My name is Kenny Burchard. I started Catholic Bible Highlights with the credo that “The Bible is the Bridge” to understanding the Catholic Faith. This site is dedicated to that journey — biblical, theological, practical, and historical reflection as a Catholic follower of Jesus.

I was not always a Catholic. After 33 years as a charismatic evangelical Christian — more than twenty of those in full-time ministry — my entire family was received into full communion with the Catholic Church in April of 2019. The YouTube video below tells that story.

I wasn’t raised Christian. I came to Christ at 17, after a chance encounter with YWAM missionaries outside a Mormon temple in Salt Lake City. From that moment I decided I’d go wherever God called me — which first meant the Navy, and later ministry in the Assemblies of God and the Foursquare Church.

I’ve been married to my wife, MaryJo, since 1992 — she had served as a nondenominational missionary before we met — and together we adopted our son, Victor, from Ukraine in 2005, when he was three. For twelve years MaryJo and I worked side-by-side as church planters, including serving as the senior and founding pastor of a Pentecostal church in central California from 2001 to 2013. During that time I completed an M.A. in New Testament at Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary (Fresno Pacific University Biblical Seminary) and taught verse-by-verse through several books of the Bible.

The Catholic shift began with one book. A friend handed me Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper, and what Hahn unpacked from Scripture about what was actually happening in the Mass cracked my paradigm wide open. The Mass, I suddenly saw, was more charismatic than any service I’d ever been in. That book launched a long, slow process of prayer and study around questions I’d been avoiding — questions about authority, Church history, and the proper interpretation of Scripture. After several years of discernment, MaryJo and I — and our family — were received into the Catholic Church in April of 2019.

It was St. Anselm of Canterbury who famously described theology as “faith seeking understanding.” For as long as I have been a Christian — over 34 years now — I have been on that journey. It has led me through some interesting terrain, and ultimately landed my family in the Catholic Church. This blog is my own attempt to keep tracking what I’m learning (or have learned) as the journey continues.

Today I serve as Director of Development for The Coming Home Network International, where I also co-host the podcast and YouTube show On the Journey alongside former Baptist pastor Ken Hensley and former Wesleyan Matt Swaim. I’m the founder and president of Bridge Builders International, a Catholic apostolate that builds bridges through Bible studies presenting the biblical foundations of Catholic teaching in a way accessible to non-Catholics. And I host the Catholic Bible Highlights YouTube channel, where I unpack Scripture from a Catholic perspective.

I co-authored God of Love, Fire, and Light: A Biblical Defense of Purgatory with Catholic author and apologist Dave Armstrong, and I’ve written two additional books on the early Church Fathers. My conversion story is also featured in Journeys Home 3 — Pentecostals and Charismatics, published by The Coming Home Network.

My mission with Catholic Bible Highlights is simple: to help Catholics defend the truth, and to help non-Catholics see that Catholicism and biblical Christianity are synonyms for the same thing.

I welcome irenic dialogue and interaction with anything you see here. Feel free to leave comments on any of the posts you find and I’ll do my best to respond.

God bless you!
— Kenny Burchard

A video about our journey out of Protestantism and into the Catholic Church.