In this video, Cy Kellett and apologist Tim Staples sit down with rising Catholic creator Adrian Lawson from Sips with Serra. Adrian shares how Tim played a key role in his conversion to the Catholic Church—and how he’s now helping lead the next generation to the faith through online evangelization.
Transcript:
Cy: Adrian from Sips with Serra, thank you very much for being here with us!
Adrian: Thank you for having me. Thank you for clearing up how to say the name. I often get Sips with Sierra, so I appreciate you saying that.
Cy: Oh, yes, right. My father is a longtime member of the Sarah Club. They pray for vocations. And he said, people always think it’s the Sierra Club, but no. Well, we’re delighted to have you here. You yourself are a convert to the Catholic faith?
Adrian: Yes. Coming up this Easter will be one year since I have been a confirmed Catholic.
Cy: Oh, congratulations. God bless you!
Adrian: Thank you.
Cy: Tell us a little bit about that. How did that happen that you came into the Catholic Church?
Adrian: Well, it’s quite a long story with some false starts and some runaround. But in short, I was going to an evangelical church, which is kind of the tradition I grew up in. Fell away when I went into atheism, came back to Protestantism, started to learn about the early church and realized, hey, they have some beliefs that really don’t line up with what my church is teaching, particularly about the Eucharist and Baptism. And that led me to look into more traditional forms of Christianity. Catholicism was obviously high on that list. And then some family scared me out of it. I was about to join RCIA. Some family scared me out of it. So I thought, like-
Cy: Like with a shotgun? What kind of family do you come from? How are they scaring you out of it?
Adrian: There were just some strong words. No weapons.
Cy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Catholics are pagans or Catholics are idol worshipers or what kind of thing?
Adrian: Yeah, they worship Mary. Idol worshipers. You won’t really be a real Christian, so on and so forth. You’ll go to hell. Thankfully, those same family members have now come around a little bit more to Catholicism. Not in the sense that they’re going to convert, but in the sense that they’re more accepting. And I’m very grateful for that.
Cy: You don’t know We can hope life is long. You don’t know. But at some point, despite the fear, you turned towards the Catholic Church. What happened?
Adrian: Yeah, so after spending two years in the Lutheran tradition, I just kept feeling this tug towards Catholicism. And a lot of it had to do with some of the work you guys are doing. A ton of it had to do with you guys, actually, especially Tim Staples. I was reading *Behold Your Mother* at that time. He got me, and I talked about this. I talked about this recently on another channel, but I read a couple of chapters of that book, and I was like, I don’t need to finish this. Everything the church says about Mary is probably true. I don’t even need to finish this. I’m so convinced because it was just so well reasoned. Whereas before I thought they just made this stuff up. They don’t know what they’re talking about. And then just seeing how well reasoned just the first few chapters were, I was like, oh, this stuff is actually pretty well founded. Very well founded in scripture and in the early church. So from there it was just a matter of time until I became a Catholic.
Cy: So tell us about your channel, Sips with Serra. People can get you on YouTube. You’re posting all the time there on YouTube. So tell us about what you do there and how that came about.
Adrian: Yeah, so I actually. So what I do there is just Catholic apologetics, but I generally just talk about topics that are interesting to me, topics that are commonly misunderstood about Catholicism. And really the way this started was I was actually on TikTok a couple of years before I became a Catholic, and I was actually doing Protestant apologetics on that channel or on that TikTok account. And then I became a Catholic. I took some time off of TikTok because I thought maybe I should just keep my mouth shut if I’m not really sure what I believe at this moment. Came back to TikTok after becoming a Catholic or soon before I became confirmed. And then I just felt like, you know, a lot of these topics need to be kind of fleshed out in more detail in longer form videos. So I brought it over to YouTube and saw pretty quick success with it. So I’ve been dedicating basically all of my time into it now.
Cy: So who’s your audience? Is it Catholics or people who are considering the Catholic Church? People who disagree with you, agree with you. What is it?
Adrian: I get a lot of converts and a lot of people who are currently in OCIA on their way into the church.
Cy: Oh, wonderful. And so their path is similar to your path.
Adrian: Yeah. In fact, just last night I was talking to one of the guys who’s a big supporter of the channel, and he had basically the same story as me. Grew up Protestant, became an atheist, came back to the faith, but was not really comfortable with Protestantism because he felt like something was missing there. We have a very similar path. So a lot of the people that I’ve encountered through the channel have that same story.
