What if the struggle many churches face with forming deep, lasting disciples is an invitation to rediscover catechesis, the ancient practice that transformed the early church? For three centuries, when Christianity was just one option among many in a pluralist culture, the church developed a patient, comprehensive approach to catechesis that formed people in the basic building blocks of thinking, praying, and living as Christians. Dr. Alex Fogleman, author of "Making Disciples: Catechesis in History, Theology, and Practice," explores how this ancient wisdom can revolutionize modern discipleship formation.

In this conversation, Alex reveals how catechesis addresses today's cultural fragmentation through what he calls a "pedagogy of enchantment"—formation that goes beyond mere information to create genuine encounters with the living God. Discover why effective catechesis takes time, how to practice "counter-catechesis" against competing cultural creeds, and practical steps for implementing this transformative approach in your church context. Whether you're wrestling with surface-level Christian education or seeking deeper formation practices, this episode offers ancient solutions for contemporary discipleship challenges.

I've just found people deeply hungry for this, especially in our age where there's lots of information out there. There's lots of surface level, but not a lot of depth, not a lot of substance. And I think that's just, I mean, that's just the way we were made. We were made to know the living God and the things of God are deep things. This is soul ⁓ nurturing ⁓ food.

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Hello everyone, welcome to the Pivot Podcast, where we explore how the Church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Dwight Zscheile The Church today faces a deep challenge of identity and formation. We know from studies that many non-Christians look at self-described Christians and don't see enough of Jesus in their lives and thus don't want anything to do with Church.

Many people in congregations struggle to live Jesus' way in a culture that quite frankly conspires against it. I see this as a kind of root challenge that has to be addressed in a pluralist, increasingly post-Christian, and in some ways neo-pagan society today. Where can we turn to address this? For the first three centuries, when Christianity was just one option among many in a pluralist culture, much like today, the church had to be

highly intentional about catechesis or forming people in the faith. This wasn't about quick fixes or an attempt to be culturally relevant. It was a patient, comprehensive process of forming people in the basic building blocks of thinking, praying, and living as Christians. Well, today I'm really excited to welcome to the Pivot podcast Dr. Alex Vogelmann.

He's Associate Dean for Special Programs and Assistant Professor of Theology at Trinity Anglican Seminary in Pennsylvania, and is the author of a new book that just came out called, Making Disciples, Catechesis in History, Theology, and Practice. Alex's work couldn't be more timely as churches wrestle with how to form deep, lasting disciples in our post-Christian cultural moment. Alex, welcome to the Pivot Podcast.

Thank you, Dwight. So good to be here with you.

So ⁓ tell us a little bit about your story and what drew you to studying catechesis and why is it so important for today's search?

Yeah, I think I was ⁓ drawn into it by both hearing about it and by experiencing it. I grew up in the church, I grew up in the south of a very sort of culturally Christian context, might say. ⁓ So I to really good churches growing up. don't have wounds and scars of sort of bad malformation or something like that. ⁓ And yet, I don't know if I ever...

I had a sort of, ⁓ was formerly Kanaka's. I didn't have that kind of process that wasn't part of the vocabulary. There was Sunday school, there was Bible study, there was youth group, ⁓ confirmation even. ⁓ And then went off to seminary. ⁓ I went to seminary at Regent College in Vancouver, which was home to the now late, ⁓

Reverend Dr. J.I. Packer. And at this point, really though, I mean, for many decades, Packer would talk about this, but especially in his latter years, was really adamant about retrieving or recovering the lost art of catechesis, as he would call it. And he was very involved with the Anglican Church and ⁓ helping them develop a catechism. But more than a catechism, he would talk about the recovery of a

practice of catechesis. And ⁓ my own interests were in studying the early church. I was really drawn especially to the theology of St. Augustine and folks around that time. ⁓ so I was hearing Dr. Packer talk about this recovery of catechesis. I was starting to become interested in the church fathers and the patristic period. ⁓ And all of it sounded great.

