faith story

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From FALC to the Catholic Church,

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a personal story of faith by Carol Sheck.

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To begin,

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a disclaimer.

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I've spent a lot of time thinking about how best to address

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my childhood faith and the issues therein publicly,

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with an eye to both the truth and to the feelings of the people involved,

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many of whom I love deeply.

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This is my experience,

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and I understand that everyone's experience is different.

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That said,

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I would ask you not to allow slight variations in personal experience to

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blind you completely to the issues at stake.

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Also,

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I ask the reader to consider the fact that the FALC's complete lack of formal

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doctrine renders criticism exceptionally difficult,

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as anything I say can be plausibly denied.

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Another note,

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as I wrote the first draft of this piece,

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I quickly realized that I simply could not spend a lot of time diving into the weeds

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on different theological issues.

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After all,

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most of these questions are big enough that many whole books have been written on them,

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so it's deliberate that I didn't spend a lot of time explaining or defending things here.

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If you want to learn more about a specific doctrine,

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I can probably recommend some resources or have a longer conversation

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about that particular topic.

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The abbreviation FALC in this essay refers to the First

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Apostolic Lutheran Church,

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also sometimes called Finnish Apostolic Lutheran Church.

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It is sometimes known as the Torla Group.

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The FALC and the Lestadian Lutheran Church,

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LLC, split in the early 1970s,

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after which the LLC remained joined to the SRK in Finland.

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It is small,

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with approximately 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 members,

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and primarily based in Michigan and Minnesota,

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USA.

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The presence in Finland and Sweden is extremely small.

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Members of the FALC are uncomfortable with the name

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Lestadian, but they do trace their history back to Lars Levi Lestadius

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and Juhani Radema.

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I've occasionally used the term Lestadian in this essay to

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refer to the larger movement and group of churches,

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and that does include the FALC.

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Growing up in the FALC,

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my family were regular churchgoers.

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We,

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the children, attended Sunday school and learned the Ten Commandments and the Apostles'

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Creed from Luther's small catechism,

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as well as a few Bible stories.

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Mostly,

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we were taught that our sins were forgiven in Jesus' name and precious blood,

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and that we were incredibly fortunate to have been born to Christian mothers and fathers.

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Indeed,

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our parents were the ones who had the power and the responsibility to forgive our sins.

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By reciting,

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believe all of your sins forgiven in Jesus' name and precious blood.

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Our parents and their friends did the same for each other.

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I don't remember at what age we kids began forgiving others

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in this way,

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with the understanding that this blessing wiped away all sins.

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It may have varied from family to family.

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There was a lot of emphasis on our childhood faith and on our

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Christian friends.

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Church was a comforting routine,

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and it was the basis for the majority of our social life.

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We were supposed to get the message that we were set apart special.

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The phrase,

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in the world,

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but not of the world,

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was bandied about a lot,

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as well as those I've already mentioned.

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In this community,

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Christian meant only the FALC,

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and we were supposed to understand ourselves to belong to the one true church.

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People at school weren't really Christians,

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even if they thought they were.

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They had TVs.

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They didn't have big families.

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Their moms might drink wine or wear makeup.

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They were definitely different from us.

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There weren't a lot of kids from other Lestadian traditions at my school,

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so I didn't encounter people from what we generally referred to as the splits,

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much as a child.

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Our specialness was easy enough for me to accept,

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especially since we were always still friendly with other people,

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if a bit more reserved.

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Plus,

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it was easy to see how some of the things church people said about the world were true.

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Some of my friends at school had parents who were divorced.

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Some had parents who were married,

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but obviously unhappy.

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These dreadful things happened more often to them because they didn't have living

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faith.

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Formal catechesis in the FALC

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stops at confirmation,

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roughly age 14 to 15,

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and never progresses beyond Luther's small catechism.

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Essentially,

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no doctrine is ever taught,

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and there's nowhere to go look it up.

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I'm not sure that the FALC as an organization actually has any.

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Maybe they were required to put some into their bylaws,

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or maybe not.

