Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. (Ps. 1)
By comparing “the way of the blessed” to “a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season” and “the way of the wicked” to “chaff that the wind drives away,” this opening song in the hymnal of God’s covenant people sets before us two completely irreconcilable ways of living in the world. There are sheep and goats, wheat and weeds, and one day Jesus Christ will separate them forever. With that future assize in view, it would be as senseless as it would be disastrous to find our identity in the wisdom of this age, which can only yield dry stubble that is set ablaze. Sinking roots deeply into God’s Word, meditating on it day and night, is the only way we can be transformed by the renewing of our minds instead of being conformed to the pattern of this fading age (Rom. 12:1-2).
A California native, I’ve lived in radically different regions of the state: lush northern landscapes where sturdy oaks and pines reach heavenward in forested canopies, and southern semi-arid desert where sage brush and chaparral follow the Santa Ana winds to the ocean. Late winter rains may turn the hills green for a few months, but by July all will be brown kindling for September fires. Farther out, in the desert proper, tumbleweeds roll recklessly across the highways during these months. Where my grandparents used to live, in the high desert, whipping-hot winds sweep the nasty weeds into heaps against any porch that would halt their random voyage. They don’t actually bear fruit. Tumbleweeds detach entirely from their root, and although now dead, they scatter seeds or spores as they tumble. Aside from providing meager foraging material for a cow here and there, their chief significance lies in being a prop in Hollywood westerns.
We are becoming more sensitive to our natural environment. But are we as aware of and concerned about the spiritual ecosystems that shape us, our families, and our neighbors? Especially in a highly individualistic and self-confident culture, it is easy to imagine that we are sturdy plants come what may, regardless of our environment. We’re expected simply to bloom where we’re planted. However, Psalm 1 presents a different picture. Stately oaks do not grow in the barren desert, and tumbleweeds do not blow aimlessly through forest meadows.
Besides the horticultural metaphors, such as trees and vines, the Bible also uses architectural ones for the process of growth in grace, such as the verb oikodomeö, “to build up.” Peter speaks of believers as “living stones” who “are being built up as a spiritual house” (1 Pet. 2:5). Buildings and bodies merge in Paul’s image of the church. In Ephesians 4, he tells us that Christ, ascended to his royal throne, is dispensing the gift of pastors and teachers
for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine….Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Eph. 4:9-16)
We may compare this passage with Psalm 1. Through this ministry of pastors and teachers, each member is “built up” in love and truth (“like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither”), in contrast to those who are “carried about by every wind of doctrine” and easily deceived (“like chaff that the wind drives away”).
God created us for a great city. Yet in our fallenness we have become vagabonds’spiritual tumbleweeds. Like those who prefer the artificial New York, New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas to the actual city, we cast longing eyes on the trivial, ephemeral, and superficial. Impatient with slow growth in the same direction, with well-watered roots and fruit-bearing branches, we are encouraged in this culture to detach ourselves, setting out on our own.
We may think that we are in control of this journey, that it has purpose and an intentional destination. And for a while at least it might be interesting to bounce and roll through wide open expanses, untethered from roots. In reality, though, we are being blown to and fro by every wind of doctrine, longing to be whatever the latest fashions of this passing age tell us we should be, for the moment anyway. We are suckers for promises of instant gratification, parodies of the “solid joys and lasting treasure” that “none but Zion’s children know.”
But what do Zion’s children know these days? How steeped are they in the solid joys and lasting treasure that rightfully belong to them as heirs of the kingdom? We may be saving up for their college or material inheritance, but are we passing on the inheritance of the faith? Do we greet the Lord’s Day as a gift of communion with the Triune God as we taste the powers of the age to come and soak up the water of life together with the saints? Do we use it as a day to be swept into the new creation, or as just another day on the calendar of this passing age?
At a time when we’ve put so much emphasis on new programs, strategies, and techniques for spiritual and numerical growth, we need desperately to recover the neglected practice of catechesis in Christian homes and churches.