But then I moved from Vancouver to Texas, to central Texas in Waco to do doctoral studies at Baylor University there. But then it was finally there, it at the church there that I was a part of a church that really took catechesis seriously. It was ingrained into the church's culture and it was just part of the orbit, ⁓ the way of life, the rhythm.

of the parish. And it was then, it was seeing it practiced and enacted that the lights really went on for me. And I could finally connect what I was hearing about from Dr. Packer, what I was trying to read about in the Church Fathers, but then saw it take root and really come to life in the parish. And I thought, this is awesome. I have like, you know, if it worked in sort of church ministry and teaching. ⁓

in spiritual formation and things like that, then to seminary, but it was only then sort of seeing it come to life that it really clicked for me. ⁓ And then started talking with other church leaders and pastors and in hearing from them the things that they were saying, the needs they were describing, what they wanted, what they hoped for in their churches.

was just so connected with what I was seeing and studying in the early church. And so really my own sort of process, writing this book and sort of things that I do here at Trinity, working with churches, is really about ⁓ helping pastors that I meet today and church teachers. I just want to introduce them to my friends, the church fathers and

put them in conversation. And so we can learn together what God is doing in our midst and how we can recover that lost art of catechesis.

How would

you define catechesis, and is it just for children or new converts?

Great question. It's a good setup there. ⁓ It is typically thought of as being just for kids or just for new converts. ⁓ And there's probably some reasons for that, or there are some definite reasons for that. ⁓ But ⁓ that's a temptation I would try to resist. And I try to follow people like Luther who would also resist that temptation. ⁓

But how I define catechesis in the book, and this is really drawing upon, especially not only the early church, but especially the early church, but then throughout history, I really try to do take a broader historical look at the tradition of catechesis. I define it as a basic but comprehensive introduction into what Christians believe, hope, and love. And by basic, I mean

not just for new converts or for children, but basic in the sense of this is about foundations. This is about what's at the root. And ⁓ that's something that's always with us. If you're well advanced in years ⁓ and there's a house without foundations, ⁓ that's not going to go well. So it's foundational.

at that level, but it's also comprehensive. And I think that's also what makes it different than other forms of ministry, such as the evangelism or other forms of discipleship or Bible study or preaching or spiritual direction and these sorts of things. It's a basic but comprehensive introduction to the Christian faith. And then by comprehensive, I also mean it has to do with ⁓ not only what Christians think,

⁓ what ought a Christian to think about ⁓ God in the world and ourselves, but also how we live and how we relate to God. faith, hope, and love are a stand-in, are a cipher for the thinking, praying, and ethical moral life of the Christian.

So I think that's really helpful when you talk about kind of this multifaceted approach to it, right? And I wanna just engage with you a little bit around the contemporary cultural environment and why formation in the way of Jesus is so difficult right now. I mean, we come off, I think maybe centuries of an assumed kind of Christendom context where there's a sort of benign assumption about.

how culture is forming people, at least to be moral people, to be good people, in some maybe often nebulous way. But what does it mean to be formed specifically in the way of Jesus as a disciple of Jesus in this moment? then I think, you know, invite you just to connect back into that early church situation, which seems to be more and more similar now.

Yeah, that's good. I would say in any generation, it's hard to follow Jesus. I think there are particular challenges to our own age, and those sort of align with challenges from different ages, including especially the early church. ⁓ But I don't actually take the view that it was somehow easier to be a Christian, say, in the Middle Ages or the Reformation or something like that. ⁓

I think the nature of the world that we live in, the nature of sin, makes it hard to follow Jesus. ⁓ It is ⁓ not just what we wake up and are naturally inclined to do. I think there's ways of thinking about this as forming a second nature, that kind of language ⁓ where things can become easier. We become sort of more inclined ⁓ rather than more disinclined. ⁓

But I think some of the particular challenges we're facing that you've already started to describe, I think can be summarized in the word fragmentation, right? The sort of disintegration of, at many levels, of our institutions. There's lots of institutional fragmentation. Our schooling and education are fragmented from our family life, from politics, from other forms of

of collective life together. So there's an institutional fragmentation and that typically tends to be where we want to go to address the problems, right? But I think it's safe to say here's that those institutional fragmentations are premised upon much deeper levels of fragmentation that occur at the space of what we might call ontology or being or epistemology, how we think about the world, how we experience the world, what we think the world is.

