Why a Methodist Joined the Ordinariate

One of my earliest memories of church is sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car, longingly looking out the window at our house, and thinking to myself “why are we going back to church? We just got home 30 minutes ago…” My father was a youth minister in the Pentecostal Church of God and came from a Pentecostal family. Lively shouting, singing, jumping, and dancing was the church experience I knew. My mother had been baptized in the Episcopal Church in high school and my parents were married in it as well. For many reasons, they settled into a United Methodist church when I was still in elementary school, and that is where I was baptized, confirmed, and started to be a lay speaker.

My experience in Methodism was “middle church” as I call it – loosely liturgical. After experiencing my first Catholic Mass, I noticed that the United Methodist Hymnal included a similar liturgy in the front of it, and that we had a Book of Worship that had many similarities to the Book of Common Prayer. I wanted desperately for my Methodist church, and indeed for Methodism to incorporate more liturgy into its worship. The more I discovered about John Wesley and the original Methodists, the more I realized that modern Methodism was not very similar. Methodism had adapted to what was around it due to a lack of ministers in the 1800s. In some places, it looked Mainline Protestant, and in others it looked Evangelical Protestant. These two divides also generally developed into liberal and conservative categories as well, respectively.

The issue that prompted me to start looking elsewhere was the issue of same-sex marriage and the church. It became increasingly clear that the UMC was on a trajectory to endorse same-sex marriage. In the process of this discovery, I also began to notice a lack of doctrinal coherence and little or no theological unity in the UMC.
Thanks primarily to Word on Fire and then Fr. (now Bishop) Robert Barron, I began to accept Catholic theology as sound and consistent. I also found that Wesleyanism fit in quite well with it actually, better than in the Methodist Church. However, I was not particularly drawn to Catholicism in such a way that I felt like I had to leave the UMC and my local community. I only did so when it became clear to me that I could no longer identify myself with the wider UMC. Once, I was having dinner with a group of Catholics that included several Protestant converts. As they were sharing things they fell in love with about Catholicism, they asked me what I fell in love with that converted me. The question rather shocked me and I had to admit disappointingly, “nothing… I just felt like there was nowhere else I could go.”

The reality was that I struggled with Catholicism and all that I felt forced to leave behind. I left a small community for a large parish, left behind Sunday School and fellowship, good music that spoke to me, biblical literacy, and traditional language like that of the King James Version. I had to leave behind more than that too, but it was all enough to leave me still feeling homeless in the Catholic Church. I made escapes to my family’s Pentecostal church, to Methodist churches, and to Catholic Charismatic Renewal services to try to get my fix of something missing. While in Germany, I attended Lutheran churches and found them better than the Catholic masses there, and while in England I attended Anglican services, particularly Evensong, and found them deeply fulfilling. It was in Cambridge, at Magdalene College especially, where I really fell in love with the Book of Common Prayer. I could see Wesleyan Spirituality and Catholicism meeting with tradition in such a beautifully synchronous way that I felt that I had found something huge.

It was recommended to me by a Catholic friend that I join the Ordinariate because of how homeless I felt in the Catholic Church. I did not seriously consider it initially because there were no Ordinariate parishes near me, but after giving it more thought, I decided that I would join. I made that decision because I believed in the Ordinariate’s mission, in the hopes that one day I would be able to have a Catholic community or parish that I could call home, and, if nothing else, as an excuse to let myself be a little different from other Catholics in the meantime.

Although this story might sound like it was a journey of “disgruntlement,” I promise it was not. Like many in the Ordinariate, my journey was about not forsaking my spiritual heritage. I wanted to experience in the Catholic Church the fullness of my own Methodist tradition, with its charism of joyful discovery and encounter with Jesus, that is possible through the Ordinariate. My journey to the Ordinariate was about keeping what I already had, and keeping it safe and consistent in the Catholic Church.
 

Paul Caleb Roland is an Ordinariate Catholic who writes from Oklahoma. His 10-Part Series on Wesley’s Method and the Ordinariate mission appears at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog.

This article first ran in the ACS monthly, St. Peter's Rambler. If you have a personal testimony about what the Ordinariate has meant to you and your Catholic faith in Jesus Christ, please email us your testimony so we can share in upcoming editions of the St. Peter’s Rambler and the ACS Blog.

Related articles by this author:
What Methodist Patrimony Brings to the Ordinariate Mission

Wesley’s Method Part I: Frequent Reception of Communion and the Love Feast

Wesley’s Method Part II: Frequent Prayer and the Daily Office

Wesley’s Method Part III: Form a Bible Study, Go Make Disciples

Wesley’s Method Part IV: Fasting Wednesdays, Fridays & Other Times for Sanctification

Wesley’s Method Part V: Forming Small Groups for Discipleship

Wesley’s Method Part VI: Following Christ by Works of Mercy

Wesley’s Method Part VII: Singing and a Hymnal in Every Home

Wesley’s Method Part VIII: How Field Preaching Equips the Laity to Proclaim Jesus Christ

Wesley’s Method Part IX: Holy Conferencing, Revivals, and their Ordinariate Potential

Wesley’s Method Part X: How Lay Servant Ministry Can Grow the Catholic Church