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Theoretically,

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we could have asked questions,

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particularly in confirmation class,

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but I think most of us had no clue what questions to ask or why.

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In my opinion,

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the huge emphasis placed on Christian friends hanging

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out with the church kids only or primarily,

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combined with a dearth of real spiritual formation,

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causes a lot of problems.

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Teenagers are not in a position to be one another's primary moral guides,

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and the assumption that kids are basically okay if they're fitting in with the Christians is

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an easy way to brush over a multitude.

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deep sin issues that can and have set into both the individuals and the

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group as a whole.

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By the time I was a young adult,

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I had an extremely shaky faith.

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Depression and purposelessness were features of my late teens and early twenties.

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I had no sense of God's love,

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no idea that God might have a plan or a will for my life.

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I didn't have this language at the time,

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but in hindsight, I was a deist.

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I believed in a creator God,

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but not a personal God.

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He was out there somewhere,

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but didn't have a vested interest in my day -to -day life.

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I had good friends in the FALC,

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and I mostly continued to maintain appearances,

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but deep patterns of sin set in in my young adulthood.

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Lestadian audiences are likely to assume from this sentence that

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I'm referring to a drinking habit.

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That is not the case,

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though I did try alcohol on a handful of occasions throughout this time period.

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Much more damaging were my deep -rooted patterns of depression,

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despair,

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purposelessness,

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unforgiveness,

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gossip,

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lust, and idolatry.

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I tried therapy and antidepressants with some amount of relief,

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though this was really fairly surface -level improvement.

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I could function.

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I could usually enjoy things,

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but I hadn't found purpose.

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At some point,

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I became attached to the idea that if I found someone to marry,

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that would solve everything.

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I would be fulfilled,

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healed, and happy.

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I started dating my husband Dylan at the age of 24,

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and we were married less than eight months later.

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There is no structure for marriage preparation or premarital counseling of any kind within

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the FALC,

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and we were radically underprepared for marriage.

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We also essentially never discussed our religious beliefs prior to marriage,

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except for one conversation in which we agreed that neither of us thought it possible that

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the FALC was the only group who would go to heaven.

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We were carried in on the current of our overwhelming feelings for each other.

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Our oldest daughter was born 11 months after our wedding.

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We had a very tumultuous first year of marriage,

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emotionally speaking,

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with very little steadiness.

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In hindsight,

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I was codependent and had made an idol of my husband.

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I was looking to him to prove to me that I was loved,

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lovable, worthy,

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and I would take any opportunity to assume that he did not in fact love me.

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I,

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in turn, had very little love to give.

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Everything was about getting what I needed instead of about serving and giving.

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Something began to shift when I had my daughter,

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though certainly not overnight.

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I had a real sense of the fact that as a mother,

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the carefree part of my life was behind me,

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but this didn't bother me.

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Instead,

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I realized that being with my baby was fulfilling in a way I'd never known before.

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Over time,

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questions began to build about what I believed about God,

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what my church really taught,

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and whether what it really taught was true.

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My first couple years of motherhood were simultaneously

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joyful,

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sanctifying,

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and really lonely.

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I wasn't around friends or other moms all that much,

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partly because the pandemic hit right around my oldest daughter's first birthday.

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I found plenty of time to consume a lot of podcasts and

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other content during this time.

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In between raising my daughter,

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having my son,

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still working as an ICU and then a hospice nurse,

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and thankfully growing as a wife and as a person.

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I followed a handful of people online who talked

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about their Christian faith in a way that was so foreign to me.

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They talked about a relationship with God.

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They talked about doing the will of God.

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They talked about loving Jesus in a personal way that I did not understand.

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They studied the word of God,

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also something I'd never done.

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I started to really yearn for these things,

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though I often genuinely could not understand what they were or how to get them.

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How did one,

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for example,

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build a real relationship with Christ or begin to understand what his will was?

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I bought a Bible that wasn't King James Version,

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a big no -no in the FALC.

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I found a Bible in a Year reading plan to follow.

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I knew I wasn't really living my faith,

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and I was starting to really,

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genuinely want to.

