My Story and the Purpose of this Podcast (#169)

[00:00:00] “If you ache for truth, goodness, and beauty, If you're hungry for a Christianity with substance and strength, if you long for a faith that's big and bold and biblical and all about Jesus Christ, if you're inspired by the idea of one church that has spanned twenty centuries, twenty four time zones, and two hemispheres, enfolding every race, nation, and language, then you're considering Catholicism.”

Well, welcome back to the podcast and welcome to 2024. This is the first episode of 2024. And I hope that you all had a very merry Christmas and that you're enjoying the holidays and the beginning of a happy new year. 

Now, this episode is going to be very, [00:01:00] very, different than any of the 168 episodes that have come before it, because it's going to be a very personal message from me to you. 

This podcast is going to be two years old next week, and it started small. The first month we just had a couple of hundred downloads. But over the last 24 months, we've grown to almost 7,000 downloads every month, and we're still increasing. We're right at about 70,000 total downloads since the “Considering Catholicism” podcast began. About 75 percent of those have come from every corner of the United States, with those from outside the U. S. coming from not only English-speaking countries like the U. K. and Ireland and Canada and Australia, but also from English speakers in parts of Europe, like from France, the Netherlands, [00:02:00] Germany, Scandinavia, and Switzerland. And from other parts of the world, like a lot from Mexico and Singapore and India.

And I've gotten so many emails from listeners in all those places, not only asking questions, but also writing to share that this podcast has made a real difference in their lives. About how it's restored their faith, or that they've decided to convert to Catholicism and entered RCIA classes at their parish and that this podcast contributed to that, and in some cases it made a significant contribution to their decision to enter the Catholic Church. Some of them write about their struggles as they consider Catholicism. They kind of want to enter the church, but there are things that are holding them back. Sometimes it's a doctrine, sometimes it's a personal relationship, a spouse that isn't ready to make the same kind of move or whatever, and they'll write and ask for advice about how to move forward. 

And that's all been so [00:03:00] moving and so motivating that it's, well, it's kept me going when uh, to be honest, I've felt like quitting sometimes. Because there's times when I've just been tired of doing this, or felt like it's taking too much time away from my other responsibilities, and the work that actually pays my family's bills. But then I'll get one of these emails and I'll read it to my wife and she'll say, "You can't stop." 

You know, I started this podcast not really knowing where it would go and who it might reach. It's kind of like shooting arrows into the dark: you don't know where they're going to land. So I'm grateful to the Lord for how he's used to the show in the lives of people that I'll probably never meet. But as I looked over these last two years and the last 168 episodes, it occurred to me that I've never really told my own story or why it is that I do this. I've dropped bits and pieces here and there, but I've never really shared my own [00:04:00] testimony about how and why I ended up here, hosting “Considering Catholicism.” So let me begin our third year by introducing myself and sharing the purpose of this podcast and asking for your prayers and partnership in this ministry. 

So, let me begin at the beginning. I grew up in Southern California, mostly in a place called Huntington Beach, which had the very cool motto of Surf Town USA. Our high school was right along the Pacific Coast Highway, by the famous Huntington Beach Pier. 

I had three great loves growing up. One, outdoor sports. Anything that got me in the ocean, in the California desert, up in the mountains, just any kind of outdoor sports. 

Number two, reading and learning and investigating everything I could about anything that I could from a very early age. I just have always loved learning. So, every subject from [00:05:00] science to history to literature. When I was in grade school, my dad worked on the Apollo space program that put the man on the moon, and I remember being like, second, third, fourth grade or whatever, I'd get to go to the labs and see the spacecraft that they were building and one time actually got to meet Neil Armstrong because he came to visit the factory and the employees got to bring their kids and get autographs or whatever. We went to, planetarium lectures, and I read the "Iliad and the Odyssey," and I read "Lord of the Rings," all before I was in 5th or 6th grade. I was fascinated by history, and I read everything that I could. I remember when I was in 9th grade, working at this gas station, we'd have customers that would leave a Wall Street Journal and I would grab it and read it later because I wanted to start understanding business and economics. So I've always just been fascinated by anything that I can learn and absorb as much knowledge as I can about anything.

And I think the [00:06:00] third thing that I grew up shaped by was the creative arts. So I was writing short stories or writing essays, or I was doing photography. And making little short films on these little Super-8 cameras. In junior high school and high school, I was fortunate enough to win some prizes for writing and arts and that opened up a lot of doors and opportunities and I got to meet lot of very interesting people and have some pretty cool experiences that God, I think, used to shape and equip me for my career.

