8 Deep Transformation Recovering Catechesis

8
Deep Transformation
Recovering Catechesis
Deep Church: On Recovering the Gospel
Deep Church Rising
Recovering the Roots of Christian Orthodoxy
“Do not let the world squeeze you into its mold”
The gospel is about communal and individual transformation: a community- the church-being
conformed to the image of Jesus, becoming more human. But Paul warns the Christians in
Rome not to be “conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2) or, in the words of J. B. Phillips, not to
let the world “squeeze you into its mold.” Yet the world is constantly shaping us with its
values, beliefs, priorities, and practices. All day every day we are exposed to a constant flow
of formative inputs and often we are oblivious to it for it is the very air we breathe. In chapter
2 we saw the way in which Christian faith and practice can be impacted by a myriad of social
factors. Consider the influences forming an ordinary devout Christian. We have spent many
hours exposed to the implicit worldview of our secular education at school and university, we
hang out with friends with very different beliefs and lifestyles, we listen to music with lyrics
that reflect certain ideas and values sung by pop celebrities whose very public lives embody
a dream quite different from that of a gospel-shaped life. Every day we watch movies and TV
shows and read books and magazines that present models for life that tell us “the way things
are.” We spend more and more time online—on our computers and mobile phones—with
instant access to information and images and people in ways unimaginable a generation
ago. We are exposed to an astronomical amount of advertising pitched with the deliberate
aim of shaping our lifestyle ambitions in ways that bear little resemblance to Christian
ambitions. Whether we want it or not we are subjected to a constant torrent of life-shaping
influences. And it is not simply the explicit content of, for instance, mass media
entertainment that shapes us. The very contours of modern life in the West embody a whole
set of values and beliefs that we simply take on board without noticing. They are so much
part of the furniture of our environment that we don’t even see them. Consider mass media
entertainment (TV, cinema, music, magazines, iPods, YouTube, facebook, twitter, game
consoles, etc.). In his insightful book iPod, YouTube, Wii Play Brent Laytham argues that
entertainment has become a multitrillion dollar cultural superpower with structures and
processes aimed to “direct our attention, foster desire, generate symbols, structure activity,
orient goals, shape relationships, and form community.” He speaks of how the industry aims
to affect our
• Heart: by fostering desires for its various products.
• Head and shoulders, knees and toes: by soliciting our desire to play (in order for it to make
profit).
• Eyes and ears: by constantly seeking to distract us and capture our attention.
• Calendars and clocks: by reshaping our patterns of work and play, indoctrinating us with
the idea that free-time is me-time, then seeking to take over our “leisure time,” colonizing our
evenings, scheduling our weekends, ordering our years with seasons, championships,
festivals, finales, and pilgrimages. Our whole experience of and relationship with time is thus
reordered.
• Family, friends, and fans: the broadcast media—radio, then television, then the internet—
has changed the patterns of association for entertainment (who we “associate” with and how
we associate with them). By reaching larger and larger audiences those audiences move

from embodied live events into homes and then into the bedrooms of individuals
reconfiguring who audiences are and how they interact. Something of this is provocatively
captured in the title of Sherry Turkle’s book on the impact of technology on social
relationships, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each
Other.
Such astonishing formative power is not something Christians can be indifferent about
because we too are concerned with making disciples. Laytham argues that we need to
navigate a course between the Scylla of media idolatry and the Charybdis of technophobia.
To this end he suggests that we consider the entertainment industry—which is more than the
sum of its parts—to be a principality and power that seeks to “captivate our gaze, colonize
our imaginations, and capture our allegiance.” It is a good part of creation that is there to
serve real, though limited, goods but it has overstretched its bounds and seeks to elevate
itself—offering its limited goods as absolute necessities—and to invite us to bow down and
worship it by offering it more and more time and money. Laytham’s basic route of resistance
is to put mass media entertainment in its place by welcoming it as a trivial pursuit—
something positive and good yet of limited value—and refusing its pretensions to ultimacy.
The way in which modern Westerners have been sculpted into consumers has had
implications for Christian discipleship, for worship, for spirituality. The church needs to be a
different kind of community but that will not happen without intentionality because we are
talking about swimming against a very powerful flow. That cannot be done without insight
and effort.
As we saw in chapter 2, living as a Christian in modernity and postmodernity is quite
different from living as a Christian before the Reformation. The sacred canopy of a Christian
culture is now virtually gone and the social structures that made Christian belief and lifestyle
plausible are no longer in place. It is harder to believe than it used to be—not because there
are better arguments against Christianity that there used to be but simply because the
plausibility structures are not in place.
If we want to be conformed to the image of Christ, if we are serious about spiritual formation
and discipleship and the plausibility of Christianity in the modern West, then going to a
church meeting for a couple of hours a week and having a five-minute “quiet time” each day
is hardly going to do the trick. It is like putting out a house fire with a handkerchief. The
churches need to get serious about rebuilding plausibility structures, about spiritual
formation, and about theological education if we are to stand any chance of shaping a
healthy church in the twenty-first century.
In ancient Greece paideia referred to the education of model citizens for the city. It referred
not so much “to the principles and practice of teaching as the formative task of transmitting a
cultural heritage in order to school virtue and cultivate character.” In this chapter we are
arguing that churches need to be preoccupied with kingdom paideia and that this starts with
catechesis. Catechesis, in turn, should be the prolegomenon to a life-long educational
process in and for a deep church.
Learning from the Early Church
Yet again the early church may prove to be a resource for remembering our future. In post-
christendom the church finds itself in a situation that has some analogies with that of the
church before Constantine’s conversion. The early ekklesia also was a minority community,
often a despised minority, whose faith was not reinforced in the world around them. If they
went out of their houses they would find the pagan worldview of Rome manifested in the

