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| Dr. James Innes Packer |
The Lost Art Of
Catechesis
It's a tried and true way of teaching,
among other things, Christian doctrine.
J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett
Historically, the church's ministry of
grounding new believers in the rudiments of Christianity has been known as catechesis—the
growing of God's people in the gospel and its implications for doctrine,
devotion, duty, and delight. It is a ministry that has waxed and waned through
the centuries. It flourished between the second and fifth centuries in the
ancient church. Those who became Christians often moved into the faith from
radically different worldviews. The churches rightly sought to ensure that
these life-revolutions were processed carefully, prayerfully, and
intentionally, with thorough understanding at each stage.
With the tightening of the alignment
between church and state in the West, combined with the impact of the Dark
Ages, the ministry of catechesis floundered. The Reformers, led by heavyweights
Luther and Calvin, sought with great resolve to reverse matters. Luther
restored the office of catechist to the churches. And seizing upon the
providential invention of the printing press, Luther, Calvin, and others made
every effort to print and distribute catechisms—small handbooks to instruct
children and "the simple" in the essentials of Christian belief,
prayer, worship, and behavior (like the Westminster Shorter Catechism).
Catechisms of greater depth were produced for Christian adults and leaders
(like Luther's Larger Catechism). Furthermore, entire congregations were
instructed through unapologetically catechetical preaching and the regular
catechizing of children in Sunday worship.
The conviction of the Reformers that such
catechetical work must be primary is unmistakable. Calvin, writing in 1548 to
the Lord Protector of England, declared, "Believe me, Monseigneur, the
church of God will never be preserved without catechesis." The Church of
Rome, responding to the growing influence of the Protestant catechisms, soon
began to produce its own. The rigorous work of nurturing believers and converts
in the faith once for all delivered to the saints, a didactic discipline
largely lost for most of the previous millennium, had become normative again
for both Catholics and Protestants.
The critical role of catechesis in
sustaining the church continued to be apparent to subsequent evangelical
trailblazers of the English-speaking world. Richard Baxter, John Owen, Charles
Spurgeon, and countless other pastors and leaders saw catechesis as one of
their most obvious and basic pastoral duties. If they could not wholeheartedly
embrace and utilize an existing catechism for such instruction, they would
adapt or edit one or would simply write their own. A pastor's chief task, it
was widely understood, was to be the teacher of the flock.
The Problem with Sunday School
Today, however, things are quite different,
and that for a host of reasons. The church in the West has largely abandoned
serious catechesis as a normative practice. Among the more surprising of the
factors that have contributed to this decline are the unintended consequences
of the great Sunday school movement. This lay-driven phenomenon swept across
North America in the 1800s and came to dominate educational efforts in most
evangelical churches through the 20th century. It effectively replaced
pastor-catechists with relatively untrained lay workers, and substituted an
instilling of familiarity (or shall we say, perhaps, over-familiarity) with
Bible stories for any form of grounding in the basic beliefs, practices, and
ethics of the faith.
Thus, for most contemporary evangelicals
the entire idea of catechesis is largely an alien concept. The very word
itself—catechesis, or any of its associated terms, including catechism—is
greeted with suspicion by most evangelicals today. ("Wait, isn't that a
Roman Catholic thing?" We are persuaded that Calvin had it right and that we are already seeing
the sad, even tragic, consequences of allowing the church to continue
uncatechized in any significant sense. We are persuaded, further, that
something can and must be done to help the Protestant churches steer a wiser
course. What we are after, to put it otherwise, is to encourage our fellow
evangelicals to seriously consider the wisdom of building believers the
old-fashioned way.
