This ministry has a specific shape because its founder grew up on one side of the bridge, built a professional life in the middle of it, and eventually came to believe that neither side can afford to stay where it is. What follows is personal, not because theology is a matter of personal experience, but because the story matters to why this project exists.
Raised BaptistI was raised Baptist, educated in Baptist universities, and formed by the theological culture that those institutions produced. Like most Protestants in that tradition, I absorbed a set of assumptions about Catholicism almost without noticing. That Catholics worship Mary. That they believe works save them. That the pope is treated as infallible in a way that borders on idolatry. That the Mass is a superstitious re-sacrifice of Christ. That they are not quite, or not fully, Christian.
These assumptions were reinforced, as assumptions often are, by humor and by distance. We joked about the things we did not understand. We did not read the sources.
The Academic TurnAcademic theology changed that. In graduate school I took a course on justification, and we were assigned the Catholic position — not a Protestant summary of it, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church in its own words. I opened the book prepared to disagree with almost everything in it. Instead I found that I agreed with almost everything in it.
That surprised me enough that I bought the Catechism and spent a year reading the entire thing, marking points of disagreement as I went. When I finished, I thought it was the best single work of theology I had ever read outside of Scripture itself — coherent, scripturally grounded, historically rooted, and pastorally serious in ways I had not expected. The disagreements were real, but they were smaller, fewer, and stranger than I had been taught.
The Prayer That Healed MeAt the same time, I had purchased the Liturgy of the Hours, the Catholic Church's ancient daily cycle of prayer built almost entirely around the Psalms. I had started it casually. I did not expect what happened next.
My brother died. My soul was crushed and I had nothing left to say to God. I had spent decades waking up early in the morning to read and pray, and now I could not form the words. For two weeks I simply made myself say the Apostles' Creed aloud, then the Lord's Prayer, then the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer. And then I forced myself back into the Liturgy of the Hours, praying the Psalms with the whole Church across the world.
Over the years that followed, praying the Psalms that way healed my soul. The ancient words carried me when I could not carry myself. I discovered, in the most concrete way possible, that the Catholic Church's liturgical tradition is not an accretion on top of the gospel but a gift for precisely the moments when the gospel needs to be prayed through a body that can no longer find its own voice.
Where I Stand NowI still attend a Protestant church. I have led and preached in congregations of thousands of people. I see the extraordinary strengths of the Protestant world — the passion for Scripture, the evangelistic seriousness, the pastoral accessibility, the willingness to adapt to reach new generations. I owe my faith to Protestant teachers and I am not leaving that world.
But I also now teach as an adjunct professor at a Catholic university. And intellectually, I align with the Catholic view more than with any other position I have held. The Catholic tradition has the historical depth, the doctrinal stability, and — most importantly to me — the authority that Protestantism by its own founding principle of sola scriptura cannot finally have. When everyone is their own interpreter of Scripture, the tradition fragments. I can see this happening in my own lifetime, and I cannot unsee the structural cracks in the Protestant framework once I have recognized them.
This is not a conversion story. It is a story of someone who has spent a long time on both sides, and who believes — not as a slogan, but as a conclusion — that they will ultimately meet each other in the end.
Why Bristol BridgeThe name comes from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, a place deeply meaningful to my wife and me. But the name also carries the theological claim: a bridge connects two sides of a gorge that cannot otherwise meet. It does not make them one. It allows them to cross.
I suspect that the vast majority of fights and struggles between the two traditions are not, finally, theological disagreements. They are misunderstandings. There are real differences — Bristol Bridge takes them seriously — but once the caricatures are cleared and the traditions are allowed to speak in their own voices, what remains is a conversation between family members who have been estranged for far too long.
Protestants and Catholics sometimes treat each other worse than they treat almost anyone else. Like the Jews and Samaritans of the New Testament, the bitterness is sharpest among those closest in shared inheritance. The ministry of Bristol Bridge is, in the smallest possible sense, the same ministry as the Samaritan woman's at the well — the ministry of being the one who finally gets to talk to the other side.
My goal is one percent closer to unity by the time I die. It is a small goal. It is a humble goal. And if it is reached, it will have been worth the whole of a life's work.