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I told no one about any of this.

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I began spending time every morning before my kids got up in God's

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Word. During the same time period,

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I was working part -time as a hospice nurse for a Christian hospice and home health company.

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Certainly not every employee and not every patient publicly

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declared their Christian faith,

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but a lot did.

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My dying patients and the compassionate,

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loving nurses who cared for them were a beautiful witness to me.

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Clearly,

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they had a real faith that animated their lives and their souls.

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Though this time period,

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2021 to 2022,

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was very much a time of strengthening faith and real growth in my life,

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in hindsight, I still had no idea how much I didn't know.

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Things that now seem like very basic knowledge to me had never

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been told to me and I'd never asked.

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For example,

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I hadn't known that the editors of the ESV Student Study Bible I'd been

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reading have a strong Calvinist bias.

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I didn't know who John Calvin was.

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I didn't know the extent of the denominational differences in Christianity

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or why those differences exist.

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I didn't know that the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches each

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claimed to be the church founded by Christ himself.

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I didn't know that the

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credo -baptist influencers I was following subscribed to a,

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historically speaking,

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relatively new doctrine.

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I only knew that my conscience kept on telling me more

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and more strongly that something wasn't right with the FALC.

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I was bothered especially by the exclusivity in what I saw as a

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culture of spiritual pride.

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I didn't bring my concerns to anyone.

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I felt that I couldn't possibly.

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It's hard to explain the usual reaction of the FALC members to

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those who ask challenging questions,

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or to those who want to live their faith too loudly or talk about Jesus a

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lot. A lot of fear and defensiveness is often involved,

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even when someone says something as simple as,

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I'm really struggling with some stuff I'm reading in the Bible.

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Very, very few in the FALC are equipped to handle questions about their faith

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with calm curiosity.

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Maybe I can't really describe it in a way that's charitable to

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those involved.

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I've been guilty of it myself.

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Suffice to say,

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I had no reason to believe that anyone in my life would receive my questions or my

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journey well.

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As my conscience grew heavier and heavier,

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I started finding other local pastors' sermons to listen to online.

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Again,

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not understanding different denominations,

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I was grasping fairly randomly.

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I found a local independent fundamental Baptist church whose pastor preached expositionally,

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verse by verse.

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This seemed like a marvelous thing to me to further enrich my

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Bible study, and I started listening to some of his work.

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I'd been dragging my feet all this time about bringing any of

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my faith life or concerns to my husband.

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He did know that I read the Bible.

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One night I just did it.

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I told him I've got some real concerns about our church.

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He heard me out calmly and steadily.

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I told him about how the Gospel of John says over and over that all

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who come to Christ will be saved,

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that I didn't understand how belonging to this one tiny church

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group could possibly be essential for salvation,

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and that I didn't understand how they all claimed to have authority to forgive

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one another's sins.

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I didn't understand why a group who claimed to be the one true

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church wasn't trying to bring the whole world to Christ,

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or do more charity outside the tiny group,

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or get their members to dive into their Bibles and try to grow in their faith.

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He had also never really read the Bible,

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but he started after that in the Gospel of John.

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We continued to have many conversations about what he was reading.

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I shared some of the sermons I was listening to with him as well.

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We decided we needed to meet with a minister from the FALC,

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and we reached out to the pastor of the local IFB church as well.

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I won't try to recount the conversation with the FALC minister in too much

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detail for two reasons.

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One,

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when we met,

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I think everyone fully understood it to be a private conversation,

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and I want to respect that.

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Two,

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I'm afraid I'll misquote or misremember.

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This was an incredibly emotional and stressful time in my life for a few reasons,

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and my memories of the time are not as sharp as I'd like.

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The gist of the conversation is this.

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When we invited him over,

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I was already becoming deeply distraught over my concerns about the FALC.

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I felt deeply convicted that the Bible did not support the blessing the

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way the FALC used it.

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I did not think that people could forgive one another's sins.

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I did not think it possible that the FALC could be the one true church.

