INTRODUCTION
We who worked together on this book are separated generationally, ecclesiastically, and culturally. Parrett is an American, a free churchman, and a younger man than Packer by some decades. Packer is a veteran Anglican presbyter, English by extraction, and Canadian by choice. The discovery, however, that we were both passionate about catechesis brought us together.
As evangelical Christian educators, we see catechesis as integral to the allage Christian nurture that every congregation should be practicing. Together we mourn its current eclipse, perceiving this as the deepest root of the immaturity that is so widespread in evangelical circles, and we unite in seeking the recognition, restoration, and indeed enhancement of it as a basic discipline of Christian life.
In this we find that we see eye to eye with the late Pope John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, and we are happy to be in their company at this point. Both have been clear and emphatic that in order to be fully useful, Christians must know their faith well. We could not agree more.
Surveying evangelical congregations in the Western world today, we believe that what confronts us is a case of being so close yet so far away. Conservative evangelical congregations regularly excel in the number and variety of forms of Sunday instruction and midweek group experiences provided for their adherents. Yet the hustle and bustle ends up like a shower of arrows that all hit the target yet miss the bull’s-eye. Although these congregations have done well in so many ways, something more is needed.
What exactly is the problem? Look at it this way. During the past century mechanization and technology have increased the pace of Western life, leaving us all wanting to do things more quickly so as to get on with whatever we see as next business. The hurrying mindset has led to the fast-food revolution, in which we wolf snacks as we go along rather than treat meals as big deals in the way our grandparents did. And out of this fast-food revolution has come the junk food predicament: we are offered, and gobble down, what quickly makes us feel full, but it isn’t a balanced diet. It doesn’t give us the vitamins we need but loads us up with unnecessary fats. As a result, we end up obese, flabby, and out of shape. Something similar seems to happen in our churches; the food we get and give in our learning and teaching, though no doubt tasty, does not nourish us as spiritual food should. Before anything else, adjustments in our diet are needed, or we shall never be lithe, virile, upright Christians— strong, resilient, and passionate for God in the way that evangelical Christians in days past were.
After J.I.’s heart attack he was given a document entitled “Guidelines for a ‘Heart-Healthy’ Life . . . Low Saturated Fat Diet.” One way in which his spouse helps him is by regularly reminding him of what the document directs and deprecates. A spiritually heart-healthy diet, we think, is the primary need of present-day Western congregations. And the foundation of that diet, we believe, is good catechesis. We came to hope that by pooling our resources we might make a helpful difference at that point. Hence the present volume.
Obstacles
We are well aware that in advocating a renewal of catechesis we fight an uphill battle and swim against the stream. Why should this be? For several reasons, which we now review.
The first and biggest factor that inhibits catechesis, and the hardest to counter or circumvent, is the turn away from external authority in Western culture. This became potent in the nineteenth century. As a cultural force, it grew out of the anti-Catholic-church fury of the French Revolution that burst out in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille. To be sure, this fury was, at least on the surface, political rather than directly religious. The maddened mob believed the French Roman Catholic hierarchy and the attached church system were buttressing the irresponsible royal autocracy and sought to bring both power structures down in flames together. Deists and atheists gave their support, and the aftermath was the slow but inexorable crossing of a western European and American cultural barrier: leading thinkers in the West began to see themselves as pioneers of a new, post-Christian era in which the Christian heritage of belief might be questioned and critiqued like any other human point of view. This was a radical turn from a millennium and a half of acknowledging the truth and authority of God’s written Word as set forth in and by the church.
The clearest discernment of this shift was in Holland, where men like Groen van Prinsterer and Abraham Kuyper analyzed it realistically as an anti–theistic flow of thought, and the Antirevolutionary political party and the Free University of Amsterdam were founded to stand against it. But because all this was done in the Dutch language, it had no impact outside of Holland. Elsewhere, ripples of the Revolution, linked with the burgeoning egocentricity of the Romantic movement in literature and the arts, carried intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic over the watershed, thus preparing the ground for critical biblical scholarship and theological liberalism. This turn away from external authority led straight to the post-theistic perspective of Nietzsche, though few traveled so far or so disruptively. Many Protestant leaders remained largely unaware that the real roots of Christianity—namely, belief in the Trinity, the incarnation, salvation in Christ, and the supernaturalness of the church—were being replaced by the idea that those who adhered to the church system and kept up religious appearances were still free to believe or disbelieve as their personal judgment might suggest. This liberal mindset undercuts catechesis completely, for catechesis assumes the existence of authoritative truth that needs to be taught. Liberalism, in the church as in today’s wider culture, says there is no such thing. At best, therefore, catechesis will only be a minority interest among conservative Christians—Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox—one which many are likely to deride both in and outside official church structures.
