100PercentCatholic January 23, 2011 For this entire recording as well as other free downloads, please visit www.biblechristiansociety.com Father Gray Bean is a former Baptist minister who tells his story of how he found his way home to the Catholic … [More]

100PercentCatholic January 23, 2011 For this entire recording as well as other free downloads, please visit www.biblechristiansociety.com Father Gray Bean is a former Baptist minister who tells his story of how he found his way home to the Catholic faith and later became a priest. He talks about the reasons he decided to leave the Baptist faith and join the Catholic Church. One of those reasons is that there is no central authority in any Protestant churches. Nobody has the authority to stop someone else from branching off and forming their own denomination that believes something completely different from what you believe. Everyone claims to pray to the Holy Spirit for guidance when reading the bible, yet everyone believes something different as we now have tens of thousands of different Christian denominations. He came to the realization that either this method of praying to the Holy Spirit and being lead to all truths does not work, or the Holy Spirit is seriously schizophrenic. The faith and belief of the people in his congregation that trusted him was dependent on what side of the bed he got up on that day. That was just too much pressure for him to handle. He realized that there had to be an authority higher than himself. The Baptist denomination he belonged to believed that once you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, this salvation cannot be lost. But even when he was a minister, he did not believe this. So when he would show the leaders of his church passages from the bible that clearly states that you can lose your salvation, they would show him a couple of passages that seemed to suggest that you couldn't. This led him to an interesting thought. Who has the authority to interpret the bible? As he continued to study, he found out that the bible was a Catholic book and without any Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church there would be no bible. He also studied the earliest Christian writings and found out how Catholic all of their teachings were. For example, Saint Ignatius wrote in the year 110 AD things such as "Wherever the Bishop appears, there let the multitude of the people be; just as where Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church." He found that the early church has bishops, priests, and the Eucharist. He was convinced that the early Christian church was indeed Catholic. Father Bean wanted to become Catholic, but this was something very hard for him to do. After all, he had a job as a Baptist minister and had people that trusted him and looked up to him. He made many excuses why he could not become Catholic. One excuse was this whole idea of the Eucharist. As a non-Catholic, he saw the practice of kneeling before a piece of bread as very strange. So he prayed for God to show him the truth. After going to a Eucharistic chapel for several months and praying, he was about to give up. So he told God that unless God can show him some kind of proof that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, Father Bean would give up on this venture. After hours of prayer, something in the back of his head told him to pick up the bible. He opened his bible randomly and their on the page was John Chapter 6, "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you." He could not believe that this was actually in the bible. This was the final proof that he needed to convince him that it was time to become Catholic. For more on this central authority that is missing from all Protestant churches, please read my discussion article entitled Is The Bible The Only Authority You Need? http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid... View all of my discussion articles on my Facebook page at 100percentcatholic.com