Lutheran Education: Getting Down to the Basics (Part 5 of 8)
It would be easy to assume that all of this, the catechism, the daily prayer, the careful forming of children, is a Lutheran specialty. It is not. When you enroll a child in this kind of formation, you are joining something far older than the Reformation. The ancient church knew it first.
Chrysostom and the soul like a city
Around the year 390, a preacher named John Chrysostom wrote what is likely the earliest Christian book on raising children. He had watched too many Christian parents hand their children’s whole formation over to hired help, paying attention to everything except the one thing that mattered most. So he wrote to call fathers and mothers back to the work themselves.
His pictures are worth keeping. He compared a child’s soul to a newly founded city, with the five senses as its gates. What passes through those gates, what the child sees, hears, and says, becomes the citizens who will live in that city for life. Parents, he taught, are the guardians of the gates. He compared a parent to an artist laboring over a statue, shaping it with patience and care. And he said the goal was to raise “an athlete for Christ,” a child trained and ready, not coddled and soft.
He was firm about something many would not expect from an ancient writer: do not rely on the rod. A child ruled only by the fear of punishment learns to despise the punishment and never learns to love what is good. The aim is not a child who behaves out of fear, but a child whose heart has been turned toward virtue. And the way to do that, Chrysostom said, is the reading of Scripture, the practice of prayer, and patient teaching of the faith at home.
Read that list again. Scripture, prayer, catechesis, in the home, by parents. Sixteen centuries before St. John’s school existed, a pastor in Antioch was describing exactly what a Lutheran school exists to support.
Augustine and the long memory of the church
A generation later, Augustine of Hippo was wrestling with how to teach the faith to people who came knowing nothing. He wrote a whole book on instructing beginners. He understood that the human heart does not save itself, that the Law shows us our need and the Gospel gives us Christ, and that this had to be taught, patiently, to the unformed and the confused alike.
Behind both of these men stood an old practice the church took for granted: the catechumenate. Before a person was baptized, the church walked them through the faith step by step, the commandments, the creed, the prayer, the sacraments. It was slow, deliberate formation, shared by the whole community. It is, in fact, the same shape Luther later put into his little catechism. He was not inventing something new. He was handing back to ordinary families a treasure the church had always carried.
You are joining something ancient
Scripture assumes this long chain of handing-down. “Hear, my son, and receive my sayings… I have taught you in the way of wisdom; I have led you in right paths” (Proverbs 4:10–11). “Bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). The same charge runs from Moses to the apostles to Chrysostom to Augustine to Luther to a classroom in our own town.
That is worth saying plainly to a parent deciding where to send a child. A Lutheran school is not a recent experiment or a denominational quirk. It is the continuation of something the church has been doing since its earliest centuries: guarding the gates of a child’s soul, shaping it with care, training an athlete for Christ. When your child is formed here, he takes his place in a line two thousand years long.
Next week: the people who believed in this so fiercely they crossed an ocean to keep it.
Come and see. When you enroll a child at St. John Lutheran School, you join a practice as old as the church itself. We are enrolling now, and we would be glad to show you what it looks like today. To visit, ask questions, or learn about registration, contact the school office or speak with Pastor Gillespie.
Next in the series: A Treasure Worth Crossing an Ocean For
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.