The second inhibiting factor, a corollary of the first, is resistance to authoritative instruction within the Christian community. This is particularly apparent in Western Anglicanism. For three and a half centuries, partly out of reaction against the highly catechetical character of Puritanism and partly in the belief that liturgical conformity is what really matters, the assumption has held sway that, once confirmed, congregants need to learn no more for the rest of their Christian lives. But similar resistance breaks surface in other circles too. In children’s and youth work across the board, today’s agenda is learning Bible stories rather than being grounded in truths about the Triune God.
In group Bible studies generally, participants are led to look directly for personal devotional applications without first contemplating the writers’ points about the greatness, goals, methods, and mystery of God. In putting together Christian books and magazines for popular reading and in composing, preaching, hearing, and thinking about sermons, the story is the same: it is assumed that our reaction to realities is more significant than any of the realities to which we react. Thus we learn to cultivate a mode of piety that rests upon a smudgy, deficient, and sometimes misleading conception of who and what the God we serve really is. Brought up on this, we now reflect the subjectivist turn of the Western thought-world of more than a century ago: personal guesses and fantasies about God replace the church’s dogma as our authority, a hermeneutic of habitual distrust and suspicion of dogma establishes itself, and dogma becomes a dirty word, loaded with overtones of obscurantism, tunnel vision, unreality, superstition, and mental enslavement.
It would be quite unrealistic to expect a welcome for catechesis within such a context. We must expect to have to fight for a hearing in order to say what is on our hearts. It is countercultural not only in secular terms, but in church terms also. And so we expect to have a struggle on our hands, even with some whom we might otherwise count as friends.
A final factor inhibiting catechesis emerges here: preoccupation. In most evangelical churches, the Sunday and weekly programs are already as full as can reasonably be managed. To make room for catechesis, some familiar elements of church life will have to be pushed into the background, if not, indeed, terminated. Otherwise the good will be found blocking out the best. That resentment and resistance will result when such a rearrangement is attempted is, unhappily, a foregone conclusion.
Our book, therefore, must and will combine exposition with advocacy. Nothing we say will be meant, nor must be read as, negative criticism of faithful evangelical pastoral ministry that is already going on. Our sole purpose is to see the good made better, under God and for his glory. We ask our readers to bear this in mind, and to focus simply on weighing what we have to say by the scriptural standard.
Foundations
Underlying our argument, first to last, is a particular view of human nature, and how God shapes it for himself. This view, though largely overshadowed in today’s church, not to mention today’s world, has a long history; we find it in C. S. Lewis, Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Irenaeus, both Testaments of our Bibles, and most fully and explicitly in the teaching of Paul and John—Paul especially. It has in fact been the mainstream Christian view throughout. In thumbnail-sketch form, it is as follows:
Human Nature and God
Created by God through human agency, each human individual is a psychophysical entity, an embodied soul or (one could say) an ensouled body. Intellectually, emotionally, and volitionally, actively and reactively, we are self-conscious units who live in and through our physical bodies—bodies that grow, mature, wear out, and finally cease functioning altogether. While they function, they sustain and condition our conscious life, but not always in the best way. Our physical makeup can cause problems—sometimes very acute problems. Instinctively we know that controlling and directing our bodies in our interactions with people and things so that we achieve goals and avoid disasters is the path of fulfillment. We act accordingly, though in important ways our bodies are always somewhat beyond our control. With resurrection bodies in glory we may expect our experience of “body management” to be different, but here on earth this is how it is.
Human life is a matter of consciously acting to fulfill decisions made in obedience to desires and determinations that are fueled partly by a sense of obligation, partly by a prospect of pleasure and satisfaction and avoidance of trouble, and partly by a sense of need. Some of these latter desires are triggered by felt physical and personal needs for relief of some kind, and others by pressures arising from circumstances and possibilities imaginatively envisaged. But all our desires stem from the central core of selfhood within the soul, which Scripture speaks of as the heart, and all come with a moral quality which that power of the mind that we call conscience discerns, approvingly or disapprovingly as the case may be.