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I also had become totally convinced that I could not stay

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and raise my children in a church with which I radically disagreed.

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I wanted the minister to clarify the FALC's positions in a

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way that either showed I'd misunderstood what I'd been hearing my whole life,

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or assuaged my conscience enough for me to stay.

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Neither of those things happened.

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I left the conversation understanding that the FALC does in fact consider

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itself to be the one true church,

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and that it considers its blessing to be essential for salvation,

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for having one's sins forgiven.

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These things were completely irreconcilable to me.

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I knew I'd leave,

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though I didn't yet know when.

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We met with the local IFB pastor as well and attended

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his church one Sunday.

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They were incredibly welcoming,

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charitable people.

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I think,

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in hindsight, that we just needed someone to make us feel less alone and less crazy.

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Certainly under his Baptist theology,

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we were doing the right thing by planning to leave,

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though he wasn't at all the type to broadly condemn Lutherans.

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All of us took the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura as a given and

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our reading of scripture wasn't backing up what the FALC was preaching.

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In March of 2023,

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we told our families and friends that we were leaving the FALC.

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It was an emotional time for us as well as for many of our

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loved ones.

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Again,

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I prefer not to share details of highly personal conversations.

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I do think some of the common themes to these conversations are

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worthy of closer examination,

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but that's beyond the scope of this essay.

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We were carried through it mostly on the strength of our conviction that we were doing the right thing

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and that this was going to enable us to really live for the Lord.

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It was a time of major upheaval.

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within most of our relationships,

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which is the standard experience for those who leave.

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We did our best to stress that we were not leaving out of

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hostility to those within the FALC,

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and I'm glad we did.

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It didn't prevent deep changes to lifelong friendships,

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but in many cases it did prevent a final rupture.

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I'm grateful to have maintained some of those relationships,

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though they look very different now.

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We were church shopping at this point.

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In hindsight,

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the logical inconsistencies within modern Protestantism were starting to

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show already.

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We had left the FALC because we thought it was wrong.

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Therefore, we had to find a church that was right,

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right? But we also knew that under sola scriptura,

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no one church can realistically claim to be the one true church.

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It doesn't follow that any one Protestant denomination has a unique

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claim to the promises of the kingdom of God.

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The effect of this approach is that we were trying to magically retrofit a

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local church to our interpretation of the scriptures.

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I was specifically trying to avoid the Reformed or Calvinist ones,

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since I did,

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and still do,

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strenuously object to quite a few of their doctrines.

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We wound up having phone calls and meetings with some local pastors,

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getting their takes on some cherry -picked doctrines that were,

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for the moment,

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of great import to me.

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We wound up at a local evangelical covenant

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church.

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It ticked some basic boxes.

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Not Calvinist.

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Lots of young families.

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Kids primarily attended the service instead of being shunted elsewhere.

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I started attending a ladies' Bible study.

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I was still consuming a great deal of Christian books and content

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and wanting so much to grow in my faith.

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I've always enjoyed reading and learning,

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and one of the things I found deeply bothersome in the FALC was the lack of means to have

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an intellectual faith.

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I had come to believe that God wants us to use all of our faculties,

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including our intellects,

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to follow and know him instead of having a compartmentalized faith.

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Some of what I was reading challenged me and opened my eyes to

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how little I really knew and how many questions I hadn't known to ask as

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we were discerning whether to leave the FALC.

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For example,

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when I read about the Reformers,

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I realized that none of them had a theology like mine.

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Why couldn't I find a Reformer who thought like me?

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Wasn't I just reading the Bible for what it really said?

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I also learned that one of the major topics of disagreement between the Reformers was

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the role of Holy Communion.

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I hadn't thought to ask a single question about Communion.

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Actually,

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it was beginning to strike me as very odd that we only received quarterly at our evangelical

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church.

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Also,

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our church's adult baptism service was upcoming,

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and I didn't know if I should get baptized again.

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At first,

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I thought I should, as a public declaration of my new life of faith.

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Certainly,

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a lot of the people I was listening and talking to at that time thought so.

