Carlos - Catholic to Evangelical Pastor

I have been an evangelical pastor for more than 20 years and now I serve on the council of an evangelical church as well as being an editor of the magazine “En la Calle Recta”.

The word evangelical was for me, from childhood, a heretical word the same as the word Protestant.

I was born in 1955, in a home with a Roman Catholic tradition like most Spaniards. My parents took me to be baptized shortly after I was born. When I was eight years old, I received my first communion, blindly and happily trusting that God was enclosed in that little consecrated wafer that he was bringing to my mouth. I watched with great fear of not biting God, but simply waiting to swallow that bread without suffocating.

The joy of having God "inside" of me was soon forgotten and I dedicated myself to knowing everything that the world offers to an adolescent. Until he was 16 years old, he went to mass every day, being one of the few students at the Salesian school who still attended this celebration. From then on, all my classmates and I stopped going to church because it gave us absolutely nothing.

I remember on one occasion shortly after leaving school visiting a Roman Catholic temple to resume Christian life and fulfill all the commandments, but the good intention lasted 24 hours. I told myself that I was a good person, that God was my “compadre” and that therefore he understood that I did not fulfill all the requirements of the commandments.

I continued to be a rogue until the day I got married. That day I set foot in a church again. But only that day. My life and that of my wife were doomed to the most resounding marital failure until one day an “evangelical” challenged me to read the Bible. How is it that as a Catholic I had not read the entire Bible, but only some sacred stories and some of the gospels? Then I discovered that there were books like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes full of rich wisdom for everyone, or epistles like James' that says things so clearly that the dumbest can understand them.

It was then, when at the age of 27, reading the Bible by myself in a hotel, God spoke to me powerfully through his Word. I was reading Psalm 50 when a few verses touched my heart deeply.

But to the bad one God said:

What do you have to talk about my laws,

And what to take my pact in your mouth?

For you hate correction

And you throw my words behind you.

If you saw the thief, you ran with him,

And with adulterers it was your part.

Your mouth got in bad,

And your tongue made up deception.

You sat down and spoke against your brother;

You infamy your mother's son.

These things you did, and I have kept silent;

You thought that I would really be like you;

But I will rebuke you, and put them in front of your eyes.

God made a portrait of my life with those words. I was that bad guy you're talking about. And he had been silent until then. He chided me in such a way that I fell to my knees on the hotel floor, crying for hours. God could have destroyed me and He hadn't. He had mercy on me. From that moment I knew that it belonged to him. That he loved me out of sheer grace. And I understood the perfect value of all the work of salvation in Christ on my behalf.

[Source: https://www.enlacallerecta.es/getuigenissen/testimonios-carlos]