All truth, that is, all our knowledge of reality at every level, enters our heart through our mind, as our minds receive and process the products of different modes of awareness of various sorts of things—animate and inanimate, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. This is how we come by such knowledge as we have of our own selves, other selves, and God. In the case of God, it is through the impact of his works in creation, providence, and grace, plus the input of his Word, made effective to us by his Spirit, that we come to know what we do in fact know of his reality (which knowledge, though much in itself, is, we may be sure, not much in relation to all that he is and knows himself to be in himself). All the knowledge of God we have is given to us by God, and has as its purpose our responsive obedience to him in worship and work. Then, as we give God pleasure by obeying his will revealed to us and by matching our works and ways to his as our sovereign Creator, royal Covenanter, and universal Companion, we bear his image and display his likeness. Thus, at least, it was meant to be; but this, unhappily, is not what actually goes on.
Human Sin and Divine Grace
Human life, as we live it ourselves and observe it in others, is tragically far from what it was meant to be. It is distorted, disfigured, marked by disaffection to God and inner disintegration of our various personal powers. God made us all for fellowship with himself in love, worship, and service, but a perverting force, which Scripture labels sin, now controls us, and has so twisted our hearts that self-service (egocentricity) rather than God’s service (God-centeredness) is all that is natural to us now. Total unawareness of God is impossible—God sees to that!—but the pride and self-will, envy and greed, that now rule in our hearts go far to blanket this awareness, or alternatively to falsify it beyond recognition. Irreligious self-assertion and idolatrous religiosity both result from damage done by sin to our hearts and minds.
Regarding religiosity: we need to realize that pride and self-will are compatible with a great deal of meticulous religious observance (witness the Pharisees of Jesus’s day). What they are not compatible with is the humility of conscious worthlessness and amazement at discovering that God lavishes love on so unworthy a person as oneself. In all the world’s major religions apart from Christianity, and among many on the fringes of the Christian churches, such observances are assumed to commend us to whatever divine being or beings there may be, and to secure for us a right to, and a place in, the divine favor. This self-deception, a regular by-product of our pride, constantly confirms an inner confidence that winning our way into God’s good graces is a real possibility. From this flows a complacent stubbornness that makes people all over the world very slow to surrender this assumption. Christianity, however, is unique in insisting that God’s favor toward humanity is already forfeit, that it cannot now be earned or secured by any action on our part, and that we have only condemnation and final rejection to look forward to. Nevertheless, Christianity continues, God receives lost sinners into his favor, pardons, adopts, and literally remakes them, through the grace and mercy that are mediated via Jesus Christ the Lord, God’s incarnated, crucified, risen, reigning, returning Son.
Paradoxical? Certainly, yet true. Fantastic? Certainly, yet factual. Beyond comprehension? Certainly, yet real nonetheless. We confront here the mind-blowing, heart-stirring wonder of the redeeming love of God, that which makes the Gospel genuinely and uniquely good news.
Let us be clear on this. Christianity is not in essence a moral code or an ascetic routine, as so many down the centuries have mistakenly supposed. Rather, it is a supernaturalizing personal relationship with a supernatural personal Savior. Christianity centers upon Jesus Christ the Lord who, today and every day through the Holy Spirit, confronts everyone to whom the Gospel comes, summoning us to recognize and respond to him. He calls on us, not just to acknowledge his reality and the salient facts about him, but to exercise faith in him—that is, on the basis of the facts, to trust him—for the forgiveness of our sins; to repent—that is, to leave behind our present natural life of sin-driven bondage, and enter a new life of Christ-led freedom; and to become disciples—persons, that is, who conscientiously, as our life project, walk with him, learn from him, worship him and the Father through him, and maintain obedience to him, conforming ourselves to his recorded attitudes and example up to the limit of the Holy Spirit’s enabling.
It is the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Godhead residing in each believer’s inner being, who, having invisibly but effectively united believers to Christ, now sustains them in that union, working in them the motivation and compassion of Christ, and mediating to and through them the power of his risen life. He illuminates their minds to understand Christ’s teaching, and biblical teaching generally, to see how it applies to them personally, and to envisage and pray for Christian advance. He reshapes their outlook, habits, and character by energizing their efforts at faithful obedience across the board. Every Christian thus becomes a work in progress, a lifelong reconstruction site, with the Holy Spirit as architect and craftsman at every point, first to last.
Following the Bible, we call the Spirit’s engendering of faith, repentance, and the commitment to discipleship regeneration or new birth (John 3:1–8; Titus 3:5; 1 Peter 1:22–23; 1 John 2:29; 3:9; 5:1, 18), and we speak of the consequent whole-souled pursuit of holiness and righteousness as sanctification, growth in grace, and glorification begun (Rom. 8:30; 2 Cor. 3:18; 1 Thess. 5:23; 2 Peter 3:18).
