Via Media Podcast, Episode 30
Anglican Basics: Catechesis
Lee Nelson
January 16, 2020

https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2020/anglican-basics-catechesis


Announcer:     

The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott.

McDermott:

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Welcome to the Via Media. Our guest today is Father Lee Nelson, Rector of Christ Church in Waco, Texas. I was a visitor there this past year and I was amazed by the vitality, the size of the church, it’s outreach into the Baylor University community, the number of professors and students who come to Christ Church, the large number of children and young families, and the excitement and the deep faith that is there.

Now, Father Lee Nelson is also the Director of Catechesis for the Anglican Church in North America. I want to talk to you today, by the way, welcome, Lee. 

Nelson:

It’s good to be here.

McDermott:

(laughs) I want to talk to you today Lee about catechesis, because this is a specialty of yours and your church, Christ Church, in a way has been built out of catechesis, but first, before we get to that story, tell us – what is this thing called “catechesis?”

Nelson:

Catechesis comes from the Greek word katecheo which is actually a word used five times in the New Testament. Paul says I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct or catechize others than ten thousand words in a tongue. So, I’ve taken that to heart through the years. 

It’s essentially, it means instruction. It has a connotation that’s something like words resounding in a cave, the cave in itself is empty and yet it’s made to resound sound. In the same way someone who is devoid of the knowledge of God is made in the image of God to resound knowledge of him back. So, it has this connotation of resounding, that’s why in the reformation the reformers wrote question and answer catechisms to allow that call and response type catechesis. 

Catechesis focuses on three manners of instruction there in what we believe, how we pray, and how we live, and it follows the traditional three-fold pattern of three pillars: the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. These three form the foundations of basic instruction in the Christian faith and disciplines. The Church Fathers went at-length to teach these things in addition to building basically biblical knowledge and ordinarily in the ancient Church it took a year to three years of catechesis before one would be baptized. And this was a very rigorous thing. Many people spent their lives as catechumens, which isn’t a great thing, I mean, they were putting off baptism for a long time. But it was meant to be rigorous and meant to be ... there’s a very high level of expectation for those coming into the Church for the first time.

McDermott:

Now you helped produce the ACNA Catechism, which first came out about seven, eight years ago.

Nelson:

Almost six years ago, yeah.

McDermott:

Six years ago. And now has been revised and you are on the revision committee, and is about to be re-published in the revised version in January. And it follows this ancient pattern of the three pillars?

Nelson:

Yes.

McDermott:

The Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles Creed, and the Ten Commandments. Is there where the three pillars came from, from the Fathers?

Nelson:

Yes. You can look to Augustine. You can look to many places where they take this approach of teaching on these things. Many of the Fathers have extended orations on the Apostles Creed. The Apostles Creed being the rule of faith. You know, the experience of a catechumen would be very often that they were taught scripture and then in the very last week leading up to their baptism they would be taught to memorize the Apostles Creed, taught the Lord’s Prayer; they would have learned the commandments in advance of that. 

Some of the reformers believe you ought to teach the commandments first, but we think really a good way to do this is to teach the creed first and then the Lord’s Prayer, and then the Ten Commandments. There’s a method to the madness in that. But really and truly you can look at ancient baptismal rites and catechumens were expected to be able to give back, hand back the creed that they had received. Ambrose says you should memorize this creed but don’t say it out loud when you’re home and you’re memorizing it and you’re working on it, because someone might hear it, and it’s a sacred text.

McDermott:

Well, this is the Early Church’s disciplina arcana, right?

Nelson:

That’s right.

McDermott:

The secret discipline. They took very seriously Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: don’t throw pearls before swine. And that the person who isn’t spiritually prepared is going to misunderstand and to abuse the precious pearls of the teachings of the Church, right?

Nelson:

They were very precious. I mean, one of my favorite examples of this is John Chrysostom would, on someone’s emergence from the baptismal waters would take their hands and put them on his head and he would say, “Now, pray for me.” Because he believed, like most ancient Christians, that the prayer of a neophyte was powerful and mystical and effective. And the prayer that he would ask them to pray was the Lord’s Prayer. It would be the first valid prayer they ever prayed.

McDermott:

Whoa.

