“For those of you in the congregation who are raising your children, how important it is that you love them sufficiently to discipline them and instruct them in the things of the Word of God, so that as they mature they do reflect the grace of God that you have come to know in Jesus Christ.” – S. Lewis Johnson

Here is 2 year old Knox, handling the first 48 questions of Catechism. Yes, you read that right!

It is a fun video to watch and very heart-warming to know that as a 2 year old, he may not grasp all the concepts and categories he is citing just now, one day he will, and the biblical truths memorized in words will stand him in great stead for the rest of his life. What a blessing this is!

Here is Knox’s big brother Carter (two years ago) at age 7. It took 2 years of ‘diligent practice’ but, as you can see, the result is more than worth the hard work involved.

Perhaps seeing Knox and Carter may encourage your family to continue with your catechism if you’ve started, or begin if you haven’t.

Here is a link to the catechism being used.

Josh Neimi, author of the book “Expository Parenting” writes: “I took the 1840 Joseph P. Engles’ Catechism and tweaked it ‘ever so slightly.'”

This excerpt is adapted from Living for God’s Glory: An Introduction to Calvinism by Joel Beeke.

Although evangelism differs to some degree from generation to generation according to gifts, culture, style, and language, the primary methods of Puritan evangelism—plain preaching and catechetical teaching—can show us much about how to present the gospel to sinners.

Like the Reformers, the Puritans were catechists. They believed that pulpit messages should be reinforced by personalized ministry through catechesis—the instruction in the doctrines of Scripture using catechisms. Puritan catechizing was evangelistic in several ways.

Scores of Puritans reached out evangelistically to children and young people by writing catechism books that explained fundamental Christian doctrines via questions and answers supported by Scripture. For example, John Cotton titled his catechism Milk for Babes, drawn out of the Breasts of both Testaments. Other Puritans included in the titles of their catechisms such expressions as “the main and fundamental points,” “the sum of the Christian religion,” the “several heads” or “first principles” of religion, and “the ABC of Christianity.” At various levels in the church as well as in the homes of their parishioners, Puritan ministers taught rising generations from both the Bible and their catechisms. Their goals were to explain the fundamental teachings of the Bible, to help young people commit the Bible to memory, to make sermons and the sacraments more understandable, to prepare covenant children for confession of faith, to teach them how to defend their faith against error, and to help parents teach their own children.

Catechizing was a follow-up to sermons and a way to reach neighbors with the gospel. Alleine reportedly followed his work on Sunday by several days each week of catechizing church members as well as reaching out with the gospel to people he met on the streets. Baxter, whose vision for catechizing is expounded in The Reformed Pastor, said that he came to the painful conclusion that “some ignorant persons, who have been so long unprofitable hearers, have got more knowledge and remorse of conscience in half an hour’s close disclosure, than they did from ten years’ public preaching.” Baxter invited people to his home every Thursday evening to discuss and pray for blessing on the sermons of the previous Sabbath.

The hard work of the Puritan catechist was greatly rewarded. Richard Greenham claimed that catechism teaching built up the Reformed church and seriously damaged Roman Catholicism. When Baxter was installed at Kidderminster in Worcestershire, perhaps one family in each street honored God in family worship; at the end of his ministry there, there were streets where every family did so. He could say that of the six hundred converts brought to faith under his preaching, he could not name one who had backslidden to the ways of the world. How vastly different was that result compared with those of today’s evangelists, who press for mass conversions and turn over the hard work of follow-up to others.

An Interview with J. I. Packer and Gary Parrett – Thursday, 30 Jun 2011 – original source WhiteHorseInn.org

Throughout the history of the church, young believers and new converts to the faith went through a process called “catechism.” Although this is an ancient practice, it has fallen out of use in contemporary Christianity. In seeking a remedy to this, White Horse Inn talked with J. I. Packer and Gary Parrett, authors of an important book entitled Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way. Dr. Packer teaches theology at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., and is the author of numerous books. Dr. Parrett is associate professor of educational ministries at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and is also the coauthor of another book on this subject, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful: A Biblical Vision for Education in the Church.

