How do you help people come to faith in Christ in a culture deeply but imperfectly suffused with Christian themes? How do you nurture genuine faith when everyone thinks they know what Christianity is, but actual knowledge and commitment are lacking? How do you educate people about Christianity when broad but shallow exposure to the faith domesticates it and makes people miss out on its soul-transforming power?

These are questions that I, as a minister in the post-Christian West, find myself asking all the time. Churches dot the landscape, if much less full than they once were. Many of our public holidays are Christian in origin. The vestiges of seventeen hundred years of public Christianity still survive in myriad ways: in invocations that begin legislative sessions, public deference toward clergy, church tax schemes, and, in a few places, legal establishment. Our society’s sense of right and wrong is shaped by Christian presuppositions that once shocked Roman antiquity. But this very ubiquity can inhibit real understanding of Christianity. People encounter the flotsam and jetsam of the Christian faith, the remnants of an only ever partially Christian culture, and find it easy to reject Christianity as a whole. So how can we help people know Jesus in this environment?

Clarence Gagnon, Canadian Village, Grey Day, oil on panel, 1912. All images from WikiArt (public domain).

It is tempting to think that these questions are new ones, born specifically out of the rapid twentieth-century secularization of Europe and North America. How different our situation is, after all, from that of the early church, where a long catechumenate for would-be Christians was designed to wean people away from the assumptions and practices of pagan culture and instill in them the radically different commitments of the body of Christ. The problem was not too much familiarity with the outward forms of Christianity, but not enough.

But in fact, the question of how to more deeply Christianize or re-Christianize people living in an outwardly Christian culture has been asked over and over again, and perhaps most dramatically in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Even if it ultimately produced a fracturing of Western Christianity into separate confessions, the creation of new churches was hardly the goal. Rather, for Protestant, Catholic, and other reformers, the goal was one of renewal, of re-Christianizing a continent that lacked deep engagement with the faith it claimed.

In the preface to his 1529 Small Catechism, a short question-and-answer text written for the instruction of laypeople, Martin Luther mourns a lack of Christian knowledge on the part of ordinary people. Lamenting the “deplorable, wretched deprivation” that he noticed in his travels, he writes, “Dear God, what misery I beheld! The ordinary person, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about the Christian faith, and unfortunately many pastors are completely unskilled and incompetent teachers. Yet supposedly they all bear the name Christian, are baptized, and receive the holy sacrament, even though they do not know the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments!” With such theological “poverty and need everywhere,” he wrote to his colleague Nikolaus von Amsdorf, “may the Lord send workers into his harvest.”

For Luther and other critics of traditional religion, the genuine teachings of Christ and the early church about faith and good works had been occluded by attention to human inventions and ritual observance. Thus Luther’s 1521 sermon on the three kinds of good life contrasts “ceremonies, the outward performances in matters of dress or food” with the genuine good works of love of neighbor commanded by scripture and the life of faith that looks to Christ for salvation. This faith alone, Luther believed, makes one able to joyfully do genuine good works, not out of an attempt to earn favor with God but in gracious response to what God has done for us in Christ.

Likewise, the Reformation in Zurich began when the church’s Lenten fasting rules were deliberately broken: the printer Christoph Froschauer and some colleagues ate sausages on Good Friday 1522, and the city preacher (and soon-to-be chief reformer) Ulrich Zwingli delivered a sermon against making food rules central to the Christian faith. More radical reformers, first dubbed Anabaptists by their critics, argued that Christians had utterly failed to embrace the moral demands of Christ and called for things like nonviolence, the refusal to swear oaths, and holding all things in common.

Even those who would not throw their lot in with the new Reformation churches saw a need for a deeper Christianization of society. Desiderius Erasmus, prince of the humanists, complained bitterly about superstitious and inappropriate practices (pilgrimages, say, or exaggerated veneration of the saints), which in his view distracted people from the pure worship of God and the self-sacrificing life of good works. And while the Council of Trent, the great ecumenical council called in response to the Protestant challenge, ultimately reaffirmed practices like prayer for the dead or the cult of the saints, it also called for a broad program of reform and education, of raising the standard of Christian living for clergy and laity alike.

