February 18, 2008
Wesley Brings Me Home
At the beginning of 2006 I began my studies at a Lutheran seminary in town that was approved to train Methodist pastors. It was a seminary I had attended many, many years before and so I felt very comfortable there. I also enjoyed the fact that they had daily chapel and weekly communion, with a sense of some liturgical heritage. However, the one difficulty with this school was that it was not structured for working adults. Meaning that it was becoming harder and harder for me to find classes that fit into my schedule, since I couldn’t just give up my job to go to school.
I did give it a try though and one of the things that I came to love was my Methodist classes that I took. One of the systematic theology professors was a Methodist pastor and offered the basic classes on John Wesley, history and polity, that every Methodist needed to get ordained. There were a couple dozen Methodist students on campus so we got to know each other pretty well, and the classes were a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. In fact I started to learn too much. The more and more I read Wesley, the more and more I was becoming convinced that the church that Wesley was a part of, and dreamed of, didn’t exist in a recognizable form in the current United Methodist Church (UMC). Wesley was an Anglican, and had a very high view of liturgy, but yet in most UMC churches today you’ll find communion once a month, and more often only once every three months. Many historical and cultural factors played into things like this, and there were many in the UMC that were seeking to bring back liturgical worship and ancient faith practices. The Order of St. Luke was even founded by some to help bring about a revival of these ideas, and so I still felt like there was hope for me in the UMC.
Things started to change more though as I went through 2006 and into 2007. I kept getting these nagging feelings that I just wasn’t going to end up in the UMC. I kept asking myself questions like, “If I really want something different than what most UMC churches do, is it right for me to force it on my congregation? Or should I just move on to where the things I hold to are more accepted and practiced?” Even though I felt in my heart that many of these questions only had on answer, I still kept ‘toughing it out’ where I was at. One thing that helped was a wonderful Small Group that I was a part of that let me do all kinds of liturgical experiments on them, however, it just made me long for more and more of what I wasn’t going to find in the Methodist church.
Over Christmas I had started really questioning things and decided to would venture into a Catholic bookstore to just browse a bit and see what I found. I had been doing a lot of reading on the Internet and in other books but wanted to see some of the material first hand. I walked out of the bookstore with a copy of the Catholic Catechism, and a book by John Neuhaus called “Catholic Matters”. I tucked these books away and started reading them little bits at a time.
In January of 2007 a bunch of us Methodist students took a trip to Chicago for a small conference on John Wesley. There were two speakers at the conference, and one of them was the author of the text that we had used in our Wesleyan theology class. We all felt this would be a great opportunity to get to hear a great speaker. I didn’t know much about the second speaker there, but that would change rather quickly.
Two of my fellow students and I packed into my minivan and we headed out. I never mentioned to them that at the time I had my two secret Catholic books packed away in my luggage. As we got close to Chicago, I asked one of them who had been to the conference before what the facility was like. He said, “Oh, it’s nice and quiet. It’s a Catholic retreat center.” At that point I think I knew I was doomed. We arrived and unpacked our things and got ready for the next couple of days. I had plenty of time to walk around the facility and see what it was about, and they even had a bookstore that I was able to spend some time in.
Very quickly I got to meet our second speaker, an author and pastor as well. However, some of the things that he was saying made me almost think that he was feeling like I was about the state of the Methodist church, and of Protestantism in general. One morning at breakfast he sat near me and I started probing a bit about his thinking about Catholicism and how many of the things that Wesley talked about seemed to lean somewhat that way. He looked at me and said, “The more you read Wesley, the more Catholic you’ll become.” Once again, the phrase, “It is useless to resist” kept popping into my head. By the end of the conference I think I knew in my heart that there was no turning back for me. He was right, the more and more I tried to fit my thinking into the Protestant church, the more and more I found myself drifting away from it. On the drive home I started thinking about how I would tell my wife and friends about all of this.
One of the side-effects of this decision is that I would be dropping out of school. However, I didn’t have to leave empty handed. Since I had already gotten enough credits from my first seminary for a Master of Arts degree, I was able to go back and simply request receiving that degree instead of the higher level degree. In many ways I knew that dropping out of seminary was the right decision, not just because of my desire to go Catholic, but also because the schedule of the second seminary had been making family life very hard. My wife was actually quite happy that it was ending, since my youngest son hadn’t even ever known a time when daddy wasn’t busy in school. She also took to the news about my Catholic desires fine, since she’s not really a detail person, and doesn’t really have a lot of strong opinions about things like that. So starting in March of 2007 our journey began to find a parish and join with the Catholic faith.
We were able to narrow down our choices and managed to find a great parish to call home. It even has a parish school where we’re sending our children. We began our RCIA classes in the fall of 2007 and coming this Easter we will be received into the Catholic church. It’s been a long, long journey, and it’s no where near where I thought I would be at the beginning. But it’s where I feel God has led us and it’s where I feel God can use me the most.
Even though this is the end of the “tale” there’s more to talk about. In particular I want to spend some time talking about why I chose the Catholic church, and in particular why I didn’t chose the Orthodox church. But again, I’ll save that for the next time…
Written and posted by Jamison on February 18, 2008, 11:20 pm.
Filed under: Catholicism, General Discussion, Looking Back, The Journey, Transformation
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