What Is Catechesis?
In their enormously helpful book, Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Baker, 2010), J. I. Packer and Gary Parrett call for a recovery of catechesis (for more on this, see the White Horse Inn interview on page 52). After explaining the history of this practice in the ancient church and its revival in the Reformation, they explore some of the reasons for and the devastating impact of its decline. The balance of the book is given to practical counsel for recovering catechesis in the church and home.
Early in the church’s history, the path to adult baptism and church membership was considered part and parcel of a person’s conversion. At the initial stage, Jews and Gentiles interested in learning the Christian faith would become inquirers. Immersed in the Scriptures through question-and-answer guides, the candidate would then meet at the end of the course with the minister/bishop and elders. Together, they would decide whether it was time to become a catechumen (“one who is taught,” as in Galatians 6:6). Catechesis was considered so important (being, as it is, an essential part of the Great Commission) that even famous ministers of immense congregations led it’notables such as Chrysostom and Augustine.
Identified now as “hearers of the Word,” catechumens were included in worship but were then dismissed at the celebration of Communion. As incipient disciples, catechumens were expected not only to learn the “steps,” but to dance them as well, active in prayer and good deeds. Then sponsors in the church would vouch for them, along with the elders, and after yet a final stage of intense instruction, they were qualified for baptism. It is from such local practices that we have the earliest fragments of the ancient creeds. Reciting the creed from memory, the adult candidate with his or her children would be baptized. The “neophytes,” as the adult baptized were now called (from “new plant/child”), were immediately admitted to the Lord’s Supper, while the children were catechized with the goal of full participation in covenant membership’namely, their own public profession of faith and admission to the Supper.
Yet the catechesis continued for all members throughout their pilgrimage. This is what it meant to fulfill the Great Commission: preaching the gospel, baptizing, and teaching. “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).
The Biblical Basis for Catechesis
Besides the Great Commission and the example of discipleship in Christ’s ministry, there are many other references to regular instruction as essential not only for entering into the faith but also for living in it to the end. “The faith once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) is an objective body of doctrine. Although each of us exercises personal faith in Christ, when Scripture speaks of the faith, it refers to this common creed. The faith that believes (fides qua creditur) and the faith that is believed (fides quae creditur) are both crucial, and “faith” (pistis) is used in both senses throughout the New Testament. The faith delivered to the saints by Christ, through his apostles, is not something that each believer discovers or constructs based on his or her personal experience. Each of us must believe, but what we believe is delivered to us as a body from generation to generation and in every place. Like our own act of faith, the faith is a gift that we receive. Paul speaks of a summary of the gospel that he received, even as he also delivered it to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:3-5). The same formula is found in chapter 11: “I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you” (v. 12), just as in verse 2 he lauds them because they “maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you.”
Paul reminds Timothy, “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you” (2 Tim. 1:13-14). Scattered throughout the New Testament Epistles are apostolic exhortations to receive, pass on, and guard “the teaching you have learned” and “received from us” (Rom. 16:17; 1 Tim. 6:1; 2 Thess. 3:6). Timothy is told to “charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:3) and to live in such a way “that the teaching may not be reviled” (1 Tim. 6:1). “If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing” (1 Tim. 6:3-4).
Underscoring the fact that mission drift is a perennial problem for the church throughout this passing evil age, Paul reminds his young protégé, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:3). He reminds Titus that an elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9). “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). Peter also warns believers to avoid the example of apostates by being grounded in the truth: “It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them” (2 Pet. 2:21). John adds, “Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son” (2 John 9).