But about the only place that I wasn't growing up was in church. So I grew up in a culture that labeled itself as Christian, sort of a self-identified that way, and it sort of vaguely believed in God, but most people I know never went to church. In fact, Southern California at the time that I was growing up there prided itself on being really on the cutting edge of [00:07:00] world history. We had the space program. We had Hollywood. We were ground zero for the tech revolution that was going on. We owned American culture and increasingly California sort of owned the global culture. Disneyland was only 20 minutes from my house. Catholicism represented the old world order, but in the latter part of the 20th century, California was inventing a new, better world order. And I was growing up right in the middle of it. It was exciting. Right? 

And think when it came to church, I was aware that there was this emerging Jesus Movement in Southern California and all these new denominations: Calvary Chapel, the Vineyard, the whole Christian contemporary rock music, with all of its megachurches and evangelistic rock concerts and stadiums and all that. All of that was happening within like a 20-30 minute radius of my house. So it was [00:08:00] going on all around me. But so was the New Age Movement at the time. That was exploding as well. And by the time I graduated from high school, I think my head was full of all this conflicting, contradicting stuff. I was just as influenced by New Age beliefs and scientific materialism as anything resembling Christianity.

So, ended up at this huge public university in the Los Angeles area, And after, a year, year and a half there, I transferred to another huge public university in Boulder, Colorado. Mostly because it was a cool place to ski and climb and race bicycles every day. You know, Boulder was an incredible place for someone like me at that age. And Boulder was also at the time probably one of the most left-wing universities in America. Boulder was also a center for New Age and [00:09:00] alternative religions, so it was this giant kind of goulash stew thing of all these different beliefs and cultures and stuff. And, uh, yeah, wacky stuff and academics and you know, it was really exciting for someone like myself because I felt like I was just in the middle of everything that was going on and was going to get to meet and encounter and experience everything that was going on in the latter part of the 20th century. 

So, during my first couple of years at college, or university, I was studying photojournalism. Because my dream was to someday travel the world writing books and articles and making documentary films about science and history and all kinds of cool things. Like that was the ultimate thing for me to be able to use writing and media and creative arts to tell all these stories about the world. That was my big dream. But during my second year of college, I was [00:10:00] going through some struggles, some sports injuries and some broken relationships and you know, the kind of stuff that a 18, 19, 20 year-old kind of goes through or whatever. And I ended up getting invited to and attending some Bible studies that were put on by an international evangelical campus organization called InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. 

And it was about a half dozen guys my age, would sit in this one guy's dorm room at like nine o'clock on Tuesday nights, and we'd eat chips and salsa and donuts or whatever, and we'd read through, I think it was the Gospel of Mark, but we were also working our way through C. S. Lewis's “Mere Christianity” and a couple of his other non-fiction books as well.

After about something like six months of this bible study, I intellectually came to the point where I actually believed that Christianity [00:11:00] was true. I came to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth really was the incarnate Son of God who died and rose on the third day, and that the Bible was God's infallible Word given to humanity so that we could know the gospel and believe.

Now, I think that's as far as my Christianity went at that point. I wasn't going to church. I didn't have a church. I certainly wasn't living a Christian life, but I believed that Christianity was essentially true.

And so one night in that dorm room Bible study, I told the other guys that I believed. And then they were all like, "Cool, dude!" And I was like, "Now what?" And they were like, yeah, "Well, dude, the Bible says believe and get baptized. So now you need to get baptized." Now [00:12:00] understand, we were like a half dozen 19 year-old guys at 10 o'clock at night in this dorm room surrounded by junk food. We weren't a part of a church. I wasn't going to a church. I didn't even know where I would go to church or how. So I was like, “Uh, how and where do I get baptized?” And they said, “Let's do it at the college pool tomorrow morning.” I was, “Oh, okay.” So the next morning, the guys in my group, we went down to the college pool at like 6:30 a.m. and three or four of the guys jumped in with me and they baptized me in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We were all just like college sophomores and we didn't know what we were doing. There was no pastor and there were people trying to do their morning lap swim in the pool. So we had to be quick about it. So we jumped in, did it. And then we went to the dining hall and had breakfast, and that's how I became a Christian. 

For another year or so, I [00:13:00] didn't go to any one church. It wasn't like I joined a church or anything. I got invited to visit a few and check them out, but I never felt like I fit in anywhere different denominations. I mean, I visited a Catholic church and I visited a Lutheran church and I visited a Baptist church and I visited a non denominational church and whatever, but I, I didn't fit in anywhere. I didn't really click for me. I, I didn't really know why going to church on Sunday was really necessary anyway, because I always had sports and stuff on the weekend and I was mostly You know, content just to go to like a midweek campus thing and skip the weekend. I think mostly when I did go, it was to see if there were any girls there, um, to be honest. 

