Journey Home

Fr. Scott Woods’ family wasn’t Catholic, but because they sent him to Catholic school, he developed some strong associations with Catholicism, and especially the priesthood. He began telling everyone that he wanted to be a priest, even though he wasn’t yet a Catholic. He began attending daily Mass in high school, and his parents, seeing that he was so serious, allowed him to enter the Catholic Chu...

Rhonda Ortiz had roots in Evangelical experience, including some in Pentecostalism, but a search for a Christian home during her college years led her to begin exploring the Catholic Faith. Her love for and study of the “Great Books” of history helped further point her toward Catholic ideas, and meeting her husband, who was going through the same kind of awakening of faith, was a crucial step in h...

Ashley Stinnett attended numerous Evangelical congregations growing up, and even explored RCIA in the early 2000’s before dropping out due to family medical reasons. His wife was the daughter of a Protestant minister, and when COVID hit, it caused them both to completely re-evaluate questions about authority and Christian unity, and the purpose of worship. They began to see the Eucharist as the ce...

Lucas Koach came to faith as a teenager through Young Life, and pursued a call to ministry, entering Denver Seminary. That trajectory eventually led him to the Anglican Church of North America, where he served as an ordained priest for several years. Drawn by Catholic Social Teaching, a desire for Christian unity, and the thought of St. John Henry Newman, Lucas eventually became convicted of the t...

Tsh Oxenreider was raised Evangelical, and even felt called to do missionary work, but her desire to grow deeper in her faith began to lead her toward liturgy and the sacraments, which she began exploring through the Anglican tradition. However, she still felt as though God was calling her to deeper roots, and the more she prayed and discerned her way through her questions, the more she felt that...

Phillip Seeberg grew up in a Reformed Jewish household, but stopped attending synagogue after his Bar Mitzvah. In college, he met some Christians who were handing out New Testaments, and he began to read the story of Jesus. Powerfully moved by what he read, he became a Christian, and joined InterVarsity Fellowship, but the divisions between denominations led him to seek the historical roots of the...

Debbie Capen came from a Catholic family, but was not well-formed in her faith. An unplanned pregnancy in college, followed by an abortion, led to a dark turn in her life. Searching for answers, she began to pray the Our Father, the only prayer she remembered from her Catholic childhood. That opened a door for her to make a slow and steady return to the sacraments, beginning with Confession. Debbi...

Justus Hunter’s dad was a Methodist pastor, and he himself decided to pursue academic study in theology, attending Asbury College and Seminary, where he encountered Church history in a way that made him want to learn more about the world of the early Christians. After getting a doctorate from Southern Methodist University, he went on to teach theology at the seminary level, and it was during this...

Sr. John Dominic Rasmussen, O.P., grew up in Nashville, and her dad worked in the country music industry. Though not always serious about questions of faith, it was while she was in high school that she felt called to enter the Catholic Church, and began to discern a vocation to religious life. She would go on to help found the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, a teaching order t...

Dr. Brian Duncan graduated high school early and went straight into Baptist ministry training. On fire for Jesus, he was constantly seeking deeper resources to help him teach the faith, which led him to discover the Church Fathers. Teaching from them caused problems in his independent Baptist congregation, so he spent a little time in a Reformed Baptist church, which also didn’t work out. Disillus...

Amanda Martin came from a strong Christian background, and her husband became an Episcopalian priest. Not coming from a liturgical or sacramental Christian experience, she experienced significant opposition from family who thought she was making a huge mistake and overcomplicating Christianity with rituals and external piety. She shares some of the ways she prayed and discerned through that proces...

Fr. Doug Martin grew up in a Godly United Methodist family, but didn’t start taking a call to ministry seriously until college, where exposure to various Christian traditions led him to research Church history. At that time, he became Episcopalian, and eventually was ordained an Episcopal priest. After realizing the need for a stronger way of understanding of Christian authority, he gravitated tow...