So I think some of these ⁓ ways of knowing how we know God, how we know one another, those things become fragmented. ⁓ And at heart, these are always ever theological questions. And so I think this is one way that the early church, ⁓ especially focused on catechizing and discipling Christians, ⁓ they saw these

They had an integrative approach to formation and discipleship. And they were living in the cultural comparisons, and many people have made these and debated these. And I'm not super invested in saying, well, our culture is just like the early church or whatever. But again, there's sorts of echoes and there are sorts of rhymes in the ways that these cultures become fragmented. And that the ways in which

a non-Christian approach to addressing those fragmentation can often turn to violence and forced unity ⁓ rather than a unity that's founded on following Jesus Christ. ⁓ yeah, so those are some of the ways that I think that part of what I'm advocating in this approach to catechesis is a unitive and integrative approach to Christian formation.

that through this structure, through this sort of attention to the integration of belief, of hope, of spirituality, of doctrine and ethics, through the integration of these things, that very practice itself becomes a way of healing some of the more fragmentary aspects of our culture.

So tell us a bit about what that looks like in practice in churches today. So what is a contemporary version of catechesis, a kind of contextualized version for today? ⁓ What does that look like? Tell some stories or use a case study for us.

Yeah,

In the book, I try to tell some of these stories. I give a lot of stories that are... I'm not a very practical person, as you can probably tell. But I do, as my own story indicates, and some of what I try to do in the book is just tell the story of others, whether they lived in the fourth century or the 16th century or...

or the eighth century or today, I try to tell stories about how I've seen this look and practice. I think it is going to, so a lot of things will depend on one's own context, what kind of church tradition, what kind of culture, or particular culture one finds himself in, all sorts of things that disincline me from being too prescriptive about what one ought to do. ⁓

But with that in mind, some of the common things that I've seen is ⁓ an approach to catechesis that's just slower. ⁓ It's more deliberate. It's a recognition that good things take time. ⁓ And that's something that is again, in terms of sort of disalignment with our current culture, that one really, really sort of...

what scripture talks about when it talks about maturity and becoming ⁓ sound ⁓ in doctrine, not being susceptible to the winds of doctrine, right? These are just good kind of biblical tenets. I take some of the language of the Sermon on the Mount being founded on the rock. And of course, I read that Christologically. this image of

Christian formation that takes time is one that I think is sort of a lesson that we can learn and somewhat a common pattern that I see in different approaches to catechesis. But it's not very complicated or it's not very mysterious. It looks like Christians gathering together focused on these core tenets of the faith. Again,

Typically, that's been something like looking at the creed, ⁓ looking at the Lord's Prayer, ⁓ and looking at the Ten Commandments. These, again, have often been seen as standards or pillars of catechesis that allow the Christian to become habituated into the thinking, feeling, and living of the Christian life. ⁓

And with that, I think there's also an introduction to the Gospel narrative, an introduction to the story of scriptures. ⁓ What is the larger arc? What is the larger narrative of scripture? ⁓ That would often be one of the first things that early Christians would do. They say, this is the story from the beginning until now. And there's this orientation to the large story. ⁓

And you need these, the larger story, you need the narrative, you need the bedrocks of creed, prayer and commandments in order for them, then for people to go on and make progress in the Christian faith in order to grow up. ⁓ So there's ⁓ this just time taking ⁓ with these pillars, with these foundational elements of the Christian faith. And then,

And then the third element I would add along with it takes time. It's a focus on these three pillars. ⁓ And then there's a relational dimension to this. I think this is one of the key dimensions for our own age, which is increasingly digital. It's less relational, less personal. ⁓ We can be easily inclined to think that

One can be catechized just by reading a book or, you know, looking up, you know, answers to a catechism in an app or something like that. And I think we want to return to the relational lived communal dimensions of catechesis. Historically, the role of a, not only a teachers and students, but also of sponsors was really important to the process of catechesis. ⁓ Sponsors were not only people who

⁓ you know, attended your baptism. They were people who walked alongside you, who prayed with you, who prayed for you, and who simply lived the Christian life with you during the process of catechesis. So they also spoke on your behalf. You know, if the baptizing bishop would say, you know, tell me, how has this person lived? ⁓

What do they believe and how have they lived over this process of catechesis? And so the sponsor would be a witness to these things. So there's this inescapable relational element to catechesis that I think is really important in some of the stories that I've seen.