One of the foundational ways that the Protestant reformers sought to re-Christianize Western Europe was by exposure to scripture. The Protestant Reformation and vernacular Bible translation went hand in hand. Some even argued that the scriptures had supernatural power. As the English Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer puts it in his 1540 preface to the Great Bible, the scriptures are “the most precious jewel and most holy relic that remaineth upon earth.” And in his 1547 Book of Homilies, he writes, “Let us ruminate and, as it were, chew the cud, that we may have the sweet juice, spiritual effect, marrow, honey, kernel, taste, comfort, and consolation of them.”

In a world before mass literacy, worship was the primary means for people to encounter scripture. The Reformation also involved a transformation of Christian worship as Protestants sought to recenter liturgy in scripture and especially the Gospels. Any notion that we merit forgiveness in any way when worshiping God had to go, as did invocations of the saints and prayers for the dead – all central to the late medieval Mass. In their place came an increased emphasis on the reading and exposition of scripture and new understandings of Holy Communion that emphasized God’s free gift of himself to us. Some of these reforms were much more radical than others. But they shared the conviction that God would use renewed worship to enliven faith.

Clarence Gagnon, Misty Day in Winter, Baie-Saint-Paul, oil on panel, 1915.

The sixteenth century also saw the explosion of a new genre for Christian instruction, the question-and-answer catechism. Luther’s 1529 Small Catechism was the most famous, but other Lutheran catechisms existed too, and these were joined by Reformed texts like the Heidelberg Catechism and Roman Catholic ones like the Catechism of Trent – all designed for use in church, in schools, and at home to teach children and adults alike the basics of the Christian faith. Many authors took pains to argue that interaction with the catechism should be a lifelong process. Luther wrote that despite his extensive education, he “must remain a child and pupil of the catechism – and I also do so gladly.”

There is a modern tendency to be critical of rote repetition as a method of learning. But the best material in these catechisms is designed to stick permanently in one’s head, to be called upon at need in times of doubt or trouble. The first question of the 1573 Heidelberg Catechism is worth quoting in full:

Q: What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A: That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Another way that reformers sought to re-Christianize Europe was through church discipline. In most Reformed and Lutheran churches as well as in the Roman Catholic Church, those wishing to take communion had to submit to some sort of examination or make a confession so that clergy could assess whether they were prepared to receive the sacrament. Consistories were set up to regulate the behavior of Christians and call sinners to repentance. The Anabaptists were among the most determined users of internal church discipline; “the ban” was widely used to exclude individuals from communion or membership and maintain the purity of communities of professed believers committed to radically living out the gospel.

This aspect of the sixteenth-century reform program is less attractive to modern sensibilities. Indeed, there is a widespread body of scholarly literature that argues that early modern states used church discipline in both Protestant and Catholic contexts to ensure an obedient citizenry (a use of state power that was antithetical to Anabaptism). But without defending every system in its entirety, we do have evidence that discipline was not merely imposed by the state upon unwilling commoners. Rather, it was seen by both church leaders and many ordinary people as a means of furthering the transformation of life that true faith would create.

This may give the impression that the re-Christianization of Europe was a rather dour thing. But Protestants and Catholics alike were convinced that true Christianity brought joy even amidst genuine struggles. One of the most popular ways of spreading Protestantism during the Reformation was through song. Early adherents built upon a widespread culture of communal music-making, and ordinary people very happily took it up. There was popular singing in church services on Sundays, but perhaps even more importantly, Protestants sang the songs of the faith at home, school, work, and play.

