Journeys Home (27 page)

Ultimately, while maintaining my business vocation, I became a
lay minister. I never desired to become a fulltime minister, but
wanted instead to help build up the church, living out my faith
as a layman.

Three years later, I transferred from the Assemblies of God to
an independent charismatic church that I believed was more aligned
to the Scriptures' presentation of the early Church in polity
and theology. From these experiences, I came to appreciate the
charismatics' respect and zeal for understanding the Scriptures.
I also came to pursue a right, authoritative church polity and
an understanding of God's covenant with man.

On the other hand, I became disenchanted with the charismatics'
errors: dispensational theology, a pietistic and pessimistic outlook
on life and culture, and a discipleship that produced ascetic,
self-absorbed believers who focused continually on their own psyches.

Jennifer's relatives had immigrated to America from Italy during
the 1940s. Originally Catholic, they quickly became Protestant,
joining the Christian Church of North America (an Italian Pentecostal
church). Her family's spiritual journey over several years included
attending Nazarene, Free Methodist, Calvary Chapel, and Evangelical
Free churches.

Jennifer was baptized at age ten, but by age twenty, after having
witnessed years of church infighting, pastoral immorality, and
doctrinal immaturity, she became disillusioned with organized
religion. The Holy Spirit intervened when she was twenty-one and
opened her eyes to see that the Scriptures were the standard for
faith and life, and God required obedience to them.

Jennifer and I met in 1986, when I was on a business trip to California.
We were married in Ohio in 1988. In our marriage ceremony we vowed
to love each other and dedicate ourselves to serving and blessing
Christ's people, His church.

On our honeymoon in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, we met a noted Reformed
scholar who was ministering in a local charismatic church. He
taught us the glory of Church history and her saints, the errors
of dispensationalism, and the need to train one's children diligently
in the faith. We resonated with his message. It launched within
both Jennifer and me a great desire to seek and know and enjoy
the righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit -- the Kingdom
of God -- to which the Scriptures refer in Romans 14:11.

God had graced us to seek the blessed land wherein, according
to 1 Chronicles 4:40, the children of Israel found rich, good
pasture; a land that was broad, quiet, and peaceful; that is,
the Church. We had not yet found this land, but upon our return
to Springfield, Jennifer started her new job as a clinical therapist
working with male juvenile sex offenders. Her associate in this
work and his wife, the Whites, were a lovely, peaceful, and knowledgeable
Catholic couple.

Within a few months of our marriage, Jennifer and I mutually agreed
to save money so that the following year we could take a sabbatical
to attend a charismatic Bible school in East Texas to deepen our
understanding of the Scriptures and the Kingdom of God. Our spiritual
journey to date had left us without assurance that we were interpreting
God and His will for our lives correctly. We were desperate to
know God and His way, a desperation that to our friends seemed
overly zealous and somewhat foolish.

By the end of that sabbatical year, God had answered more of our
prayers regarding His Kingdom: To put it bluntly, He had showed
us through our experience at the Bible school that the undisciplined
and subjective nature of the charismatic tradition was misguided.
We saw that it lacked unity with the broader church; it was substandard
in theology and devoid of any historical roots prior to the early
1900s.

On our last day in Texas before returning to Springfield, we visited
a bookstore where we found several volumes by Reformed Presbyterian
and Christian Reconstructionist authors. The store manager was
the wife of a minister who would become one of our Reformed Presbyterian
mentors. We purchased $200 worth of books that would, over the
subsequent months, root us in the history of the Church, in the
theology of the creeds and confessions, in the knowledge of the
Kingdom of God, and in the doctrines of the broader Protestant
tradition.

Jennifer and I were so distracted by all that God was teaching
us that we never considered that we were entrenched in an irrational
Protestant bias. We were not consciously bigoted against the Catholic
Church. The thought of embracing the Catholic faith simply never
occurred to us. Sadly, most of the Catholics we knew were cynical
and unknowledgeable about the Church and the Scriptures.

