Old Skool Discipleship

How often do we think about the Church Catechism? It's a brief outline of the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer that's been in every Book of Common Prayer since 1549 (largely unchanged although the bit on the sacraments was added in 1604).

So what?

Well, the catechism contains what Anglicans believe are the essentials of the faith (cf. the 39 Articles which have a different function altogether). To reinforce this, lots of Anglican churches actually have the Creed, Commandments and Lord's Prayer up on 'commandment boards' at the front of the building to make starkly plain what it is that we believe about God, how we want to live in light of those beliefs and the way we can call on God to help us in that. This triplet was so important to the Church of England that, according to Prof. Ian Green who's written the book on catechisms, there were something like 500,000 copies of the catechism printed between the 1540s and 1640s, making it by far the most printed text of the time. Everyone was expected to know the catechism off by heart as a summary of their faith.

So now, here's the question. How many Anglicans nowadays can rattle off the Apostles' Creed, Ten Commandments and Lord's Prayer without looking them up? I'm not suggesting that this is the test of a 'true' Christian and I'm well aware that we're living in a different time, with different ways of learning, etc, etc. However, if we can't recite these things and demonstrate some basic understanding of their right meaning, I do wonder whether we've been learning other equally valuable things instead or if we've just abandoned the idea of a clearly structured, educative discipleship. I guess it probably depends a lot on which particular Anglican church you go to.

I suspect that some people might read this and think "I don't know those things, but I learn the Bible each week". Well, that would be a great thing. But before we just move on from there, it's good to remember that the Ten Commandments and Lord's Prayer actually come from the Bible anyway and that the 16th century church also had the ideal of reading the entire Old Testament once a year, the New Testament three times and all the Psalms each month, so they weren't using the catechism as some light-weight alternative to Bible reading.

Just as I'd been thinking about this, a friend sent me this link to an iPad ap for a modern day catechism. I was wondering how we could revive old skool catechesis. Someone beat me to it!