Lutheran Education: Getting Down to the Basics (Part 4 of 8)
If you have any memory of confirmation class, you may remember the catechism as something to get through. A list of questions, a list of answers, a test at the end, and then, for many people, a quiet relief that it was over. If that is the catechism you knew, you never really met it.
Luther did not write the Small Catechism as a final exam. He wrote it as a prayer book.
What is actually in it
The Small Catechism gathers the six things every Christian needs to live by: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, Confession, and the Lord’s Supper. These are not Lutheran inventions. They are the oldest, most basic texts of the Christian faith, the ones the church has handed to every new believer since the beginning. Luther simply put them in a little book with plain explanations, so that a father could teach them to his household at the kitchen table.
And he meant them to be used daily, like bread. He was not embarrassed to say he used them that way himself. In the preface to the Large Catechism he wrote: “I am also a doctor and preacher… yet I do as a child who is being taught the Catechism, and every morning, and whenever I have time, I read and say word for word the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer.” If the catechism was a daily prayer for the man who wrote it, it is not something a child finishes at thirteen.
Learned by heart, for life
This is why a Lutheran school teaches the catechism the way it does. Not as content to be tested and forgotten, but as words to be learned by heart and kept for life. At one well-known Lutheran academy, children know the whole Small Catechism by memory by the end of third grade. That is not because they are quizzed harder than other children. It is because the catechism is treated as equipment for living: the words a person reaches for when he needs to confess a sin, comfort a friend, pray at a graveside, or simply remember whose he is.
Scripture commands exactly this kind of deep storage. “You shall teach them diligently to your children” (Deuteronomy 6:7). “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16). A child who has the catechism in his bones has the word of Christ dwelling in him richly, ready for any day life brings.
One of the best modern teachers of Lutheran education warns about the danger of letting the catechism become a head-only exercise, a set of right answers detached from prayer and the Christian life. A Lutheran school guards against that by keeping the catechism where it belongs: on the lips, in the prayers, woven through the day, not just penciled into a workbook.
Why the pastor is in the school
There is one more piece, and it is part of what makes a Lutheran school Lutheran. The catechism is the pastor’s stock in trade. He is the one called to teach the faith, to absolve sins, to prepare people for the Lord’s Supper. So in a healthy Lutheran school the pastor is not a stranger who appears for chapel and disappears. He is present, teaching catechesis to the older grades himself, known to the children, teaching them to receive the gifts of Christ in the Divine Service and preparing them over years for first communion and confirmation.
Walther, the first president of our church body, said it simply: “Where schools have been established, it is absolutely necessary for the pastor to visit them.” That is the goal St. John holds and keeps working toward: a school where the shepherd knows the lambs, and the lambs know the catechism as the language of their own prayers.
A textbook gets you through a test. A prayer book gets you through a life. The catechism is the second kind of book, and a Lutheran school hands it to your child as a gift to keep.
Next week: how the ancient church, long before there were Lutherans, already knew that children must be formed this way.
Come and see. At St. John Lutheran School, the catechism is prayed, not just passed. We are enrolling now, and we would be glad to show you what daily formation in the faith looks like for your child. To visit, ask questions, or learn about registration, contact the school office or speak with Pastor Gillespie.
Next in the series: What the Ancient Church Already Knew
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.