CRC Inside Baseball #4: Catechesis

A larger vision

I think we’re at the point we can put a few threads together to talk about one “chunk” of a vision for the CRC. Today we’re going to talk about catechesis.

If a denomination is more like a language and a culture, if people learn from observing and living alongside one another, and if we recognize that we’re “coasting” a little bit right now then what can we do in response? Well one part of what we can do is catechesis. Catechesis is basic Christian training to orient people to live within the faith. In the Christian Reformed Church we might assume this means a Catechism class, but if we’re following Lindbeck and recognizing that a denomination is not only a group that shares a list of beliefs, then you probably know that I’m going to encourage us to consider more than that in catechesis.

To be sure, the Heidelberg Catechism is a good overview of Reformed theology. It does particularly well helping us understand that we cannot earn our own salvation, that we must be saved by a mediator who is both fully God and fully man, and that Jesus fulfills this role for us. It also covers three of the more important bits of text for Christians to memorize; the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. Lindbeck’s view of religion as a culture (or language as we will talk about it more in this post) doesn’t remove beliefs and propositions from our practice, so I would actually add that we need to expand some of the knowledge we try to pass on beyond just the Catechism. Biblical literacy, an essential part of living out a Reformed faith, is quite low. Some of the finer points of Reformed Theology seem to be misunderstood or forgotten entirely. We also don’t talk about the way that we read Scripture enough. Everyone develops their own approaches to it or brings in what they learned in another tradition instead of sharing what we have understood as Reformed Christians. It is still important to know what we believe and spend time learning this in an age and ability appropriate way.

But this catechesis does not cover everything. Lindbeck describes his approach to religion as a cultural-linguistic model, and languages help us understand this a little bit better. If you’ve ever tried to learn a language, you may have started with gaining some knowledge of its words. You download Duolingo on your phone and you work up a hot streak lasting a few hundred days of short bursts of language learning. You will probably get some vocabulary and some basic phrases down which will make you feel like you know the language. But then you will arrive in a foreign country and discover that there are a lot of things that you don’t know. People speak with slightly different pronunciations than the app. When you say what you think is an intelligible statement, people look at you with confusion. You discover that even though you know something about speaking German, you can’t really speak German.

The same thing happens in a denomination. I can have you read the creeds and confessions of the CRC. I can give you a list of position statements Synod has produced over the years. You could even get really into reading old study-committee reports from Synod and seeing what we have decided over the years. But when you arrive in a CRC congregation, your experience is going to be different from what you have read. That’s because the community has lived through the production of all of these different pieces of information, and it has altered the language that they speak together. The life and practices of the community will look slightly different from what you read on the page. We have had arguments over women in ecclesiastical office which went back and forth, and so there’s a particular response to that issue within our churches. We have developed a particular approach to reading the Bible through study committee reports and our training that is distinct from other denominations.

So the second part of Catechesis is to start to experience how the congregation lives out its beliefs in practice. This is complicated because in some cases the person undergoing catechesis may discover that the congregation is living in a way that’s very different from what we state that we believe. When they ask, someone from the congregation might say “that’s not how we do things here” but this might be a case where the catechumenate has identified a place where the congregation might need to rediscover its written tradition. But even with this, a new Christian needs to spend time in the community to begin to understand some way of how people get along in order to understand the “language” of the denomination.

Let me give you a list of things that will accomplish this: coffee time or meals after worship when people are talking to each other, service projects like a community cleanup, meetings (council, committees, membership, Classis, and Synod all count), board game nights, carolling around Christmas time, small group gatherings, prayer meetings, outings to the beach, and Church softball teams. What these things have in common is that the put people in a Church community together and they live life together. In the process of living the life of their community, people will get the chance to learn the grammar of the community and start to speak it themselves.