So, after about a year of this, the missionary pastor who ran the InterVarsity group in Boulder came to me and he asked me to start a Bible [00:14:00] study in my dormitory. I was living in an international student dorm, or at least ours was kind of predominantly full of international students. And he said he'd wanted to see a Bible study get started in there for years, but he never had anyone to do it. And I said, “I, I don't know how.” But he told me, “Don't worry about it. You'll learn on the job.”

And thus began the worst Bible study in the 2000-year history of the church. I mean, it was really bad. I didn't know what I was doing, but I persisted. And I think I did learn on the job. So I found myself studying Bible passages so that I could turn around and explain them to and answer questions from these students who were from Europe and Africa and South America and Asia. There were all of these linguistic and cultural and conceptual barriers in the group and the people I was talking to, [00:15:00] especially in a left-wing New Age environment like Boulder was back then. But I worked hard at it. I really did. I guess I'd say I began to develop the, I don't know, well, for lack of a better word, the “craft” that ended up becoming my career, which has largely been the ability to take complex theological or philosophical or historical concepts, especially from scripture, and then break them down and make them understandable to people who had never heard them before and had no reason to believe them. And in many cases, every reason not to. And I just found that I had this knack for being able to communicate with people, in that mode.

And I guess that led me to begin to sense a vocation. So I changed my major from photojournalism and film to history of philosophy, focusing on classical and medieval philosophy, a lot of modern stuff too, and some philosophy of [00:16:00] science. 

And I became a part of a graduate program called the Theology Forum. So they'd have these seminars full of grad students and faculty and guests with all these diverse viewpoints, from atheists to Buddhists to New Agers and everything in-between. And they'd be like an assigned subject for the seminar. And then everybody, this roundtable or panel discussion, would sort of duke it out. And I ended up being the token Bible-believing Evangelical Christian, right? So, in every seminar, every panel discussion or whatever, I got challenged all the time. But eventually, I learned to hold my own in these arguments about the faith. And in the process, I met some really interesting people. I got to know this Jesuit priest who was a liberation theologian. who was teaching at the university and he had us reading these leftist Catholic theologians at the time, like Gustavo Gutierrez and Ernesto Sugundo. [00:17:00] And this is back when the Nicaraguan civil war was going on. And it's ironic because little did I know that about 10 or 15 years later, I'd end up going to Nicaragua multiple times to train local pastors there in evangelism. So, you know, there was some irony in what God was doing in my life at the time,

But, and this is important to the story, because during these campus ministry years, I ended up buying into the theology of Calvinism. Why Calvinism instead of Catholicism? After all, I was studying medieval philosophy, so I was reading people like Thomas Aquinas and the other scholastic philosophers, and I absolutely loved them, but at the same time, I was dialoguing and doing apologetics with all these New Agers and Marxists and everything else, and Well, I really hate to say this, but all of the actual Catholics that I was meeting at the time were pretty much worthless when it came to [00:18:00] apologetics.

So this is like the mid-1980s, and the Catholic priests and faculty that I met in Boulder didn't want to have anything to do with Thomas Aquinas or historic Catholicism or whatever. I mean, theologically and politically and culturally, almost every single one of them was a leftist. They were into liberation theology or weird syncretism with New Age religion or goofy liturgies or, whatever. and so I found myself looking for a Christian framework that could respond to New Agers and secular materialists and cultural Marxists, and give me some way to sort of engage them in a coherent Christian worldview. And Calvinism seemed to me at the time to offer that kind of rational, internally consistent theology that made sense out of scripture and human nature in a way that you could actually use it in apologetics. And so, [00:19:00] I started reading John Calvin and attending this small Calvinist church. Those, by the way, are often called Reformed churches based on their connection to the Reformation. So I started attending this Reformed church that was just off campus and it had a lot of grad students and faculty attending it and I sort of fit in there. In fact, the pastor actually asked me to come on as an intern and work with him, and I ended up running their ministry for students and recent graduates. 

