How a Coming Home Network book made me rethink my Pentecostal past
When I was about 12, my mother abandoned the structure and tradition of the Episcopal church for the freeform experience of a country Pentecostal church. She took me with her. Within the Episcopal church, I found an island of peace from a disrupted homelife. In the exuberance of Pentecostalism, my mother said she found great love.
Ultimately, I embraced Pentecostalism for a dozen years. Then, after years of searching, I found great peace in the two-thousand-year-old orthodoxy of the Catholic church.
Shortly before that life-changing move, I’d carefully locked my Charismatic experience in carbon freeze. Like a book of old photos, it was something to be occasionally viewed but was too closely associated with the religious and personal anxiety I had experienced.
Talkin’ ’bout my generation
My mother was raised by parents of a deeply scarred generation. They endured the horrors of World War I, the devastation of the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II. They can be excused if their worldview – and how they lived and parented – was shaped by those 30 years of tragedy. In their disrupted world, I imagine my grandparents found solace in the stability and formality of the Episcopal church, shaped by the scarcity, perseverance, and restraint of their time.
But the world was a different place when my mother came of age in the 1950s. The post-war economy boomed, and exuberant young ladies and men embraced the idea of marriage and big families. They tossed off the restraints of scarcity and duty they’d been raised with. My parents married in 1955, when my mother was just 22. By 1964, they had six kids. The exuberance of the 1950s faded into the reality of a large, hungry, demanding family. This wasn’t unique to us; it was generational. We weren’t the only family of the 1960s that could fill an entire church pew, with stressed parents as bookends. While my grandparents were shaped by the challenge of physical survival, my mother and her friends faced emotional survival. When the Charismatic Movement reached our Episcopal church, it was a lifeline she quickly grasped.
The Charismatic Movement
With roots in the Azusa Street Pentecostal revival of 1906, the Charismatic Movement of the 1960s gained traction within mainline Protestant denominations. Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett’s announcement to his California parish that he’d received the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit” marked its beginning.
The Charismatic Movement was about a personal encounter with Jesus through the Holy Spirit. And their gatherings often included exhibitions of spiritual gifts, including speaking in tongues and healings. By the mid-1970s, renewal networks and healing ministries had rapidly spread across denominations.
The people of the Charismatic Movement were not always met with open arms in their traditional – often liturgical – churches. Reflecting their 1950s cultural shift, many of these new Charismatics ultimately cast off what they perceived as the constraints of their mainline denominations. Some, like my mother, connected with independent Pentecostal churches. Others were drawn to the birth of modern Charismatic churches, such as the Vineyard Movement. Many of today’s evangelical churches and groups have their roots in this shift.
My Sunday morning fix
Just as my grandparents were formed by their early life experiences, the Charismatic Movement had a profound impact on my life. At its core, it emphasized a personal relationship with Jesus and baptism in the Holy Spirit. In the 1970s and 1980s, this movement gave us a new culture, with speaking in tongues, healings, and – especially important to me – contemporary Christian music. But, for me, there was a harmful risk. I became caught up in emotionalism, expecting the spiritual euphoria of Sunday worship or a Christian music concert to accompany me always – as a sort of proof that God loved me. Sunday worship was where I sought my emotional “fix.”
I didn’t have the words then, but realize today that I was envious of the spiritual euphoria I thought others were living. I was less grateful – or even aware – of what God had given me. Ultimately, this set me on a road that looked beyond Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement. In the process, I carefully quarantined those Charismatic years in Carbon Freeze.
If you’re missing the Carbon Freeze cultural reference, you’ll find it in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. There, Han Solo was frozen in carbonite. Later, in Return of the Jedi, he was unfrozen.
Cracks in the carbon
When I came into the Catholic Church, my Charismatic experience seemed to be safely frozen away for life. I had found something deeply rich and satisfying through an encounter with The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit. I occasionally encountered a Charismatic Catholic and discovered there had been a Charismatic Movement within the Catholic Church since the late 1960s. But, in the parishes where I worshipped, that movement was largely absent, invisible, or had died out.
Encounters with Charismatic Catholics made me a bit uncomfortable. I had never stopped believing that the Holy Spirit moves powerfully in our lives today. But encounters with Charismatics brought back feelings I thought I’d left safely in Carbon Freeze. That carbonite remained largely intact until I read a book from the Coming Home Network.
In July 2025, I was invited to tape an episode of CHN’s program, The Journey Home. I used the opportunity to describe my journey through mainline, independent, and Charismatic churches into the Catholic Church.
