Although it was 9:30 p.m., Stephanie Coleman remembered the night of Aug. 27, 2023 clear as day.

It was her first time at Gahanna St. Matthew the Apostle Catholic Church. She stopped by the church earlier that evening to attend a class about becoming Catholic, which she saw advertised on the parish website. 

Coleman, who is a social worker serving homeless youth in Columbus, at the time could be considered somewhat curious about the Catholic faith, but she said she had no intention of converting. All of that changed the moment she left the church later that evening.

“I remember walking out of that first session like on fire,” she said. “I was ecstatic. It was 9:30, almost 10, time to go to bed, and I could have run a marathon. I felt amazing because I felt like I had found something. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that I had found something.”

Coleman did not know it, but she was attending the first Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA) class for adults preparing to receive the sacraments of initiation in the Catholic Church at Easter.

She said she simply wanted to know more about Catholicism. The first OCIA class covered the curriculum and core beliefs of the Catholic faith, she said, and she was quite surprised by what she learned.

“It was everything that I had ever wanted to hear in a religious institution ever,” Coleman said.

“It was, ‘We’re going to study. We’re going to go back to the beginning. We’re going to understand what our faith is. We’re going to understand what God wants from us. We value Scripture and Tradition and prayer, and Jesus Christ – the Holy Trinity.’”

Coleman, who is from Columbus, was baptized at age 12 at Eastland Christian Church in Columbus. She attended various Protestant churches growing up. 

Her family attended Christmas and Easter services at a Southern Baptist church. In high school, she participated in a Baptist church youth group.

Coleman has a grandmother who was Methodist and a grandfather who was raised Catholic. Her grandparents left their faiths and stopped going to church for several years. When they began attending services again, they went to a Southern Baptist church.

Prior to her first OCIA class, Coleman and her friends attended Protestant churches. Coleman said she stopped going to church because she was discouraged.

“We just weren’t finding what we needed in church, so we started a Bible study, but we’ve been going through a lot of Paul’s letters, and he’s essentially telling all these churches a lot about what’s going on today,” she said.

“Nothing’s really changed honestly. He’s telling people, ‘You need to get along. You need to be of one mind. You need to stop fighting. You need to stop bickering, and we need to be love.’”

At Bible study one evening, the group discussed inspired texts and debated whether divine inspiration ceased after the Bible was written. Coleman said the conversation led to a discussion about the “lost books of the Bible,” and she discovered that the Catholic Bible has seven additional books.

Coleman downloaded the Catholic Bible on her phone that night and began delving into the books. She first read the Book of Tobit, which is removed from Protestant Bibles, and said it was an answered prayer.

The book is about a righteous Jew, Tobit, who is blind and in exile in Nineveh, and Sarah, a young woman in Media who lost seven husbands, each killed on his wedding night by a demon. God sends the angel Raphael, in disguise, to help them. Tobit’s son, Tobias, goes with Raphael to Media, binds the demon and marries Sarah.

“It was quite beautiful to me because that’s what I had been struggling with for the longest time anyway,” she said of her history with relationships. “If you build it for Him and you just do it by faith, it doesn’t need to make sense and He’ll bless you, so it was beautiful, and that’s all I needed to hear.”

While familiarizing herself with the Catholic Bible, Coleman had a conversation with her brother and his fiancée later that same week, which led her a step closer to the Catholic Church.

At dinner one evening, her brother’s fiancée, who comes from a Catholic family, brought up how their wedding Mass would go. She was under the impression that her fiancé and his family were Catholic. She was surprised when Coleman revealed that they were not.

Coleman said her brother did not recognize the difference between Christian and Catholic, so he told his fiancée that they were Catholic. Learning this was false, the bride-to-be realized there would be implications for her wedding Mass.

Coleman, trying to ease the situation, said she would find out what it takes to become Catholic with her brother before the wedding.

“I said, ‘I’m going to look into what it’s going to take to be Catholic,’ she said. “‘We’re going to figure this out, and you want to be Catholic? I’ll do it with you’ because, I didn’t tell them, but I was already looking into it. I was already reading the Catholic Bible.”

Coleman’s work colleague mentioned that he attended a wedding at St. Matthew, and her brother’s fiancée’s family lived in the Gahanna area and attended Mass there. So, when Coleman learned the church was offering a class on Catholicism that Sunday, she decided to check it out.

