What I Learned in Catechism

I was raised in the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, and that meant two years of catechism in 7^th and 8^th grades. Every Tuesday and Thursday during the school year, 4 p.m. would find me and other junior higher waiting outside the door of the pastor’s office for catechism class to begin. Both grades met at the same time, which meant in 8^th grade you repeated what you had studied the first year.

We sat in rows of light brown metal folding chairs in front of the pastor’s desk. Without anyone ever communicating the message, we knew the 8^th graders said in the back rows and the 7^th graders in front. There were usually about 25 of us, half from each grade. Our textbook was Luther’s Small Catechism. (Would you believe I still have my original copy?)

The end point of catechism was confirmation (wearing white robes) and first communion. What we were doing, or what we were trying to do, was to learn about God.

And we did learn. A lot stuck – more than I expected. I still remember the first verses we memorized – Romans 8:38-39 (“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons…”). Our Bible was the King James Version. We learned the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds. We learned the Ten Commandments. We studied the life of Jesus. We had assignments, just like school.

When it came time for confirmation (and the dreaded questioning by the pastor in front of the entire congregation), only four of our original 12 or 13 were left. Moves out of the city or to other parts of the city had taken its toll on our class. So there stood Rosalie, Theresa, Susan and Glynn, wearing our white robes, waiting for each of us to be questioned. The girls were smiling, because they somehow knew that the only boy in the group was going to get the tough questions.

They were right. I got the tough ones. But the pastor knew his students, and he figured I would come through with the right answers. And I did, sweating the entire time, but I did.

Catechism was mostly about head knowledge. But head knowledge was important. It awoke something in me that grew very slowly in high school (I almost joined a Baptist church, much to my mother’s horror), suffered a serious setback the first three-and-a-half years of college, and then one cool January night in 1973 migrated from my head to my heart.

As A.W. Tozer might say, I had been led (sometimes dragged) to God. “At the heart of the Christian message,” he writes in The Pursuit of God, “is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence.”

And that’s what happened. I pushed into that conscious awareness.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading and discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Removing the Veil,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. Next week we’ll conclude the discussion of this chapter.