Cy: So what are you working on now? Like, what kind of topics are you working on now?
Adrian: Oh, man, I talk about a lot of different things. I mean, any given week I’ll be covering a couple of different subjects. Lately I’ve been getting into the authority of the church, which is one of the main things that attracted me to the Catholic Church at first because, yeah, I know it puts a lot of people off, especially in an American context, to say I have to submit. I don’t really like that, but for me it just made sense. You know, I was, at the time, I was in a Lutheran church and I had bounced around a couple of different Lutheran churches because some of them were just not very faithful. Some of them were doing basically open communion, which even Lutheranism is just not cool with. And I just felt like if there was a church authority that could just, you know, say, hey, stop doing that. If you want to continue to be a valid church, that type of authority makes a lot of sense. So just seeing the practical benefits of having a church structure the way that the Catholic Church has really made that a much stronger case to me.
Cy: Would you like to be Tim Staples someday? Like, learn all that he has learned and make a profession out of it?
Tim: Say no! No, you don’t want to be.
Adrian: I could only hope. I could only hope.
Cy: But is that something that’s of interest to you? Like, would you like to pursue this as a professional path?
Adrian: Yes. Yes. In fact, I don’t, I don’t. Not to like make a whole sob story or whatever, but I got laid off of my job recently, which is happening a lot right now, unfortunately to a lot of people. But because of that, I’m treating this. I’m like, okay, this is my full-time job now. So that’s kind of, that is the goal.
Caller: God bless you. Wonderful. Wonderful.
Tim: I have a very important question. Did you finish my book?
Cy: No. He said he didn’t have to.
Adrian: I didn’t, I didn’t finish.
Cy: What?
Adrian: I gotta be honest.
Cy: You need to finish that book. What are you talking about?
Tim: No, you know,
Adrian: It’s such a good book.
Tim: It’s really cool though, that you’re sharing as you are, because you do hear this side from converts. The authority of the church is really the linchpin for so many folks. I know for me, I can remember getting to the point where I saw it and it was like, man, it ought to be true if it’s not. But I had so many other questions that I just couldn’t buy it yet. And so I had to deal then with the individual issues, you know, works and sacraments and Mary and the rest. Was that similar for you?
Adrian: Yeah, although for me, it was Mary was the first. I guess the Eucharist, baptism, and Mary were like the first three things that I came to accept. And then from there I accepted the church’s authority. And I think the last thing that clicked for me was the papacy itself. So, yeah, that was not the same exact trajectory as you, but it was a domino effect.
Tim: Right, got it.
Cy: You know, Tim and I, a lot of gray hair between the two of us. I mean, a lot. And a lot of product making holding it all together, but. So you got no gray hairs yet. What do you find works with? I assume that you have a younger audience. I think that’s fantastic. They’ve been through a lot. People your age. You’re what, early 30s, right? So people your age have been through a lot. They’ve been through the pandemic. They grew up with the war on terror. You were little kids when the World Trade Center, as far as Christianity goes, scandals and upsets and frankly, a kind of the rise of the social media world, all of that is what your generation went through. What do they need to come to Christ and to his church?
Tim: Yeah.
Adrian: Oof. That’s a big question. I mean, I think a lot of what people my age are fed up with nowadays is the age of, or the philosophy of relativism that we kind of grew up in, where everybody’s opinion is valid. And that’s your truth, and this is my truth and that whole thing. And we’ve seen how that’s resulted in a lot of different strange things happening in society today. But I think a lot of people my age are kind of tired of that, and they’re looking for what is something solid I can stand on, what is something solid I can base my life off of, rather than just living in this kind of vacuum of purposelessness where there’s no sense of objective truth. I think people are looking for something that is opposite of what they grew up with, and that’s obviously very easily found in the Catholic Church.
Cy: What a beautiful answer and what a beautiful work you’ve undertaken, Adrian. We’re really grateful that you took the time with us.
Adrian: Thank you so much.
Tim: And next time you come back, I’ll be asking if you finished my book.
Adrian: So I have to do it now?
Tim: That’s right, you do.
Cy: You do have to finish the book. It took him long enough to finish it. Now you should finish it.