“I went inside twice,” she recounted. “It was under construction at the time, so all the lights were turned off, and there were statues, and it was a little eerie to be honest. I didn’t know where I was going.

“Some things were locked, and there was no sign of a human being anywhere, and so, then I finally walk outside, and I see this older couple walking up, and I decide to wait and follow them in.”

Unbeknownst to the couple, they led Coleman downstairs to a room that changed the trajectory of her life. After the first class, Coleman began a nine-month journey into full communion with the Catholic Church, which will culminate at the Easter Vigil this year.

“I am happy with how our candidates and catechumens are entering into the season of Lent to prepare for the Easter sacraments,” said Father Ted Sill, the pastor of St. Matthew. “They are an inspiration to our entire parish.

“I am blessed to have a great director, Jen Cabe, and her team of volunteers who are so committed to helping them in their journey.”

Coleman’s journey through OCIA transformed several of her previous ways of thinking and beliefs, including her idea of marriage.

Prior to OCIA, she had vowed never to get married because every marriage she knew ended in divorce, was violent or aggressive and did not glorify God, she said. Learning about the sacrament of marriage in OCIA and witnessing it lived out in the Catholic Church changed her heart.

“We had a week where we went over the Catholic family and marriage, and it was describing Catholic family in a way where, to me, it sounded like an absolute unicorn,” she said. “It was this fictitious mystical animal that didn’t exist.

“I wouldn’t have believed this to be true if I hadn’t started meeting Catholic families that were inviting me into their homes as I was getting to understand this faith more – people were inviting me into their homes and teaching me about their family and talking to me about their Catholic history. 

“I was getting invited to these places with these Catholic families, and I was seeing what I had read in (OCIA) on the paper come to life.”

Coleman was invited to attend Mass with Catholics, including one of her colleagues’ families, as well as families at St. Matthew. She was amazed that people who did not know her would welcome her into their family.

She said it was beautiful to witness them help each other to be holy, build one another up and spouses help each other achieve salvation. She understood how Christ designed marriage, and she saw the sacrament in a new light.

“It started a healing process that I’m still working through just because of where I’ve come from, but it’s this hopeful healing process that the life that I thought was meant for me doesn’t need to be meant for me,” she said.

“It could be something that does glorify God, and it can be something beautiful and uplifting and supportive and encouraging to other people. It doesn’t have to be the trauma and the craziness that I’ve come from.”

She discovered parallels between Scripture’s description of the bride and bridegroom and how it is lived out in each Catholic family, the domestic church.

Coleman appreciated and welcomed the unity of the Catholic Church. While various Catholic churches are located throughout the world, they are united and celebrate the same sacrifice.

“That was part of the reason why I was struggling so much in the Protestant churches because I would go to these churches and I wouldn’t see Christ anywhere,” Coleman said. “There wasn’t any uniformity. There wasn’t this centralized goal of wanting to glorify or worship God; it was something else depending on where you went.

“Through these families and going through the classes, it’s starting to make me see … the verbiage that’s used in the Scriptures for the bride and the bridegroom from the beginning all the way to the end and see the structure of how God wants the family to be.” 

Coleman began attending Mass the week after starting OCIA. She described her first Mass as a “stimulus overload.” 

Once she became more familiar with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, Coleman said she could understand what was happening. She said she found in the Mass what she had been searching for.

It was when “I got to watch what was happening in Mass and actually see it and pay attention to it and observe it where it clicked,” she said. “This entire time I’ve been looking for God in the church. I’ve been looking for Christ, and He’s been here the whole time, so it was beautiful.”

Coleman was emotional, she said, watching Christ offer Himself as a sacrifice on the altar. She said that reinforced the “magnitude” of Christ’s sacrifice and that it is the “linchpin of history.”

Coleman said she believes many Protestants are struggling and seeking to find truth, but a negative view of the Catholic Church prevents them from discovering it. Her journey through OCIA heightened her sense of a need for unity among Christians.

The disconnect between “the Catholic tradition and the Protestant world needs to end,” Coleman said, or there needs to be “some type of resolution.” She said truth is found in the Catholic Church.

“The Catholic faith has their beliefs from the beginning, and it will not change no matter where you go,” she said. “For that to be so universal, in contrast to all the differences and the division that’s out there and the lack of truth, and the fact that even in the midst of a church on every corner people are still struggling with truth, that just kind of seals it for me. 

“You can put a building up anywhere you want to, but if what people are teaching isn’t true, if it isn’t Christ, then it will never matter.”