Why did you feel compelled to write Grounded in the Gospel?
GP: In the garden-variety evangelical world I have moved in for most of the last thirty years, there’s very little sense of a catechetical vision or ongoing catechetical ministries. We therefore felt compelled to try to help address this. This has been on my mind for a while, largely because of seeds planted by Dr. Packer when I was his student almost twenty-five years ago.

Those who don’t come from a background in Reformed, Lutheran, or Anglican traditions might say that catechism sounds Roman Catholic. What is the origin of catechism and how do you define this word?
GP: It comes from the Greek word katekeo, which is used in several places in the New Testament and means “instruct.” In some ways, it is a general word for instruction; but very early on in the life of the church, it was a particular form of instruction that focused on the basics via oral communication’give and take, back and forth. There’s a biblical concern for teaching the faith in substantive ways.

When did this practice of catechesis start and when was it revived?
GP: In the ancient church, in the second through fifth centuries in particular, anybody who came to Christ, especially from outside of the Christian community, went through a rigorous preparation for baptism that was catechizing, equipping them in the basics of Christian doctrine, Christian living, and Christian praying’often for many months, up to two or three years of instruction’before they were permitted to be baptized. Then catechesis went underground in a lot of ways for most of the Middle Ages, was revived by the Reformers with great zeal, and was the dominant feature of Protestantism, at least through the era of the Puritans. But as you suggested, ever since the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, it has been retained largely only in Reformed and Lutheran circles.

Our theme recently on the White Horse Inn was “Recovering Scripture.” Our producer visited a local Bible college, asking students if they were familiar with the book of Galatians. Here are some of their answers to the following questions:

What’s the book of Galatians about? Have you ever read that book or studied it?

I’ve read it, but I don’t really remember.
Um, I haven’t studied it in depth. I’ve read it, but I can’t really recall the one firm message.
I think it’s Paul writing to the church in Galatia. I would say it’s about how a Christian ought to live their life.
Hmm. I read through that a couple months ago, but I don’t recall specifically what that one’s about. I believe it talks a lot about community in the church.
I’m not familiar with it enough to talk a lot about it, I guess.
It comes back to strengthening others in Christ, I believe. I haven’t studied that book. I grew up in the church, but never had a study on that book, not in detail at least.

One of the words that pops up again and again through Galatians is “justification.” Are you familiar with that word?

No. I haven’t looked into it.
I’ve actually only heard of that concept in the last couple of years. I’ve never heard that phrase used in a church, which might just have to do with my church background. I went to one church as a kid and that was it. They never really got very deep.

That’s the same answer I’m getting from everybody. Are churches doing a poor job teaching the basic content of Scripture from kindergarten to college age?

Yeah, I agree with that. I think they need to do a better job of equipping us of how to read the Bible, and less on the topical, like how to do life.
My personal take is that they do a horrible job. Sometimes it could be teachers who don’t really know it themselves. We kind of dumb it down.
I don’t have remotely near the knowledge of the Bible that I feel I ought to have, being able to say, “I was raised in church and went to a Christian college.”
I do think that the church needs to have more in-depth teaching of the Bible, especially starting in Sunday school, because I think a lot of times it’s pretty shallow.

Now what’s striking here is that this is not at a public university campus; this is at a Bible college. Is this exceptional, or is this why you wrote Grounded in the Gospel?
JIP: The conversation you’ve just relayed shows that we today in the evangelical community are far out of sync with Christian discipling in the first century, in the apostolic age. We claim to be Bible people, and we talk a lot about the Bible; but whereas they in the first century drilled people in what now we may properly call Bible doctrine, we simply don’t do that. We go some distance in helping people understand a bit of the historical background and the books of the Bible; but even so, we don’t go very far in encouraging people to soak themselves in the Bible. As C. H. Spurgeon once said, “A Christian’s blood should be bibline.” He was being fanciful; but that is to say, if you prick the Christian with a pin, the blood that comes out should be just oozing Scripture. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Reformers, the Puritans, the evangelicals were literally soaked in Scripture. They seemed to know their Bible backwards. They could quote it appropriately and apply it in relation to anything that came up in conversation. We simply aren’t like that, and yet we think we’re being loyal to the reformational heritage. Continue reading →