Brantley Rutz
The state of Alabama has no shortage of summer heat, college football rivalries, southern hospitality, and Baptist churches. I’ve experienced a heavy dose of each of these in my 34 years of life.
If you were to drive north on I-65 from where I live you’ll travel past a prominent sign featuring a silhouette of the Devil with his pitchfork and the words “Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You!” in bold print. It’s a stark reminder that, here in the south, we believe in the good Lord above and the reality of evil. And the remedy is to stay in church.
My parents did their best to make sure that happened. I grew up in the Baptist church. I had a wonderful pastor. He was both the man who baptized me at the age of 10 and who played a crucial role in helping my family stay together through a very difficult period. I was surrounded by a gracious and loving church family. These were people who loved Jesus and gave their time and energy to teach me about His love for me. For all of the theological disagreements I may have now with those individuals, I truly thank them for helping shape me into the man I am today; a man seeking to follow Christ in every aspect of his life.
I was very active in my youth group. From singing, to playing music, to acting on stage, I was heavily involved and there was hardly a Wednesday night meeting that I ever missed. From the outside looking in, I was a good ol’ church kid. Trust me, I had my faults. But it wasn’t until my college years when I had some new found freedom that things started going off the rails.
I moved out of my parents’ house and lived with a couple of my friends. We lived together for a year. Sadly, I used that year to engage in sin that, all of the years later, I still feel ashamed of. I would have told you I was a Christian during this time, but my life reflected nothing of the sort. I was in open rebellion against my Savior. I was the person the Lord spoke about when he said, “...this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me...” (Isa. 29:13) But what I meant for evil the Lord intended for good. One of the guys I was living with ended up having a massive impact on my life. He was a Christian; the type of Christian that actively sought to live out his faith. And, while he had his faults like everyone else, I saw something different in him; something that I wanted for myself.
By the end of that year, I was starting to take my faith seriously. Soon after I began feeling what I thought was a call to full-time vocational ministry as a Baptist pastor. I graduated in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in theology and started to pursue a master’s at a Southern Baptist Seminary. At this time, there were a couple of things I felt certain of: 1) I wanted to preach the gospel as a vocational minister and 2) The Catholic Church was a false church preaching a false gospel. The theologians and pastors whose material I was absorbing were very consistent on the second part. They would readily claim that whatever truths Rome may possess, the gospel certainly wasn’t one of them. I was fully convinced of that fact and saw anyone that had been deceived by this false gospel desperately needed to hear the “true gospel.”
Fast forward several years to 2020 and I am 10 years into marriage with four kids. I wasn’t in vocational ministry, but I’d had several occasions where I was able to preach and teach. And I was still certain that Rome was a false church. But it wouldn’t be long before things changed.
It all started when I decided to reassess my stance on the two sacraments (or ordinances) of my Protestant denomination: the Lord’s Supper and baptism. Through careful study and prayer, what I began to realize was how disconnected I was in my interpretation from that of the earliest Christians. If there were two things they were unanimous on it was the efficacy of baptism and its being the instrumental cause of our salvation along with the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. When I allowed myself to look at Scripture again with fresh eyes, prima facie, the regenerative nature of baptism and the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament seemed to be pretty clear. However, this did not immediately push me towards Rome. I began to look at some of the churches with a higher sacramentology that held to at least these two viewpoints.
That pointed me towards Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Orthodoxy, or Catholicism. What essentially sealed the deal for me was the issue of authority. Mainly, how can we *know* what is right? We all believe the Holy Spirit is guiding us into all truth but when you take a brief survey of the thousands of denominations that exist it would seem the Holy Spirit is confusing everyone. But I knew that this couldn’t be the case. God is not the author of confusion. The question I had to ask myself was, “Did Christ give us a mechanism by which we can know that the Holy Spirit has led the Church to the correct interpretations of the essential truths of Scripture?” The conclusion I ultimately came to was that He did and that the mechanism that He gave us is the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
Once I knew that Christ had established a Church, not churches, and that He had given us both a vicar on earth, the pope, along with the Magisterium there was nowhere else I could go. I knew that if my desire was to be as close to my Savior as I could this side of heaven then I had to unite myself with His Bride, the Catholic Church.