As the “little flock” of Christ witnessed even under severe persecution to the saving gospel, the church expanded rapidly throughout Caesar’s empire. Eventually, however, the church became a privileged institution. The Greek word for church, ekklesia, means “called out.” With the conversion of Constantine, Christianity became the empire’s official religion, and in both the East and the West the sense of being “called out” of the world to belong to Christ diminished. No longer having to be converted from Judaism or paganism, like the first Christians, many professing Christians were nominal in their convictions and practices.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the written Scriptures were not available except to monks and clergy, in Latin. In any case, the masses were largely illiterate (including many priests), and the simple service of preaching and participation of the whole congregation in the prayers, psalm singing, and the Supper was transformed into elaborate theater with the congregation assuming the role of spectators. They did not regularly participate in Communion (the norm was once a year) and received only the bread, not the cup. Gospel narratives blended with pagan folktales and festivals in a kind of civil religion. Who was the average layperson to distinguish fact from fiction, Scripture from folk culture? There was no formal process of catechesis’certainly no official catechism. In fact, the Counter-Reformation drew up its own catechism only in reaction to those of the Reformation.
Into this dilapidated condition stepped Martin Luther. He wrote his own Small Catechism after pastoral visitations, as he explains in his preface:
The deplorable conditions which I recently encountered when I was a visitor constrained me to prepare this brief and simple catechism or statement of Christian teaching. Good God, what wretchedness I beheld! The common people, especially those who live in the country, have no knowledge whatever of Christian teaching, and unfortunately many pastors are quite incompetent and unfitted for teaching. Although the people are supposed to be Christian, are baptized, and receive the holy sacrament, they do not know the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments, they live as if they were pigs and irrational beasts, and now that the Gospel has been restored they have mastered the fine art of abusing liberty. (Quoted by Packer and Parrett, 61)
So Luther’s catechism drew together clusters of questions and answers around the overarching structure of the Lord’s Prayer, the creed, and the Ten Commandments.
Like Chrysostom and Augustine, Luther was an enormously busy pastor who nevertheless regarded it as his vocation to teach the congregation, especially the youth. So he began regular catechism classes throughout the week. John Calvin did the same in Geneva with his Geneva Catechism, and after 1563 the Heidelberg Catechism became the most widely used Reformed tool of instruction, from the Ottoman lands of Hungary to the Church of England. Like Luther’s, the Heidelberg Catechism‘and later the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms‘are organized around the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.
Why We Need Catechesis
Whatever our time and place, it belongs to “this passing evil age.” Yet because of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, and the descent of the Spirit, the powers of the age to come are breaking in on it. Similar to Psalm 1, Paul’s counsel works in any age and in any culture:
Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving….If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Col 2:6-7; 3:1-4)
Christ didn’t leave his body and history in the grave, but was raised in glory. He did not ascend away from this world, but away from this age under the reign of sin, crushing the head of the serpent and freeing captives from the fear of death. As our head, pioneer, forerunner, and firstfruits, Jesus Christ radically changed the course of our own history. As he now is, so we will be one day. Like boxcars attached to the engine, we belong to him. Our destiny is inseparable from his. Adam plunged us all into death, but Christ has already arrived in the station, with us in tow.
That’s where we are in history. Whether a fourth-century African, a sixteenth-century German, an eighteenth-century Pacific Islander, or a twenty-first-century Korean-American, every believer is living at the intersection of these two ages. The one age is passing away and the other is everlasting. The one is defined by the “nowhere man, living in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” The other is defined by the plans, promises, and achievements of the Father, in the Son, through the Spirit.
But make no mistake about it: Whatever our time and place, the cultures of this present age are catechizing us all. We may see this more evidently in places other than our own. For example, it’s been a privilege to learn from African students who come to our seminary. There are more confessional Reformed churches in Nigeria than North America, and students who come from these churches tell me they have a rigorous catechetical process. In fact, it’s very close to the early church procedure. Why so much instruction before baptism? “Well,” students reply, “most have come either from pagan animism (spirit worship) or Islam.” Conversion is definitive in that sort of situation.
