Why is our Faith Shallow III
How does the average new Christian in your church learn the faith?
I’m sure you have some sort of membership process and maybe run some different programmes but I wonder how many churches have a rigorous way to do this? I suspect most would answer with, “the same way everyone else does: word, sacrament, and small groups.” Other than the elevation of the home group to the holy trinity of the church’s mission to the saints, it’s hard to disagree. We learn on the journey; we are fed the gospel every week.
I think this is essentially right, because the faith isn’t a deposit of information but a way of being in the world and the following of Jesus as King, but it’s easy to make it sound like there isn’t any deposit to learn.
How do your children learn the faith, if you’ve been blessed to have them?
Hopefully your answer isn’t ‘we send them to kids work,’ because that’s a massive abrogation of parental responsibility to assume it’s someone else’s job to teach your kids the faith. Hopefully it contains some element of your teaching them in some kind of regular rhythm. Maybe you even get them to learn some things by rote.
Back in the olden days (not that long ago, really) they’d have called this catechising and the content of what you’re getting them to learn by rote would be a catechism. All Christians would have been expected to go through it, learning in line with their ability the answers to particular key questions about the faith.
It’s been a long time in most British evangelical circles since we did something like that. Whether this method is the way in the modern age is a fair question, but I don’t think we replaced it with anything, it seems like we just stopped. I’m less clear on why we stopped formally teaching the faith to people, but we are unlikely to learn without being told.
When I teach either the Bible or theology to people in settings where we do some Q&A, I’m often surprised by the basic things people don’t know or have misunderstood. That’s not their fault, of course, nobody told them. In fact, it’s to their credit that they’ve turned up to some sort of teaching setting and are asking a question despite any fears that their lack of knowledge might be exposed. Would their tribe increase! You can’t learn if you’re scared of being ignorant.
However great your preaching is, it will not teach the people in front of you the basics of the faith any time soon. And, that’s not really what it’s for. You’ll need another setting to do this in. You need a way of catechising your people.
To complicate matters, everyone is being counter-catechised by a selection of pernicious ideologies which are at odds with the Christian faith. They spend their days in workplaces, schools, universities, and a media landscape, that’s full of stories that are askew from the true story of the world. Some of that is obvious, but some of it is deeply ingrained and hard for us to spot. It takes time to relearn the world, but if we aren’t actively ‘catechising’ we’re making our lives harder.
I don’t think this has to be literal—taking the form of the reformation era questions and answers—but it can be. The New City Catechism could be a great resource for you to use. I’m not suggesting that Pastors start systematically visiting their congregants and testing them on these sorts of questions, not because I think that’s wrong but because I think it would be tremendously ill-received in the current cultural moment. There are other ways we can explore using to teach people the basics.
You could run some sort of new believers’ course (Alpha used to run the unfortunately named ‘Beta’ course), but I suspect more than just your new Christians need this. You could add something into your baptism preparation—this is a good idea, actually, that when you baptise someone on ‘profession of your faith’ you’ve taught them through something like the creed, so they know what they’re professing to—but again it won’t help with everyone else whose faith is shallow.
There are lots of possible responses, I’m going to explore some later in this blogging series. I think people often doubt that this is really needed: surely we don’t need to make sure people actually understand what Christianity is? No one is quite as bold in their denials as that.
It’s a feature of our wider malaise though: an uneducated congregation will lead to uneducated Pastors and the cycle will spiral. Our relentless focus on making things simple so that people will come to faith—the triple blow of reducing the strangeness actually reducing the appeal; forgetting that evangelism is about an invitation into the worship of God; and assuming too much for the ability of ‘right methods’ to yield conversions—is a factor in churches that seem to exist to get people over the line rather than into a rich life of kingdom leaving. There are revivalist (faith is just a decision) and eschatological (low views of our efforts to build for the kingdom) angles here too.
I think this is one of the most serious questions facing Pastors and churches at the moment: how will you catechise your people? The question might be simple, but let’s not assume that its answers are.
Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash
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