Christian Discipleship and Teaching
Teaching is a universal human activity, found in families, schools, all forms of task-oriented communities, and among friends and colleagues in every mode of society. It consists of transmitting knowledge and skills. Biblical religion required teaching from the start and in every new generation; priests, Levites, and parents were solemnly charged to do this, and in Jesus’s day this was the life’s work of the scribes. Jesus himself was a teacher par excellence, and when he gave his marching orders to his first disciples before withdrawing from this world he specified that a teaching ministry corresponding to his own must go on. Go, he said, “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” (Matt. 28:19–20). We speak of this, rightly, as Christ’s Great Commission to his church. God’s children are called and charged to be people who, having themselves learned, now reach out to teach what they have learned.
It is apparent that the Christian pioneers took the terms of Jesus’s commission very seriously, for there is a kind of drumbeat with regard to teaching that resonates throughout the New Testament. Teaching, not just for the correcting of current errors (though there was much of that to be done), but for the maturing of the faithful in themselves, was at the heart of their church life. The mindset involved is shown by Paul’s words to Timothy: “What you have heard from me [as your teacher] in the presence of many witnesses commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2). The church is to be a learning-and-teaching fellowship in which the passing on of what we learn becomes a regular part of the service we render to each other. Surely this is a realization that today’s churches urgently need to recover.
A teacher, of course, is a person from whom others do in fact learn. Real teaching, whether at home, at school, in the pulpit, or wherever, will engage attention, strike sparks in the mind, and evoke some kind of interactive response. Where this does not happen, the correct verdict is that one has tried to teach but has not succeeded, thus verifying the schoolteacher’s time-honored tag: “no impression without expression.” While teaching comes naturally and instinctively to some, it is an art that can be mastered to a degree by anyone who can think and speak clearly about things and is concerned to get them across. Paul sees teaching as a spiritual gift (that is, a capacity to serve Christ by some form of Christian expression; see Rom. 12:7), but that does not mean that there is no need to stir up, develop, and hone the skill by reflection, preparation, practice, and submission to competent assessment. The reverse is true, and it is only pride and stubbornness that will make improvement here impossible. Many, if not most of us, can learn to teach adequately, at least in an informal setting, if that is what we really desire to do.
Building Believers
This phrase appears in our subtitle, and before we plunge into our argument we would like to comment on its meaning and fittingness as an expression of our goal.
The Greek 
and its cognate verb 
, which in the New Testament signify spiritual maturing and consolidation, have given rise to the English phrases “build up,” “built up,” and “building up,” which are regularly used in pastoral contexts as variants for “edify” and “edification.” (“Built up” as a rendering of is found in 1 Peter 2:5 KJV.) They are words taken from the building trade and used metaphorically to denote the desired outcome of pastoral care and the pastoral process. In identifying with this desire, we would observe that the little adverb “up” in these renderings tends to mislead. It seems to suggest that the goal of the pastoral process, of which catechesis is part, is to produce some form of height, distinction, or dignity. But the true associations of the word lie elsewhere, in ideas of sound workmanship, thoroughness of construction, solidity, stability, and utility with no weak spots, defects, or malfunctions that might reduce the building’s quality. It is important to see this.
Not too long ago, during a building boom, a couple purchased one of a pair of houses that were virtually identical in design and were to be put up side by side on a vacant lot. The wife visited the site most days and watched the house go up. The result was a structure the housing inspector described as remarkably well built, and it has proved trouble free ever since. Leaks and cracks in the house next door, however, have revealed shoddy workmanship. The effects of faulty assembly can be long term. And so can the consequences of deficient discipling, which is our point here.
Superficial smatterings of truth, blurry notions about God and godliness, and thoughtlessness about the issues of living—careerwise, communitywise, familywise, and churchwise—are all too often the marks of evangelical congregations today, particularly, if we may dare to say it, some newly planted ones. (We pick on evangelical groupings because we ourselves belong to them, and thus know something about them from the inside. We do not imply that other brands of contemporary Christianity are free from the same faults.) We think that as long as catechesis, which was the strength of Christian nurture in the past, continues to be out of fashion, these shortcomings are not likely to disappear. As we contemplate today’s complex concerns, hopes, dreams, and ventures of Christian renewal, discipleship impresses us as the key present-day issue, and catechesis as the key present-day element of discipleship, all the world over. The Christian faith must be both well and wisely taught and well and truly learned! A far-reaching change of mindset about this is called for, without which such well-worn dictums as “American Christianity is three thousand miles wide and half an inch deep” will continue, sadly, to be verified. Recovery of the educational-devotional discipline that we are advocating cannot, to our mind, come a moment too soon.
