Fr. Longenecker was brought up in an Evangelical home in Pennsylvania. After graduating from the fundamentalist Bob Jones University with a degree in Speech and English, he went on to study theology at Oxford University. Eventually he was ordained an Anglican priest and served as a curate, a school chaplain in Cambridge, and a country parson on the Isle of Wight. Realizing that he and the Anglican Church were on divergent paths, in 1995 he and his family were received into the Catholic Church. For ten years they continued to live in England, where he worked as a freelance writer and charity worker. Then in 2006, the door opened to return to the USA and be ordained a Catholic priest. Fr. Longenecker now serves as pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Greenville, South Carolina.