The

early church practiced what you call a pedagogy of enchantment and an education of desire. Those are wonderful phrases where this whole kind of pedagogical, this journey, right? This pedagogical journey is catechetical journey was about an encounter with a living God. And I'd love to draw you out a little bit on that because we in Western cultures have a very informational approach to thinking about education often. But this is actually about

but cultivating experiences of encounter with a living God and say more about how that works and why it's so important.

Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I draw at least the phrase enchantment. ⁓ I think the language of desire has been sort of popularized. Like we're a little more familiar with that language or more attentive to the importance of desire and the ways that it can be calculated and contrived and misdirected. It's a sort of Augustinian. ⁓

⁓ mode. ⁓ But this language of enchantment ⁓ is one that I draw from a scholar named Brian Dunkel, who's a scholar of the church, Father Ambrose of Milan. ⁓ And ⁓ Ambrose was famous among other things. First of all, he's the person who baptized St. Augustine.

So he's got that going for him, which is nice. But he was also one of the great poets of the early church. So he ⁓ not only preached wonderful sermons, but he wrote some of the, in Latin, some of the church's first great poetry. And these were all ⁓ pedagogical. They were teaching ⁓

They were for the purpose of teaching. He, and so the scholar Brian Dunkel talks about his, book called Enchantment and Creed in Ambrose of Milan or something like that. But it's putting these together, enchantment and creed, which I think are really two words that we don't really think of together. ⁓

But it's that paradigm to say that there's a way in which our encounter with these catechetical elements, with the creed, with the Lord's Prayer, even the Ten Commandments. When we approach those texts, not simply as, ⁓ you know, just doctrine or like things to know, when we begin to see these as

means of encounter with the Living God as kind of quasi-sacramental in character such that our encounter with the Creed is not just an encounter with information about Christ, but it is actual encounter with the Living Christ through this medium. Then we begin to really see things

We begin to approach the whole enterprise differently. ⁓ The whole practice of the Christian life, we become opened up to this living encounter with God right from the very start. Right? This isn't, so I don't see Catechism as just information that we learn now in order later on to help us have a living encounter. That encounter starts right now with these texts.

And that's premised, I think, on theological reasons, like who God is and how God has invited us to encounter Him through the means of this world.

So the culture we live in now says things like, you should primarily be true to yourself, you know, you be you, those kinds of narratives. How does this approach to catechesis ⁓ counteract or engage some of those deep formational myths, if you will, in contemporary Western culture?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great one. Yeah, I get a lot of this from Tim Keller, who writes about this and he's written some really wonderful things about Catechism, I think. There's been lots of great tributes to his legacy in terms of his approach to cultural apologetics, things like that. But I think some of, he wrote

some really, really Winston stuff on catechesis and it's some digging around. found that he actually got some of this from, from J.I. Packer, which was not probably not surprising to people, but it was, it was neat for me. ⁓ But he would talk about what he called counter catechesis. ⁓ And Keller would use this phrase to describe ⁓ the way in which we can look at

culture and we can start to just being attentive to culture, being sort of students, observers of culture, and we can look at the implicit or in many cases now explicit creeds of our culture. Like, you you've got to be true to yourself or everything is progressing towards something better. Or, you know, we can achieve all of our goals through the application of science and technology or these sorts of things.

So again, those can be more implicit, just the premise upon which all of our society is ordered, or it can be more explicit. This can come out in kind of quasi-cretal form and people will boldly declare it in their yard signs and things like that. But what Keller helped me see was that the job of the catechist is to...

go from sort of surface level issues to look at foundational level issues and address sort of cultural issues at that level. And that's, think, what is something that catechesis can do especially well. ⁓ It can look at, ⁓ you know, the culture's creed and it can look at the Christian creed and it can... ⁓

examine things at that level. And I think what you've done there is to help Christians who are on the fence, are wanting to become better formed Christians, who are wanting to faithfully follow Jesus. But they don't have a real way to do that. They don't have a real practical guide or instruction or pathway into doing those things. And so they tend to stay at surface level.

They tend to say, well, yeah, of course I believe that Jesus is Lord, ⁓ but they can't help it. But living as if the culture's creed is really the true way to live. ⁓ So being able to connect at that foundational level is I think one way we can approach what Keller called counter catechesis at that sort of deep level. What are...

