Journey Home

Jeff and Lois were both raised in Christian households, and Lois’s parents were missionaries. They met at a Wesleyan school, and began ministering together while still attending college, eventually serving as a pastoring couple for 34 years. Growing questions about what was meant by “the Church” bothered them, as well as difficulty in resolving theological disputes within their own congregations....

Grant had roots in both Baptist and Assemblies of God congregations, and went on to seminary to prepare for ministry. While there, he was introduced to the Church Fathers, who had a very different view of Baptism than the one he’d grown up with. Seeing that they treated it as a sacrament made him wonder if his view of Communion was also out of step with historic Christianity. After serving seven y...

A committed Christian who followed a call to Baptist ministry, Gary’s life took a dramatic and unexpected turn when he was invited to help develop a network of Cowboy Churches in Texas. He flourished in this role, and it grew rapidly. However, the chaos of COVID, combined with partisan political infighting in his congregations, led him to seek an anchor in a theological tradition that could transc...

Vijaya was baptized in a Methodist church and raised Anglican in India, but some painful experiences in her youth led her to mistrust God as Father, and she stopped praying in her teens. She went on to become a scientist, and abandoned religion altogether for years. After 9/11, she and her American husband began to read Bible stories to their children, but didn’t know which church to go back to. T...

Rebekah had Judaism in her background, but was raised in a fundamentalist form of Pentecostalism that she rebelled against strongly, going deep into a world of regrettable life decisions. Through God’s providence and some key relationships, she began to come back to faith, and was surprised to find, after her initial Christian conversion, that her true spiritual home was in the Catholic Church. Sh...

Jennifer Wood’s desire to serve the Lord led her to pursue formation in a Lutheran seminary. It was in her ongoing research and study that she began to realize that there was a deeper and more faithful form of Christianity, and that had its most definitive expression in the Catholic Church. Her desire to work in evangelization and discipleship led her to get involved with Spiritus Ministries, form...

Jeff’s family was Episcopalian, but early in his childhood, his mom started taking him to a Pentecostal church, which caused a lot of confusion for him over the years. Seeking some spiritual stability, he later began to explore the Lutheran church, but that opened new doors for him of history, liturgy and sacramentality, and eventually led him home to the Catholic Faith

Ken Oliver-Mendez came from a Presbyterian background, attending both Cedarville College and Covenant College. His experience of faith formation and journalism gave him a broad view of the many different expressions of Christianity, but in the midst of all of them, he realized that his true spiritual home was in the Catholic Church. He currently brings his faith and his professional experience tog...

When a friend said he was becoming Catholic, Chris began to explore this foreign Christianity and fell in love with the Church, fully entering with his wife at Easter Vigil 2021.

After 34 years as an Evangelical pastor, Gerard began to dig deeper into issues dividing Protestants and Catholics, realizing it was time to return to the Faith of his childhood.

Terry and Renee grew up in the Assemblies of God, and avoided some anti-Catholic prejudices because of the Catholics they met in charismatic ecumenical gatherings. Terry went into medicine, and in his 40’s, he and his wife felt a call to become overseas medical missionaries. After years of service, Renee’s illness led them to have to come back to the states, where Terry began working in a Catholic...

Jennifer was raised Christian, but by middle school had decided that religion was a stupid thing for stupid people. As an exchange student in Austria, she began to be intrigued by Catholic culture, but still saw it as outdated and superstitious. While studying Marxism in East Germany at Karl Marx University, it gave her a realization she needed to have a better grounding in philosophy, which led h...

David and Roseanna White came from a strong Baptist faith, and Roseanna began a successful career writing Christian historical fiction, with David founding a publishing house. Fascinated by CS Lewis and his description of Christianity as a house with different denominational rooms, Roseanna decided to search out which “room” she belonged in. The more she and David researched it, the more they real...