Nelson:

Because the understanding was if one was not a child of God, born in the waters of baptism, they could not pray. That’s getting back to this disciplina arcani, the understanding that the faith doesn’t belong to outsiders. 

McDermott:

Now, Father Lee, many of our listeners came out of the evangelical churches. Some of our listeners are in evangelical churches, which we think are a good thing, after all evangelical comes from the Greek word euangelion, the good news, the gospel. There’s everything good about that. However, the Anglican tradition says God has blessed us with even more. We aren’t the perfect church, but God has blessed us with liturgy and sacraments, and I think many of our listeners will have the question when they hear this talk about catechesis – so, why not just have bible studies? Why not just teach the Bible? I mean, why do you have to get into all these words of men? Like a catechism or the Apostles Creed? Why not just teach the pure Word of God, Genesis to Revelation?

Nelson:

Well, you should do that, right? No one should say you shouldn’t do that. But scripture, and we were talking about this last night, I think. Scripture, especially New Testament are occasional letters, they’re not meant to be exhausted works of systematic theology. And the other thing that I would say, too, is they’re not easy to understand. Peter says of Paul’s writings, they’re difficult to understand. 

The idea in catechesis is that you lay a systematic basic doctrinal framework within which the scriptures can be understood. And so my experience of it that basic catechesis actually accelerates scriptural learning in a way that is really powerful.

McDermott:

And don’t you think that without basic catechesis the opportunity to run into heresy is high? 

Nelson:

Very high.

McDermott:

Look at Protestantism. It’s divided not into 30,000 congregations, but 30,000 denominations. Almost all of which disagree with one another on what the scriptures are teaching. 

Nelson:

Yes.

McDermott:

And I like to think of catechesis, and you probably tell your folks this – it’s the teaching of the Early Church. It’s the summaries of the teachings of the Fathers, who are far close to the culture of Jesus and the apostles than we are. So, why not sit at their feet and learn from them the basic patterns, the basic framework as you put it, through which to understand scripture?

Nelson:

That’s the idea. And you’ll note in our catechism that every answer is tied directly to scripture, or just about every answer. There’s scriptural notations throughout. And that is to say that, for Anglicans, all of our teaching is biblical. But it’s through the received teaching of the church, through the centuries, through the Fathers as Hooker and others put it, that we come to understand that deposit. 

And I would say this isn’t self evident so much as we would like to think it is. The scriptures are hard to understand. You have to be versed in language. You have to have a vocabulary with which to understand scripture. And so I think we have a task in the church which is to do this in a much more rigorous and streamlined and organized way. 

One of the best analogies I’ve ever gotten for this is what happens with most youth or even adults in a church is that we write ... it’s almost like we’re taking a pad of post-it notes and we write little biblical truths on them and we just stick them on you. (laughs) And over time you accumulate this smattering of post-it notes that are full of these biblical truths. But they’re disorganized. And so when you have to access them you’re looking around, “Where did that go?” (laughs) And it’s not easy to find.

So, I think of a freshman in college who has to struggle with some issues, with how do they take what they’ve learned and live it out? They can’t find it because it’s disorganized. The Catechesis is expressly organized. Each thing builds on the next. Each teaching builds on the next. And so you’re not trying to build a rigorous Christian life with certain essential features missing. 

McDermott:

So, could we say the Catechesis connects the dots of Christian faith and life?

Nelson:

Absolutely. 

McDermott:

In ways that really nothing else does.

Nelson:

Right.

McDermott:

You’ve been here the last couple of days at Beeson Divinity School, here in Birmingham. You’ve been telling my students, our students here, stories of how attractive catechesis has been to so many. What are some of the things they tell you? Why is catechesis becoming so attractive?

Nelson:

One reason is it’s rare; nothing increases attraction to something like its rarity. Catechesis is rare. Most American churches function on a system of exegetical preaching, inductive Bible study, and people are not receiving the core doctrine, except by haphazard explorations with scripture in which those doctrines might come to the fore. They also might not. 

Which is to explain part of it, which is that these things have become so rare that when people see, oh my goodness, you have this plan for how to teach through this, that it actually happens.

