Journey Home

After experimenting with different religious ideas as a young man, Fr. Jonathan Mitchican became a Christian and followed a call to ordination in the Episcopal Church. Eventually, through history, liturgy, and authority, he felt drawn more and more to the Catholic Faith. He entered the Church in 2015, and in 2018, was ordained to the priesthood through the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St....

Jonathan Bieler was born in Switzerland, and came from a strong Swiss Reformed Church background, with multiple family members who had served in ministry; Jonathan even pursued studies in hopes of possibly becoming a pastor himself. His studies in theology eventually led him to the U.S., where he began working on a Masters at the Dominican House of Studies, and in the process, became more and more...

Pierce Benefield came from an Evangelical Christian family in Georgia, and got some good Bible basics from the Christian school he went to as a kid. As a young man, he became more serious about his faith, and began to explore Calvinism, and even briefly considered becoming a pastor. During COVID, he was working at the Post Office, and a coworker invited him to a Reformed congregation that began to...

Cary Klivan grew up Jewish in Brooklyn, and though he was culturally observant, he was spiritually agnostic, more along the lines of scientific materialism. He ended up marrying his childhood sweetheart, who happened to be one of the few Catholics in his neighborhood. He agreed to raise his children Catholic, because to him faith was just a cultural marker. The reality of becoming a father, howeve...

Mark DeYoung came from a Nazarene family, and was heavily involved in church. He went on to attend Trevecca Nazarene in Nashville, and then began work at a Christian music station, where he also hosted the morning show. During this time, he experienced some major challenges to his personal faith. When he began to rediscover it, it lead him to seminary studies, and eventually on staff at a seeker-f...

David DeAtkine was born into a Baptist family, but they also explored Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches along the way. When he went to medical school, David began attending Episcopal services, because that was his wife’s background. However, this raised even more questions for him about Church history, the sacraments, and the nature of Christian authority, and set him on a quest to find out...

Fr. Samuel Keyes was raised Baptist in Mississippi, but became an Episcopalian as a young adult, going on to serve as a priest in Massachusetts, Alabama, and Maryland. His spiritual trajectory continued to lead him deeper on the questions of tradition, liturgy and authority, and he eventually became a Catholic and an ordained priest through the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

David Lach grew up in a group called the Church Universal and Triumphant, a syncretistic form of Theosophy, which taught a sort of monotheistic spin on the idea of the God within. Among other things, he began to realize that his community’s concept of Jesus as an ascended master did not match up with the Jesus he saw in the New Testament. He visited a Catholic Mass, and immediately felt like this...

TJ Nielsen grew up in a Christian household, and his interest in philosophy and history led him to Hillsdale College. While there, he began to reflect more deeply on what it meant to take his Christian faith seriously, and his encounter with serious Catholics impacted him in such a way that he eventually felt called home to the Catholic Church himself. He has since gone on to found the Center for...

Amy McEntee was raised in the Church of the Brethren, and as she grew older, began to experience Christianity in a number of different denominational contexts. When she began attending the University of Dayton and meeting faithful and engaged Catholics, she began to discover the truth and beauty of the Church, and started taking steps to become a part of it.

Sam Nunnally grew up in Charismatic, Methodist and non-denominational Christianity in the South, and his desire to learn more about the faith took him right to the edge of believing in the Real Presence from his own personal study of Scripture, without any thought that he was drawing specifically Catholic conclusions. After graduating college, he kept feeling the pull to ministry, serving in youth...

Erika Bachiochi was not raised in a religious household, and her reaction to divorce in her family, as well as suicides among friends, led her to a dark place spiritually. Seeking truth and meaning, she was befriended by pro-life intellectuals, who helped her see that life was meaningful, and faith could be reasonable. She came home to the Catholic Faith in 1997, and has been active in the Catholi...

Monique Ruberu was raised Catholic, but picked and chose what aspects of Catholicism she was going to prioritize. In 2012, her marriage began to experience crisis, and she knew she needed to take her faith much more seriously if her marriage was to survive. That search led her on a deeper journey of love for the Eucharist, but also into a renewed understanding of the sanctity of life, and she bega...

