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"O blessed light,
 O Trinity and
 first Unity!"

The Dilemma

"For years I had struggled with a deep sense of spiritual dryness, habitual sin, and a growing feeling of despair that my interior life only seemed to be getting worse."

For 30 years I was an evangelical protestant. I came to know Jesus Christ as my Savior at the age of nine. A Sunday School teacher gave me the basics, geared to my pre-adolescent understanding. In a nutshell she told that God loved me and wanted me to be with Him forever. His son, Jesus, died to take the punishment for anything bad I'd ever done or ever could do, and that all I had to do was to ask Jesus to come and live inside me. Since the moment of that decision, I have followed Him, sometimes for better (when I obeyed and trusted Him) and often for worse (when I chose not to).

For a decade or more, I had wrestled with a number of questions about some evangelical doctrines I had always held to be true. I was sure of the basics (the Trinity, the atonement, the literal resurrection of the Lord), but had questions about a lot of other stuff. More and more, the standard answers weren't working for me. As I studied the specific scripture verses that I had always been told answered those specific questions, I kept coming up with more questions, as I realized that many of those scriptures could reasonably be interpreted in more than one way.

For years I had struggled with a deep sense of spiritual dryness, habitual sin, and a growing feeling of despair that my interior life only seemed to be getting worse. Working full-time in a Protestant ministry, I deeply felt my own hypocrisy as I encouraged people to embrace a walk with Jesus that I seemed incapable of experiencing. I told a friend that I felt like a carrier of Christianity, a spiritual Typhoid Mary who could infect others with the gospel but seemed immune to it myself. I came to see that I was living the lie for which Jesus had scathingly rebuked the Pharisees, telling them that "You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean" (Matthew 23:26).

The Discovery

In the midst of this struggle, I happened upon a program on EWTN (an excellent Catholic cable channel) that featured Marcus Grodi of the Coming Home Network. I'd seen his EWTN program, "The Journey Home," a few times, and stopped channel surfing long enough to hear what he was saying. The program I was watching featured Marcus, Scott Hahn, and several other former protestant pastors talking about the questions and struggles that led them to give up their ministries and join the Catholic Church. I was shocked to discover that they were talking about the same questions with which I was struggling--and I got really uncomfortable when I realized their answers were making a lot of sense. In 45 minutes, my entire view of my faith, and my understanding of the history of the Christian Church, began to change. I spent the next several months on the web and in bookstores, reading everything I could get my hands on about Church history and Catholic teaching. Some excellent books by former evangelicals Mark Shea, Scott Hahn, and others helped me immensely.

While I was studying about the Church, I began experimenting with Catholic prayer and devotions. Prayer has always been a difficult activity for me, often ending in frustration because I felt like my words weren't going any farther than the ceiling. As I began to incorporate Catholic devotions into my prayer life, my experience with God became more personal, more immediate, and much, much deeper. I began to see areas of my life change that had vexed me for years, and realized that the Lord was using this experience to do a major overhaul in my heart. When I eventually told my wife what was going on, she said it answered some questions she'd been having about my behavior. She said I had become more understanding, more patient, and more kind, as well as seeming to be much more at peace with myself than she'd seen me in almost 15 years of marriage.

The View From Here

Some of my Protestant friends worry that my discovery of the Catholic Church means substituting a relationship with Jesus Christ for rules and rituals. My experience has been very much the opposite. I've discovered that the core of Catholicism isn't about the rules. It's about what Christianity should be about: knowing and serving Jesus Christ as sovereign Lord. I know Him better, love him more, and experience more of His presence in my life than I ever have before. As I've grown to understand more about the structure of the Church, the sacraments, and the liturgical year, I've discovered a richness of faith meant to help me to progress daily on the road to holiness. I can't really explain what has happened in my heart in such a short time, other than to tell you that my journey into the Church is a journey with Jesus into the heart of God. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have discovered the richness of faith that was waiting for me all along in the Catholic Church.

My goal in creating JoeConvert.com is to aid and support others taking this journey (or even considering it). The core of JoeConvert.com is the "Meet Joe Convert" weblog, an ongoing chronicle of my experiences and my perspective as a former evangelical embracing (and being embraced by) the Church. I hope to create a bookstore soon that will offer some of the best tools I've found for sorting out what the Church teaches and what it all means; the merchandise store is mostly just there for fun (items are priced at cost), but it might also be a subtle way to share JoeConvert.com with someone else.

Whatever your faith journey, and wherever you are along the way, I pray that you will come to know better the God who created you, and who loves you more than you can possibly imagine. I hope that JoeConvert.com will help some people toward that goal.

Peace,

Sean Herriott
joeconvert.com