Kyle A. King

We all have a past, a lineage, and a family tree, whether we know it or not. For most evangelical Christians, including myself, we have been ignorant of it. I remember when I first became interested in the history of my faith—looking to examples such as D.L Moody, Charles Spurgeon, John Wesley, and Johnathan Edwards. These were men who shaped what evangelicalism has become in the last few hundred years. They were revivalist preachers who wanted to see the whole world experience rebirth, but they were also compassionate pastors who truly were concerned that people have a real experience with Jesus grounded in the scriptures. People flocked to these men, because they didn’t want to be mediocre anymore. They wanted the same fire that they had. And so did I.
This book is not about returning to mediocre, legalistic versions of Christianity and finding Biblical support for that. It is not about falling asleep in the pew, listening to boring or fluffy sermons, or choosing rules and church laws over experiencing the power of the Risen Christ. This book is about reimagining and rediscovering the fiery heart of Catholic Christianity that existed from the beginning as evidenced by history, and how present evangelical pastors and leaders are returning to the family we believe we have always belonged to. This book is about falling into deeper love with Jesus and receiving the gifts He always intended us to have so that we can complete the mission he gave us—teaching, baptizing, and making more authentic disciples of Jesus who supernaturally love one another.
In 2011, I made the decision to resign from my evangelical church in order to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church and reconcile with my family tree. I did this for numerous reasons, but it is important for me to say that it was not because I found my past experiences within evangelical Christianity unfulfilling. My years being formed in two evangelical churches and an evangelical school, Taylor University, were deeply transformative that helped me grow in my relationship and understanding of Jesus. I actually cannot speak of these experiences enough! There are many, many people who I could think of that poured their very hearts into mine and to them I am forever grateful (my parents being on top of the list). But I also began to find some of our historical claims rooted in a Protestant worldview to be incomplete and inconsistent as began to grow in my understanding of the scriptures.
Growing up, I would have never said that the fullness of the Church seemed to be complete within Catholic Christianity. I was largely ignorant of Catholicism, but I generally believed that the Catholic Church was a medieval dinosaur about to go extinct! Like all traditional churches, it was slowly being abandoned by the people and needed to be left to die in the streets. I had it reinforced in my mind time and time again that Biblical truth and freedom was largely abandoned until the 16th century when Martin Luther came around like Moses to set God’s people free! When I was a child, I also heard it said that there were some saved Catholics, but these ‘saved’ Catholics were the ones who were fortunate enough to still see Jesus in the thick of medieval superstition, pharisaic legalism, and severe doctrinal confusion. The prayer was that someday they would discover freedom in a church like ‘ours.’
I began to appreciate the Catholic Church more in college as I encountered the church fathers, the spiritual disciplines, the monastic movements, and ancient forms of Christian worship. However, my mindset was more like a man grabbing prized possessions from a burning building. The ‘Roman Catholic Church’ would still crumble or become obsolete in its relevance, and it was the duty of Christian leaders to preserve was still good in this system. As a future pastor and church planter, I could take some of these effective ideas and use them in ministry settings.
My world was turned upside down however when my best friend became Catholic and challenged me on several points. The Catholic claim is that it is the form of Christianity that has been around since basically the Book of Acts and that the study of church history from the earliest sources vindicates this claim. So I sought to both understand my friend, but also use Biblical and historical evidence to show that he was wrong. That process backfired, and I discovered that the first generations of Christians sounded shockingly Catholic. Ideas that I thought originated in the Middle Ages were documented at the end of the New Testament era. I found that there was quite a bit of evidence that the Catholic Church was the only thing around in the first few centuries except a few heretical groups that nobody wants to be associated with today! Blessed John Henry Newman summarizes this experience quite well, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”
My first reaction was anger that this information had been hid from me by my college professors. My second reaction was shock that I missed this information even after reading some of these writings before and that it had the potential to completely change my life. My third reaction was fear that the Catholic Church was going to have a bunch of baggage that I would have to accept and that it was no longer the church it once was. My fourth reaction was sorrow—that I would hurt friends and family members, leading some to think that I had become a fearful, timid pastor who was simply looking for way out of ministry. In reality, I was embarking on the most courageous journey God had ever called me to.
Today, the breakdown in prejudice between Catholics and Protestants and advances in Biblical scholarship has led to a new phenomenon — a significant number of evangelical theologians, pastors, and leaders have become Catholic after rediscovering the real teachings of the Catholic Church. This could be clearly seen in 2007 when the President of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, resigned in order to enter into the Catholic Church. Beckwith admits he does not feel as though he stopped being an evangelical when he became Catholic, but that his evangelicalism was being fulfilled by being in right relationship with Christ’s Church in its visible and historical fullness. In response to this startling news about Beckham, a book was written by Norman Geisler and Betancourt called, “Is Rome the True Church?,” which argued against the Catholic Church’s claims. Shortly after it was published, the co-author Betancourt made a dramatic decision to also become Catholic himself. He found as I have found and many others that there are good arguments against Catholic Church, but there are still much stronger ones for it, or as G.K. Chesterton puts it, “It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment a man ceases to pull against it he feels a tug towards it. The moment he ceases to shout it down he begins to listen to it with pleasure. The moment he tries to be fair to it he begins to be fond of it.”
In 2008, evangelical pastor Allen Hunt made the decision to resign from his 10,000 person Methodist congregation to become Catholic, and this last year, in 2014, Ulf Ekman followed Hunt’s example by resigning from his evangelical, Pentecostal mega church in Sweden after studying the Church’s claims and building strong relationships with Charismatic Catholics across the globe. There is a entire organization called the “Coming Home Network” that networks with pastors and Christian ministry leaders so they can tell their story and find support from one another.
Looking at Catholics and Evangelicals from a distance, there is a lot that we have in common. Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren noted that, “We have more in common than we have different,” when he visited the Vatican in November of 2014 in order to give a talk on Marriage. There is even an organization called, “Catholics and Evangelicals Together” begun by evangelical Chuck Colson and former Lutheran theologian turned Catholic, Father Richard Neuhaus, and they have issued significant declarations together while still noting their differences. Much has been done in the last 25 years to warm up the relations between Catholics and Evangelicals, most notably seen when Billy Graham visited Pope John Paul II in 1981, and the Pope responded by calling them “brothers.” This warming of the relationship may be alarming to some, but generally, it has produced fruit in unity and holiness that helps more people see Jesus as we love another. My greatest aim for this book is that after reading it Catholics and Evangelicals would be much more stirred up to love one another and seek understanding from each other prayerfully so that the light of the Risen Jesus would shine out all the more clearly and powerfully through us.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”
2 Corinthians 4:7

