“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)
Easier said than done, right? What exactly constitutes “training”? Matthew 28:19 gives us a bit of help: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” The baptism part is pretty straightforward, but the teaching clause has fallen on hard times. It seems that either we use it as a proof-text for indoctrination or we chuck it altogether for a “deeds, not creeds” philosophy. A few years ago, our friends at the White Horse Inn interviewed Kenda Creasy Dean, the Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theology Seminary and author of Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford University Press, 2010), on what catechesis looks like in the American church, and how we might take a helpful leaf from the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ book. (Not The Pearl of Great Price—or The Book of Mormon—but you get it.)
KCD: I heard Tony Campolo say once that we’re not going to lose this generation because we ask too much; we’re going to lose them because we ask too little. I think he’s dead on about that. We talked to a lot of Mormon teenagers, and they were the most articulate about their faith; they knew more about it, they talked more about their faith in their families. It was a common subject of conversation.
If you talk to Mormons, they’re crazed about how they’re going to help their kids have faith in the same way that everybody else is, because fewer kids are going to seminary. Seminary is a fascinating phenomenon among the Mormons: for four years, every morning before school, you participate in this small group that meets in a home, so there’s the solidarity of parents. It’s a huge commitment, but you see there’s an urgency in Mormon practices that a lot of Christian communities don’t have, and that’s this: on the other end of high school, Mormon kids are going to do something immediately that will have consequences for their faith. If you’re a guy, you’re probably going to be involved in a mission assignment (although Mormons complain that there aren’t enough people doing that—still, a lot of them do). If you’re a girl, you’re very likely to get married young—if not right out of high school, then often before college—and you become the primary catechist of your family. There’s an urgency to get these teenagers trained in the faith. These parents will get up at the crack of dawn to get their kids to seminary, because they
care that their kids have the tools to take on these tasks that are quite imminent.
I think a lot of Protestants tend to think (and I tend to think this way myself), that even if my kids don’t get this instruction in high school, there’s still plenty of time—they’ll get it eventually. Mormon urgency doesn’t allow for that.
WHI: You quote extensively from the preface to Martin Luther’s Small Catechism of 1529, in which he says:
The common man knows practically nothing of Christian doctrine, and many of the pastors are almost entirely incompetent and unable to teach; yet all the people who are supposed to be Christians have been baptized and receive the holy sacrament, yet they do not know the Lord’s Prayer, the creed or the Ten Commandments.
Do you think we’re living in a similar situation, and if so, do you think a recovery of catechism is one of the ways we can help glue together what happens in church with what happens in the home? Will making catechism not just something that we do on the church nickel but something that we do in our homes as families help ground the faith in which we raise our children? It’s ironic to think that this is being done almost exclusively by Mormons and a few smaller confessional groups.
KCD: Definitely that’s a way to begin to get at this. Now, you have to be careful, because a lot of people understand catechism as a very inert document. Of course, that’s not the way it was understood in the Reformation. The way Martin Luther talked about catechism was that it was one of those things you hung on the dining room wall; and the idea was that the parents, specifically the fathers, were supposed to talk about it in the presence of their children and their servants—it was a way of catechizing the whole household. I don’t actually think that just sitting down and teaching people anything codified in a document is going to do the trick.
What catechisms do offer is a common language, and one of the things that has been lost—and this was striking in the national study of youth and religion—is that young people have very, very few language resources when it comes to faith. Even if they hold some faith belief, they don’t know how to talk about it; they don’t feel safe talking about it, or they actually don’t have a language to lay claim to it. A friend of mine put it this way: part of the problem is that we’ve become a generation of mules. He said that what happened was the marriage between Protestantism and consumer culture. A generation ago, people’s faith might have been healthy, but because they couldn’t talk about it, they couldn’t “reproduce.” They don’t have a way of talking about their faith—it’s not something they received, so they can’t pass it on to their children.
One of the points I hoped to make in this book was that people may talk about the problem with youth and youth ministry and adolescent faith, but this is a problem for all of us. This is something that starts with parents, with adults, with a generation of people who just plain never learned the basic tools to communicate about faith. Even if they have questions about faith, they don’t know how to ask those questions.
WHI: So we need to recover the grammar before we can pass the language on to our kids.
KCD: Well said—I wish I’d said it that way!
