Counter-catechesis For A Secular Age

Lesslie Newbigin was a British missionary and theologian. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne and studying for two degrees at Cambridge, he was commissioned to India as a Church of Scotland missionary and lived abroad for 40 years. Newbigin was an evangelist, community activist, church planter, and organizational strategist.

In 1974, Lesslie and his wife, Helen, retired from full-time missionary work. To celebrate this milestone, they took the long way home. Instead of flying in an airplane, they took a slower 40-day journey of rickshaws, cars, trains, and boats to travel “home” through Europe. On returning to England, the Newbigins were shocked to visit many old towns—once strongholds of Christian thought, now reduced to spiritual rubble. Lesslie recognized how a strong Christian heritage could nearly disappear.

Arriving in London, the Newbigins were surprised to see widespread spiritual apathy. The church’s lack of missionary urgency was matched by a way of life that was overly adapted and accommodating to the surrounding society. As he considered the challenges facing the church in his time, Lesslie asked a question that still resonates today: “What if instead of trying to explain the gospel in terms of our culture, we tried to explain our culture in light of the gospel?”

Church Under the Influence

Today, the church is too often under the influence, drugged by worldly philosophies and practices, sluggish in our witness and evangelism, diminished in our influence as salt and light. Cultural narratives in the West are so powerful that they make it hard for God’s people to see straight. We struggle to see things as they are, to understand the difference between truth and error, and to live true to our identity. The secular script of “expressive individualism”—an outlook that describes our purpose in life as looking within to find ourselves and then express ourselves to the world—is prevalent now, to the point we’re unaware of how pervasive it has become.

Cultural narratives in the West are so powerful that they make it hard for God’s people to see straight.

This new cultural landscape requires new tactics to contend for the gospel. In The Open Secret, Newbigin wrote, “It is not enough for the church to repeat the same words and phrases in different cultural situations. New ways have to be found of stating the essential Trinitarian faith.”

Like Newbigin, and like countless other Christians seeking to be faithful to the Lord Jesus in their own time and place, today’s believers want to rearticulate what we believe in fresh terms. We want to expound the Christian faith in response to new challenges, fresh questions, and the perceived contradictions in this cultural moment.

Catechism for a Secular Age

One way of meeting the challenges of our day is to take an ancient practice and employ it afresh, to help the church recover what we believe in both depth and breadth. “Catechesis” simply means “instruction.” A catechism is one way instruction takes place.

Almost every denomination and tradition in church history has used some form of catechesis for the religious education of Christian children and adults: Lutherans (with Luther’s Small Catechism), Presbyterians (with The Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms), Baptists (with Keach’s Catechism), Catholics (with Catechism of the Catholic Church), and Anglicans (with To Be a Christian by J. I. Packer and The Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer).

In the Reformation era, catechisms presented Protestant beliefs over against the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church of the time. These were exercises in counter-catechesis, in that they not only provided a positive vision of Christianity but also sought to oppose the dominant religious options at the time.

Counter-catechesis is a way of presenting Christian truth as opposed to the dominant beliefs of a society. What outlook defines our culture today? A secularism that marginalizes and privatizes religious faith and authority; a built-in bias against transcendence and the supernatural; a radical commitment to individualism, pluralism, and skepticism; an openness to all kinds of personal spiritualities that start with the self and not with God. Counter-catechesis is a way of saying, “Christianity is not this but that.” It’s saying, “Here’s what the world says, but look at what the Bible says.” It’s also saying, “You think what you’ve heard is good, but let me show you how Christianity is better.”

In How to Reach the West Again, Tim Keller was right to call for a counter-catechism that “explains, refutes, and re-narrates the world’s catechisms to Christians.” The Christian story told in the Bible needs to be taught alongside and even against the secular narratives of the day.

Counter-Catechetical Instinct

One of our generation’s tasks is to present the Christian faith in a way that helps young and old alike to stand out, to shine like stars in a crooked generation. A counter-catechism—such as the Gospel Way Catechism I’ve developed with Thomas West, a pastor friend of mine who planted a church in London—is a tool for helping Christians showcase the beauty of the gospel.

Our goal is to reintroduce (to adults and students, and in an adapted version next year, to kids) the old truths of Christianity in a way that identifies cultural narratives so they can be seen and considered, affirmed for the ways they rightly embody some aspect of the biblical story, subverted and critiqued for not going far enough in delivering our deep desires of joy and fulfillment, and finally shown only to be fulfilled in and through Jesus Christ.

Catechisms are tools for thought, study, and memorization. We believe the problem in the church is that we’ve asked not too much of people but too little. We’re inspired by Keller’s vision of finding new ways of providing instruction for Christians. He said,

Christian education, in general, needs to be massively redone. We must not merely explain Christian doctrine to children, youth, and adults, but use Christian doctrine to subvert the baseline cultural narratives to which believers are exposed in powerful ways daily. We should distribute this material widely to all, disrupting existing channels, flooding society, as it were, with the material as well as directly incorporating it into local churches.

The word “disciple” simply means “student,” and we envision the church as a formative and holistic learning community, not merely an inspirational gathering or performance attended only a couple times a month. For the longtime Christian, a counter-catechism can provide a tune-up of sorts, a reminder of how distinct and wonderful the Christian faith is. For the new believer, a counter-catechism can introduce the basics of the Christian faith in distinction to what we experience as common-sense beliefs and practices in the world.

The Christian story told in the Bible needs to be taught alongside and even against the secular narratives of the day.

Christianity isn’t simply something we look at but a lens we look through to understand our world. We need to recover the scriptural story as the story we look through to make sense of the world in which we live.

In the end, if we’re going to answer Keller’s call to counter-catechesis, we need more than just tools and books and resources. More important than the instruction is the instinct––developing and honing the instinct for how Christianity makes us different, how the gospel counters the world’s lies while fulfilling the deeper longing. Ultimately, it’s not about memorizing a bunch of questions and answers. It’s about learning to see all of life through the lens of Scripture so we’re faithful to the Lord in our time.

Hopeful Way Forward

We hope to see churches where believers are eager to relearn the basics of the Christian faith, where the rhythms of faith become second nature, shaping how we think, talk, and act. We hope to see Christians take time every day to immerse themselves in the truths of the gospel—not to check a box but to reshape their hearts and renew their minds. We hope to see conversations that move beyond surface-level chatter, so friends and fellow church members can press deeper, challenging one another to live in light of the Christian story rather than the secular scripts on offer from the world.

We hope to see faithfulness forged through slow and steady reflection—not the hurried consumption of content but the careful, contemplative work of letting biblical truth settle deep and take root. Most of all, we hope to see communities united in truth and bound together in love as Christians walk side by side, committed to the way of Jesus as true, good, and beautiful in a world of distraction and deception.