Where in the Bible do you see Jesus personally endorsing Popes, Priests, and Bishops? Doesn’t Jesus speak against organized religion and the traditions of men? Isn’t the Catholic Church a human invention and a distortion of what Jesus started?

Many non-Christians and more and more Protestant Christians are claiming to follow a Jesus who has been rescued from the hands of the Church. They take some of His words that reveal His love for humanity and disdain for the ‘current establishment’ of religious leaders, and they pit those words against everything else He says. To summarize their message: “love God and others but do it in way that you find best rather than what organized religion says, because you are the only authority that matters in your personal relationship with God.” The problem with this line of thinking is that it does not consider a third possibility—that God has given us a faithful and reliable picture (revelation) of Himself in history so that we can know and experience Him on His own terms.

Recall what God said during Jesus’ transfiguration, “This is my Son, Listen to Him” (Luke 9:35). If we listen to the Son, we will hear Him speak through His Life, Death, and Resurrection, and we will hear Him speak when He appointed Apostles and gave them His authority to heal, teach, forgive sins, and cast out demons in His name. We will hear Him speak when he says, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). The point is this—the Church was not an invention of man, but a Mystical Body breathed into existence by Christ Himself.

Excitingly, for Catholic Christians, the Story does not stop there. These Apostles then appointed deacons to assist them in service (Acts 6:1-7), presbyters (priests in English) to assist them in running the local churches (Acts 14:23), and lastly, bishops to assist them in governing whole cities (dioceses) of churches. As seen in Titus 1:5 and 1 Timothy 1:3 , Saint Paul transferred His apostolic gift to Titus and Timothy as bishops over Ephesus and Crete so that they could appoint more presbyters and keep things moving orderly. These first bishops then appointed other men and passed on this apostolic gift to the present day through an unbroken line of successors. One of the earliest bishops, Saint Ireneaus, described this doctrine around 180 AD, “It is incumbent to obey the presbyters who are in the Church—those who, as I have shown, possess the succession from the apostles; those who, together with the succession of the episcopate (college of bishops), have received the infallible charism of truth, according to the good pleasure of the Father.”

What a wonderful gift God has given to the Catholic Church—the gift of infallibility guarded and taught through our bishops and priests so that we might rightly hear the voice of God’s Son.  Let’s honor Christ by honoring those whom He appointed by not sitting on the sidelines, but by joining them in their labor so that our communities might know that Jesus still is alive and that He has not rejected the Church, but continues to live and reign in Her.