What should the role of sacraments in catechesis be? Now know in the early church, catechesis preceded participation in the sacraments, there'd be baptism, and only then would you be able to ⁓ experience Holy Communion. But how do you think about that for today's church?

Yeah, this is one of the, as we may encounter as one of the stranger things about the early church is that ⁓ they would, for a catechumen who wasn't yet baptized, somebody who's going through catechesis during that two or three year process, that person would be welcome to come to church, know, welcome, come hear the church, come hear the scripture, come hear the preached word. And then there's, you know, broadly speaking, there's

There's, you know, kind of the ministry of the Word, ministry of the sacrament, parts of a service. And then after the preaching of the Word or teaching, they would just be kindly asked to leave. And the believers, the baptized would stay and that's where they would celebrate the Eucharist together. And not only that, not only were they physically excused, ⁓

And there's like liturgical elements of this in the early church. It's called the Liturgy of the Catechumens is a nice formal way of saying, bye now. But ⁓ they would also try to avoid talking about the sacraments before the non-baptized. This is sometimes called the discipline of secrecy. And it was a way of saying that, ⁓

These are holy mysteries. The sacraments are ⁓ the place in which we do encounter the living God. And so like Moses, we need our sandals removed. We need a kind of cleansing, a kind of sanctification, because without that, we're playing with fire. ⁓ And that's...

So they understood things a little bit differently in terms of our approach, what one scholar calls becoming capacitated to know God. ⁓ And so the sacraments, ⁓ I mean, there's the practice of the sacraments, but even sort of teaching around sacraments would be kind of ⁓ a little more shielded or guarded about how they would even talk about the sacraments, ⁓ just out of a sort of

of a reverence for the holiness of God and the things of God. So there was, ⁓ but then that would change after baptism. So after baptism, ⁓ there was a practice that would often, it's often called mystagogy, which is one those great words that some people just love and some people really don't like. But mystagogy would describe the process after baptism in which you were fully

instructed into the sacramental life of the Church. So we have these great sermons or instructions to the newly baptized in which they walk through the liturgy of baptism, the liturgy of the Eucharist, and they're explaining things to the newly baptized of what they've experienced. So they've lived through this.

They've experienced now the rite of baptism in their first communion. ⁓ And it's only after that, that they're told this is what this means. And it's deeply biblical, all the sort of biblical elements of the liturgy. saying this, when you came in, when you were anointed with oil, you ⁓ went down into the water, when you came up, died and rose with Christ, like it's this.

It's this deeply biblically rich exposition of the liturgy, but it's for those who have just experienced it. So it's really different from our paradigm, which is just like, tell everybody everything right at once and just try to like put it all out there. And you know, there's no information that we can't access. There's a different kind of pedagogy there. And I think that's tied to that pedagogy of enchantment that we were talking about earlier.

So as we bring the conversation to a close, what's one thing you would ⁓ say to church leaders who might be watching or listening to this, who might want to lean into thinking about introducing or deepening catechesis in their context? What would be kind of one takeaway?

⁓ One takeaway would be ⁓ that this is, catechesis I've found, this is something that people are deeply hungry for. This is a space in which ⁓ people can really come to encounter the living God. They can engage with the questions of the faith that they struggle with, but they otherwise don't have a lot of

venues in which to question and pursue and to make these things their own. This is, I found Catechesis to be this unique space in which the living tradition of the Church really comes into full light. This is the handing over the faith, but not only the handing over, it's the reception of the faith. So it's an active receptivity.

And I've just found people deeply hungry for this, especially in our age where there's lots of information out there. There's lots of surface level, but not a lot of depth, not a lot of substance. And I think that's just, I mean, that's just the way we were made. We were made to know the living God and the things of God are deep things. And so I would just give a word of encouragement to pastors to say that this is something people are hungry for. This is soul.

nurturing ⁓ food. And so I would give them that encouragement.

Well, Alex, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation on the Pivot Podcast.

Absolutely, thanks so much. This was great to be with you.

Well, to our ⁓ audience listening and viewing, to help spread the word about Pivot, please like and subscribe if you're catching us on YouTube, leave a review, or share Pivot with a friend. And this is Dwight Zscheile signing off. We'll see you next week.