Deacon Lee Ashton was raised Episcopalian, but when he joined the military, he felt a disconnection from that faith tradition, and began to search for a new Christian community. For 27 years, he got involved in Evangelical congregations, having some great experiences with them along the way. However, he began to realize that different churches were preaching differently on different passages, and...

Dr. John Bruchalski of Divine Mercy Care and Kerstin Pakka of Project Rachel in the Diocese of Toledo share the stories of how they came from believing in a right to abortion, to having a radical encounter with the forgiveness of Christ that has since empowered each of them to work to build a culture of life and promote access to the kind of care that leads others like themselves to heal from the...

Deacon Lester Loh came from a Presbyterian family, but by early childhood was already completely tuned out of anything related to faith. Over the years, a couple of his siblings became Catholic, which caught his attention, but he didn’t take it too seriously. He ended up dating ad eventually marrying a Catholic, observing her faith from afar until eventually he began to feel convicted to take the...

Reza Akhtar was raised Muslim in Canada, but was not particularly observant. At a private elementary school, he became exposed to basic Protestant Christianity, but it was in college that he began to explore it more deeply. He married a Catholic, but wasn’t quite ready to make the full leap into the Church, so he spent a few years in an Anglican congregation, before he felt God calling him home to...

Taylor Kemp was baptized Catholic, but early in his life, soccer effectively became his religion, taking up not only all his time on Sundays, as well as all his attention and affection. The more success he found, the more inadequate he felt, realizing that he had made himself and his soccer skills the measure of everything. By the time he had become a professional player in the MLS with DC United,...

As the son of a pastor, Luke Nelson grew up surrounded by people of deep faith. Following his own call to ministry, he attended Bible college and served for 25 years in the Wesleyan Church. There were several issues that began to trouble him, but among them was the question of the Lord’s Supper. In his Wesleyan/Methodist tradition, it was considered important, but he couldn’t articulate all the as...

Dino Remedios grew up nominally Catholic, absorbing much of what he knew about the faith from the Filipino culture he came from. In his teenage years, he began to drift more into relativistic lines of thought, becoming a practical agnostic. Over time, however, he found that the answers offered by materialism were dissatisfying, and through a discovery process that involved philosophy, beauty, and...

Joe Ward was adopted from foster care in New York, and attended a number of different churches growing up, including Presbyterian, Methodist and Mennonite congregations. In his college years, he became extremely interested in Calvinist theology, and explored it deeply while also doing work with InterVarsity Fellowship. After graduating, Joe went on to teach music, and became part of the worship te...

Seth and Julianne met each other in small town Ohio, and even though Seth was raised Catholic, that took a bit of a back seat as he focused all his attention on using his skills as a kicker to try and break into the NFL. They eventually ended up in a Presbyterian congregation together, but they began to struggle with the question of how they should approach receiving communion in the various churc...

Megan Thomas grew up heavily involved in her Baptist world, steeped in Scripture, prayer, mission trips, and more. However, she still felt like something was missing in the way she understood Christianity. As she grew older and she began to take greater ownership of her faith, Megan realized that a lot of the arguments she was using to defend her faith had their greatest roots in the Catholic inte...

Dr. Kent Hill has had a front-row seat to some of the most important ecumenical moments in American Christianity over the last several decades. Along with his roles in international development, Kent also served as president of Eastern Nazarene College, and was an original signer of the 1994 document "Evangelicals and Catholics Together." He shares the story of the relationships, prayer, and refle...

In Eduardo Faria’s experience as a Presbyterian pastor in Brazil, he was deeply in love with his faith and passionate about teaching it. But when some significant questions about the nature of the early Church and Christian authority led him to explore Catholicism, it also raised many questions about what this might mean for his ministry, his family, and where God might be calling him now after ye...

Fr. Jerry Byrd was raised Baptist, and had a strong interest in music. When a high school friend announced they were becoming Catholic, he decided to go to Mass to see what it was all about. Having played music in his Baptist church, he was drawn immediately to the beauty of the liturgy, and the truth of the Eucharist. He decided to enter the Church, and ended up discerning a vocation to the pries...