But that’s “over there,” right? This is America, after all, born in the cradle of Judeo-Christian civilization. We forget that ever since our founding, our culture (including religion) has been a mixture of traditional Christianity and successive waves of infidelity, pseudo-Christian sects and cults, and esoteric spiritualities. We are catechized more by the rituals of the market than those of historic Christianity. Although bells rarely announce the assembly of saints today, the ringing of the opening bell on Wall Street is a daily ritual. We may recognize idolatry in the tribesman’s dependence on the carved amulet in his pocket, but it doesn’t occur to us that we may be idolaters as we clutch our iPhone for security, look to the market’s daily news for our hope, entertain ourselves to death, and crave an identity that is shaped by the fashions of the moment.
Visiting with Christian families in their homes is often a rewarding perk of pastoral ministry. Yet it can also be disappointing. Break the ice with some mention of sports, and sometimes the younger members of the family eagerly engage, rattling off statistics, players, and plays. Or break out a piece of technology and they can actually show you what it does! Movies make for easy conversation. But then you break open the Scriptures, ask a catechism question or two, and try to talk about God, and the room often falls silent. Parents hide their sweaty palms, nervously offering to refresh the drinks, while the children begin to stare off into space or break out their cell phones and videogames. We all have to ask ourselves: What really matters? And what really matters to our children is at least some indication of what really matters to us.
Actually, churches in Africa and Asia are growing rapidly. Some, too influenced by American trends (especially the prosperity gospel), spread tumbleweeds. Yet others, grounded in the gospel, are also growing in depth and in size. They are forming the base stations for the next wave of world missions.
The statistics are in. Most professing evangelicals in North America are biblically and doctrinally illiterate. It’s therefore not surprising that there is virtually no difference between the “churched” and the “unchurched” in terms of values and lifestyle. We’re learning the hard way that “deeds” cannot live long without “creeds”‘that you can’t have the fruit without the tree. And you can’t have a healthy and fruitful tree unless it’s “planted by streams of water.” As long as we are living in this present age, the church will always be “called out” to belong to Christ in the power of the Spirit who works through his Word. The “way of the righteous” will always be a stream in the desert’not out of this world, but a different environment where strange trees grow. Disciples experience many things and do many things, but first and foremost they are recipients of many things’especially, of the gospel story from Genesis to Revelation that creates and sustains our faith, fuels our hope, and produces the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, and peace. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.”
The Way of the Righteous: Catechesis Is More than Downloading Information
Worldly wisdom is a perversion of godly wisdom. Of course, there are still brilliant remnants of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in this passing evil age. Because they cannot completely eradicate the image of God in them and the common grace by which the Spirit of Life stirs up and fortifies the natural gifts of their creation, our non-Christian neighbors contribute to our common good. In the arts and sciences, law and medicine, government and education, we are co-laborers with them. Yet in Christ alone is found the source of all wisdom and the content of that highest wisdom. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, Christ is not only the Light to whom we look, but the one in whose light we see everything else. The wisdom of this age knows nothing of a history with a meaningful origin and destiny, but only the cycle of life and death. Not the festivals of Israel and the church, celebrating the “new thing” that God has done in our midst, but rather the repetitive rhythms of nature’s course’winter, spring, summer, and fall’mark the path of one’s life.
Meaningful catechesis involves a surrender of the script that has been handed down to us from our cultural forebears, so that we may be written into the unfolding drama whose playwright, central character, and producer is the Triune God. Effective catechesis is not merely memorizing the script and saying our lines, but actually taking our place in the chorus that surrounds the Lamb in praise. There is so much talk about “practical application” today, as if the wisdom of God’chiefly, the gospel’was already well known. Yet, as J. Gresham Machen said in the 1920s, “We are rapidly approaching the state in which there is so much ‘applied Christianity’ that there is no ‘Christianity’ to apply.”
It’s precisely a condition such as ours that requires a conscious, serious, and sustained commitment to catechesis. It won’t solve everything, but without it nothing stands. We cannot “just live the faith” unless we understand it. We can’t play the music if we don’t have the music. And catechesis is not merely a matter of downloading information. As important as the names, dates, and books of the Bible certainly are, the goal of catechesis is to draw strangers and saints into the drama of redemption. Following the grain of natural development, good catechesis begins with repetition and memorization in young children, but challenges teenagers to question and explore. Not only teaching what we believe, but knowing why we believe it, we are ready to heed Peter’s exhortation: “Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Pet. 3:15-16).
