The practice of Reformed catechesis is quite counter-cultural. Having given it a little thought, a few reasons come to mind. 1. Catechesis is an authoritative discipline. It deals not with opinions, but with dogma. Not with suggestions, but with commandments. Not tips and hints, but with divinely mandated means of grace. 2. Catechesis is churchly in orientation. It is by the church and for the church. It presumes that membership in the Visible Church – nothing less than the Kingdom of God on earth – is a high privilege, and involves serious preparation. 3. Catechesis is rigorously intellectual. While seeking to reach those of the smallest capacities, even the “little ones” without offending them, it yet pushes everyone under its influence to think and think deeply. 4. Catechesis is thoroughly covenantal. It has always had the next generation of the church in view, preparing baptized children to lay hold of the promise that is their birthright (Acts 2:39). While catechesis leaves regeneration to the sovereignty of the Spirit, it does not leave children to cut their own religious path. It cuts the path for them. We do not blush to say that in catechism, the church indoctrinates its children. 5. Catechesis is catholic. By catholic, I mean that it does not deal with secondary matters, much less the novel, but with the faith once delivered to the saints. The things “most surely believed among us” (Luke 1:1). It is not provincial, pedaling its own idiosyncratic theology (African theology, feminist theology, etc.), but it holds forth what unifies all true believers in all ages. There is “one body, and one Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph. 4:4-6). 6. Catechesis is confessional. Contra biblicism, catechesis affirms that the Spirit leads his Church into all truth, and that the Church has a responsibility to articulate that truth using its own words. Further, it delimits what we must believe from what we must not – heresy. 7. Catechesis is biblical. “To the law and to the testimony.” If one seriously studies the great catechisms of the Reformation, one will be confronted not only with lengthy footnoted proof texts undergirding each proposition. He will also see how their very language is shaped by the Scriptures. Not surprisingly, then, catechesis is rejected precisely because men will not receive the Word of God.
Archive for the ‘Ordinary Means Ministry’ Category
Reformed catechesis: the swim upstream
Posted in Articles, Care for the Youth, Catechesis, Ordinary Means Ministry, WPE Editor on October 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Visibility & the Visible Church
Posted in Church of Scotland, John Knox, Ordinary Means Ministry, The Visible Church on May 31, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The following quote from the First Book of Discipline (1560) illustrates how perceptive the Reformers were in the machinations of Satan – and human vulnerability. Time and again, he has sought to draw the Church aside to the extremes of hyper-visibility (idolatry) and hyper-invisibility (profanity):
As Satan hath never ceased from the beginning to draw mankind into one of two extremities, to wit, that men should either be so ravished with gazing upon the risible creatures, that forgetting the cause wherefore they are ordained, they attribute unto them a virtue and power which God hath not granted unto them; or else that men should so contemn and despise God’s blessed ordinances and holy institutions, as if that neither in the right use of them there were any profit, neither yet in their profanation there were any danger: as this way, we say, Satan hath blinded the most part of mankind from the beginning; so doubt we not, but that he will strive to continue in his malice even to the end.
The Reformers sought to hold to a biblical via media in these matters. There is a Visible Church. Knox wished to alter the Creed from “I believe an holy kirk” to “I see (video) an holy kirk.” Thus, the Reformers weren’t hyper-invisibilists like so many Anabaptist radicals. But on the other hand, they were not hyper-visibilists calling believers to walk by sight and not by faith.
We absolutely must retain this vital balance in the present climate of evangelical low-churchism. And let us also be aware of the law of extremes. Like the pendulum, one overreaction begets its opposite. I’m sure Rome could become appealing to mystified followers of an eccentric old man who has to revise his end-time decrees every few years.
