From ‘idolatry’ to the Eucharist, John Bergsma recounts his path to the Church

Jan 2, 2026 / 18:05 pm

John Bergsma grew up convinced that the Catholic Mass was not merely mistaken but “abominable idolatry.”

Speaking Jan. 2 to thousands of college students and young adults at SEEK 2026 in Columbus, Ohio, the former Calvinist pastor described how that belief slowly unraveled, leading him into the Catholic Church. Some 26,000 attendees have gathered through Jan. 5 in Columbus, Denver, and Fort Worth, Texas, for the SEEK 2026 conference organized by FOCUS.

Bergsma, a senior biblical scholar at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, titled his talk “Mass Conversion: How I Discovered the Eucharist and the Catholic Church.” His story, he said, begins in a Dutch Calvinist upbringing that was “ethnically Dutch, theologically Protestant,” rooted in the teachings of John Calvin.

“In our doctrinal documents, there was a section on what we rejected,” Bergsma said. “And in particular, we rejected the Catholic Mass.”

He explained that he was taught Catholics committed idolatry by worshipping bread and wine as God. “If you worship the creature as the Creator,” he said, “that is idolatry.”

Following in the footsteps of his father, a U.S. Navy chaplain, Bergsma became a Protestant pastor in western Michigan in his early 20s. But it was there, he told the SEEK audience, that cracks began to form in the theological framework he had always defended — especially the Reformation principle of sola fide, or salvation by faith alone. 

While participating in door-to-door evangelization with an older pastor, Bergsma used a popular method known as “the Roman Road,” a series of biblical verses meant to present salvation through faith alone. 

One afternoon, the men visited a woman who welcomed them into her apartment and responded to their message positively. They prayed with her, and Bergsma recalled feeling a “real sense of peace and the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

Then, he said, the conversation took an unexpected turn.

“My mentor asked her, ‘If you go out tomorrow, rob a bank, and skip town, will you still go to heaven?” Bergsma recounted.

When the woman hesitated and answered no, the pastor corrected her. According to the logic of salvation by faith alone, he insisted, she would still be saved — “once saved, always saved.”

“At that moment, I agreed with the woman,” Bergsma said.

Scripture immediately came to mind, he explained, including Christ’s warning that “not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven,” and Jesus’ call to take up the cross daily. “It didn’t fit,” he said.

The encounter forced Bergsma to confront what he actually meant by “faith alone.” After four years of study — examining Scripture, Protestant confessions, and the Catholic catechism — he concluded that either sola fide was incorrect, or it required so many qualifications that it ultimately converged with the Catholic understanding of salvation.

Bergsma’s doubts deepened as he wrestled with sola scriptura, the belief that Scripture alone serves as the ultimate authority for Christians. While ministering in a single neighborhood, he observed at least six struggling Protestant congregations, all professing the same principle but disagreeing on core teachings ranging from baptism and the Eucharist to marriage and morality.

A decisive shift came when a Catholic graduate student encouraged him to read the writings of the early Church Fathers. Bergsma began with St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of the Apostle John, whose letters spoke unmistakably of episcopal authority and the Eucharist as “the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ.”

“There was no symbolic way around that,” Bergsma said.

After months of resistance, he entered the Catholic Church in February 2001. Now a Catholic theologian addressing SEEK, Bergsma said his journey ultimately hinged on the Eucharist — the doctrine he had once condemned. His testimony resonated with the conference’s young adult audience, many of whom are navigating questions of faith, authority, and conversion.

“There’s a lot of young people who are on the back end of a cultural disaster and growing up in cultural chaos,” Bergsma said after his keynote address. “They’re looking for something solid and lasting that can give them hope for the future.”

Referencing the number of young converts in various dioceses across the country, he added: “They’re coming back to the Catholic Church specifically because the Church has remained steady during that whole time, and that’s a real testament that we’re on the right track.”

“We’re getting a revival of interest in tradition and in something stable amid the instability and chaos of the modern world,” Bergsma said. “Young people are saying, ‘I want to get married. I want to have a family. I want to have a future. So, what am I going to build on?’”

The answer to that question, Bergsma emphasized in reflecting on his own journey of conversion, is the Catholic Church.