After returning to Springfield in 1990, Jennifer and I had no
church affiliation, having left the charismatic movement. Instead
we led a home Bible study in which we and others studied the Scriptures,
the Westminster Confession of Faith, and Schaff's
History of the
Christian Church
. Eventually our group concluded that we needed
to join the Presbyterian Church.

We were extremely attracted to its polity of elder rule, its Reformation-based
theology (much of which is grounded in the Scriptures), and its
historical roots -- all elements that are missing in much of Evangelical
Protestantism. Confused by the existence of hundreds of Presbyterian
denominations and thousands of church congregations, we called
upon our mentor in Texas for help. He belonged to the Reformed
Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (RPCUS), but counseled us and
the rest of our Bible study group to join the Orthodox Presbyterian
Church (OPC), which we all did in 1992.

We thought that our journey into the broad land was accomplished.
We had found more of the Kingdom of God than we had ever known:
spiritual authority, enthusiastic preaching of the Scriptures,
and the organized and visible church in all of her -- as we believed
at the time -- orthodox glory. The Reformation cries of
sola fide
and
sola scriptura
were faithfully taught, and we took church
membership vows to honor those tenets.

Unbiblical ecclesiastical traditions were nixed in that denomination,
or so we thought. Our three children -- Jedidiah, Josiah, and
Sarah -- were baptized in the OPC. Three years later, I became
a ruling elder, and the following year I began to train to become
a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

In 1997, I earned a Master of Divinity degree from Greenville
Presbyterian Theological Seminary, the most conservative seminary
servicing the OPC. My studies were steeped in Church history,
the ancient Greek and Hebrew languages, and the development of
theology. These, along with my extra historical and ecclesiastical
studies with Jennifer, broadened our theological and ethical outlook.
By reading the early Church Fathers, the creeds and confessions,
and the
Catechism of the Catholic Church,
I began learning a great
deal about the Catholic faith.

Jennifer and I were exhilarated by all we were learning, and our
zeal infected many of our lay brethren in the church. Delighting
in God's will, we were forming intimate fellowship with many families
who seemed fervent for the faith. In addition, I taught a series
from the Book of Ecclesiastes that changed Jennifer and me to
this day.

From that book we learned that we did not need to be overly righteous
or religious about life (see Eccl 7:16). We could relax and eat,
drink, and be merry while submitting to the fear of God and the
keeping of His commandments (Eccl 8:15; 12:13). We realized that
God did not require us to be able to split every doctrinal hair
in order to please Him.

We assessed our lives and agreed that our journey to date had
made us overly narrow theologically, too legalistic, too pietistic,
overly critical of others and other churches, anti-Catholic (although
we believed that there were Christians in the Catholic Church),
and devoid of a zeal to perform good works out of a warm heart
of love. We saw ourselves becoming what we did not want to become
and what we clearly saw in the Scriptures that Christ detested.

We repented thoroughly to God. Christ, we realized, was not as
concerned about what exactly we believed as He was concerned about
our charity toward all of mankind. The parables that we had studied
about the sheep and the goats and about the poor and the needy
were illuminating our minds and correcting our thoughts.

We realized that God would be just as pleased whether I was serving
others in my business vocation or in fulltime ministry. In addition,
each day we were feeling more and more the need to burst out of
the fetters that our elders had placed on us. We were serving
the church twenty to thirty hours per week and were exhausted.
They were merciless about giving us any reprieve.

In addition, we were feeling the need to be
outside
of the church's
four walls to serve Christ and to build our own lives: to serve
in a soup kitchen, to bake for the neighbors, to provide free
tutoring for a child, to enroll our children in community affairs,
and to pursue creative ventures. But verbally and nonverbally,
the elders communicated to us their displeasure with our newfound
liberty and trajectory.