And then we have the third part of Catechesis which is our practices, especially in worship. Rev. Eric Dirksen from Christ Church Davis in California has this phrase he’s said which is connected to Lindbeck. The phrase is something like “Christianity is sometimes caught more than taught.” When our worship has practices which are thick with meaning and connection to what we believe, it allows people to experience what it means to be Christian Reformed in a different way than if we were to tell them in a class. When we being our worship with a call to worship from God, we are learning that God is the one who calls us to worship and we don’t come here on our own. When we pray a prayer of confession every Sunday, pause for times of silent confession, and then immediately pronounce God’s forgiveness, we remember both our tendency towards sin, and the endless grace of God’s forgiving love in Jesus. When we ask for the Spirit to illumine our hearts before we read the scripture, it’s a sign that we need God’s guidance even as we read his Word.

We don’t always explain the purpose behind our worship practices, but when they are clearly connected and done in a way that fits with our beliefs and our life with God, then they create a way for new Christians or learning ones to internalize our faith even before they may have believed its propositions. I still remember distinctly the day someone said to me “We always have something to confess when we come before God” and I immediately thought about the endless number of prayers of confession I had performed in Church, never once feeling like there was nothing to confess to God. In that moment I understood my constant need for forgiveness in a way that someone just telling me that never would have. People undergo catechesis when they regularly participate in our worship provided its connected to what we believe in a meaningful and intentional way.

If Catechesis is done well, then it relies on all three of these pieces. It relies on a community that understands its beliefs well (including Scripture, and its own theology) so that it can pass those things on. It relies on a community that is living within that context and has developed in through time and through different challenges and conflicts so that it can identify “this is how we do things.” And it also relies on regular practices which reinforce both the head knowledge of Scripture and Theology, and the practical knowledge of how we live this out and make decisions.

A challenge we have in the denomination is that our head knowledge, our communal wisdom, and our practices have been weakened as a denomination. We don’t have a good pool of common understanding which we all share between churches. Some congregations are much more well read on some topics than others. We don’t have a good pool of shared wisdom. The implicit knowledge of how we make decisions seems to have gotten lost, or in some cases “how we make decisions” has more to do with our personal Christian walk than it does with the other people whom we are supposed to be on a journey with. And we don’t have a lot of shared practices. While there is some similarity, the worship practices of Christian Reformed Churches vary widely. Some variety is understandable and makes sense, but some of this variety loses the thoughtfulness we’d ideally have if our practices were going to be a part of our Catechesis.

If we want to come together as a denomination, I think there’s a need to begin doing all three of these things at the same time. I know that there’s a wing which is already working on enriching our understanding of our three forms of unity. I think we need to add to that some more distinctly Reformed perspectives on reading Scripture and an effort to deepen every member’s familiarity with Scripture.

Then there is a need to recover our “Christian Reformed Way” which has really taken a beating in the great turmoil we are currently experiencing. I don’t know who, but someone needs to make some of our shared history through Synod and other episodes more accessible in order to help newcomers understand what kind of journey we’ve been on together and how that has shaped our life together. Maybe we need to write some of this down. We also need to recognize that a community needs to do more than just worship and learn together. It needs to life together so we can teach one another some of the untranslatable grammar of our denomination.

And then there is a need to get a little more serious about shared practice. I think this is an even greater difficulty. We have become so accustomed to doing things our own way that we bristle at the suggestion that anyone might tell us the way we ought to do something. I’m not advocating for a set denomination-wide liturgy or set liturgical forms for every part of the service. I think there can be room for tremendous freedom within the structure of our Reformed tradition. But I think we’ve got to define some things which are absolute essentials, and start to point out where we are going too far from patterns of worship that reflect our history as a part of the Church and our life in Christ together. We already have two resources in the Red “Lift Up Your Hearts” hymnal and “The Worship Sourcebook” which provide us with consistency amid uniformity. If we could set aside some of our desire for freedom to recognize the wisdom of common practice in helping catechumenates come to learn what it means to be Christian Reformed, it would be a big help.

So in summary, we need to do some Catechesis. Everyone has some things to learn. But it has to be a broad project. We have to learn together, live together, and worship together. Bringing all three things together would help us to learn and develop the language that we speak as CRC people.