This post is part of a series on my selection of a Christian church. There will be a new post every few days.
I was raised mainly in American Baptist churches. In high school and college, I attended non-denominational Evangelical churches, including Calvary Chapel. The teachings of all these churches were largely compatible, but the non-denominational churches tended to be less formally organized. That is, there was no particular oversight of the church or the pastor that influenced the churches’ teachings, and the order of the service was structured according to practical considerations and the leadership’s preference. Some of the Baptist churches I attended were more traditional in the structure of their services (robes for the pastor and choir, hymns rather than modern worship songs, etc.), but none of the churches had a formal liturgy.
In 2006, I moved to Newport News, Virginia to go to grad school and started attending Calvary Chapel Newport News. Sometime in 2008, I started looking into other forms of Christianity, such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Mostly unrelated to this, near the end of 2008 I began to be more and more dissatisfied with the Calvary Chapel I attended. (See this post for my view of that church from a year ago.)
In July of last year, I left the local Calvary Chapel because of my growing list of objections to that particular church. (My specific reasons for leaving this church are beyond the scope of this series.) Given what I had been learning about the various forms of Christianity and my unwillingness to remain at Calvary Chapel, I was essentially forced into a decision about what sort of church I wanted to attend. My decision was based on what I had been learning about various Christian denominations and churches rather than simply choosing a church that was like the ones I had attended before.
In this series, I will describe how I decided where I fit within Christendom. I have definite reasons for believing in Christianity, but I will not list my reasons or discuss any non-Christian religions in this series. A defense of Christianity will have to wait for a later time.
Those of you who know me personally most likely know by now that I have decided to become a Catholic. I was confirmed as a full member of the Catholic Church on April 3, the day before Easter. This decision has come with its share of challenges. For one thing, I have had to completely reevaluate my religious beliefs; for another, my choice has strained my relationships with many of my friends and family. But in this series of posts I hope to demonstrate that I have important reasons for my choosing Catholicism, and that it wasn’t done on a whim or for any reason other than sincerely seeking the truth about God and our relationship with him.
Confronted with the things I learned about Catholicism, with my growing conviction that it was the truth, I had to make a decision. It would have been easier in some ways to stay as a Protestant, but what could I say other than to echo the words of Peter in the prologue to this series? “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68–69) So come what may, I have acted on my convictions and joined what I believe to be the Church founded by Jesus, who is the only one who can say, “Take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
Tags: Christianity