Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 4

 In the last story, I talked about mostly my early battles against the "Emerging Church" movement in the early 2010s when I was still doing graduate work.  This part of the story is going to come back to what my own spiritual odyssey is, as I went down a lot of rabbit trails and probably will enter some more as I do this. 

So, another aspect I talked about is regarding zeal in my faith.  When I was younger, zeal came easy - it does with youth for some reason.  When I hear certain types of religious music - the Kathryn Kuhlman crusade songs I talked about earlier, for example - it gives me fond memories of those days.  Not everything about my Pentecostal past was bad, and in all honesty there are things I miss.  The whole point of my conversation is to explore that.  Again, I am not sure how long this is going to be, and I am just sharing thoughts as they come to me, but sorting through all of this is like going through an old box of mementos you come across in an attic.  We all do have mental attics too - a lot of memories and things get stored away in our minds, and on occasion we have to kind of do a little digging just to rediscover things about ourselves.  In essence, that is what I am doing - I am rummaging through my own dusty mental attic, and there's much to sort out.  This has been a little different than many of my recent musings, as for the first time in a few years I have a focused objective rather than just a bunch of off-the-cuff observations about a particular topic.  When someone reads all this rambling mess one day, they are going to think I was clinically insane probably, but I am also hoping others will see it too - others to whom this is actually directed, those who are sorting through similar thoughts and feelings and trying to rediscover themselves.  It's a big task for sure, but it is beneficial in its own merit though. 

The mid-1990s for me was a time of rethinking myself as far as my Christianity goes, and I began to do so by finally embracing things I had been wanting to do, and beginning in the early 1990s I had a means of doing so.  That year, Ministries Today magazine published an article about a rising new movement called Convergence, and it was what I wanted to be part of.  The movement itself was centered on somehow bringing together what were called "Three Streams" of Christian experience - sacramental/liturgical, Evangelical, and Charismatic.  Many of its early pioneers were people like the late Dr. Robert Webber, who was a professor at Wheaton College in Chicago.  Dr. Webber wrote two important books identified with this movement.  The first was his personal journey, a very well-known text called Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail.  I want to say this was published in 1983, but would have to double-check that.  Webber, who was raised as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, had begun to question some of the more controversial things about the faith of his heritage, and as he did so he began a study of the early Church and what it held and believed.  At around the same time, a group of workers with the Evangelical organization Campus Crusade for Christ led by one Peter Gillquist, underwent a similar journey - Gillquist later published this process in his book Becoming Orthodox.  While Webber would later find his home in a high-Church Anglican tradition, Gillquist and his colleagues would by 1987 be received into the Antiochian Orthodox Church and many of them would be ordained priests.  A third individual, David Bercot, who had been a former Jehovah's Witness and an attorney in Texas, likewise began a similar journey, and like Webber, he initially became Anglican as well - he published what he learned in a book called Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up?  In time, a host of others - a surprising number from Pentecostal or Charismatic backgrounds - began to make similar journeys, and in the early 1990s the official Convergence Movement was born with the advent of an independent church of Anglican heritage called the Charismatic Episcopal Church, which elected as its Patriarch/Archbishop a former nondenominational Charismatic minister in California named Randall Adler.  From this, and through the course of the 1990s, other Convergence bodies formed, including the Charismatic Orthodox Church, the Evangelical Episcopal Church, and others.  I too was part of this movement at that time, as I found people of common conviction that I could relate to, and for many years I sought to actually get credentials as a priest in one of these groups but it never happened for some weird reason.  Many Convergence people though - myself included - later found themselves not so much in independent congregations, but they eventually "came home" to either the Roman Catholic Church (as I did) or to the Orthodox Church (following Peter Gillquist's group).  And, in time, Convergence was a stepping-stone to getting back to where we were supposed to be so it was a tool God used.  In my case though, I had a variety of other influences then as well.

There are two important influences along my own journey I wish to talk about.  The one was the late Greek Orthodox priest Fr. Eusebius Stephanou.  In the early 1990s, I established regular contact with Fr. Eusebius and his right-hand man at his Orthodox retreat center in northern Florida, Symeon MacKnight. Fr. Eusebius was perhaps one of the few voices for Charismatic Renewal in the Orthodox Church, as the Charismatic movement by and large was seen as "too western" and thus rejected by most Orthodox hierarchs.  While Fr. Eusebius created some controversy, for the most part his teachings never waivered significantly from Orthodox tradition, and I learned much from him.  I still consider one of his last books, Sacramentalized but Not Evangelized, as an important and influential text.  A second movement that impacted me was a pre-Pentecostal movement called Irvingism, or the Catholic Apostolic Church movement.  Beginning in the 1830s, this movement was a fully sacramental/liturgical group that also emphasized eschatology and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including tongues.  It is considered an important precursor to the Pentecostal movement, and its uniqueness is what drew me.  The largest denomination in this movement, the New Apostolic Church, has a membership today in the millions, but it is a lot more "low-church" than the CAC from which it came.  Thanks to a priest of a somewhat restored CAC group in Germany, Rev. Harald Scheffler, I learned a lot about this movement, and again Harald was encouraging me to be ordained in it.   I am still good friends with Harald today, as he has a small group he still leads, but now that I have decided to be Catholic, ordination is not a thing anymore although I still do hold some of the original convictions that I share with this movement.  All of this together - not to mention my constant interest in Syriac/Assyrian, Maronite, Coptic, and Armenian Christian traditions - is what led me on my journey in this direction.  Interest in those movements did not stop when I was received into the Catholic Church on Easter 2000, but rather I found ways to make them part of my own Catholic experience.  This story bears more examination of its own, but by now you get the idea of what led me to be Catholic. 

In officially coming into communion with Rome, I had a lot to sort out, but thankfully I was able to do so.  My eschatology was refined better, thanks in part to my dear friend Desmond Birch's excellent resource Trial, Tribulation and Triumph as well as the Hebrew Catholic Movement, in particular Fr. Elias Friedman's seminal book Jewish Identity.  I also found out that it was not wrong to embrace Biblical Creationism too, as thankfully a group of Catholic Creationists, the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation led by Hugh Owen and based in Virginia, proved to be a valuable resource as well. Again, it took learning how things fit together, as well as finding resources, to reconcile my former identity as a Pentecostal with my newfound Catholic faith.  And, lest one doubts, I did have the usual struggles with things such as Mariology, purgatory, and other particulars of the Catholic faith that other converts struggle with, but in time as I learned more thanks to good people as well as a well-grounded orthodox Catholic education at Franciscan University of Steubenville, I not only came to terms with those, but I enthusiastically embraced those doctrines once I fully understood them, and they revolutionized my faith. The journey to being Catholic was not always easy - and there is much more to say about it for sure - but it was worth it, every RCIA class, every moment I sought to research doctrines I struggled with, etc. I found home in the Church, and thanks be to God for leading me here. 

There are many more things to tell, so we will continue this discussion in the next installment.  Thank you.