From Conversion to Confirmation Sponsor
- Elijah Hamilton
- Nov 26, 2025
- 5 min read
Hello, my name is Elijah Hamilton. I work for the city of Mishawaka in the water department as a Water Quality Technician and also as the ranger for the Mishawaka Res. I am from the Mishawaka area and my family attends St. Joseph Parish where I have recently been brought on as a presenter for the parish's adult education program. I have been married to my high school sweetheart Lynnea for 3 years now, and we have a wonderful baby girl. I can also joyfully tell you that my wife and I are adult converts confirmed on August 4th of 2024.
I was raised in a group called the Church of Christ which was born out of the restorationist movement that also spawned the Jehovah's witnesses and Mormons, but this church stayed much closer to Christian orthodoxy. The importance of a personal faith and devotion to Christ, not only as my savior but also as Lord of my life, were very helpful in developing my love for the Lord. The Church of Christ also holds to a very flat and Congregationalist church structure which allowed me to quickly discern a desire and calling for preaching and teaching the scriptures. As such, I started to give Sunday sermons, lead Bible study and apologetic classes, and speak at youth camps from the age of 14 and continued up until my conversion.
As part of this calling in my life, I knew that I not only needed to understand scripture and work through common contentious passages but I wanted to really study the unique denominational positions if I was going to pursue this calling as a full time job to support my family. Shortly after I began this study, my brother-in-law came back to the Catholic Church and that put a much more intentional focus on the claims of Catholicism. Truth be told, I started from a place of trying to prove his decision wrong but quickly learned everything I thought I knew about the Catholic Church was so wrong and misconstrued.
It was a few months into this phase of study that I went to the St. Joseph County 4H Fair and saw a huge banner in the main building that said “free Catholic information.” Taking that as a sign of providence, my wife and I approached the booth set up by the Knights of Columbus and spoke to them briefly about where we were at in wrestling with questions of our faith. A kind man there gave us a rosary, a few helpful brochures on church teaching, and told us about an exciting young adult ministry hosted at St. Therese Little Flower Church called Ablaze Mission.
I came to love the Christian faith and make it my own largely due to argumentation from Blaise Pascal who wrote wonderfully on the relationship between the intellect and the will. On an intellectual level, as I studied the church fathers and compared the exegesis of the scriptures, I was coming closer to desiring the Catholic Church but it was largely due to Ablaze Mission that my will also was receiving the grace of conversion. It was seeing young Catholics love scripture just as much as I did and strive to love God and please him which helped to show me that true faith wasn’t just in the saints of old whose works I was reading, but also in the living church today that was still making saints! I knew that, once I accepted the truths of the faith, I could find a community of believers to support myself and my young family in shaping our wills to conform to those teachings.
My conversion process took about a year and I have now been a confirmed Catholic for over a year. In these last two years I have known God in a way I never thought possible. In my previous tradition, much emphasis was placed on scripture, which is a wonderful thing because as St. Jerome tells us “ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.” However, there was not much of a culture of deep spirituality present. There were no equivalents to St. Ignatius of Loyola or St. Francis de Sales or many others I’m sure you’re familiar with. Similarly, while I was raised with a high view of baptism, that was the only real sacrament. I only came to learn this later through study but I was also essentially raised to be Pelagian in my views of Grace which is rightly condemned by the Church.
Being Catholic has made me a better Christian than before, taught me about the necessity of God’s grace, has helped me to grow so much deeper in my spiritual devotional life, and ultimately made it possible like never before to be united with Christ through the sacraments I had been missing. To receive forgiveness in a sacramental confession, to see my marriage thrive in its elevation from natural to sacramental, to see my original vocation to teaching and preaching the gospel flourish through the graces of confirmation, and primarily to have unity with my Lord in receiving his body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Holy Eucharist has been the joy of my life and has brought me peace like never before. I will always be grateful to evangelistic Catholics and to the Ablaze Mission community for showing me the true way of salvation through Christ and his Church.
Our God, so rich in mercy, didn’t wait long to send me with this newfound help to serve others. Shortly after my own Confirmation, I was invited to continue attending OCIA and to serve as a sponsor for a super smart guy named Nicholas, who was also interested in coming into the Church. Not only was it intimidating to try to help answer the questions of a PhD candidate, but he also came from the Lutheran Church (LCMS) where the differences are much more intricate and nuanced. Serving as his sponsor and seeing the changes in Nicholas over the past year was, however, such a gift from God. It helped me to make a great new friend and to know our faith even better than in my own conversion. It helped confirm to me the peace and spiritual help the Church offers, as I saw those areas especially in Nicholas’ faith grow exponentially in his conversion. And finally, it reminded me that my first year in the Church was just that, my first of many wonderful years to come.