But that's when the most important event, other than coming to Christ, happened. Because I met the woman who would become my wife. We met through the InterVarsity Campus Ministry. We were both a part of it. And she was a member of that small Calvinist Reformed Church. And we, well, you know, hit it off. And after we dated for about eight or nine months, we realized that we wanted to get married. But that raised [00:20:00] this really awkward question, right? Like, what am I going to do for a living? Uh, if I get married and have a wife, you know, I, I still wanted to be a writer and work in media and do all this exciting stuff, but everybody around me was affirming my gifts for evangelism and apologetics and work in the church. So my fiancé and I, after much discussion and prayer, decided that we'd get married after graduation and then I'd go to a Protestant seminary. I'd get a Master of Divinity it was called, and biblical studies, and then I could decide what to do next after I got it. So at the time I'm thinking, well, with that degree, maybe I could go on and get a PhD and be a university professor or I could work in campus ministry or maybe I could still kind of become a writer and a media producer, but I'd have this education so I could make Christian books and films. It was all really fuzzy, you know, in a lot of ways it was the [00:21:00] old “go to grad school as a way to kick the can down the road for a few years and then figure it out sort of scheme,” that far too many college students have fallen into.

So, two weeks after graduation, we got married at that little Reformed church just off campus and then we loaded up our rusty old Chevette and moved a thousand miles away so I could start working on a Master of Divinity degree at this Calvinist seminary. And the very first course was this intensive summer boot camp in biblical Hebrew. 

Now I'm gonna jump over those four years. Just suffice it to say that I got what I think was a first-class biblical education. We had Old Testament and New Testament in the original languages, Hebrew and Greek. The systematic and philosophical theology courses were good, not great, but good. Our moral theology courses were weak, because for Calvinists, moral theology isn't much more nuanced than saying, [00:22:00] “Obey the Ten Commandments.” Church history was a skewed mess, it was well taught, but it was all through the lens of the Reformation, so it wasn't really complete. Sacramental theology was non-existent, because Calvinism's understanding of and practice of the sacraments is minimal, but we got a lot of training in missions, global missions, cross cultural missions, church growth strategies and techniques and all that. Looking back on it, I can already see that in seminary, I was starting to see the contrast between the depth of the medieval Catholic theologians like Aquinas that I'd studied and Calvinism. And Catholicism, if I admitted it, which I didn't really want to, was scoring a lot of intellectual points for me. In fact, at one point while I was in seminary, I went to Notre Dame University for a few days and met with some faculty there. And I kind of briefly considered going there to get a PhD, but [00:23:00] at that point, I was committed to the program that I was in.

But truthfully, I was having, some doubts because in some undefinable ways, I was feeling myself drawn to Catholicism. In fact, funny story, when I graduated at the end of the four-year program, in my final oral exam for my ordination, I was asked which theologian had most influenced me. Now I'm in front of this examination board full of faculty and all these esteemed ministers and whatnot. And I kind of hesitated and I said, “Well, I guess there's two, uh, John Calvin, of course, right. But also Thomas Aquinas.” So I almost flunked my ordination for that answer, but, uh, they let me in, I think maybe with something of an asterisk on my record, but, but they let me in and I got ordained.

Now, as a Protestant, my ordination didn't look like a Catholic priest's ordination. I didn't lie face down on the floor of the cathedral or swear [00:24:00] obedience to a bishop or anything like that. But one thing that did happen during the service or ceremony, and I really want to stress this because it has been one of the guiding principles of my life and the reason that I'm doing this podcast is that during that ordination service, someone laid hands on me and read this passage from 2 Timothy, Paul's second letter to Timothy, from chapter 4, verses 1-5. Paul says to Timothy:

“I charge you in the presence of God and of Jesus Christ, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearance and his kingdom, preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching. But having itching ears, they will [00:25:00] accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”

I need to stop here and stress how important that passage has been in my life. I could have looked at it as just a formality, but I didn't, and I don't. Because I heard that as if it was given from Paul to me. That felt to me like an unbreakable vocation. I guess I still think of it that way. 

You don't know me other than hearing my voice on the podcast, but if you want to understand who I am and why I do what I do, then you have to understand that I always hear those words running in the back of my head. I mean, sometimes they're a whisper. And sometimes they're a [00:26:00] shout. But they're always there.

Look, I'm a normal guy who likes to have fun. I don't surf and ski and run marathons and race triathlons like I used to 30, 35 years ago. I've got way too many miles and too many scars on this body for that sort of thing. These days I really like to play golf. I go to the movies with my buddy Ed the Protestant. I like to travel with my wife. I like to play with my dog Finnegan and my kids and sit by the fire pit and enjoy a cocktail or a really nice bottle of wine. You know, my career took some interesting turns and I got to do a lot of really cool things and go to a lot of really cool places that had nothing to do with ministry, but that vocation, that mission is always in the background. It's part of my conscience. “Preach the Word when it's popular and when it's unpopular. Be steady and patient in teaching and convincing people. Do the work of an evangelist. [00:27:00] Fulfill your ministry.” And I'm always asking myself, “Am I being true to the vocation, the mission that I was given, and I accepted at my ordination?”

