Catechesis 3: On Building a Culture
Wendell Berry, in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, argued that agribusiness was taking the practice of farming out of its cultural context and away from families. It was a prophetic work, and in the years since, we have seen continued decline in family farming in favor of a system that devalues community and human labor in favor of profit and product. In many ways, we can trace a parallel trend in the Church. We have removed the work of catechesis, worship, and prayer from its proper cultural context, that of the family and deep Christian community, in favor of a Church model driven by programs. Today’s pastor continually develops and introduces new programs as a means to sustained growth. Altering an unstable disciple-making culture diminishes congregational fruit in both quantity and quality.
In short, as American farming became about ever larger machinery and ever larger farms, the American church became about ever better programmatic offerings and ever larger churches. Somewhere along the way, we lost the biblical vision of families growing and instructing their children in the way of faith. Churches are making and growing disciples who could, in turn, make more disciples. We’ve learned this intuitively through church planting, where the smaller, leaner, family-oriented congregation makes disciples three times more effectively than established churches. But, what would it look like if all our churches took a holistic, culturally oriented look at building a culture of catechesis, just as many farmers are returning to the old ways and discovering a rich and sustainable life?
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A Culture of Solidarity & Subsidiarity
The twin principles of solidarity and subsidiarity form the core of Catholic social teaching. They mainly deal with what is centralized and what is not decentralized. For instance, a government should rightly decide where to put a highway (centralized), but not what a child should eat for breakfast (decentralized). In essence, the smallest possible unit (subsidiarity) should undertake most things in a society. However, when needs arise, smaller groups can band together in solidarity to address them. This applies just as well, if not more so, to the Church. Families can, and should, take responsibility for the teaching of their children, while maintaining solidarity with the Church. Parish churches should be responsible for most, if not all, of their internal affairs, including budgets, service times, which Sunday School curriculum they should use, etc. But, they should bear in mind their solidarity with the whole Church in teaching and worship.
A simple way to put it is this: bigger is not necessarily better, but each smaller unit is responsible for the whole. In reviving a culture of catechesis for the Church, the family must take center stage once again as the primary unit of catechesis and prayer. Central to the Gospel is the responsibility of parents to instill deep Christian virtue, belief, and prayer in their children. In our tradition, parents of baptized infants have been exhorted in their “parts and duties” to teach their children the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, as well as to “virtuously bring them up to lead a godly and Christian life” and “die to sin and rise again to righteousness.” This is no small task, and it takes churches and pastors who advocate for family catechesis at every level.
Discipleship & Culture
Expanding on this idea even more, subsidiarity requires that our efforts at making disciples go from “mass production” to one-on-one discipleship. In recent years, Apple has embraced this way of teaching people to use their products in their “one-to-one” initiative. Apple understands that the classroom environment is not always the best way to impart knowledge, and even more important, a culture. Culture passes through a context of living relationships between people. Skilled catechists understand this and seek to guide new believers, nominal Christians, and seekers through conversion, not in a classroom, but in one-on-one relationships.
A Culture of Apprenticeship
In the not-so-distant past, a career began with an apprenticeship. Woodworkers, coopers, brewers, tailors, and others all began as apprentices. Essentially, this meant working for room and board in exchange for gathering skills and proficiency in the craft at hand. This constituted that intimate passing of culture in the context of living relationships. In the last century, we have rejected this model in favor of a system of higher education in which apprenticeship is rare. This seems to be part of the phenomenon of recent college graduates unable to find work because of a lack of skill or experience. Expansion of the minimum requirements to master’s level education seems, so far, to be unhelpful.
Observers have also noted this trend in the Church. Many people view theological education as something primarily occurring in seminaries, where individuals must enroll and receive classroom instruction. This situation came into sharp focus for me recently when a friend, who teaches an introductory theology course at a seminary, shared his account: his students were unprepared for such a course, lacking even the most basic understanding of the Bible, the creeds, or the simplest doctrines.
Catechesis: Not Only a Seminary Responsibility
All they knew was that they had seen well-formed Christians teaching or pastoring or leading, and wanting to become like them, had enrolled in a seminary. We can, and should, envision a day when catechists (as master Christians) instruct Christians in such things from a very early time in their formation, doing so again within the context of living relationships. A catechist is responsible for passing a whole way of living and believing to a new disciple. As pastors, we need to raise a generation of catechists who can do this.
We shouldn’t assume that theological education is the sole calling of seminaries. Yet again, we must recognize theological education and spiritual formation as our parishes’ responsibilities if we are to meet the challenges of proclaiming the Gospel in the post-Christian world.
A Culture of Practice
To be a Christian is to live not merely in theory, but to apply the Faith practically. Much has been made in recent years of practical preaching, but much of this has been detached from deep theological underpinnings, resulting in chaos. I remember some years ago going with my church to serve lunch to the homeless on Good Friday. Families would take their children out of school daily to participate in this work. It was inspiring to watch children five and six years old serving tables and supplying the needs of the homeless. For the Church Fathers, this instruction in Christian charity formed part of the corpus of catechetical instruction. John Chrysostom believed it necessary to show catechumens how to visit prisoners. He expected that adults coming to baptism would be fully formed in the work of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.
The challenge for us today is to recover a culture of not only believing and worshipping together, but practicing charity and mission together, passing along the habits and virtues of the Church to others. This includes the transmission of spiritual disciplines as well. New disciples are crying out for people who will teach them practical ways of praying, fasting, giving to the poor, and living out Christian vocation in daily life. The Church has the opportunity to rise to the challenge.
A Culture of Multiplication
Strong cultures necessarily multiply. Whether this is in terms of birth rates, art, or agricultural products, multiplication is of the essence. My grandfather made this clear to me several years ago. I’m the oldest of eighteen first cousins on that side of the family, and I had just introduced him to my daughter, the first of many great-grandchildren. We stood on the patio, overlooking the scene—aunts, uncles, wives, husbands, my cousins’ boyfriends and girlfriends enjoying a wonderful lakefront backyard, and he said, “Fifty-five years ago, it was just your grandmother and I.”
He was making a point about multiplication. Abraham became the father of many nations. The 120 disciples gathered in Jerusalem became the dominant religious and cultural force in the Roman Empire in a matter of less than 300 years. God means for his people to multiply. Jesus himself, teaching in the parable of the seeds, says that
…other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.
Mark 4:8
He uses many parables and images to deliver this teaching on multiplication, including leaven and mustard seeds. As Rodney Stark of Baylor University has pointed out, this is not a mere matter of evangelism, but of procreation and adoption. We Christians are meant to grow in number, to become pervasive, and to fill the earth. Catechesis is thus not only the means of imparting a new way of believing and living, but a new way of multiplying oneself
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:10-11
Photo by: Fra Angelico’s Sermon on the Mount, 1440-43 from Wikipedia.
The Church Offers What the Culture Can’t
As a youth minister, summer camp is a regular part of my life. Every year, we load up the church van and head into the middle of nowhere for a week of sleepless nights, camp food, sunburn, and ruthless competition. While I love all the craziness that comes with camp, there is one experience I…
Book Review: The Gospel After Christendom
In The Gospel After Christendom, the writers, pastors, and scholars of The Gospel Coalition and the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics have applied a similar understanding of cultural apologetics in a unified collection of essays designed to “define cultural apologetics, explain its biblical and historical grounding, and demonstrate how it is important for the church today.”
