I used to think Catholicism wasn’t Christianity. I grew up singing Hillsong lyrics accompanied by electric guitar, passing grape juice in little plastic cups through rows of cushioned seats, and watching my pastor preach in jeans and a button-up. It was the most sacred kind of worship I knew. 

In fact, it wasn’t until eleventh-grade religion class at my Lutheran high school that I found out that Catholics actually do worship Jesus, and not just Mary. 

And once I got to college and stepped into the young, Reformed evangelical canon event known as the “Calvinist cage stage,” I came up with just about every objection that there is to Catholicism. Venerating saints detracts from Jesus. The Eucharist re-crucifies Christ. The papacy is tyrannical. Purgatory is unbiblical. The theology is works-based. Marian devotion is idolatry. Liturgy produces legalism. Catholics don’t read their Bibles.

The story of how all of those objections got answered spans two years. It took a lot of wrestling with God and is way too long to write in a single column for the Clarion. If you really want to scrap about theology, look my number up in the directory and give me a call. I would love to talk to you. 

But before all the complex theology, it started with the simplest way of knowing God: Worship. 

Hype or holiness?

The bass was bumping, the crowd was packed, and the room smelled like a humid gym bag. People were jumping, dancing, slapping each other’s backs. The lights on the stage flashed from blue to pink to orange. The house lights were dim. A mosh pit was forming. At least five people stepped on my feet. The floor was sticky and wet.

I was not at a club, actually. I was at a baptism service.

The event was organized by the church I attended at the time. The room was full of college students who ranged from lifelong Christians to new converts, almost all of them clad in He Would Love First merch. As a lifelong Christian myself, I was used to the joyful, church camp-esque worship. 

But at some point between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., amidst the shouts of college guys, the worship leader urging everyone to throw their hands up and the 28th refrain of Maverick City’s “I Thank God,” I got the sense that the whole event was structured to be a hyped up, fun, Christian-themed party more than a reverent act of lifelong dedication of one’s whole self to God.

Sure, maybe I wasn’t being charitable. Maybe, in that moment, I was more focused on judging everyone than I was on worshipping Jesus. 

But a part of my brain kept insisting that this was a superficial expression of Christ’s sacrifice at best, and at worst, an event catering to fun-seeking college kids, enticing them with free BUBBL’R and the potential opportunity to find their future spouse, but maybe not with a robust theology of suffering and self-emptying. 

I tried to push that uncomfortable thought out of my mind. I was planning on getting baptized in this church when the next baptism party rolled around. I’d never gotten around to it as a lukewarm teenager, and now that my faith was becoming my own, I wanted to show the world how much I loved Jesus. 

But in this moment, I started to wonder: Was I showing the world how much I loved Jesus? Or was I just baptizing myself as part of the Christian in-group that wore Jesus merch and posted Instagram stories with Forrest Frank music in the background that I probably wouldn’t be part of once I graduated? 

This moment changed my idea of what I wanted for my baptism. I wanted to make sure it was in a church that I could be committed to my whole life. One that could be reverent, representing the God who I’d fought with through the worst times of my whole life and still ended up faithful. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just getting baptized out of emotions or excitement or approval from others. 

And I wasn’t sure that I could claim those weren’t my reasons in a situation purposely marketed to be emotional and exciting towards people aged 18-21. 

So I decided to try to find a different church to be baptized in.

Christian consumerism 

The search began. 

Non-denominational churches where the pastor praised his “smoking hot wife” for being a “Proverbs 31 woman.” An Anglican church that spent the 20-minute homily urging the congregants to sign an international petition to stop using fossil fuels, but never mentioned Jesus once. Presbyterian churches where the median age was 65. Pentecostal churches where women danced through the aisles with silks and the pastor preached borderline Pelagian heresy. Baptist churches that held sermon series on stewarding personal finance but never on giving to the poor. 

I got the sense that each of these churches had a target audience. And it seemed like the target audience was always, well, the audience. But maybe not the God they were there to worship.  

I still tried to find somewhere to plant my feet. But I couldn’t shake how marketed it all was. Are you a gun-wielding conservative? I’ve got the perfect church for you. Are you a pacifist progressive? Well, come on in! Are you traditional and stoic? Right this way. Free-spirited flower child? Over here, sister!

I couldn’t find a place that was united enough to appeal to liberals and conservatives, Spirit-filled hippies and Bible-thumping traditionalists. Because they all just went to the places that gave them what they wanted. 

But if church was just about what I wanted, as an introvert, I might as well just stay home, listen to a recorded sermon I like the sound of and play my favorite hymns. But I didn’t want a perfectly tailored, personal experience every time I went to church.

I wanted to better know the Jesus who called for repentance, who also had self-sacrificial compassion for the overlooked. Not one or the other. 

I found that my appraisal of the many churches I visited boiled down to how scriptural I thought they were, and the worship experience they offered me. 

But how could I make sure I was the one interpreting scripture correctly, and not the churches I disagreed with? And what happened when I couldn’t feel anything at all? Does that mean God wasn’t present in that church? Or was it my fault? Was the lack of emotion in me a lack of personal faith? 

And when I could feel things, how could I differentiate if I was actually feeling God or if it was just a psychological reaction to the chord progressions, darkened room and heartfelt lyrics?

This is my body (not just my mind) 

The first time I went to Catholic mass, I was uncomfortable with how little it had to do with me, how seemingly impersonal the liturgical directions on the folding bulletin were. Why were people lunging before getting into the pews? Could they smell the Protestant on me?

All the liturgy made me feel awkward. I didn’t know how to apply it perfectly to my life, unlike the step-by-step sermons and worship songs of my Protestant upbringing. 

So I went back to my Baptist church for a while. It was a lot easier.

A few months later, unable to shake certain theological convictions that I had about Catholicism, I came back to mass. And the longer I went, the more I understood. 

I loved noticing the intention in the order of the mass; how it started with the liturgy of the word and ended with the liturgy of the Eucharist, reflecting the old covenant of the word fulfilled, not destroyed, in the new covenant, Christ’s bodily sacrifice. 

I loved that worship was full-body, with genuflecting, the sign of the cross and kneeling, rather than just being focused on a feeling or state of mind. It carried me on the days I was distracted in the service or unable to conjure up emotion. 

I loved that babies cried during the service and weren’t swept away into children’s church. They weren’t a mere distraction that required people to take care of them in a separate room. Even if they didn’t understand it, they were invited into this sacramental reality, too. 

This physical, not just emotional or intellectual, worship reminded me that God isn’t just an omnipresent spiritual orb or a set of systematic doctrines. He became man, physically.  

I wasn’t scrutinizing my heart every time I didn’t feel something or forced into ruminating on what was wrong with me. Because it wasn’t about me. It was about the sorrowful man hanging on the cross above the sanctuary.

Of course, the liturgy alone wasn’t enough to convert me. There was still the papacy, Mary, purgatory and a million other things that kept me from converting that I had to take up with God, my local parish, the church fathers and YouTube theology debates (in that order). I still definitely don’t have all the answers, and I’d never be able to do the questions justice in a 1500-word column. 

At the end of the day, the core of what I believe is that Jesus is a merciful God with more love for you than you could comprehend, no matter your denomination or doubts you’re dragging along. So take me up on that phone call, or don’t. That’s all I hope you know.