ubiquitous temples and shrines, the politics, the art, the commerce, the public
entertainments, and the ethical practices. It is safe to say that the plausibility structures of
the Roman Empire were not ones that functioned to reinforce Christian faith! Quite the
contrary, the Empire worked hard to project a world for its citizens in which the glory of Rome
and of Caesar dazzled through the buildings and statues and festivals and legends and
public entertainments. To proclaim Jesus, rather than Caesar, as Lord and Savior was to
swim against the flow. That took a renewed imagination that could see the world through
different eyes. And that took catechesis, education into the faith.
The early church took catechesis very seriously. According to the third-century Apostolic
Tradition, catechesis was a journey that lasted for three years. The Synod of Elvira in the
fourth century even made provisions for a five-year catechesis. This was no six-week
Introduction to Christianity course! They knew that pagan people entering the community
were not coming in as blank slates ready to be written on by the Spirit but were coming in
already covered in scribbles—long-term exposure to practices and beliefs that the church
considered demonic. Such converts were coming already pre-formed, or de-formed, from
years of exposure to influences that ran counter to the subversive gospel of God. So the
church, especially after it moved into primarily pagan rather than Jewish contexts, did not
simply let people straight into the community. Instead, catechesis functioned as a kind of
decompression chamber that took those seeking entry into the church on a transformative
journey, climaxing in baptism and full entry into the Christian community.
One of the downsides of Christendom was that as the culture became more Christianized
the demands of catechesis became a lot less rigorous because it was expected that people
would learn to be Christian through the culture. And to some extent they did. However, the
withering of catechetical formation led to a growth of Christians with confused understanding
of Christian faith and ambiguous practice of it. But the new cultural context in which the
Western church finds itself creates an opportunity to rediscover catechesis.
Dimensions of Catechesis
Catechesis Is Learning to Worship
Christianity is not beliefs about God plus behavior… To become a disciple is not a matter of
a new or changed self-understanding, but rather to become part of a different community
with a different set of practices.
For example, I am sometimes confronted by people who are not Christians but who say they
want to know about Christianity… After many years of vain attempts to “explain” God as
Trinity, I now say, “Well, to begin with we Christians have been taught to pray, ‘Our Father,
who art in heaven…’” I then suggest that a good place to begin to understand what we
Christians are about is to join me in that prayer.
For to learn to pray is no easy matter but requires much training, not unlike learning to lay
bricks. It does no one any good to believe in God, at least the God we find in Jesus of
Nazareth, if they have not learned to pray. To learn to pray means that we must acquire
humility not as something we try to do, but as commensurate with the practice of prayer. In
short, we do not believe in God, become humble, and then learn to pray, but in learning to
pray we humbly discover we cannot do other than believe in God.
But, of course, to learn to pray requires we learn to pray with other Christians. It means we
must learn the disciplines necessary to worship God. Worship, at least for Christians, is the
activity in which all our skills are ordered. That is why there can be no separation of Christian