Our culture has an insatiable craving for information, but without knowledge there is no context, and without wisdom there is no facility for interpreting it as anything more than random data. T. S. Eliot put the matter eloquently in his 1934 poem, “Choruses from the Rock”:
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Our Urgent Need to Recover Catechesis
Almost as ubiquitous as its native weed, the high desert is also a place where, during the boom of the 1980s and 90s, gated communities emerged overnight’mainly as distant but affordable bedroom neighborhoods for the sprawling L.A. Basin. Many, however, are virtual ghost towns today. On the outside, many of the houses built in Southern California during that famous boom (including my own) have “curb appeal.” They are spacious. Some even have faux brickwork and stones to add charm. Yet upon closer inspection, we often discover that they are cheaply built and require repairs as soon as the “new” wears off.
Something similar is happening in the church. At first glance, many churches seem fine. They advertise themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing.” There is a lot of activity for all ages, always something new for the weekly announcements. Yet upon closer inspection, they are frequently taken up with other concerns, more urgent operations to make themselves relevant, meaningful, and important in the community. The ministry of Word and Sacrament instituted by Christ in Scripture is subordinate to myriad ministries and programs created by our own ingenuity. There’s always something to do for Jesus, but what’s often lost is the work that Jesus did’and still does’for us.
A few years ago, a leading megachurch in suburban Chicago launched a study that discovered widespread discontent among its most highly committed attendees, who complained that they were not really growing in their faith. Although most attributed “burn-out” to the lack of serious teaching and worship, the leadership drew a different conclusion’namely, that as Christians mature they need the church less. Like a coach at the gym, believers need their own customized workout plan. They need to become “self-feeders.”
This is a recipe for creating tumbleweeds rather than trees. Think of all the varied images for the relationship of Christ and his church in the New Testament, such as vine and branches, cornerstone and sanctuary, shepherd and sheep. Christ placed under-shepherds over the flock precisely so they would be led to the rich pastures. Through the ministry of pastors and teachers, every part of the body grows up into Christ as the head. The “way of the righteous” is not detachment and rootless tumbling toward death, but being “planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.”
Paul challenged the Corinthians to give up their worldly divisions, reminding them, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17). However, many younger believers I’ve met, who were reared in the church, have never really belonged to the church as members and cannot recall having received Communion in the regular services, although they may have done so at a youth retreat, summer camp, or some other meeting where they were separated from the local expression of “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
Tumbleweeds start out well enough. They look green at first, flush with winter rains. However, they are like the seed in Jesus’ parable that fell on rocky ground, without sufficient soil in which to sink down its roots and grow. Elsewhere Jesus says that wheat and weeds look similar at first, until the harvest when he will separate them. Before long, beaten down by the scorching sun, the weed withers and is blown away.
Pastors, you can have thousands of people pass through your doors. You can sell millions of books promising how to have meaning, happiness, better relationships, and control over your finances, your family, and your personal well-being. You can have the town’s most coveted campus, organ, choir, praise band, or youth ministry. You can have lots of people engaged in spiritual disciplines or participating in evangelistic and social outreach in the community. Yet if the proclamation of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, teaching, and corporate discipline are not the “core values” of a church’s mission statement, then it isn’t a church. The Great Commission, not our own strategic plans, determines what constitutes a true church. Otherwise, it’s just another self-help group, spiritual mall, entertainment center, or community service agency.
You don’t have to break a sweat for tumbleweeds. Like all weeds, they can take care of themselves. But planting and growing trees takes a lot of time and energy on everyone’s part. And it’s not enough to plant them; let’s allow Christ to determine the ecology or environment that will make them “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen” (2 Pet. 3:18).
