Here's an email question from Abby in Millersville, Maryland. "Pastor John, in the past few years I've heard from several former Protestant friends, 20-somethings from a variety of evangelical denominations, that they are joining the Catholic Church. Some of these friends are saying that they place a higher value on tradition than on Scripture.

They are people with whom I spent years ministering and studying Scripture. What's going on here, are these just non-believers who are being weeded from the fold?" What do you say, Pastor John? The road to Rome is not a new phenomenon. It was happening when I was in college. It's always been happening ever since there was a church.

People have left and people have returned to the Roman Catholic Church. And I suspect it will always be as long as both kinds of churches exist. It would be way too rash to say that everyone who makes the trek from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism are unbelievers who are being weeded out of the fold.

They're just too many different kinds of reasons and the stories are never over in this life. So if a person goes this way or that way, you don't know where they're going to end up. And so don't write them off in either case. There are a lot of reasons, and it might be helpful for me to give you my take on why do people sometimes gravitate towards Roman Catholicism out of evangelicalism.

And I'll give you, here's four things. One, many people of those who return to Rome are hungry for seriousness and are tired of the slapstick worship services that are normative in many evangelical churches. Number two, many are hungry for roots, a sense of history that they don't feel in the new church plant down the street that seems to mainly want to hide its connectedness to any tradition.

Three, many are hungry for intellectual and artistic richness that worship services in jeans and movie clips and bouncing beach balls and the shrines of the drum set just don't satisfy. And fourth, many are hungry for authority and clarity and stability. And sometimes it's just easier to let the church tell you what to believe and to be unburdened by the need to work it all out.

So those would be at least four things that I think grip some people and say, "I think the Roman church is more satisfying in all those regards." But for me, Tony, even though I sympathize with every one of those, my heart longs for seriousness, longs for roots, longs for intellectual and artistic richness, and loves true authority nevertheless.

Questions remain, don't they? Are the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church biblical? And my answer is too many of them are not. I think the Roman church gets it wrong on justification. I think they get it wrong on the mass and the dispensing of grace. I think they get it wrong on the role of tradition alongside Scripture.

I think they get it wrong on the authority of the Pope. I think they get it wrong in the doctrine of baptism or regeneration, which I think is very destructive. I think they get it wrong in the veneration of Mary and the prayers to the saints, and there are others.

And so I can't let my desire for certain forms or styles or richness or traditions trump the doctrinal issues for me. So what I would like to say to those who are listening to this clip is, let's pour our lives into the true evangelical doctrines and grow churches that are strong and rich and serious and relevant and powerful and biblical and that overcome the weaknesses that have pushed some people away.

Amen. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Visit us online at DesiringGod.org to find thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. 1 you