of them. I mean, I suppose you could
• 1:41:41
  maybe talk about tweaking the unconditional election, but not
• 1:41:46
  in the way it's understood in a, in a reformed sense.
• 1:41:49
  But yeah. So I, I believe Jesus died for
• 1:41:53
  everyone, not just for the elect.
• 1:41:56
  I believe he died for everyone. I believe that you could walk
• 1:41:59
  away from him. You know, you, you can lose your
• 1:42:02
  salvation. To put it in more vernacular
• 1:42:04
  terms, I don't understand the the depravity of man in the same
• 1:42:10
  way. It's more of a deprivation.
• 1:42:12
  It's not different reforms. People will talk about it
• 1:42:16
  differently. One of the ones that I learned
• 1:42:18
  the most from would refer to it sometimes descriptively as
• 1:42:22
  radical corruption through and through, which I don't think on
• 1:42:25
  the surface a Catholic would have to disagree with.
• 1:42:28
  It is a radical corruption, original sin and what we
• 1:42:30
  inherited, but it's not a total, it's not being totally depraved.
• 1:42:36
  It's not, there's no, it's that there's no element of good in us
• 1:42:41
  in our fallen state, that there's nothing good we can do.
• 1:42:44
  And you really have to push it out to that extreme to be
• 1:42:47
  consistently reformed in your understanding of the, the
• 1:42:51
  radical fallenness of mankind. So I don't agree with that.
• 1:42:55
  I definitely don't. I said I don't agree with
• 1:42:56
  limited atonement, irresistible grace.
• 1:43:01
  You can resist that grace. So again, a lot of it has to do
• 1:43:06
  with God's absolute sovereignty apart from our will in a sense.
• 1:43:12
  And the Calvinist isn't going to want to admit that because he's
• 1:43:15
  going to want to say, no, it is God's sovereignty and it's our
• 1:43:18
  responsibility. OK, fine, there's mystery in
• 1:43:21
  that. But at the end of the day, God's
• 1:43:23
  sovereignty always wins when you start bumping up against
• 1:43:28
  different things in the, in the, in the Bible that seem to say,
• 1:43:31
  for instance, when Paul says that I, I strive to win the
• 1:43:37
  race, I buffet my body so that lest after proclaiming the
• 1:43:40
  gospel, you, I should find myself disqualified.
• 1:43:45
  There's no point in saying that if it's not possible for him to
• 1:43:50
  be disqualified, but he's saying it's possible.
• 1:43:53
  And so This is why I function this way in my spiritual life,
• 1:43:57
  because I don't want to end up helping you guys get across the
• 1:44:01
  finish line and then find myself disqualified.
• 1:44:04
  Was there anything else besides Tulip?
• 1:44:07
  I think those. Would be the main things that I
• 1:44:08
  can think of off the the distinctively.
• 1:44:10
  Reformed doctrines would be the main things because creedily and
• 1:44:15
  we've already talked about the apostles, Nicene Athanation
• 1:44:18
  already totally on board with all of that.
• 1:44:20
  What's so beautiful about what you just shared?
• 1:44:23
  And it's the truth for I would say the.
• 1:44:24
  Large majority of Protestants, I would say maybe virtually all,
• 1:44:28
  except for those that will hold very strongly to something like
• 1:44:31
  Tulip and most don't, even if they identify as reformed, they
• 1:44:34
  don't actually hold the Tulip. Is that what the, what you're,
• 1:44:38
  what you're really saying is all of our Protestant brothers and
• 1:44:41
  sisters out there, what I guess I'm, you know, suggesting here,
• 1:44:44
  they actually have nothing is wrong with their teaching in
• 1:44:48
  terms of the our Catholic faith. It's all part of it.
• 1:44:52
  They're just missing pieces. They're just missing elements.
• 1:44:55
  I I agree with that. It's it's, I've heard many
• 1:44:59
  people say. Put it this way, it's not that
• 1:45:05
  when you when you're Protestant and you discover the truth and
• 1:45:07
  the beauty of the Catholic Church.
• 1:45:09
  What you're discovering is that there's more yes, it's not so
• 1:45:12
  much all the things you have to get rid of all the things will
• 1:45:15
  look at all this stuff with that I had completely wrong and now I
• 1:45:18
  have to believe the exact opposite about it.
• 1:45:20
  There may be some of those things, but the vast majority of
• 1:45:23
  it is what you get to add to what you already have.
• 1:45:26
  That's true 100%. And that's what I that's what I
• 1:45:28
  found for sure. What was it like to be confirmed
• 1:45:32
  with Cammy and to receive? The Eucharist for the first
• 1:45:35
  time, you know it was. It was a whirlwind of a day,
• 1:45:41
  I'll say. I'll say that it was, it was
• 1:45:46
  wonderful. It was wonderful to watch the
• 1:45:48
  the way we lined up. If I remember right, I was the
• 1:45:53
  first confirmed and then Cammy and then my two children.
