We said earlier that catechetical teaching means causing someone to know the truth by the method of question and answer. By "knowing" the truth we do not mean just a temporary intellectual acquain­tance, but we use the word "knowing" in the Biblical sense, meaning a deep and intimate union or bond of love bringing forth fruit.

Corn & Catechumens⤒🔗

This is a good time to answer a criticism that has been fired at structured catechism teach­ing. "With all your require­ments for reading, learning, memorizing, testing, and demanding thorough prepara­tion, you are trying to take the place of the Holy Spirit. You cannot make believers out of them. You cannot teach the Bible as you teach biology."

Well, it is true, we cannot make believers out of them. It's always good to be remind­ed that we are but men, and that the blessing of God and the power of the Holy Spirit alone changes hearts and lives. That should keep us humble and prayerful.

However, even if we know the apostle Paul a little, we will be convinced that there was no amount of laboring and striving, preaching and teaching, pleading and argu­ment he would not do, if by any means he might save some.¹.

You see, even when we walk out in the field we confess it is the Spirit alone that gives life to our corn crop.² But the Holy Spirit has been pleased to bind Himself to means. You do not get 180 bushels of corn to the acre by pulling out a lawn chair and watching. But you pray and plow, disc, fertil­ize, plant, irrigate, spray, and cultivate. Ora et labora; pray and work.

Therefore just as in the nat­ural realm we are bound to use every means consistent with the sound agricultural principles that God provides to ensure a good crop, so also in the supernatural realm, we must use every means consis­tent with sound Biblical prin­ciples to ensure a crop of fruitful children of God. And then we may truly say with Paul, "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase" (1 Cor. 3:6).

Get Ready For Class←⤒🔗

One of the reasons why teach­ing catechism need not be just a lecture is because we expect the catechumens to come pre­pared. We expect them to read and study the lesson and the Bible passages assigned. We also tell them to memo­rize. Memorization is an important part of preparation. Parents find out soon enough that for some children learn­ing by heart is easy and for some it is very hard. I have known mothers who had to spend half an hour every day for six days before their child knew it. But let me tell you, after that much hammering it was really in there. Children have to get ready for class by thorough learning by heart. But, comes the frequent objection, is not memoriza­tion outdated?

Throw Out Memorization?←⤒🔗

I am afraid that many still cling to the notion that mem­ory work is a relic of the pre-computer age, that it is wor­thy only of parrots, and that it does not do any good anyway because most of the time kids do not know the meaning of what they have memorized.

First let us remember that memorization has held an honored place in the history of the church. Memorization is remembering, and one of God's repeated rebukes to Israel was that they so soon forgot; "...(they) forgot His works and His wonders that He had shown them" (Psalm 78:11). On the other hand, the history of the church is full of evidence that wherever true religion flourished Christians committed the truths of Scripture to memory and required their children to memorize them as well. At the Synod of Dort in 1618 the churches of Emden, East Netherlands reported that toddlers of five and six years old recited the principal catechism questions without hesi­tation and children of eight and ten knew the complete catechism ³

Matthew Henry lists various spiritual advantages to memo­rization and concludes by say­ing, "Let not the wisest and best be ashamed to repeat the words of their catechism, as they have occasion to quote them; but let them rather be ashamed who cannot do it."⁴

Now let's ask why so many view it with disfavor. Let us freely admit that the cause principally lies in the depraved heart of man, which loathes hard work and the truth. Memorization is work, it is disciplined and applied work, ill-suited to a people who only do what feels good or what will pay. Have we for­gotten the high cost Christ placed on discipleship?

What You Don't Know You Won't Understand←⤒🔗

Now let us examine a more weighty objection, that children do not understand what they memorize, and that it is far better for them to know what it means than what it says. Here we can expose that statement as a fallacy and discover the answer. Memorization is simply know­ing "what it says," and if they do not begin by knowing "what it says," they shall never know "what it means."

Answers memorized are the material we work with. Memorized truths are like the lumber used to build a house. The carpenter must measure, cut, plane. So the catechumen comes to class with the raw material of the answers stocked in his mind. The teacher then reaches into that material, draws it out with ques­tions, shapes it, planes it, and fits it into place.

Pull It Out And Put It Into Shape←⤒🔗

Ask any catechism teacher. The child who has faithfully memorized will delight to be drawn out with questions, to be led by various questions, to work together with the teacher by question and answer in exploring the mean­ing of what he has memorized.

Take, however, the student who has failed to memorize, and you will find a teacher dealing with a complete lack of interest, because he is try­ing to draw material from a mind that is supplied with nothing but air. So how does the teacher proceed?

Check their mem­ory work cer­tainly; but go farther than that. Checking just sees if there is material to work with. Ask questions about the les­son. Sometimes just begin a narrative of the lesson, rephrasing the memory ques­tions as you go along. Even from students who have thor­oughly memorized the answers you may draw a com­plete blank when you ask the memory question in other words. How very plain it then becomes that they knew the answer but not the meaning. There are many ways we can teach by questioning and by encouraging ques­tions by the catechu­mens. Check over their memory work for words they may not understand and ask the meanings. Do not assume they know what they are say­ing. Question what they mean.Children, espe­cially young chil­dren, love to answer ques­tions, and then later on, love to ask why.

I have never found it easy to teach an hour-long class by questions. It was easy for me to lapse into lec­ture, except that I was jolted out of it by the glaze settling on my students' eyes. So to avoid those lapses in my early years of teaching, as part of my preparation I would make up thirty to eighty questions I could ask about the lesson and the Bible assignment. Even if I did not ask them all it put me in the questioning mode.                                                                              

Teachers Must Get Ready Too←⤒🔗

Does the challenge convince you catechism teachers that there is more to catechism than just opening with prayer and checking memory work? You are a catechist (in the early church a special office) and your challenge is to cate­chize. You must engage and hold the minds and hearts of children. Your work is pas­toral, shepherding lambs. You are not done when you have dumped a bale of hay in front of them. Augustine says the pupil must be watched and ques­tioned, and carefully dealt with individually, by this he may be caused to know the truth rather than merely be caused to hear or read it.

Catechizing is a discipline. Proficiency is achieved by prayer, hard work and prac­tice. Discipline is expected of disciples, and in this the cate­chist and the catechumen share. Just as intense disci­pline produces good pianists, so catechists, by practice bring forth the splendid music of truth from their students.

Let me close this encourage­ment to teachers by this quote from John Jebb in his Pastoral Instructions. He was a minis­ter of the Gospel in Limerick, Ireland, and although you may think his conclusion an overstatement, he pastors pas­tors.

Let not the common prejudice be entertained, that catechizing is a slight and trifling exercise to be performed without pains and preparation on your part. This would be so if it were the mere rote-work of asking and answer­ing the questions in our Church Catechism: but to open, to explain, and familiarly to illus­trate these questions in such a manner as, at once, to reach the understanding and touch the affections of little children, is a work which demands no ordi­nary acquaintance, at once, with the whole scheme of Christian theology, with the philosophy of the human mind, and with the yet profounder mysteries of the human heart. It has, therefore, been well and truly said, by I recollect not what writer, that a boy may preach, but to catechize requires a man.⁵