Steve Deace Protestant minister turned Catholic apologist

On a recent special episode of “The Steve Deace Show,” Steve, a devout evangelical, interviewed former Protestant pastor turned Catholic apologist Keith Nester about his decision to convert to Catholicism.

In this fascinating and educational interview, Steve and Keith dive headfirst into the turbulent waters of the core issues that separate Catholics and Protestants with openness and sincerity.

The son of a United Methodist pastor, Keith gave his heart to Jesus at church camp when he was just 11 years old. Catholicism wasn’t even something on his radar until his young adulthood, when he got the opportunity to serve as a youth pastor at a small church in Iowa. The youth program started with just 12 children, but two years later, it had grown to 250. Many of these children’s parents then began coming to the church, and the congregation exploded.

Most of these new congregants, however, were Catholics. “They were coming over to our church going, ‘This is the greatest thing ever. I’ve never seen anything like it before. We’re learning about Jesus here,”’ says Keith.

This engrained the idea that Catholics “don’t know anything about the Bible” into his mind as he began his ministry as a Protestant pastor.

But this mindset started to unravel soon after he met a graphic designer who was an on-fire-for-Jesus Catholic. The two quickly began trying to convert each other. Keith, who at the time was in seminary school, consulted his Bible professor to give him the information he needed to “defeat this Catholic.”

“She just said to me, ‘Well, we believe that because we’re Protestants,”’ says Keith, who was forced to go on his own “wild goose chase” looking for the “silver bullet” that would prove his Catholic friend wrong.

But after years and years of searching, he never found it. It wasn’t long before he felt the Lord calling him to convert to Catholicism, but he was resistant — not because he didn’t fully believe in Catholic doctrine but because he had built a life as a Protestant youth pastor. His wife, who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, and his children were devoted to the Protestant church.

For years, Keith dodged the calling he felt God had put on his heart. “Life got pretty dark. Things went kind of crazy for me,” he admits.

In 2015 the Methodist Church, which Keith had been part of since his childhood, began unraveling. Heated debates over same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ+ people started to fray the edges of the denomination. Keith, committed to scripture, found himself in heated arguments with other Methodists, who contended that scripture could be interpreted in different ways.

“I started to think, okay, well, if I can’t argue from scripture alone, from tradition, then I have to argue from authority, right?” he recalls.

“That got turned back on me pretty hardcore. I even had someone say to me, ‘Well, if you believe in all this church authority stuff, why aren’t you a Catholic?”’

This sent Keith back to the dusty Catholic apologetics books his old friend had given him years prior. “Through a series of just deep dives into things and … semi-mystical experiences, where I just had things that happened to me experientially around things related to the Catholic faith, I became convinced that the Catholic Church was what it claimed to be: the one true church … the church that Jesus Christ started,” he tells Steve.

But there was still the issue of his family and established career as a Protestant minister. One night Keith cried out to Jesus: “If you want me to become Catholic, I will do it. But you’ve got to make a way.”

“And I’m not kidding around, Steve, from the crucifix, He spoke to me and He said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. You don’t need me to make a way, you just need me.’ And I realized in that moment that there He was in the Eucharist and that there He was with me, and He was calling me to lay it all on the line for Him,” he recounts. “I had never felt something more strongly when it comes to my faith in all my life.”

He went home that night and told his wife, and the next day he told the senior pastor at his church. “It was tough … but I knew in my heart that this is what it meant for me to follow the Lord,” Keith admits.

In the second half of the interview, Keith and Steve dive into the individual issues that distinguish Catholicism from Protestantism: the authority of the Catholic Church versus sola scriptura, the role of Scripture and tradition, the veneration of Mary and saints, and the nature of church unity and historical continuity.

To hear their compelling and heartfelt discussion on the core differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, tune in to the full interview above.

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