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My husband asked gentle questions that made me pause and continue to think and pray about

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whether to be rebaptized.

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Had our baptisms actually been wrong?

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Had people actually been baptizing babies since Jesus' time?

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Why? Also,

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why couldn't our church definitively tell me one way or the other?

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They accepted both infant and believer's baptisms.

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I was starting to feel crushed under the weight of how little

18:06

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I knew and understood.

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I knew I loved Jesus.

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I believed he loved me and had died for me.

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I knew I wanted my faith life to be real and meaningful.

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I couldn't think of anything more important to focus my life around.

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I also knew I believed in real truth.

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That was the whole point,

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and it was worth giving anything for.

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There had to be a right way.

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I happened to follow an Instagram account at the time of a woman

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who was an Eastern Orthodox Christian.

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That wasn't even what her content was about,

18:35

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but she talked about it and took questions about it from time to time,

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and I was intrigued.

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She mentioned once that Eastern Orthodox don't believe in sola scriptura.

18:42

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I was floored.

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Another time,

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she stated that the Orthodox Church is the church founded by our Lord himself.

18:48

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I was flummoxed.

18:49

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Was this seriously a real claim people made?

18:52

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Wasn't the church just the worldwide body of believers?

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So many questions were opening up for me.

18:58

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I was absolutely frantic in my content consumption at this point.

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I was listening to many podcasts about Orthodoxy,

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and a lot of what they were saying was starting to make so much sense to me.

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I still had questions,

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though, especially since the Orthodox sometimes seemed to be almost anti -Western

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and I couldn't get there.

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I was bringing a lot of this to my husband.

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He was patiently hearing me out and agreeing on some points,

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but he was hesitant.

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Also,

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we were a solid hour from an Orthodox church.

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One day it occurred to me.

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I had never at any point in my life tried to learn what Catholics

19:30

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really believe.

19:31

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Everything I'd ever heard about Catholicism was from the perspective of

19:35

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Protestants or the Orthodox,

19:36

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and it was primarily negative.

19:38

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As I'd soon come to learn,

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it was also largely nonsense.

19:40

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I started to dip my toes into Catholic doctrine.

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I had happened upon an interview between Matt Fradd and Live Action's

19:48

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Lila Rose, who I'd heard of from her pro -life work,

19:51

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on the topic of Lila's conversion to Catholicism.

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This was the first time I'd ever heard of someone choosing Catholicism as an adult.

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I continued to

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explore Catholicism online and soon heard of the apologist Trent Horn and the theologian

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Scott Hahn.

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Both men were instrumental to our conversion as they explained key

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doctrines in a way that made the truth of the Catholic faith plain.

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Scott Hahn's book Rome Sweet Home deserves a specific mention

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here.

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I read it and immediately passed it to my husband.

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We both consider that book to have had a major role in our conversion for a couple

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of reasons.

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First, the depth and breadth of Hahn's Bible knowledge is so vast,

20:27

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it became very obvious to me that I and most laypeople could never hope for

20:31

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that level of scholarship.

20:32

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To be clear,

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I don't necessarily mean that I came to believe that Scott Hahn has earned the right to tell

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people which Christian tradition is correct through the extent of his knowledge.

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I merely came to see very clearly that I'd been incredibly prideful to think

20:46

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that I had the ability to interpret scripture to its fullest extent on my own.

20:50

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Scott Hahn was asking and exploring questions about scripture on a level I'd never

20:54

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been capable of.

20:55

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The underlying assumptions behind sola scriptura were really beginning

20:59

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to fall apart for me.

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Second,

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the way Hahn explores and explains some key doctrines just made them click for us

21:06

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in a way that cannot be unclicked,

21:08

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so to speak.

21:09

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For example,

21:10

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he does a really wonderful job laying out the way the old covenant is fulfilled in

21:14

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the new, and that the new Israel is the Catholic Church,

21:17

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to which all are called.

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The way the papacy is prefigured in the Old Testament is another great example.

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It's beyond the scope of this essay,

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again, to dive into every single Catholic doctrine that I came to accept and understand during

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