We subsequently made a collaborative decision not to pursue a
pastorate in the OPC. This was the beginning of sorrows. In 2000,
not having found a suitable congregation to join and yet equipped
with the qualifications, ministerial experience, sponsorship,
and desire to begin a less legalistic and more merciful Reformed
congregation in Springfield, we joined with our mentor minister
in the RPCUS to begin pastoring a new congregation: Springfield
Reformed Presbyterian Church.

The OPC that we left learned of our new congregation and the sponsoring
RPCUS denomination. Though Springfield had no Reformed congregation,
and though the nearest OPC congregation was about thirty-five
miles away, the OPC congregation feared that their parishioners
would travel that distance to Springfield to partake of a former
elder's ministry. The RPCUS graciously requested that the OPC
allow the Springfield congregation to come into the RPCUS without
incident.

The OPC, after much discourse, refused to do so. Because of this
refusal, our congregation became a member of the Association of
Free Reformed Churches.

Although our congregation seemed free and clear of the most sectarian
portions of the Presbyterian world, we were beginning to note
that these several judicatories were basically doing "what was
right in [their] own eyes" (Jgs 21:25). Not only was all this
an example of disunity, but my family also had to bear my verdict
of excommunication by the OPC, a result of a humiliating and public
church trial. The judgment of excommunication means that that
particular session of elders ruled me an "infidel" or an "unbeliever"
to be shunned.

Families and friends with whom we had spent countless ministry
and friendship hours no longer spoke to us, fearing punishment
if they disobeyed the elders. Nearly ten years of relationships
and emotions were annihilated. We were ousted and ostracized because
we failed to adhere to what the OPC defined as the Protestant
ministerial tradition. Nevertheless, we ministered, published,
worked, and persevered for nearly four years at Springfield Reformed
Church.

Our congregation grew, and we served our community. We urged the
flock to be rich in good works. Eventually, however, as we witnessed
the continued disunity and hateful infighting among many members
of the Reformed community locally and nationally, Jennifer and
I began to become disenchanted with the Reformed Presbyterian
tradition and the Protestant tradition altogether. A crisis point
in our spiritual journey home had arrived.

While teaching a series on the justification of the saints to
my congregation, I returned to my studies of Protestant doctrines
and Catholic doctrines that I had learned in seminary. Several
theologians seeking Protestant and Catholic dialogue had sparked
my consideration of the legitimacy of the Catholic faith.

While poring over Protestant and Catholic dogma, I lost my theological
moorings. I began to vacillate back and forth between wanting
to remain Protestant and wanting to join the broad fellowship
of the Catholic faith, which I saw as "deep in Scripture, deep
in tradition, and deep in history" (a quote from the Coming Home
Network International website, which I had been perusing).

At first, I would spend days holding to Protestant teaching and
minutes holding to Catholic teaching. Then I would wake up Protestant
in the morning and become a convinced Catholic at night. I was
angry that my spiritual journey had come to this major confusion.

My poor wife, while waiting for me to land, longed for our family
to be rightly planted and rested in Christ's Church. She would
have continued in our denomination if I had desired it, but she
did not want me to continue ministering as a pastor if I was so
frustrated and unhappy.

Eventually we came to some rational conclusions. First, Jennifer
and I realized that Protestant teaching was not honest, as it
purported to be, with all the Scriptures regarding justification
by works (such as Jas 2:24). As a result, we concluded that
sola
fide
was now out. I also found that the Scriptures themselves
were a part of Church (that is, Catholic Church) Tradition and
even spoke of the reception of Church Tradition. This made the
phrase
sola scriptura
not only unscriptural but also unethical.
So,
sola scriptura
was out too.

Moreover, Church Tradition and Sacred Scripture constitute the
"deposit of faith" handed down to us by the Fathers. My eyes were
opened to the fact that Protestants reject the pope in favor of
establishing their own smaller popes (independent congregations)
and curia (Presbyterian denominations).