Pierce Benefield - Former Evangelical Protestant

Luma Simms grew up in a Christian family in Iraq. For her as a child, Christianity was very much a cultural identity, tied also to her experience of the Orthodox Faith. When her family left Iraq before coming to the US, they encountered Evangelical missionaries who told them they were not "real” Christians yet, and that they had to adopt Evangelicalism. Along the way, Luma began to gravitate toward a more Calvinist expression of Christianity. But when that theology began to unravel, she started to look deeper into historical theology, finding that her true Christian home was in the Catholic Church, which she entered in 2018.

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. Peter. He now serves as chaplain of a Catholic high school in Texas, and has written extensively on the value of the Sacrament of Confession.

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 aligned with a Catholic worldview, entering the Church once back in Switzerland. He finished a Ph.D in patristics and theology, and then came back to the United States, where he now serves as a professor at the JPII Institute for Marriage and Family.

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 zero him in on his faith further. For the first time, he started exploring the differences between forms of Christianity, and was startled at how strong the intellectual case was for Catholicism. In the course of this, he became convinced that he needed to come home to the Catholic Church.

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, however, got him asking deeper philosophical and spiritual questions. He began to see that the stories he learned in his Jewish background came to life anew in fulfilled form in Jesus, and suddenly, he found himself not only believing, but desiring to be baptized and serve the Church as a Permanent Deacon.

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-friendly church. The toxicity he experienced there led him to leave ministry altogether, and wonder if he’d ever fit in at any church. After wrestling with alcohol, he realized he needed an anchor of stability that would align his faith and his personal life. Discovering Catholic media, he began to finally get real answers, and realized that his true spiritual home was in the Catholic Church.

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 what kind of Church Jesus had truly founded.

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 was the place where he could encounter the real Jesus. It started him on the path to explore the Catholic Faith, and eventually be received into the Church.

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 Evangelical Catholicism.