Anyway, after graduating with a Master of Divinity degree with some additional educational experiences, I got hired by this missionary agency that was planting brand new churches. And I got hired to plant one where I'd grown up along the beach in Southern California and to assist other church planters in Southern California to get their’s started. Now, this whole church planning thing was a big deal in the early 1990s. The idea was that America was full of all of these pockets that were underserved by churches. And these areas were becoming secularized because they didn't have enough churches in their neighborhoods. So the idea was, we were going to make all these new Christians by simply going into these secular pockets, these communities, and [00:28:00] starting smart, efficient, well-run church operations that were slickly marketed and demographically targeted. You know, essentially we were just borrowing, the business models, of franchise companies, right? We were going to franchise contemporary evangelicalism using the same strategies and tactics that Starbucks or Ikea or Chick-Fil-A or whatever use to expand into new territories. So I got hired, and they actually paid for me to start working on an MBA in marketing at UCLA. New church developers like me would get 3-5 years of funding from the agency. And it was an entrepreneurial thing. You started by doing demographic research in the region, in my case, Southern California, to find a city or a suburb that didn't have enough Christians in it based on census data and all this other demographic data you can pull and marketing data that you can pull. The community had to be underserved by [00:29:00] contemporary, smart churches. It didn't matter if they had Catholic churches because Catholic churches didn't count because they weren't cool with slick music and attractive programming and good marketing that was going to draw people in. And so, after your research, you would put together a business plan, you got it approved by headquarters, and then you took your church planting binder that they gave you full of all these plans to the new town and you got to work.

So my wife and I and our newborn son moved to this really cool beach town about 30 minutes north of Los Angeles between Malibu and Santa Barbara that our demographic research had determined was too secular because it was underserved by contemporary evangelical churches, right? And I began trying to meet people and invite them to Bible studies at our house. Because there was no church, there was nothing we could do, so I'm going to the gym, and I'm going to coffee shops, and places like that, and meeting people and talking to them, striking up conversations. And, [00:30:00] you know, one thing leads to another, and eventually we have 6-8 people coming to this little bible study at our house and they became the core group and over the next year we ended up renting this school gym and we had a couple of hundred people showing up and then eventually we leased space in this office park and we had this little mission church going. And almost everybody who was able to come and visit us coming to that ministry was not really from another church. So it really was evangelism and we were sharing the gospel and baptizing people and it was kind of exciting. 

But during that time, I also had this sense that a lot of what we were doing was shallow. It wasn't really connected to anything bigger, to anything more permanent or profound or anything with roots and I don't know, gravitas. So I reached out and found a Jesuit priest, of all things, to lead me through the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. [00:31:00] Now it was kind of weird because I was working for this evangelical church planning agency, franchising the hip and groovy 90s church experience around Southern California, but every few weeks I'd drive to this Jesuit retreat house up in the mountains overlooking L. A. And I'd sit there with this Jesuit priest on their balcony kind of looking over the famous lights of Los Angeles drinking red wine and talking about God and the spiritual life and missions and Catholicism. I was clear that there was no way I'd ever become Catholic. I just wanted to sort of scrape what was useful off of Catholicism and use it in my evangelical ministry, but looking back, it seems so obvious to me now that God was starting to bend the trajectory of my life.

So, let's fast forward. I had been pastoring that startup church north of LA for five [00:32:00] years when I was recruited to become the senior pastor of a large contemporary church in the Great Lakes region of the United States. Now, the California coast was beautiful. We could see the Channel Islands from our house and there were dolphins in the water and we could, I mean, do all kinds of outdoor stuff and it was just gorgeous. The weather was perfect. But it was a really expensive place to live and we had little kids and I didn't make very much money. So the move seemed like a God thing that we had this opportunity. And in hindsight it was. 

We moved to the Great Lakes region, and I took up responsibilities as the senior pastor of this big church, a “seeker church.” So, this was the mid-90s and the height of what was known as the Seeker Church Movement. The weekend services were these big theater productions, like shows really, with rock bands and [00:33:00] videos on big screens and live dramatic plays with actors and sets. And then, after all of that, the senior pastor, like me, would come out and stand in the spotlight with a headset mic on and and give a heartfelt message that tied all of the entertainment elements you'd seen for the last hour or whatever kind of thematically together into this dramatic evangelistic point.