Chad Nelson grew up Catholic, but his faith caught fire as a teenager when he encountered Pentecostalism, and he eventually became an ordained Pentecostal preacher. Eventually, through studying history and scripture, he began to discover that many of the things he loved most about Pentecostalism — a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit, the power of miracles, and the reality of God working in power thro...

Jeromy Darling was a deeply devoted Christian, who got into church planting and the house church movement through his dad’s pastoral ministry. When that community completely collapsed, it caused Jeremy to ask some serious questions for the first time: what did early Christianity actually look like? What kind of communities did the apostles found? How did we get the Bible in the first place? The an...

Deacon Michael Nixon had a deeply troubled home life, and after a few years of homelessness, joined the Hare Krishnas at 13 and started selling drugs on the side. When he met his wife, they began a journey of spiritual exploration together, and in the most unexpected fashion, found a home in the Catholic Church, entering with their very young children. One of them, Fr. Michael Nixon, was a guest o...

Dr. Lisa Heerema came from a Reformed Christian background, and became interested in the Catholic Church through history, liturgy, and the sacraments, but had many questions, including about the saints, and her background in Calvinism was a significant hurdle in understanding the Catholic perspective. Attending a Coming Home Network retreat was key in helping her feel more at peace about her journ...

Fr. Allan Phan grew up in a family with Buddhist roots, but they sent him to Catholic school in Nebraska, where he began to flourish, and develop spiritual connections with all kinds of elements of the Catholic life, including and especially with St. Francis of Assisi. Despite some objections from loved ones, he made the journey home to the Catholic Faith, and discerned a vocation to the priesthoo...

Garrett Hines was raised in the non-instrumental Church of Christ, but had a renewed excitement for Evangelization through a nondenominational congregation, and became a missionary to Indonesia for a few years. That ended poorly, and shook his faith. During COVID especially, he began to explore other ways to renew his Christian commitment, and became fascinated with the Catholic Church. He became...

Brenda Caster was raised SDA, and even went to an Adventist boarding school. She rebellled a little in her teens, but ended up staying SDA, and eventually married a man who became an SDA elder. When she found a network of ex-SDA people trying to help people out of the church, it opened her eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world. Brenda shopped around Protestant congregations, but was intr...

Patrick Correa’s mom was Pentecostal, but his dad was an atheist. At age 15, after his brother’s suicide, Patrick decided he was an atheist as well. In 2004, at the age of 29, he hit rock bottom and had a born-again experience, going between different churches, and in the course of that, felt God strongly calling him to commit to RCIA at the Catholic parish his wife had been attending. His faith c...

Steve Sjogren had an encounter with Jesus as a young man that led him to become involved with the pioneers of the Vineyard movement, eventually planting one of the most successful Vineyard congregations in the country in Cincinnati. However, a combination of burnout in ministry and dissatisfaction with whether or not he was doing Church the way Jesus intended led him to go deeper, and the more he...

Matt Daniels was raised Baptist, and his dad was a football coach, which meant he moved around a lot. When he was in college, his dad had a heart attack, and it forced him to lean on God and turn to prayer. Around this same time, he was also studying in Rome, and while there, decided to try to pray the Rosary for the first time. It made a profound impact on him, and began to connect him with the s...

Shaun McAfee, contributor to Catholic Answers and the National Catholic Register, discusses how the experiences he had during his military service and the development of a relationship with a Catholic counselor played into his decision to join the Church. His wife, Jessica, discusses how her own formation in Evangelicalism was challenged by the things she was discovering in Catholicism as well. Th...

Deacon Stephen Nash was baptized Catholic, but several of the family members who had been anchors of faith in his life passed away when he was young. There were sparks of faith along the way that caused him to pop in and out of Church occasionally, especially in college, when he became friends with a classmate at Princeton who was discerning the priesthood. When he married his wife, he started goi...