An Evangelical Journey Home to the Catholic Church

By Bill & Amy Renje

This article is an excerpt from The Final Pieces: Our Spiritual Journey

The Calling

Amy’s journey home to Catholicism began as she looked around our church home at the time – both our former megachurch as well as the smaller churches we began attending – and just felt like something wasn’t right, something was missing. She had grown tired of the production, the gimmicks, the entertainment, the social aspect of the larger church, while feeling like the smaller churches were just evangelical “starter kits” as she called them. They’re just smaller versions with the exact same formats, that looked the same and sounded the same. Even though something was off, she couldn’t quite put it together:

I just started praying to God, ‘what do you want me to do?’ I remember looking around the church and I said, ‘is this what it’s supposed to look like?’ and I remember when I was having that conversation in my head, it was during praise and worship. Everybody’s singing, everybody’s happy. It was almost like I couldn’t hear anything in the room, like the music had stopped. But everybody’s still up and moving and clapping and doing their thing. But all I could hear was the sound in my mind of me questioning, ‘is this what it’s supposed to look like?’ and the Lord saying to me, ‘What did it look like in the beginning?’

And so Amy began her journey having no idea where it would lead. What her prayers, research and questions started revealing was that the Catholic Church was the early Church. This was a slow transition, taking place over months. But much as she tried, she couldn’t shake where the hand of God was leading her. And she was as resistant as I was at the time of becoming Catholic because again, they weren’t even on our radar as authentic Christians. However, the more she, and eventually I, we’re led by the Lord down this road, the more implausible and nonsensical it came to believe that Jesus would have left us his Church while then allowing it to immediately veer wrong or go dormant until revived by Luther and the reformers 1500 years later.

So now I’m left with this question, “What did Church look like in the beginning”, and honestly I felt kind of stupid because I thought I’ve never asked that question. Why would I ever ask that question as a Christian? I have this faith that’s supposedly this old faith, so why would I ever ask myself, ‘what did it look like in the beginning’.

But looking back, the reason was that I never was taught what Church looked like in the beginning. I don’t remember in all the classes that we had taken, in all the Bible studies and all the Sunday school lessons and all the sermons I’ve heard, I don’t remember anybody ever talking about what it looked like in the beginning. So I went home and I started researching and googling. I didn’t know what to google. But I remember looking at a few different pages after I had pulled up, ‘what did the early Church look like.’ I just started reading some quotes of the early Church fathers.

I didn’t know they were early Church fathers. I didn’t know what that term meant at the time. I started slowly just doing a little bit each day and reading different quotes and different opinions and going to different websites and this website will lead you to that website. Then I got on YouTube and I saw a few videos and it didn’t take me long to realize that Jesus did leave us a Church. He didn’t leave us multiple churches. He left us a Church and that Church was Catholic.

I was obviously not prepared for that revelation. I had no idea, as crazy as that sounds, that the true Church, the early Church, the first Church was the Catholic Church. I didn’t know what to do with that information. So me, being one who likes to research a bit, I just kept reading and kept watching videos. I would look for other opinions that would convince me that what I was reading was wrong and I couldn’t seem to find any that I believed, or made sense as they fell short when weighed against scripture and Church history.

We have really good friends who are Catholic who have never pushed their faith on us. We had conversations up to that point, but not real in-depth conversations about matters of faith. I started asking them a bunch of questions. I asked them so many questions that they thought I was trying to convert them, which I obviously wasn’t. But I just really wanted to know the truth. I wanted to know the truth about Catholicism from the Catholic perspective, not from a former Catholic who wasn’t properly catechized, or a person who was raised Catholic but never practicing, or a Protestant who was only taught what they had heard from other Protestants. I wanted to know what the Catholic Church believed and taught directly from the Catholic Church, from the perspective of practicing Catholics. Those who I knew personally, who I loved and who I’ve seen working out their faith in their life.

In Protestant circles, churches and networks, much of our history is not told, or when it is told, it’s told as if, Christianity didn’t start until the 1500s. And that’s because there isn’t a Protestant denomination or church that traces its roots back more than 100, 200 or 500 years. Whereas Catholicism traces its roots all the way back to Jesus. To my knowledge, the oldest Protestant decree (theological order) is the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647. There’s just naturally going to be a lot of misinformation and ignorance, an almost denial of history if you’re largely overlooking 1500 years (more than 3/4s of church history), or if you’re being very selective in how you look at that history. That would be like learning American history by starting 50 years ago. We never learned about any of the early Church fathers from the first 300 years of Christianity, when it exploded across the modern world at the time. When it comes to Protestant sources, the most you’ll ever really hear is about Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the two most influential historical theologians on Western Christianity. But it’s always through a filter where their Catholicism, and high Catholic dogma – the priesthood, the Mass, the Eucharist, purgatory, Mary, etc., etc. – has been stripped away.

We knew that Augustine held a high view of scripture, but we never knew, because it was never taught, that he was a Catholic priest, then a bishop, who said, “For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.” We would be surprised to come to find out that it wasn’t the Catholic Church that was the apostate. If anything, the apostates were those that came 1500 plus years later with doctrine, with theology, with worship practices and a view of the gospel unrecognizable by the early Church and any of the Church fathers.

When Amy started down this road, I told her that she would have to wait until I die if she was ever going to become Catholic. But I’ve always trusted my wife 100% in every way, especially spiritually. My wife has always been the most godly, spirit-led, spirit-filled, in-tune follower of Christ that I’ve ever known. So when she started this journey, I was fully supportive, knowing that wherever she was going, it was because this was where God was taking her. I did not want her to become Catholic, but more so out of fear, fear of what others would think, fear of friends abandoning me, and, being the executive director of a nonprofit ministry,  fear of donors leaving me. So I told her she couldn’t become Catholic until I died.

For me, I got there much slower. I wouldn’t even say that I was searching. But there was a longing to fill in what I thought were holes and gaps in my Christian faith. Theological questions that I had always wrestled with, but was able to fully grasp. Holes and gaps in what I’d been taught in my church experience that I now know were stripped away after the Protestant Reformation. And by the ever-growing, ever-increasing Westernized, Americanized, corporately (not necessarily biblically) modeled modern churches that would be unrecognizable by J.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis just 75 years ago, let alone to those familiar with the Church in Acts. If you were to teleport the early Church here, they would figure out rather quickly and catch on to a Catholic Mass. Could we say the same about a modern evangelical service?