So, during that, I got to use my creative arts background. I had a staff and a huge volunteer team and we produced these short films and these full length dramatic productions and we wrote original music and all of that and we also, while I was there, built a new building on 40 acres of land. The main church in the new building was really more of a theater auditorium for these shows that were our Sunday services than it was anything that you'd recognize as a church interior or whatnot. 

But anyway, [00:34:00] I pastored that church for five years. But near the end of that time, I had an experience that really further bent my trajectory towards Catholicism and and really did put me on the road to Rome.

So, what happened was I was on a trip to Ireland and I was on the West coast of Ireland in County Kerry. And I had the opportunity to visit a very very special place. It's an island 12 miles off the Irish coast called Skellig Michael. And really it's this rock pinnacle in the North Atlantic. And for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, there was a small monastery on top of this pinnacle, like 700, 800 feet over the ocean. And you have to go up steep, dangerous steps to get to it. Now, during those centuries in the Middle Ages, no more than a dozen monks lived in these little beehive huts up there, alone, out there with the Atlantic gales and the puffins [00:35:00] and the Vikings coming by trying to raid them. And I got to visit this, climb up the steps and sit in the huts.

And as I sat in one of those huts looking out on the Atlantic Ocean, I asked myself, “Why did men give their lives to this?” I mean, this was as far from the church and Christianity that I was working so hard to help spread as night from day, as from the west is from the east. And as I sat there in that little monastic beehive hut, asking that question, I felt the Holy Spirit tell me that I was to investigate that question. Why was it that men gave their lives to this? What was this all about? And I felt God sort of pushing me on a path to understand the kind of Christianity that had produced that monastery.

And so, from [00:36:00] that point on, that's what I did. I began reading everything that I could about medieval Catholic Christianity. What had produced monasteries like that? What were they all about? What was the rule of life in them? What were the principles? What was the theology? And on that trip and other trips to Europe and some other places, I began to go out of my way to visit Catholic cathedrals and basilicas and shrines. And on my iPod, back when we had iPods, I began to listen to Gregorian chant, pray some Catholic prayers. 

And yet at the same time I was still the senior pastor of this rock and roll hip and groovy seeker church. And I got to a point where that just didn't work anymore. My heart wasn't in it. I wasn't thinking that I would become Catholic. But I just couldn't do that ministry anymore. And [00:37:00] so about a year later, that church and I just kind of parted ways. It wasn’t a good fit anymore.

So I woke up one morning and I said, “Well, I'm on this path that God has put me on, but now I have little kids and no job.” And I'm not going to get into all the details, but what happened next was that the Holy Spirit took me on a wild ride, because the Lord introduced me to people, and he opened doors. And the next 16 years of my career, my life, were just this whirlwind. At the time, I had all of this experience and connections in the megachurch world, the evangelical world, and doors opened. Long stories that I don't want to get into, but I ended up working in that world, well, all over the world. So for years I worked on and off with an architecture firm that built megachurch buildings I was kind of a [00:38:00] liaison to their clients. I worked in Christian publishing, well in publishing, for the largest evangelical publisher in the world as a sort of liaison to megachurch authors and organizations. I worked with some megachurch fundraising organizations on strategies and marketing for big building projects. I did a bunch of stuff and along the way and it was always like one thing led to the next and then I would get a phone call. I just was kind of moving around and there was always this next project to work on, this next invitation to be involved in something. 

And along the way, I ended up starting my own creative agency and my own publishing label. So I had this really, really cool studio space in this downtown area with a bunch of employees. And we were doing branding and websites and media and videos and books and marketing campaigns, not only for [00:39:00] Christian but also secular clients. On the secular side, for years we worked big time in the craft beer industry when it was exploding, doing a lot of branding and marketing and publishing and all that. I ended up doing a lot of work for high-end restaurants, and for financial services firms. And, I think during that time we helped publish, and I either helped ghostwrite or edit, something like 45 books. I mean everything from Christian books and curriculum. So for several years I worked with an organization that did evangelism with Muslims around the world. And I produced some books and curriculum and media for them. But I also did books on craft beer and distilling, and I did cookbooks, and books on business and investing and, you know, you name it. We did it, kind of publishing media, branding books, all this kind of stuff, marketing campaigns. 

