Rich Sullivan was raised Catholic on Chicago's west side, taught to kneel, be quiet and discouraged from opening a Bible. He walked away from church for years - turned off, as he puts it, by hypocrisy he couldn't square with what he was being told to believe.

But God wasn't finished with him. Following a miscarriage scare that brought him to his knees, he found his way back to church. What followed wasn't a clean turnaround but a slow, deliberate work: a mentor named Kent Adams, a well-worn copy of "Mere Christianity," and a heart God kept softening year after year until the hypocrisy that once drove Rich away no longer had power over him.

After nearly five decades in the same church, working through the type of pain that sends most people looking for the exit, Rich now watches his grandkids sing worship songs from the same stage his  ...