Alexander on catechizing
Posted in Care for the Youth, Catechesis, Family Religion, Ordinary Means Ministry, The Church in America on April 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The following is a review of Ashbel Green’s Lectures on the Shorter Catechism by Archibald Alexander in 1830. Alexander (17
72-1851) was the first President of Princeton Seminary and a venerable patriarch of American Presbyterianism. The following presents the bulk of this review, which treats the warrant and nature of the good old plan of Presbyterian catechizing.
* * * * *
[If] we do not entirely misinterpret the temper and taste of the times in which we live, doctrinal catechisms, and lectures explanatory of such catechisms, are not the books which will be sought after and read with avidity. The religious taste of most readers is, we fear, greatly vitiated by works of fiction and other kinds of light reading. Nothing will now please, unless it be characterized by novelty and variety; and while many new means of instruction have been afforded to our youth, in which we sincerely rejoice, we are so old fashioned in our notions, as to feel regret that in our own church those excellent little summaries of Christian doctrine, the Westminster Catechisms, are falling with many into disuse. Our numerous (more…)
Pointers on church catechizing
Posted in Catechesis, Church of England, Diets of Catechizing, Ordinary Means Ministry on February 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Below is an exceprt from Hints on the Art of Catechising by Edward Bather, a 19th century clergyman in the Church of England. Quite helpful material from an obviously seasoned catechist. Enjoy!
* * * * *
I shall understand catechising, then, as it is commonly defined—namely, as signifying—instruction in the first rudiments of any art or science, communicated by asking questions and hearing and correcting the answers. And if I may be allowed to put my meaning into very familiar phrase, and to state plainly what I would recommend, it is this —That the catechist, having taken for his basis, or the subject matter to be unfolded, either some portion of the Church Catechism itself, or some text which illustrates it, or both, should then first “instruct” his pupils by questioning the meaning into them, and then “examine” them by questioning it out of them. 
The first process, it is obvious, may most conveniently be attended to in the school, and the second in the church: or, in other words, in the school, where he has most time, and is in least fear of being tedious, he will naturally most apply himself to put those questions by which he means to conduct his pupils into knowledge of the subject; and in the church, those by which he would give them opportunity to produce their knowledge; but in neither situation will he confine himself to either mode exclusively. And then I say, when the meaning of any general head of faith or practice, as proved and illustrated by Scripture, shall have been got out of the children in its particulars, or piece by piece, in answer to the questions put to them—those children themselves and the by-standers together will be a congregation, just in a fit condition to profit, under God, by exhortation or preaching: and there are two ways in which the minister may address them with great advantage. He has the opportunity, whilst the catechetical instruction is proceeding, of interspersing, as he gets his replies, many brief remarks and practical observations in a natural and lively, and therefore attractive and affecting manner; or he may sum up the particulars afterwards in a short discourse, and ground upon them, with good effect, the admonitions which they obviously suggest.
But of this I shall have more to say presently. The practice recommended has, of course, its difficulties, and the method cannot be fully shown without more minute examples than can well be given in an address of this nature. I may possibly, however, explain myself in some degree. The thing to be done is to possess the minds of a number of ignorant and heedless children with the sense and meaning—we will say—of one of our Lord’s parables, and to bring them to perceive and consider the practical lesson which it is intended to convey. In order to this, their attention must in the first place be gained and fixed, and then there will probably be words and phrases to be explained, perhaps old customs also—the literal story or similitude to be compared with the religious truth or doctrine which it is employed to illustrate, and other portions of Scripture to be cited, and brought to bear on the point in hand, in a way of confirmation or further exposition. Then there are two ways of proceeding: you may preach or lecture upon the subject, and in so doing, you tell your hearers what you have acquired and ascertained yourselves: or else you may communicate instruction as I advise, by asking questions, and correcting the answers; or I should rather say, by bringing the children themselves to correct them, by means of further questioning on your part. And in that case they tell you every thing. The truth and meaning comes out of their mouths to you, not out of yours to them, though it is certain you guide them to it, and put it into them. Everybody knows what in the language of the bar is meant by asking leading questions, and that a witness must not be led—because there the object is not to instruct or tell him what he should say, but to examine him or inquire what he really knows and has to say; but the case of which we are now speaking being exactly the reverse, the catechist’s aim being, at least in the first instance, to instil, and not to extract, his proceedings must be just what the advocate’s ought not to be. And then the whole “skill,” to use the words of Herbert in the Country Parson, “consists but in these three points; first an aim and mark of the whole discourse whither to drive the answerer, which the questionist must have in his mind before any question be propounded, upon which and to which the questions are to be chained. Secondly, a most plain and easy framing of the question, even containing in virtue the answer also, especially to the more ignorant. Thirdly, when the answerer sticks, an illustrating of the thing by something else which he knows, making what he knows serve him in what he knows not” (pp. 18-21).