But while all of that was going on, I couldn't get away from [00:40:00] that sense of mission, that vocation to actually do ministry, you know, what Paul describes in that passage from 2 Timothy 4 that was read over me at my ordination. So while I was doing all of that other stuff, for about a dozen years I was involved in starting a new hip and groovy downtown coffeehouse ministry next to this college in the city that we were living in. And that's where I met Ed the Protestant, because he was doing music there. And also, during that time, I accepted a lot of invitations to speak and teach and mentor pastors, especially in the developing world, what we call the “mission field." So, I got invited to speak and do seminars and training and whatnot in places like Nicaragua and Cuba and Colombia and West Africa. I went to those places a dozen times. I went to China and Europe a bunch of times. I think I went to just about all of the 50 United States.[00:41:00] For 10 years, I was on an airplane about every week going somewhere and it was a really crazy season in my life because I'd be on a plane three days a week or whatever, but then when I was home, I was teaching part time at this downtown church and my wife and I were running a campus ministry for about 40 college students. 

But inside my mind, my heart, my spirit, at this time I was seeing the cracks in evangelical Protestantism, and in Protestantism in general. Because during these years while I was traveling and flying around and teaching college students or whatnot, I was seriously by this point studying Catholicism. So I was reading everything I could. I was visiting Catholic churches and sites wherever I was traveling. And I began to realize that on most of the points of contention during the Reformation, the theological tensions, the [00:42:00] Catholic Church had been right on those issues. And I began to read the Bible through the lens of Catholic writers and teachers, and I saw that it made more sense of the scriptures. I started a group for a couple of years at the downtown church where I was part-time teaching and doing college ministry. And this group was focusing on church history, so I did a series of lectures on church history and I focused on the achievements of Catholicism. And I began to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Catholic commentators on scripture, and then when I would teach either adults or students I would sort of sneak Catholic doctrine into my teaching without telling them them where those points came from. And they would be like, “Oh, my gosh, this is great. These insights are fantastic. This really makes the scriptures make sense. Why haven't we heard anything like this before?” And I was like, “Well, you know, because it's like from the Catechism of the Catholic [00:43:00] Church.” I built relationships with Catholic leaders in my town and I would sneak over from my studio to this downtown parish at lunch for mass sometimes.

So anyway, to make what's becoming way too long of a story shorter, by the early 2010s, my wife and I were ready to become Catholic. I think in our hearts and minds, we had already sort of crossed over the Tiber River into Rome, but we weren't ready to make the switch in reality.

And one of the main things that held us back for a couple of years, maybe three years, was the college ministry that we were leading. Because we were working with this group of students and, you know, honestly, of all of the things that I've done in ministry over nearly 40 years, working with those students for those years was probably the sweetest and most rewarding, ministry I've [00:44:00] ever done. And my wife and I did it together. They would come over to our house for dinners and I would do their weddings and we were just involved in their lives and we loved them and I, I think that they loved us. And as long as that college student ministry was going, we didn't feel that we could walk away from it. That we didn't, God was calling us into the Catholic church, but we didn't have permission to do it yet. And so every year, for maybe, I don't know three maybe four years, we'd say this is the year that I'm gonna resign from this evangelical ministry. I'm gonna relinquish my ministerial ordination and we're going to enter the Catholic Church. And then spring would roll around, summer, and we'd realize which group of students would be returning in the fall and we'd say, “Not yet. We we're not done with these kids yet.” And to be honest, another thing was that my son got engaged during that period and he and his fiancé asked me to preside at the wedding. And I really wanted to do that before I became a layperson in the Catholic Church. [00:45:00] 

So, eventually, after he got married and one summer when we realized that a lot of the core students that we had really great relationships with were all going to graduate or moving on, and it would be a new batch of freshmen in the fall, my wife and I said, “It's finally just time.” And so I stood up one day at the downtown coffee house church (Ed the Protestant was there) and I announced that I was resigning and that we were going to become Catholics. Suffice it to say, it caused quite a stir. And I knew that I was saying goodbye to a career and connections in the evangelical world that I had spent over 30 years building. I knew that all of those doors would be shut to work on their books or their projects or be invited to speak at their conferences or consult with their churches. I mean, all of that was going to go away. They weren't going to have me as a Catholic working on their evangelical ministries and projects.[00:46:00] 

But after 30-something years of studying Catholic thought and this 20 year road to Rome journey since I sat in that beehive hut on Skellig Michael, I just knew that it was time to leave all that behind and become just a lay Catholic, not an ordained guy anymore, not within any position in the church. So, I’d never be clergy again. 

So we joined the parish that's closest to our house because if I was going to become a Catholic I was going to go all in. And this is our geographic parish so we're going to drive the four or five minutes and go there. We went through the RCIA program and we entered the church at Easter Vigil. And I chose Thomas Aquinas as my confirmation saint.