Agenda
It is our belief that in today’s congregations there is a need to give the same sort of training to a new generation of catechists that we now give to Bible study group leaders and Sunday school teachers. Catechists are teachers whose special task is to ground worshipers of every age in the truths Christians live by and in the ways Christians are to live by those truths. Why is this necessary? Because all congregants, adults no less than the young, need a full initial grounding in these things, followed by regular revisiting and deepened exploration of them. As we regularly revisit books of the Bible we have gone through before and find new wisdom and relevance in them because of the new experiences that we bring to the study, so it is with truths about God, his ways, and his goals. This is the basic territory of discipleship. In most evangelical churches today the need for lifelong Bible study, the value of Bible study groups for everyone, the beneficial ways good books can augment one’s experiences, and the necessity of expository preaching are pretty well established. But the attention to the comparable value of catechesis—truth-in-life study, as we may fairly call it—is not appreciated; indeed, attention to doctrine is sometimes actually avoided, lest it induce contention and coldheartedness and thereby diminish devotional ardor.
Here is our starting point. In the following chapters we shall seek to correct this imbalance, showing catechesis to be complementary to, and of no less value than, Bible study, expository preaching, and other formational ministries, and urging upon our readers that congregational strategy must find room for this biblically based and historically affirmed ministry if full spiritual health among the faithful is to be advanced. And we shall offer suggestions for implementing this insight.
Concerning the Collaboration
A Few Words from J.I.
From my standpoint, there is little to say about the providential way in which Gary and I teamed up to become joint authors of this book. As so often with God’s special providences, the sense of God’s preplanning and preparation of us both for the task has been very strong. Though Gary had been a student of mine shortly after I came to Canada, I had lost touch with him since he finished at Regent. I had no idea that he now held an academic doctorate and a professorship in educational ministries, had become an international lecturer and author (add into the bargain that he is a hymn-writer also), and was planning his own book on catechesis, a good deal of which was already drafted. It only took us a few minutes to decide—or perhaps I should say discover—that we were heaven-sent colleagues for birthing the present volume, with materials in hand that were complementary for the purpose. By vigorous and wonderfully harmonious to-ing and fro-ing we completed the book in a very few months, and I think we are both happy with it; I know I am. We have plans for more, but this is not the place to reveal them.
A Few Words from Gary
It is truly a great joy and privilege to have been able to partner with J.I. on this project. I was one of his students at Regent College during the early 1980s. Soon after I joined the faculty of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, J.I. spoke at our school and I was able to renew acquaintance with him. On several occasions over the past decade or so I have sought his counsel about how to advance the cause of catechesis. My passion for this critical ministry developed primarily as a result of my studies under J.I. and by reflecting on his own ministry as a catechist, a ministry that he modeled both in the classroom and in so much of his writing through the decades.
In the fall of 2006, Beeson Divinity School hosted a conference in honor of J.I.’s eightieth birthday. The conference was entitled “J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future.”1 I had written a hymn of thanksgiving to God for J.I.’s ministry, and Timothy George kindly invited me to join the conference for the hymn’s “debut.”2 Just before the hymn was sung, J.I. had the opportunity to respond to all the conference presenters and to offer his own thinking about “the evangelical future.” His response was, it seemed clear to me, a clarion call to catechize. J.I. mentioned that he had long wanted to do some writing in this area, but that he would really need a partner to pull it off. No sooner had the conference been formally closed than I approached my beloved former professor to express my eagerness to be that partner. Perhaps a month later, I had occasion to visit with Bob Hosack, acquisitions editor for Baker Books, and I asked him if he would be interested in receiving a proposal for such a project. He immediately said that he would be. Thus the wheels were set in motion for the book that is now in your hands. We are very thankful to Bob, as well as to our project editor, Robert Hand, and to all the others at Baker Books for their kind support of this project.
A portion of my contributions to this current book, especially in chapters 5 and 6, represents an expansion of ideas that I have presented in another recent project: Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful, which I coauthored with my Gordon-Conwell colleague and dear friend, Steve Kang.3 That book surveys a larger umbrella of formative and educational ministries, one of which is catechesis—the entire focus of the present volume. Words cannot adequately express my gratitude to J.I. for his willingness to have me partner with him in the task of promoting a recovery of so vital a ministry.
A Final Word of Warning
The reader will soon discover that both of us have a fondness for what J.I. has sometimes called “apt alliteration” or “artful alliteration.” There are plenty examples of such in this book, along with other aids for memory and organization—hymns, acrostics, acronyms, and so on. Some may think we have gone a bit over the top with such devices, but our defense is simple: these have always been among the tools employed by catechists. And since we are both catechists at heart, we really can’t seem to help ourselves! (Nor have we any desire to do so.)