Another thing that I find to be really helpful is that so much of what should be taught just isn’t taught. You think about certain moral issues like abortion, you think about certain questions like what is marriage, how do you teach that? One response would be, well, you have a sermon series on marriage and you explore Ephesians or you explore Genesis 2. Fine, right? Totally fine. But what is explored there is not memorizable. It’s not systematically rigorous. The opportunity to leave certain key things out is very high. The potential that you won’t be referring to other doctrines as well is high. And so that happens. 

The other thing that happens from time to time is, well, all the time really, is that when the content is determined by the individual teacher, things get left out. When the content is determined by a magisterial document, like a catechism, that’s been given to the Church by authority things don’t get left out. 

This is part of the issue with reformation catechisms today, is that certain things which is absolutely vital that we teach modern Christians are left out. Not because they’re unimportant, but because they weren’t issues in the 16th century. Today we have to have modern catechisms that deal with modern ... and that’s what we’ve done in the catechism, is we explore marriage, we explore moral issues, we explore all kinds of things that have not been dealt with in the past in catechisms. 

McDermott:

It all of a sudden dawns on me, Father Lee, that when we use a catechism in a church we are letting the Church, the universal Church, teach us.

Nelson:

That’s the idea.

McDermott:

Rather than, in good evangelical fashion, taking my private noggin with my private university education and making my private decisions about what scripture means.

Nelson:

That’s right. 

McDermott:

Or, what it doesn’t mean.

Nelson:

Yeah, and I would say in the last ... one of the most recent editions of ... actually the most recent edition of First Things, Rusty Reno gives a great exploration of the necessity of authority; talking about John Henry Newman. The reality of it is you can’t have a flourishing intellectual life or a flourishing life if faith without authority. Authority is the basis of that life. 

Gerry and I ... we’ve been talking about this, that just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you’re wise. (laughs) And I find this that well catechized people express a wisdom that is quite profound, actually. Especially when they’re catechized very young. They have not only the foundation set properly, but everything they build on top of that is sure and solid because the foundation is solid. 

We’re not good at thinking about building a foundation for knowledge. In the west that’s been either scripture or some kind of materialism, and obviously having a foundation of scripture is the better of the two, but it’s not immediately apparent what the doctrines of scripture are without catechesis. So, that’s what I offer is that you really have to have that exploration and that teaching in place.

McDermott:

One of your many talks here at Beeson the last couple of days has been on church planting. And you were telling our students over at Anglican lunch a few minutes ago that catechesis can be used to plant churches. Now, that’s counterintuitive. Most evangelicals when they think about planting churches they think of catechesis as something that will come down the line after our church is well established for five years. We’ve got to start with just bringing people to Jesus and teaching them about finding the Kingdom of God. 

But you’re giving us this counterintuitive thesis that you can in fact, I think you would say you “ought” to use catechesis to plant a church.

Nelson:

Yeah, well it’s certainly been my experience through church plants now that catechesis builds ... gives the congregation, the church plant, a charter for their life. I mean, that’s what we sought to give the Anglican Church of North American through the catechism was a charter for our life and for our culture. 

What often gets left aside in church planting is the very reason you plant churches, which is to make disciples, to form people who are articulate, who can live out Christian believing and faith and life in the midst of an increasingly confusing world. 

If churches are not clear doctrinally there can be a lot of fighting among members or among members with the clergy who are with the planters. And so we begin in catechesis, not only because they ask me to but because as through the years we’ve come to realize that this not only builds people up to maturity, but Paul tells us in Ephesians that when people are built up to maturity bodily growth results. So, I’ve taken that to heart. I think that’s the truth of the matter. And part of the issue today is that our churches are full of immature people. If we’re just honest about it, we’d say they’re just immature. 

And I think when I speak to clergy about this the main way I say it is you know just how immature your people are by how much they need you. (laughs) Mature Christians are able to sustain a thriving spiritual life mostly on their own. They can read, they can study scripture, they can pray, they can sustain a vital life.

McDermott:

Partake in the sacraments.

Nelson:

Absolutely. They can partake in the sacraments. But immature Christians are tossed about, as Paul says. They’re tossed about by every wind of doctrine, and the cunning of the enemy. And so catechesis builds a very solid congregational life because people are mature. 

McDermott:

So, it not only ... and in your case that’s how you planted Christ Church at Waco, but it also grows a church.