• 1:45:59
  So I got to try to be present mentally for first Easter Vigil,
• 1:46:05
  by the way, so long. Wow.
• 1:46:08
  But so I, I had mine, but then I got to stand and watch there.
• 1:46:12
  So that was a very special moment.
• 1:46:15
  Confession. First confession was that day
• 1:46:18
  too, because we're, we're driving an hour and a half from
• 1:46:22
  our home to go, 'cause we're now in Keith's hometown, 'cause
• 1:46:25
  we're coming in at his parish under his priest who's now
• 1:46:28
  becoming our priest at that time, Father Aaron.
• 1:46:31
  And so because our schedules are just so wonky compared to, since
• 1:46:36
  we didn't live in that city, he said just come on Saturday early
• 1:46:40
  and we'll do everything for all four of you that day.
• 1:46:44
  So we, we were there by like 4:00 on Saturday to each in turn
• 1:46:49
  do our first, make our first confessions.
• 1:46:53
  That's actually the thing I was looking the most forward to.
• 1:46:56
  For whatever reason, God had really impressed upon me the
• 1:47:01
  beauty of confession to a priest and receiving absolution.
• 1:47:07
  And at age 54, I knew I needed it, you know, And so I, I had,
• 1:47:12
  it wasn't with a dread, it wasn't with a, it was so
• 1:47:17
  freeing. I wanted to go and confess.
• 1:47:20
  It was the thing I was looking forward to the most.
• 1:47:22
  So there was that first confirmation and then when it
• 1:47:26
  came time for coming up for our first Eucharist, Keith was
• 1:47:31
  sponsoring me and my son Estelle was sponsoring Cami, a friend of
• 1:47:38
  our daughters at her cosmetology school who is Catholic, was
• 1:47:42
  sponsoring her and but Keith was sponsoring someone else and
• 1:47:47
  sitting on the other side across the center aisle.
• 1:47:50
  And we weren't sitting in the same rows either.
• 1:47:52
  But when we, when it came time, our rows moved at different
• 1:47:56
  speeds such that when we, when I got up and knelt, Keith was
• 1:48:02
  there at the same time and knelt.
• 1:48:03
  And so my first communion as a Catholic was with Keith Nealon,
• 1:48:09
  just to my right. Yeah.
• 1:48:10
  So it was, it couldn't have scripted it, couldn't have
• 1:48:12
  scripted it at all. So the whole night was amazing.
• 1:48:16
  It didn't feel like 3 hours. Then we were there another hour
• 1:48:19
  afterwards at the reception and just talking to people and then
• 1:48:23
  had an hour and a half drive home.
• 1:48:25
  So it, it was, it was, it was energizing, it was good.
• 1:48:28
  It was indescribable in so many ways, but in, in certain ways.
• 1:48:33
  And then at the same time, we'd look at each other.
• 1:48:36
  So did we really just do this? And what's been the biggest
• 1:48:39
  struggle since becoming Catholic?
• 1:48:41
  It's now been. For you 7 months or something
• 1:48:45
  like that, going on eight or nine months since Easter, you
• 1:48:48
  know the. Typical.
• 1:48:49
  Former Protestant pastor. Would give an answer that I just
• 1:48:54
  can't give because the the typical answer would be it's
• 1:48:59
  learning how to live as not being a pastor anymore.
• 1:49:03
  What do I do with myself? This is all I know and and
• 1:49:05
  you've given up something. I gave up something I loved, but
• 1:49:09
  I actually gave it up because of feeling like I was exhausted and
• 1:49:13
  burned out. And so that that I don't have
• 1:49:15
  that same experience. Most of the Catholics I talked
• 1:49:19
  to who were pastors, they have that in common.
• 1:49:22
  But I feel a little bit like the oddball out on that.
• 1:49:25
  Probably one of the most difficult things for me has been
• 1:49:29
  going from being the guy who just kind of pragmatically
• 1:49:34
  speaking here, I know the things.
• 1:49:37
  I know what needs to take place when and where and doing this
• 1:49:40
  and, and I know the language and I know, I know the terminology.
• 1:49:44
  I know that and and studying your way into the Catholic
• 1:49:48
  Church is one thing, but it's like being planted in a a
• 1:49:51
  different country where you have to learn a different language.
• 1:49:54
  You have to learn exactly. It's a new culture.
• 1:49:56
  What do you call the Bishop? Your Excellence, Your Eminence.
• 1:49:58
  I know. And to even think 'cause.
• 1:50:00
  You know there are Episcopal. Government churches like the
• 1:50:04
  Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, the Lutheran Church.
