Douglasville, GA

Click here to find a team or start one of your own!

This report comes to us from team leader Jeremy with our team in Douglasville, GA:

I’d like to highlight a few of the longer conversations we got to participate in together.
The first extended conversation was with a young woman named Saturn who was collecting signatures to add a Democratic Socialist candidate to the presidential ballot. She declined a Rosary, but told us that she left a local evangelical church because she was a lesbian and experienced trauma over their attempts at “conversion therapy.” She added that her Italian ancestors were Catholic and her mom had her christened as a baby. Since she had the impression that the Church was more welcoming to LGBT people, she said that if she were to return to Christianity it would be in the Catholic Church. I left her with some additional reasons why she should do this! As she walked away I said to my companions: “People like her are exactly why I wanted to start this.”

Later her colleague and friend came over to ask for our signature, not knowing we had talked with Saturn. This young woman was the daughter of the pastor of this same evangelical church, but had walked away from Christianity and was in the process of converting to Islam, which surprised me. I could discern that she really did not understand Islam and asked her how this fit with her political passions. Ironically, she said that church and state should be completely separated, and when I attempt to explain how Islam teaches the opposite and contrast that with Jesus’ renunciation of an earthly kingdom when Peter tried to protect him, she got agitated and said she wasn’t there to argue religion (but made sure she added that we have no idea what Jesus actually said or did because Paul wrote the Gospels, not the original Apostles!). While she was talking I thought about how the Catholic Church has some of things that she finds attractive about Islam yet still gives her Jesus, but she didn’t stick around long enough for me to share.

After having a very meaningful conversation with a guy from Orange Theory who was trying to sign up people for memberships – a non-practicing Protestant who was open to hearing about the Catholic Church – the last long conversation we had was with a young man – Denzel – who refused the rosary because he instead wears an Ankh, which he showed us.

Praised be Jesus Christ!