Debate Settled: Fruitland family finds truth in an unexpected place

Jessica-lee and Wesley Pokorney, and their two sons, Fyodor, 5, and Clark, 7. (Courtesy photo/Wesley Pokorney)

Gene Fadness

For the ICR

FRUITLAND – From high school and on, there were few things Wesley Pokorney enjoyed more than debating people who believed in God. Using arguments gleaned from a favorite teacher in his Caldwell High School philosophy class, he relished the idea of making naive believers squirm.

Wesley grew up in a home where his dad liked to argue with people about faith issues. His only connections to religion as a young child were the few times his mother, a non-practicing Christian, took him and his siblings to a Salvation Army church.

When he was 12, his parents divorced and his dad moved out. The family moved from Boise to Caldwell. During his high school years, Pokorney befriended a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Pokorney was impressed by his LDS friend’s family life.

“Doing those familial things, like praying before dinner and family devotionals, seemed a lot more stable than the home in which I grew up,” he said. “That led to questions about where their family practices came from.”

Wesley visited the LDS Church with his friend and even kept attending with the family after his friend left for a church mission.

“I enjoyed their family life, but I didn’t see the appeal of their church. I considered myself an atheist and wanted to disprove LDS teaching.”

He read the Book of Mormon and a biography of church founder Joseph Smith.

“I used the same tactics to argue against them that I used against Christianity in general,” Wesley said.

While attending high school, he began dating the woman who would later become his wife, Jessica-lee. They had two children together before they married in 2017.

The standard arguments he used against Christians were challenged for the first time when he happened, entirely by accident, on to Salt & Light Catholic Radio. He wasn’t interested in Catholicism, but enjoyed listening to Catholic apologetic programs like “Catholic Answers” because, he said, “I was into debates.”

It was the Christian pro-life stance that turned the once proud atheist, now a young father, into a Christian.

He listened to abortion debates online and on Catholic radio. Particularly troubling to him were the pro-abortion views of his favorite leading atheists, including podcaster and “The End of Faith” author Samuel Harris.

According to Wesley, Harris said the human becomes viable and valued only after a heartbeat is detected. Other prominent atheists, he learned, go further, supporting infanticide, or the taking of a baby’s life even after it is born.

“I could not believe that well-respected atheist philosophers were not able to recognize the horrific violence against a human person,” he said. “I realized that an atheist can act morally, but still have no basis or foundation for that moral behavior, thus nearly all of them are totally fine with the murder of innocent children.” The Christian view on the sanctity of life “made me Christian,” he said.

At about the same time, he discovered Catholic radio, Wesley and Jessica-lee befriended a handyman working on projects in their home. He was a member of an Anabaptist sect called the Old German Baptists. A breakaway sect from the Church of the Brethren, they believed in baptism only of adults by triple immersion.

They eschewed any instrumentation in their services, singing only a cappella. Men sit on one side of the church while women, heads covered, sit on the opposite side. Like other Anabaptist groups such as the Mennonites and the Amish, they are part of the historic “peace churches,” declining to take up arms against other nations.

The handyman invited Wesley and Jessica-lee to dinner with his family and fellow members.

“Again, I was impressed with their family life and their view of marriage as a lifelong commitment,” he said.

They began regularly attending church at the Baptist congregation, not missing a Sunday for nearly four years. However, they never officially joined because they had trouble accepting the church’s view that Jessica-lee, who had been baptized at age 12 at a Baptist church camp, had to be re-baptized to become a member of the church.

Their objection was based, in part, on what Wesley was hearing on Catholic radio about baptism.

“I had become convinced that the Catholic position that we are baptized only once was the correct position.”

Jessica-lee was not at all interested in Catholicism and, like Wesley, was impressed with the family life of the Anabaptist congregation. However, she felt the same unease as Wesley about their Anabaptist congregation’s requirement that she be re-baptized.

Wesley continued to listen to Catholic radio and became familiar with Catholic apologists and podcasters.

“I thought we would probably end up Catholic, but I didn’t tell my wife because, at the time, she said we could visit any church but the Catholic Church. that she would never set foot in a Catholic church.”