Well, this story has gotten way, way, way too long, but let me speed it up to how the Considering Catholicism podcast got started. About six months after the Easter Vigil where we entered the church, our parish priest [00:47:00] came to me and he asked if I would help lead a strategic planning process for the parish to develop a five-year plan that would focus the parish's resources and programs to become more effective and increase evangelization for the parish and its school. And that's what I'd spent most of my career doing and I was happy to help. He also asked if I would, you know, help teach some adult education classes, especially about the Bible and lead some pilgrimages to Italy and Israel. And so I did that and it turned into a part-time job.

And it still is. So, I spend part of my time working at the parish, helping with a lot of that. And the balance of my work is doing a lot of contract media work, consulting, and creating resources for secular clients. 

And then COVID hit. The church was locked down for, what it was? A year and a half? We couldn't hold faith formation courses, so I [00:48:00] helped the parish start an online education platform called the Lakeshore Academy for the New Evangelization. The team and I created online and distance learning courses for adults, and that's expanded to include children and families. And so for the next couple of years, I created and taught dozens of online adult ed courses and programs. And that platform is still active. You can sign up for the courses and all the archived courses for free. If you go to LANEcatholic.org.

But along the way, a couple of years ago, as we were building the lane platform and I was leading some pilgrimages–I led one to Rome–some people around me encouraged me to start a new non-profit ministry that would share Catholicism with curious non-catholics or catholics who wanted to learn more about their faith. So basically to use my experiences and gifts to reach out to people who [00:49:00] had been like myself or my wife. To be able to reach back into that world and help other people to come to the Catholic Church the way that we had. This was a couple of years ago, and at the time all I could think about was that vocation that I felt that I had received at my ordination. And what Paul said in 2 Timothy 4 that I read to you earlier: “Share the gospel, do the work of an evangelist, provide sound teaching in a time when people are gathering false teachers to fill their itching ears.” And over going on close to 40 years, I've tried to be faithful to that mission as best I can. 

So two years ago, we formed a 501c3 nonprofit organization called “One Whirling Adventure” for that purpose. One Whirling Adventure's mission is to excite and educate people about historic Catholic Christianity and to [00:50:00] equip them to live, share, and defend it in the 21st century.

And the first project for One Whirling Adventure was a new podcast, you guessed it, “Considering Catholicism.” Which brings us up to the present because next week is the second anniversary of this podcast. And as I said at the beginning, we've produced 168 episodes, with about 70,000 total global downloads.

And here we are.

So now you know who I am and how and why I started this podcast. And now I'd like to ask for your help. As I hope that you can see, I have tried to serve faithfully in ministry and persist in it through a very long and winding road since I was first baptized in that college pool and started that first bible study in the international dorm in Boulder when I was, I don't know, 20 years old.[00:51:00] 

Over the last two years, I think we've seen that this podcast has been making a difference in people's lives and it's growing, and I think it has the potential to reach more people and to make a bigger difference.

But the reality is that this little ministry is a micro ministry. It's just got enough coming in to sort of cover the hosting costs and whatnot. I work part-time at our parish and I make, as I said, the rest of my income doing secular media work. So for the last year-and-a- half, one of the things I've been doing is creating educational materials for a medical company. But I would like to invest more time in “Considering Catholicism” and help it to reach its potential. If I could get some more resources, some more monthly support for this ministry, I could do less commercial work and invest more time into “Considering Catholicism” and all the things that I think we could do with it. And I think there's some really, really cool things that we could do that we haven't even begun to [00:52:00] explore. A lot of ideas. 

What I've done has always been a gift to the Lord. It's always been a vocation to do evangelism and mission and to teach. That's what I've been doing since I was 20 years old. I'm grateful for the support that we've received. I think we have the potential to do something with this ministry.

So, if you would be willing to commit to a one-time or recurring monthly donation to One Rolling Adventure for 2024 (that’s the non-profit that makes this possible) I have some very exciting ideas for how we can expand this ministry. And some really cool things that I could and would do if I just had the bandwidth to do them, and the tools and the resources.

So, I've set up a new support webpage, where you can donate or pledge a monthly recurring donation for 2024. The link is in the show description for this episode. And there's also a link at the top of our [00:53:00] website, consideringcatholicism.com. And if you have any questions or thoughts about this ministry, I would be happy to answer them. If you want to hear more about the vision, things that we could do, then write me an email at consideringcatholicism@gmail.com. 

Well, all of this was probably way too long and too much about me. But as we go into the third year of this podcast, I wanted you to know, if you've been a regular listener, who I am, why I'm doing this, and ask you for your help to take it to the next level. So thank you for listening and Happy New Year.

We're going to have a great 2024 of episodes coming up. And hopefully if we can raise the resources, we'll expand in some kind of cool new directions. So thank you and God bless.