• 1:50:07
  It wasn't mine though. We didn't have bishops, we just
• 1:50:10
  had local elders and deacons. And so this is the ecclesiology
• 1:50:13
  is different. Yes, I was Lutheran, but I was a
• 1:50:16
  kid. I didn't pay any attention to
• 1:50:17
  that. So there's a just culture is the
• 1:50:20
  best word for it. It is a completely different
• 1:50:22
  culture with different customs, with different languages, you
• 1:50:25
  know, different sets of expectations.
• 1:50:29
  And you know, someone told me you'll know you're truly
• 1:50:33
  Catholic when you genuflect in the movie theater.
• 1:50:35
  And I, I haven't, I haven't done that yet.
• 1:50:38
  But at any rate, it's a lot of those things and feeling like
• 1:50:44
  the guy who always knew what was going on in the church to the
• 1:50:48
  guy who I know I don't have to know everything that's going on
• 1:50:51
  in the church, but it feels weird.
• 1:50:53
  I'm 15 plus years in. How many years in am I I'm going
• 1:50:56
  on? I'll be in. 20 years in, in a
• 1:50:58
  couple years, I think yes, it'll be there soon.
• 1:51:02
  And I'm still learning things every day.
• 1:51:04
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:51:06
  It's a, it's a work in progress, Yeah.
• 1:51:08
  So that. That's that's I suppose that's
• 1:51:10
  it. It's nothing dramatic.
• 1:51:11
  Or there's been no crisis because it's all been so good.
• 1:51:15
  It's what I needed, it's what she needed.
• 1:51:16
  It's what we needed. And and then we've had these
• 1:51:20
  amazing experiences with friends and family that have just kind
• 1:51:23
  of bolstered us because we did feel alone for quite a while.
• 1:51:27
  Not that they'd abandoned us, but you drive an hour and a half
• 1:51:31
  to go to Mass on Sunday morning, Cami would basically cry an hour
• 1:51:36
  and a half there and cry in an hour and a half back because
• 1:51:39
  we're not with our friends anymore.
• 1:51:40
  And. And.
• 1:51:41
  And she knew we needed to be doing what we were doing.
• 1:51:44
  It was just so hard. But some of these friends have
• 1:51:47
  now come into the church. They have now how many?
• 1:51:49
  Yeah. The total.
• 1:51:52
  Number is actually 1919 people who are close family friends
• 1:51:57
  since. Last April have now come into
• 1:52:00
  the Catholic Church after you and Cami.
• 1:52:01
  Yes, and they were all so it's there's really 4.
• 1:52:06
  Couples and with a bunch of kids, that's where we get to the
• 1:52:10
  number. Are they coming to that?
• 1:52:11
  Are they driving to Keith's church too?
• 1:52:13
  No, no, we all go in. We all go in our.
• 1:52:14
  Hometown. Now, now, now.
• 1:52:15
  It's going to be let's go to Aaron's church.
• 1:52:17
  Yeah, So what happened? A pastor in the neighboring.
• 1:52:19
  Town is going to drive to your town and go to your church.
• 1:52:22
  And. Then he'll do his own Catholic
• 1:52:23
  Church. I don't know about that.
• 1:52:24
  Not like Keith is starting a starting a movement out there.
• 1:52:27
  Well, I don't think neither. Keith nor I foresaw this
• 1:52:30
  happening. But these are all people who
• 1:52:33
  aren't just our friends, but they were my former parishioners
• 1:52:35
  too. So it's that created some
• 1:52:37
  tension, as you might imagine, and some hurt feelings at my old
• 1:52:41
  church. It's not like it's what we set
• 1:52:44
  out to do. We never even dreamed this would
• 1:52:45
  happen, but it did happen. And at that point, once that's
• 1:52:50
  what they decided to do at that point, there's no reason for us
• 1:52:53
  to not go in our hometown anymore because the cat's kind
• 1:52:56
  of out of the bag at that point. So that's what we did and that's
• 1:52:59
  what we're still doing. And so two of the two of the
• 1:53:03
  husbands of these four couples actually were reverting and they
• 1:53:08
  sponsored their own wives. And and so those two are where
• 1:53:12
  you get the 19 from the 17. Yeah.
• 1:53:14
  So it was a big group. And that was the day of that
• 1:53:17
  post and all of the all of that going on and to the point where
• 1:53:22
  I finally actually looked at what had happened later on that
• 1:53:24
  night. And so what's next for you,
• 1:53:27
  Aaron? Of course, falling more.
• 1:53:29
  In deeply into your Catholic faith with your lovely wife,
• 1:53:33
  your kids. You mentioned you have another
• 1:53:34
  child now in Ocia, one of your adult kids.
• 1:53:37
  What do you see the future holding for you?
