Deacon Drake McCalis-
ter, a former Pentecos-
tal preacher, is about to
be ordained a Catholic
Priest. At 50, he is age
is above the average age of men being
ordained as Catholic priests in the
U.S. this year is 33. He is a husband
and a father of five; most men about
to become priests will promise never
to marry, and will never have biolog-
ical children. Below is his story as
anchored by Mary Rezac
“Why do you need to be a priest?”
McCalister said he is asked many
times, sometimes even from leaders
in the Church.
“I don’t,” McCalister told CNA.
“My only desire is to be obedient to
Jesus Christ, period.” And McCalister
believes that Jesus has called him to
the priesthood.
It’s not the first time the Lord has
asked him to do something radical,
he said.
McCalister’s long and winding
vocation story begins in his early
20s, when he, as a young Pentecos-
tal, asked the Lord in prayer what
he should do with his life. After
high school, McCalister had started
working; the idea of college just hadn’t
appealed to him. But after a few years,
he knew it was time to seek God’s
plan.
“I was always ministry-minded,” he
said. “I walked into a prayer meeting
asking God: ‘What do you want me to
do?’ And as clear as the Lord has ever
told me anything in my life, it was
there during that prayer session that
the Lord made it clear: ‘Get equipped
for full-time ministry and give me the
rest of your life.’”
“So I literally walked out of that
room with a singular purpose,”
McCalister said. He knew the call
was from God, he added, because he
found himself suddenly excited to go
to college to get a theology degree –
something that had never been part of
his own plans.
Had McCalister been Catholic at
the time, he told CNA, he would
have become a priest – he was young,
unmarried and childless at the time.
But since he was not Catholic, “I went
on with life and got married and had
some kids,” he said.
After getting a theology degree,
McCalister began a 13-year stint of
Pentecostal ministry, becoming a
youth minister, then a music min-
ister and director, then an associate
pastor, and finally the senior pastor of
a church. He started his ministry in
California, but moved to Seattle after
about 4 years, where the rest of his
Pentecostal ministry took place. It was
there, starting in 1999, that he first
felt drawn to the Catholic Church –
through the radio.
“It began through EWTN radio, that
was my main source to the Catho-
lic Church, I didn’t really know any
Catholics,” McCalister said. He lis-
tened to an hour of Catholic Answers
Live, and was drawn in — not by
what was being said, but how it was
being said.
“I disagreed with all the theology,”
McCalister recalled. “But they were
charitable, evangelistic, they were
Christ-centered, they knew their
Bible, and they were Catholic. And I’d
never encountered a Catholic that had
all those (qualities).”