Other efforts to Christianize the social order included the new systems of poverty relief set out in many Protestant churches, the development of schools, the use of cheaply produced pamphlets and woodcuts to spread messages, and the new and reformed religious orders of post-Tridentine Catholic Europe. But scripture, transformed worship, catechesis, discipline, and singing were some of the central means by which Christian leaders sought to reintroduce Jesus to people who thought they knew him but might be missing out on the true good news.

Many of these strategies are applicable to twenty-first-century Christians too, as we seek to live out Jesus’ command to share the gospel with neighbors who may think they already know what Christianity is about.

First of all, the scriptures: In a time of decreasing scriptural literacy, both within our churches and outside them, it is worth thinking about how we can steep ourselves in the Bible and share its riches with others. Scripture is not merely an ancient collection of texts with people’s opinions about, or experiences of, God (a common liberal Christian stance) or a book of facts and rules (a more conservative position), but a book of promises from a gracious God, a book that God uses as an instrument to turn us to him – as Cranmer puts it, the most holy relic on earth!

Clarence Gagnon, Midnight Mass, oil on paper, 1933.

We also need to consider how our worship reflects the good news of the gospel. Many debates about the external trappings of worship – traditional versus contemporary or experimental – are ultimately secondary to the question of what is at its heart: In how our services are structured, in the content of sermons, in the way our church conducts itself, is the good news of Jesus Christ central?

The Reformation proliferation of catechisms invites us to ask how we can help people learn and love the Christian faith even outside the context of Sunday services. We cannot assume much real Christian knowledge even on the part of many lifelong Christians. I remember running an adult education group on the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed a few years ago. At the end of it, an older member of the congregation came up to tell me how thankful he was to have the chance to think and talk about the creeds, since even though he says them weekly, he hadn’t actually been given a chance to reflect on them since confirmation classes a half century ago.

We may not need to encourage people to memorize the questions and answers of the sixteenth-century catechisms, though it is worth emulating the catechism authors in being experimental in form and media while holding on to the core tenets of the faith in content. Their goal of providing opportunities to deepen people’s knowledge of Jesus needs to be our goal too.

The sixteenth-century emphasis on church discipline may seem a little grim, but even it has lessons for us. How can we help people both within and outside the church see that faith in Jesus can and should actually be life-transforming? In a world where Christian institutions have lost a great deal of moral credibility due to the very public misdeeds of Christian leaders, how can we minimize abuse and misconduct in our midst – a worthy goal for its own sake, but also for our church’s public witness?

While the combination of church and state power is a nonstarter in the post-Christian West, there is something to be learned from voluntary Christian societies within larger churches, such as Catholic third orders and Puritan, Methodist, and Pietist groups. Here, Christians participated in the ordinary life of their local churches while also belonging to groups offering increased accountability and support in living a Christian life.

Most basically, even if we rightly say that the Christian faith is not about earning divine favor through moral performance, it is vital that we do not lose sight of the hope and expectation for ourselves that Christian life really does – imperfectly but truly – transform us, that God really does sanctify his people by the power of the Holy Spirit, on whom any renewal of the faith ultimately depends.

And finally, the music: First of all, we should all be singing together more! Churches can and should provide opportunities for us to exercise the basically human but increasingly rare joy of communal music-making. And more broadly, it is worth asking where the points of connection between Christian faith and popular culture are, where Christianity can make use of and uplift the genuine goods of daily life in this society (and where it must instead say a firm no). Where are the places that we can find an infectious joy and fun in our faith, nurture it in ourselves, and invite others?

Most of all, I find it consoling to remember that we are not the first ones who have faced the challenge of sharing the good news in difficult circumstances. We are not even the first ones who have sought to share the gospel in a society that is Christian in name but largely not in reality. We are not the first ones to encounter a problem of overfamiliarity with Christianity that does not recognize its power and goodness. We too, as Luther wrote to Amsdorf, see “poverty and need” everywhere. May God give us the creativity, the courage, and the conviction to meet that poverty and need by accepting the call and sharing the grace we have received with a world that – whether it realizes it or not – desperately needs to hear it.