At the end of the episode, the host – JonMarc Grodi – took extra time to promote a new book from CHN, Journeys Home 3: Pentecostals and Charismatics. In the book, thirteen people share their experience in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, and how their openness to the Holy Spirit led them to the Catholic Church.
I had read a few books on why Catholics should become Charismatic. But had never read the testimonies of people – perhaps like me – who had found their way to Rome by way of Azusa Street. And, the Coming Home Network had great credibility with me. I’d watched The Journey Home on EWTN for years and knew them to be orthodox Catholic Christians, ministering to seekers from all religious backgrounds.
So, I got my copy – hot off the press.
Journeys Home 3: Pentecostals and Charismatics
As I jumped into the book, it began to dawn on me that the Charismatic experience and Catholicism are not an either/or proposition. Former Foursquare pastor Kenny Burchard made this plain in his introduction. “As you read these stories, you may recognize many of your own longings—perhaps even fears about what would be lost in becoming Catholic,” he wrote. “But what these converts discovered was that they didn’t leave behind the things they loved. They found them, amplified and fulfilled, in the Catholic Church.” [i]
As I read and considered my Charismatic past, I realized that my certainty in the miraculous and mysterious of the Holy Spirit never found its way into carbon freeze. Rather, it is likely part of what made it easier for me to accept these characteristics in the Catholic Church: Chief among these was the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist and the role of six other grace-laden sacraments.
What I had quarantined years ago was my own desire to receive spiritual gifts as proof that God loved me. Journeys Home 3 reinforced what I’d slowly begun to learn through the Catholic Church: That spiritual gifts – including the more dramatic Charismatic ones – are not about me. They’re there to build up Christ’s Church.[ii]
In the book, Dr. Marcus Peter, a former Assemblies of God evangelist, reached the same conclusion. “One thing I quickly learned about the charisms upon returning to the Catholic Church is that the charisms are not for my personal benefit,” he wrote. “In fact, if Christ grants one any charismatic gifts, they are all to be used for the building up of the Body of Christ.”[iii]
This was particularly evident in the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. There I was surrounded by tens of thousands of Catholics, from all walks of life, many professing a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit. Yet it was not a “Charismatic” or “Pentecostal” conference.
What I saw there was the people of Christ’s Church, seeking to live lives animated by the Holy Spirit, embracing the gifts and fruits given to them for the service of the Church and the world. By that definition, I encountered tens of thousands of faithful who may have had no sense of labeling themselves “charismatic” … just Catholic Christians seeking to serve the Lord.
Today, I no longer worry about seeking or experiencing the dramatic as proof of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in me. Nor do I fearfully consign Holy Spirit experiences to carbon freeze. Instead, I’ve learned to live in a contentment that the Holy Spirit will empower me – perhaps in very small ways – as needed for Christ’s Church. I may be oblivious to that gifting, and it need not be dramatic or even visible to anyone else.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux expressed this idea well: “He willed to create great souls comparable to lilies and roses, but He has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God’s glances when He looks down at his feet.”[iv]
In the movie Fargo, Marge Gunderson expressed this concept nicely while encouraging her husband, Norm, who was disappointed about his painting only making a three-cent stamp:[v]
Norm: “Hautman’s blue-winged teal got the twenty-nine cent. People don’t much use the three-cent.”
Marge: “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Of course they do! Whenever they raise the postage, people need the little stamps.”
My prayer is to seek virtue and find contented use in God’s service, whether the Holy Spirit empowers me as a daisy, violet, or three-cent stamp.
[i] Burchard, Kenny. “Introduction: Pentecostal Fire and the Journey Toward Fullness.” In Journeys Home 3: Pentecostals and Charismatics, edited by JonMarc Grodi, 1–8. Zanesville, OH: The Coming Home Network International, 2025.
[ii] Catechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993, nos. 799–801.
[iii] Peter, Marcus. “From the Fire to the Fireplace.” In Journeys Home 3: Pentecostals and Charismatics, edited by JonMarc Grodi, 109–124. Zanesville, OH: The Coming Home Network International, 2025.
[iv] St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 3rd ed., trans. John Clarke, OCD, (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996), 39 of 383, ebook.
[v] Fargo, directed by Joel Coen (Beverly Hills, CA: PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 1996), closing scene.
Photo: William Warby from London, England, Han Solo in Carbonite, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: (National Eucharistic Congress group worship) – By Josh Applegate, in partnership with @eucharistic_revival.