Small groups and Reformed ecclesiology
Posted in Articles, Church Order & Discipline, Ordinary Means Ministry on December 17, 2010| 11 Comments »
Small groups are immensely popular in evangelical circles these days, and increasingly commonplace in Reformed communions. I’m not sure how much of this is due to the influence of New Calvinism or whether it’s due to old-guard Reformed folk warming up to broader evangelicalism. Maybe both. Regardless of the source, it’s definitely a popular construct. Some would even argue that it’s a staple for ordinary church life.
I’ve been back and forth on small groups for some time. In my more skeptical moments, the following concerns have come to mind.
First, in classic Reformed ecclesiology – which in my judgment is radically biblical – where do small groups fit? They are not the public assembly, where the believers of a local communion “come together” to observe the corporate worship of God (Acts 14:27, 1 Cor. 11:17, 18, 20, 33, 34; 14:23, 26). And you can’t assign them to the private (Mat. 6:6, 14:23) or family devotion categories (Gen. 18:19, Deut. 6:4-9), since you can’t have a small group with one person or just one family. So if they are not in the three, traditional categories of worship/means of grace ministry (WCF 21.6), what place should they have?
I suppose an argument could be made that we can get them in the door by the body life argument. Small groups could be seen as a manifestation of koinonia, our sharing in the common life of the Spirit. Isn’t that Reformed? “Saints by profession are bound to maintain an holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God, and in performing such other spiritual services as tend to their mutual edification” (WCF 26.2). Well, I admit coming together for the Lord’s day services is not all there is to church fellowship. There is much to be done on a smaller scale and with more intimacy. Fine and good. “They that feared the Lord spoke often one with another, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name” (Mal. 3:16). But when informal, spiritual conversations transition into small groups, something changes. It is formalized, it requires organization, structure, and facilitation if not leadership. In short, it becomes programmatic. So if it is programmatic, where does it fit in the apostolic program? Is it a component of the ‘ordinary means?’
Second, there is the collective wisdom of our Reformed forbears. While I’m no expert in 16th and 17th century church history, it does appear that the Westminster Divines discouraged small groups from having a normative place in the life of God’s people. In fact, they appear to have been suspicious of them. “Whatsoever have been the effects and fruits of meetings of persons of divers families in the times of corruption or trouble, (in which cases many things are commendable, which otherwise are not tolerable,) yet, when God hath blessed us with peace and purity of the gospel, such meetings of persons of divers families (except in cases mentioned in these Directions) are to be disapproved, as tending to the hinderance of the religious exercise of each family by itself, to the prejudice of the publick ministry, to the rending of the families of particular congregations, and (in progress of time) of the whole kirk. Besides many offences which may come thereby, to the hardening of the hearts of carnal men, and grief of the godly” (Directory for Family Worship, Section 7).
Third, there is the obvious susceptibility of small groups to the influence of egalitarianism, feminism, and a host of other -isms. Clearly they are more vulnerable; and what is more, I have to wonder whether they are not in some ways the product of these extra-biblical spirits of the age.
So I ask the question – or to be more frank, I raise the doubt. For now, at least.
See also “More on My Allergy to Small Groups“
West Port Experiment 