Nelson:

Yes. It grows a church because, well, for several reasons. One is that you’re building up the body through this work of teaching. But it’s also that when people feel a freedom because they feel, and they know, that they’re under authority and they take that authority seriously they’re that much more willing to bring others into that church. They’re that much more willing because things are not nebulous. (laughs) The teaching of that church is not liable to falter. That gives people confidence. So, that’s a really big part of things is people have a certain confidence that our congregation is not going to slip off the rails (laughs) due to infighting to due to doctrinal battles coming up. 

Now, of course as Anglicans we have bishops to guard against that, but you still have to inhabit in a parish culture. 

McDermott:

Father Lee, I think maybe some of our listeners might be thinking, well, I can see how Lee Nelson would be a catechist, and you know, he’s had all this experience, he helped write the catechism, he’s a very good seminary grad, and maybe some of our priests listening are saying, you know, I’m not sure I have the gift of teaching, this sounds awfully daunting. How in the world could I do this?

Nelson:

One quick answer is if you’re ordained in the ACNA you don’t have a choice. (laughs) I mean, our ordination of the diaconate expressly says that a deacon has to instruct young and old in the catechism. 

McDermott:

Oh.

Nelson:

So, there’s no choice. 

McDermott:

(laughs)

Nelson:

So, you’d better figure it out, right, as part of the deal. I love that. I love that that was included. But I would say this: catechesis is not a talent, it’s a skill. And you can get it. You can practice it. It requires apprenticeship. It requires continual practice. It requires that you do it over and over again to build confidence, to build knowledge of it. To be a good catechesis you have to be catechized yourself.

We have a lot of seminary grads that have seminary degrees but they’ve never been really catechized. So, I tell people that really want to do this work well: be catechized. 

And there are ways to do that. But the other thing I say to people that may look and say that sounds dreadful, that sounds boring, that sounds tough is that St. Augustine’s advice to catechists, and preacher for that matter, is to cultivate delight in the material being presented so that you express joy as you’re teaching it and not boredom. 

Cultivation of delight happens in several ways, but the prime ways are through prayerful reading of scripture, being familiar with the doctrinal territory, knowing where the pitfalls are to the right and to the left, but more than that really through a life of prayer and through a life of receiving the sacraments, living a life of grace – we take delight in the things of God. 

I’m always reminded of a story my friend tells. This professor was teaching Augustine’s Confessions and this student came and said, “Ugh, professor, this is really boring. I mean, I can’t be expected to read this, can I?” The professor said, “It’s not boring, you’re boring.”

McDermott:

(laughs)

Nelson:

(laughs) And I’ve always loved that. I’ve always loved that line because if people find catechesis boring the fault is not in the catechism, the fault is in them. There’s a virtue that’s lacking. There’s a joy that’s lacking. There’s a delight in the basics of Christian believing that’s lacking. That requires repentance. 

McDermott:

Yes.

Nelson:

So, I just say this is a deep spiritual problem. It’s something that you need to get over. Catechists are like tour guides through the Christian faith. If you’ve ever ... and Augustine talks about this ... if you’ve ever taken a friend on a tour of your hometown, the things you see every day are seen in a different light and they’re seen and bring delight and excitement and joy and you want your friend to catch that joy. 

McDermott:

You know, it strikes me that what you’re saying is that to become a catechist, to lead others through the catechism, is leading others to the depth and the riches of God with the beautiful and wise guide of the historic Church.

Nelson:

That’s right. The depth and riches of God are inexhaustible. 

McDermott:

What could be more important and more joyful than that?

Nelson:

That’s right. So, I will say this ... just a testimony of being a catechist for all these years ... I find great delight in teaching, in catechizing. To see lights go on, to see things clicking, to see people who are nearly lost or who are lost coming to know the faith in a way that they haven’t before, to be able to instruct people, adults, coming to baptism, to be able to see people go through great times of repentance and change and spiritual vitality again is, I mean, that’s the bread and butter. If that can’t be exciting then I don’t know what to say. (laughs)

McDermott:

That’s great. Father Lee, thank you so much for being on Via Media.

Nelson:

This has been great.

McDermott:

And we thank you, our listening audience out there, for tuning in another episode. 

Announcer:     

You've been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry, and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Via Media.