One of the core commitments of the Scottsdale Church Plant is to be “Devoted to the Apostles Teaching” (Acts 2:42). There are several implications of this commitment for the church today. First and foremost, it entails a commitment to proclaim Christ and his Gospel as the central message of our faith week in and week out. Jesus Christ and him crucified was, after all, the center and the focus of all of the teaching and preaching of the Apostles (see Pauls summary of his own ministry in 1 Cor 2). As we live in a culture that largely believes that the Christian religion is like every other religion, giving a list of rules that we must keep in order to save ourselves, we must proclaim the good news of Christ. Christianity begins with the message, not of what we must do to save ourselves, but of what God has done to save us through his Son! A church devoted to the Apostles teaching is a church that will always point those who walk through our doors to Jesus and the salvation he freely offers. Amen!
Our commitment to the Apostles teaching doesn’t end here, however. We know from the New Testament that it also involves a commitment to learn God’s word. This instruction is clearly given by Jesus himself when he gave the great commission, which includes “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded” (Matt 28; see also 2 Tim 3, 1 Peter 1-2, Hebrews 4:16, for how important the Word is in our lives as Christians). A church therefore is to be a learning community, a place where we can grow in our understanding of Bible knowledge, content, and theology. Certainly there is more to the church and to Christian living than knowing God’s word, but there is not less. After all, how will we know how to live wisely if we don’t know God’s word? How will we recognize distortions of the Gospel message and even outright heresy? How will we be able to give good counsel or encourage other Christians? In light of this, we can only lament the increasing Biblical illiteracy of many American Christians. I am not going to go into detail here, but there is mounting evidence that those who self identify as Christians increasingly don’t know the basics of the faith (see for example the Ligonier State of Theology surveys that are done every two years). I am also very concerned that we have a generation of youth growing up in the church who leave for college without a solid grounding in the Bible or the content of their faith. When that is the case, is it any wonder that so many Christian youth lose their faith in the first year of college? Did they every really know it to begin with?
This is a lengthy lead in to the subject of this post, which is a short reflection on how we can practically teach our kids (and ourselves) the content of the faith and by God’s grace lay a foundation that will endure the test of time. But where to begin? What to do? Books on children’s ministry are endless, children’s Bible’s come in thousands of varieties, and it can all seem overwhelming. Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can stand on the generations of Christians that have come before us, and on the tested and tried methods that they recommend to us. When we look back, what we find is consistent testimony to what I will call the BIG 3: The Apostles Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. When previous generations of Christians sought to train their children and new converts in the faith, it is to the BIG 3 that they routinely turned. I recently read several short treatises by some of the early reformers, and it was striking to me how often they highlighted the BIG 3 as being of critical importance in their program for training children and discipling believers. Consider the quote below by Martin Luther along these lines as representative (with added underlines):
This instruction or direction I know not how to put in a clearer or better way than has been done since the beginning of Christendom and retained to our own day, namely in these three, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Our Father. These three contain simply and briefly, about everything a Christian needs to know, This instruction must be given…from the pulpit at stated times…and repeated or read aloud evenings and mornings in the homes for the children if we want to train them as Christians. They should not merely learn to say the words by heart, as heretofore, but with each part they should be asked questions and give answer, what each part means and how they understand it…Let none think himself too wise for this and despise such child’s play. …If we wish to train children, we must become children with them. Would to God such child’s play were widely practiced. In a short time we would have a wealth of Christian people, souls becoming rich in Scripture.
Notice that Luther is simply advocating for what we call the process of catechism. Taking central truths of the Christian faith, teaching them to our children through question and answer format, and then dialoguing with them about the meaning of them. Further, notice how Luther understands that we might be tempted to disdain this (seeing it as “child’s play”) approach and look for some bigger, better, or less time consuming way. But, as Luther noted, this practice is well worth the investment and goes all the way back to the earliest centuries of the church.
I share this with you hopefully as an encouragement to parents. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to what and how we can help our children learn the Christian faith. The BIG 3 offers a wonderful starting place, and both the Westminster Catechism and the Heidelberg Catechism contain teaching in this format on the Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s prayer. This is also why we have a catechesis program in the church and recite the Lord’s prayer and Apostles Creed regularly in Sunday worship. It’s not just as an expression of our belief (though it is that), it is also a way we teach and disciple ourselves and our children.