His high school philosophy teacher, who was the inspiration behind his earlier life’s opposition to Christianity, again influenced Wesley’s life, but not in the way he would have expected.

“When I was in high school, I kind of latched on to him as a father figure.”

Years after high school, Wesley came across a Facebook photo of the teacher at the Catholic baptism of one of his grandchildren. “I can’t believe this!” he told himself at the time. “He’s so smart. Why is he Catholic?”

Despite many questions, the Pokorneys continued to attend their Anabaptist church, still in search of an alternative that would be satisfying to both.

Another turning point for Wesley came when he discovered a YouTube video of a leading Anabaptist preacher claiming that the founder of the movement, Alexander Mack, accepted the Catholic book of Tobit as prophetic. The Book of Tobit is one of seven books in the Bible that are not accepted by most Protestants.

“That was a game-changer for me. I felt somewhat betrayed by our leaders never saying anything about it,” Wesley said, referring to Mack’s view of the Book of Tobit.

With that came also an acknowledgement that the Bible is not the “be-all, end-all,” of truth, Wesley said, noting that the Church existed for more than three centuries before the canon of scripture was completed and the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, determined which books would be included in the Bible.

“No longer believing in sola scriptura (the Protestant view that the Bible alone is the authority for the Church) eliminated every Protestant faith in my mind,” he said. “When my wife finally asked me if we were ever going to be members of this (Anabaptist) church, I said we were not.”

In response, Jessica-lee told her husband, “Then, I need you to take us to the church where we can be members.”

He called Corpus Christi Church in Fruitland, and they visited the following Sunday, the OCIA leader meeting them at the door. Neither had ever attended a Mass.

“We were definitely outsiders and some parts of the Mass were strange to us,” said Jessica-lee.

However, by this time, Wesley had studied Catholicism thoroughly.

“Even though parts of it were strange, it was also familiar. I knew it was the true form of worship, even at the first Mass,” he said.

For Jessica-lee, it was a “test of faith,” to pursue Catholicism, not so much faith in a church, but faith in her husband to lead their small family.

“I had a really good person to lead me,” she said.

She had to confront a father wound in her own life. Like Wesley, her father also left the family when she was very young.

“That deterred me from loving and appreciating a Heavenly Father,” she said. She was also frustrated at their former church leaders’ inability to answer her question as to whether the Holy Spirit remains with one who turns away from God.

Jessica-lee, the onetime obstinate opponent of all things Catholic, read all seven additional books in Catholic scripture (she had already read the rest of the Bible). She and Wesley started OCIA classes four months after that first Mass.

“We talked about the sacraments and how you could get the Holy Spirit back through Confession,” Jessica-lee said. “I also came to believe that the Eucharist was necessary to feed my soul. I couldn’t understand how just the Word of God (the Bible) is what fed you.”

And, finally, her inner struggles with the insistence of some that she be baptized again were settled once and for all when in OCIA she learned that her Triune baptism at age 12 was all that was needed. And the idea that infants could not be baptized – the view that made the Anabaptists distinctive – also no longer made sense to her.

The second chapter of Colossians equates circumcision to baptism, she noted, and Jewish boys were baptized at only eight days old.

“How could Jesus be inclusive, but not for babies?” she asked herself. “Certain things that were hurdles were starting to make sense.”

The Pokorneys started attending OCIA in the fall of 2024. At Easter this year, Wesley and their sons, Clark, 7, and Fyodor, 5, were baptized. Also, Wesley and Jessica-lee were Confirmed and their marriage was convalidated in the Church.

They feel welcomed by their much larger family at Corpus Christi, but there is one thing from Wesley’s peek inside the LDS faith and their joint venture in the Anabaptist movement they find lacking in their new faith.

“The people are friendly, but no one stays after church,” Jessica-lee said. “No family potlucks, everyone just zips out.”

She’s hoping to start a “Family Friday” evening for young families and a Bible school for kids. “I figure if there’s a problem, I should be part of the solution by volunteering,” she said.

“It has been great, and I’m growing in my love for the Church,” Wesley said. “With Anabaptists, doubts and questions came later and grew over time. With Catholics, the questions and doubts came first, but diminished as time went on.”