morality from Christian worship. As Christians, our worship is our morality for it is in worship
we find ourselves engrafted into the story of God. It is in worship that we acquire the skills to
acknowledge who we are—sinners.
Praise, thanksgiving, adoration, confession, and intercession do not come easily. What
should we say? How should we say it? When? For how long? - Lord, teach us how to pray.
Worship is a learned set of practices, and they are formative practices. So a fundamental
part of catechesis must be to teach people to engage in worship. Such learning cannot
simply be didactic- teaching about good worship- but must also be a regular, engaged
participation in communal worship.
But ortho-dox Christians will want to learn to give God “right glory” and will thus be
concerned to teach people to worship well. This protracted spiritual formation must involve a
rounded approach to worship that inducts people into a wide range of important postures in
the presence of God; not merely praise and adoration- which make up almost the entirety of
much charismatic worship but also penitence, confession, lament, supplication, thanksgiving,
silent contemplation, and attentive listening. People also need to learn to pray with and for
others, and they need to learn how to receive prayer.
Worshiping well also means learning the appropriate vocabulary for prayer. This is imbibed
through simply being part of a worshiping community over time. One helpful practice is
learning to pray the prayers of the church whether we are in a cathedral, a chapel, or at
home. This is a practice rejected by many committed Christians because it seems to them to
be “second-hand prayer” (= second best, discarded, outdated, or inferior prayer). They
eschew formal prayers because, being second-hand, they are not “our” prayers and
consequently we have doubts about their efficacy and their authenticity. But praying the
prayers of the church is to pray not with second-class material despoiled by time, but
handed-on treasures that resist and overcome the corrosions of time. In short, we read the
texts of our spiritual exemplars, so why not pray the prayers of the saints and make them our
own?
Those who do not feel comfortable with a formal liturgy may find, on examination, that they
are closer to set texts than they realize. For example, we all pray the Lord’s Prayer because
it comes straight from the lips of Jesus. But we probably also pray the prayers of David
because they come straight from his heart to our own. When we pray using his words, “a
broken and contrite heart, ? God, you will not despise” (Ps 51:17), we do it with deep-felt
conviction and remorse, not with a sense of parroting somebody else’s sentiments. We
teach the faith of the church, we preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, so it is natural—not
artificial or contrived—that we follow Jesus in praying to the Father and, like Jesus, make the
psalms of David our own. It is difficult to change habits of a lifetime and switch from
individual prayers in our own words to handed-on prayers, but we may find that we have
been unwittingly praying church prayers for years: to be familiar with the corpus of Charles
Wesley’s hymns, for example, is already to be saturated in prayerful prose and rhyme—of
praise, intercession, and contemplation.
Worshiping well also involves learning how to engage the body in worship. Modernity
encouraged a focus on the cerebral side of worship- getting the words right in the sermons
and prayers. But humans are embodied beings and need to learn to respond right to God in
embodied ways. One’s physical posture when worshiping does not simply communicate
one’s inner attitude, it also shapes it. If we slouch with our hands in our pockets as we
confess our sins that doesn’t merely express an inappropriately laid back frame of mind; it
reinforces it. To change the posture can re-poise the heart. So standing, kneeling, raising
hands, closing the eyes, opening the eyes, looking up, bowing the head, sharing the peace,

moving forward to take the Eucharist, making the sign of the cross, dancing, clapping, laying
on hands, and so on, are not merely secondary fluff.
This is about learning to worship in an engaged, holistic way. To speak of what the body
does as “mere outward religion” is to underestimate the ways in which we can know and
experience God through our body. Anthropologist Talal Asad astutely comments that it is not
a lack of religious education that leads to the lack of faith in secular Europe but “untaught
bodies.”
Catechesis Is Learning Basic Theology
Let us be frank: the man and woman in the pew are often woefully ignorant about their faith.
Sometimes, in the very place you would expect the greatest knowledge and enthusiasm for
Christian teaching and doctrinal commitment- that is, in what the Americans call the “Bible
churches”-there hangs a pall of a “know-nothing” Christianity. To be sure, they often know
the latest fads brought to their attention by audio- and video-taped ministries from itinerant
evangelists, but they dry up when asked to articulate the great truths of the gospel.
Catechesis could make a big difference here.
What a deep church needs today is a theology of Christian basics. ? good place to start for
adults would be at the centre of faith with the great hymn of affirmation that “Jesus Christ is
Lord” (Phil 2:11). From this catechumens can move “further in and further down” (to adapt
Lewis) to a deeper understanding of the Trinity where, like St. John of the Cross, we find
ourselves lost for words at the ineffable mystery of a God who is beyond our understanding,
yet who has chosen to reveal himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (in whom all the
fullness of the Godhead dwells). It is through the mediation of the revealed Lord Jesus that
we have direct access to God the Father in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit.
Educationalists for a deep church need to start as they mean to go on: after a basic
introduction to the Christian faith on the person and work of Christ, the Holy Trinity, and
God’s love toward his creation (the “grand narrative” of faith), young Christians need to be
encouraged to learn more. Having found for themselves the primary source of faith, God
himself, Christian disciples will want to go on to become acquainted with the secondary
sources (the saints and the theologians) who illuminate God’s self-revelation like a good
commentary sheds light on an ancient text.
Catechesis Is Learning to Read the Bible
The Bible is a text that to modern Westerners seems to speak from “along time ago, in a
galaxy far far away…” And as the practice of Bible-reading is no longer passed on in the
general culture of post-Christendom the Bible has come to seem increasingly alien and
irrelevant. To read the Bible well one must be taught.
First and foremost this is learning to understand the broad sweep of the biblical story-from
creation through fall and redemption to new creation, from Genesis to Revelation. It is
learning to understand one’s own life in relation to that story. In this way we see the Bible as
a whole- a grand narrative- and not simply a compilation of timeless, blessed thoughts.
Second, it is learning some simple hermeneutical guidelines for rightly understanding texts in
historical and literary contexts. For instance, one should learn a basic understanding of
genre, of interpreting parts in the light of the whole, and of consulting a commentary to get
some historical and literary background.

Third, it is about learning from the wisdom of traditional Christian Bible interpretative
strategies—reading in the light of the rule of faith, christological reading, typological reading,
even controlled versions of allegorical interpretation.
Fourth, it is about learning traditional Christian practices of devotional reading- lectio divina,
praying the Psalms, Ignatian imaginative reading, and so on.
Taken from Deep Church Rising by Andrew G. Walker and Robin A. Parry