The 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (325) is now behind us. The revelers have gone home. Others never got the notice there even was a party or, if they did, never knew what all the fuss was about. Yet the Nicene Creed—what the first global gathering of church leaders discerned about the core of Christian belief—is of lasting importance, providing nourishment, milk and solid food (1 Cor. 3:2), for new and mature believers alike. Let the Nicene times roll on.
A ‘Sixth Awakening’?
Colonial America experienced the First Great Awakening beginning in the 1730s, thanks to preachers like George Whitefield. There have been other revivals in the United States and the United Kingdom, associated with the Wesleys, Charles Finney and Charles Spurgeon. However, recent statistics suggest that the West is now experiencing a radical dechurching. More people have left the church in the past 20 years than all the people converted in the first two Great Awakenings and all the Billy Graham crusades combined. Call it the Great Slumbering.
Of less notice is what Patrick Johnstone describes as the “Sixth Awakening,” a great gathering of new believers in the Global South: Africa, Asia and Latin America. What is different about this Sixth Awakening is that it is happening in places where there is no established Christian culture into which these new believers may be invited and nurtured.
The Second Century Again
The situation today resembles that of the early church. Michael J. Kruger in Christianity at the Crossroads observes several commonalities between the second-century church and the 21st-century church. Like the early Christians, we have to work hard to articulate our core theological identity in the face of so many competing alternatives, from other religions to secular humanism to various forms of pagan spirituality.
Large swaths of the Global South may still be pre-Christian, but the West is becoming post-Christian. The worldwide challenge today, as in the early church, is to help new converts, wherever they may be, to understand what Christian belief, behavior and belonging involves.
The School of Christ
I affirm sola Scriptura, but it is naive to assume that new Christians can grow into the full stature of Christ simply by being told to read the Bible alone. When Philip asked the Ethiopian eunuch if he understood what he was reading, he replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:31).
Peter warns of false prophets and false teachers “who will secretly bring in destructive heresies” (2 Peter 2:1). False doctrine leads to false practice, disobedience. There is safety in numbers, however. When possible, therefore, read in the communion of the saints.
Jesus left his disciples with a mandate for making disciples. It was less a formal curriculum than a charge: “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20).
Teaching was a large part of Jesus’ ministry, so it’s no surprise that he asks his disciples to go and do likewise. The second-century Didache (also called “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles”) instructed new believers in such things as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, prayer, fasting and other elements of the Christian way.
Made, Not Begotten
Tertullian said “Christians are made, not born.” He meant that becoming a disciple was not something you simply inherited from your family. It was rather the result of a new convert’s training, instruction and socialization into a counterculture. Baptism was the convert’s port of entry, but those who wanted to enter into the city of God—to use Augustine’s terminology—first had to pass the citizenship test.
By the end of the third century, a system for teaching new converts had developed: the catechumenate. Its name derives from the Greek katecheo (to instruct) and appears in several passages, such as Galatians 6:6: “Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches.” Eventually the form of this instruction (oral teaching) was called a catechism.
Catechesis, says Alex Fogleman in Making Disciples: Catechesis in History, Theology, and Practice, is the process of forming lifelong followers of Jesus Christ. It is the process of learning how to speak, think and act Christian. In the early church, it involved a two- to three-year course of instruction in Christian belief, behavior and belonging, an entire “grammar for living the Christian life.”
Early Christians did not need to be literate in order to be learners. The etymology of catechesis explains why: ekhe means to echo. Catechetical instruction was largely a matter of repeating back what one had heard in order to learn it by heart.