• 1:53:38
  Are you still asking God what's next?
• 1:53:41
  It's a yes and yes it's. It's we're still kind of
• 1:53:48
  informally having these conversations as they come up.
• 1:53:51
  There's actually her brother and his wife are now in OCI together
• 1:53:57
  as well. And there are others.
• 1:54:01
  I, I have permission to say them and my oldest son, I don't have
• 1:54:05
  permission to say the others, but there are others that are
• 1:54:07
  looking seriously at this as well.
• 1:54:09
  So God continues to put these opportunities for these
• 1:54:13
  conversations and to be able to use what we've learned to help
• 1:54:17
  other people who have the exact same questions.
• 1:54:20
  And so there's that. I am, I have been working on a
• 1:54:25
  manuscript and I'm hopeful. I call it a manuscript 'cause it
• 1:54:29
  feels presumptuous to call it a book.
• 1:54:31
  But I have reasons to be hopeful about this.
• 1:54:33
  And the the whole thing about this is it's just meant to help
• 1:54:37
  people have these same conversations.
• 1:54:39
  I'm not an expert. I'm not a Catholic theologian.
• 1:54:42
  I need to, I had this sense of I need to stay in my lane because
• 1:54:46
  having been a pastor doesn't make me a Catholic theologian.
• 1:54:50
  But what I can do is write about my own experience and write
• 1:54:53
  about the things that convinced me and, and to help other people
• 1:54:57
  have the same conversations that we have had with our friends and
• 1:55:01
  family. So that's the purpose of that.
• 1:55:03
  And I'm also kind of writing, chronicling this story on
• 1:55:08
  Substack. So that's something I've started
• 1:55:10
  doing at Keith's encouragement. So that's something I'm doing.
• 1:55:15
  But in terms of what's next, I'm still at Exodus 1414.
• 1:55:21
  The Lord will fight for you. You need only be still.
• 1:55:24
  That was actually confirmed to us at a daily mass one day.
• 1:55:27
  We were both feeling very anxious about no job.
• 1:55:31
  What do we do? God, can you make this clear?
• 1:55:33
  Is the lack of an answer of what to do the answer, in other
• 1:55:37
  words, is the fact that we haven't heard anything
• 1:55:40
  definitive from God, him saying just go get a job and do
• 1:55:43
  something, which is a viable option.
• 1:55:45
  We just neither of us felt like that's what I should do.
• 1:55:49
  And so we go to daily Mass on this one Monday.
• 1:55:52
  And I haven't read the readings yet, but first reading comes
• 1:55:55
  around and it's from Exodus 14 and goes right up to the Lord
• 1:55:59
  will fight for you, you need to only be still.
• 1:56:01
  And I just kind of looked at her and she looked at me and we
• 1:56:03
  talked after Mass and I said, so do you think that's what I think
• 1:56:06
  it was? Yeah, we're just going to keep
• 1:56:08
  waiting and see what happens. And so as I wait, things come up
• 1:56:12
  like this opportunity which I never would have even imagined,
• 1:56:15
  you know? So we just, God puts a door in
• 1:56:19
  front of us and cracks it open and we just try our best to walk
• 1:56:22
  through if we feel like that's what he's calling us to do,
• 1:56:24
  trusting that in the end it's going to work out according to
• 1:56:28
  the way he wants it to. So and we're, that's all we
• 1:56:31
  want. What He wants for us is what we
• 1:56:33
  want for us. Amen.
• 1:56:35
  I'm so excited to see where God continues to take.
• 1:56:38
  You what's the name of the substack?
• 1:56:41
  So Lord of the Rings fan that I am and the fact that I am Aaron
• 1:56:45
  and the. Fact that my favorite Lord of
• 1:56:46
  the Rings character is Aragorn. I am Aaron Gorn online.
• 1:56:50
  That's your ex handles wonderful Aaron gorn.substack.com amazing.
• 1:56:56
  Thank you, Aaron. I'm so happy.
• 1:56:59
  For you and Cami, I'm so grateful for your willingness to
• 1:57:01
  Share your story and testimony and just for your love of God
• 1:57:05
  and other souls. So thank you so much.
• 1:57:09
  Thank you so much. Thanks for the opportunity I've.
• 1:57:11
  Really enjoyed this. Conversation, thanks for having.
• 1:57:13
  Me and for the invitation and for not being spam and that
• 1:57:16
  Yeah, of course not and I'm excited I mean I know that God
• 1:57:20
  is at. Work here of course, and I'm, I
• 1:57:22
  think there's very wonderful, even more wonderful things to
• 1:57:24
  come. Appreciate that.
• 1:57:26
  Thank you very much. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:57:28
  this episode of the. Lila ro Show, make sure you hit
• 1:57:31
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• 1:57:32
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