Eben Emerson, a former Church of Christ minister and missionary, was originally on The Journey Home in 2011. In the decade and a half since that, Eben has some powerful insights to share about common mistakes new converts make, many of which are lessons he himself learned the hard way. Eben's experience is hopefully a great encouragement to those of you who are new Catholics, and trying to take th...

Although raised Methodist, Susan Sucher began attending an Assemblies of God youth group in her teens, which is where her faith really took off. As she and her husband were discerning marriage, they were also processing together some of the inconsistencies they’d been noticing in Pentecostal theology, particularly when it came to the Lord’s Supper. She decided to explore the Catholic Church, and w...

Shane Page was raised in a United Methodist family in North Carolina, and went on to become an elder and a pastor in a congregation there, serving 18 years in church leadership. He didn’t grow up with any experience of Catholicism, and had almost no knowledge of it, but his desire to be as fully formed as possible in his faith led him to dive headfirst into questions of history, liturgy, and even...

Heidi had a strong faith life, and went to Azusa Pacific hoping to do some kind of ministry. She was leading music at a Baptist church and preparing for a mission trip to Europe when her pastor announced he was becoming Catholic. This threw everything into question for her, and she began to wonder, if God was calling someone she deeply respected into the Catholic Church, what might that mean for t...

Michael Garcia was baptized Catholic, but wandered a bit as a young man. When his brother got involved with a Oneness Pentecostal community, Michael was intrigued, and after exploring it, felt that this was the kind of community God was calling him to. He quickly began to sense a call to ministry, serving in a couple of different United Pentecostal congregations along the way. However, when Michae...

It has been a longstanding tradition in the Coming Home Network, which is located in the Diocese of Columbus, to invite the sitting bishop to share his story on The Journey Home -- even if he's not technically a convert! In the case of Bishop Earl Fernandes, there is a lot of story to tell -- from his immigrant parents' faithful handing on of the Catholic Faith, to his vocation to the priesthood,...

Deacon Matt Halbach grew up Catholic but wasn’t very well formed. As a young man, he began to struggle with depression and anxiety, and was even thinking of suicide at one point. In the midst of that, a coworker began to share his Catholic faith, and invited Matt back to Mass. Finally, he agreed to go, and went back to Confession. Everything changed for him from there, and he had a major conversio...

After beginning a personal relationship with Jesus as a teenager, Joshua Mangels felt a call to ministry and eventually became an Assemblies of God pastor. As he studied the Church Fathers, he discovered a sacramental worldview that was completely new to him, and he had to know more. Initially, he and his wife hesitated to dig deeper for fear of risking their ministry. However as Joshua began teac...

Bishop James Conley was raised Presbyterian, and studied Applied Humanities at Kansas University in the 1970’s, falling in love with the Great Books. That led him to become Catholic his junior year of college. He traveled Europe for a bit after that, considering a monastic vocation, before following a call to diocesan priesthood, and eventually becoming an ordained bishop. He has since become incr...

Fr. Michael Nixon was born in Hawaii to parents who were Hare Krishnas. When he was in elementary school, his whole family became Catholic, which was a radical change for him. He began the process of discovery of the Catholic faith among fellow Catholics his age who had known all this stuff from birth, and that perspective as a child discovering Catholicism in the context of his family’s conversio...

Fr. Scott Wooten grew up firmly Anglican, but attended Catholic school. As he continued toward ordination as an Episcopal priest, he persisted in the belief that the Anglican, Orthodox, and Roman churches were all legitimate branches of the true Catholic Church, so he didn’t feel that there was ever any need for him to become a “Roman” Catholic; he considered his form of Anglicanism to be legitima...

Dr. Matthew Wiseman was raised with strong Baptist roots, and even as a young child, he was constantly reading and studying the Bible. His family attended progressively smaller churches, and even a house church, determined to live the Scriptures as faithfully as possible. Their ongoing study of the Old Testament story led his family toward the Hebrew Roots Movement, a form of Messianic Christianit...