A Catechism for the Underground Church

A Catechism for the Underground Church

“The Church has to wake up, to read the signs of the times, and start building small communities and networks of small communities, so that when persecution starts, we will be able to continue the life of the Church. Some are doing this now. Here tonight we have Father Daniel French, an Anglican vicar from Salcombe, who is at work on a catechism for the underground church.”   

Rod Dreher, London speech to the annual Open Doors Lecture November 2022.

Four months ago I unwrapped a giant whiteboard for the vicarage study. Every day I would photograph it, print an A4 copy, and then wipe the whole thing blank, and then return to scribbling. What did I fill it with?  Yes, there were pearls of wisdom from tomes and lectures, the great and the good like Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Lewis, Gerard, and so on. But there were also incidental conversations, life stories, and testimonies of encounters with the living Lord.   

Perhaps by entering into a period of intense study participants volunteer themselves into (for want of a better word) a kind of madness. Since my serious adoption of Christianity in my late teens I had been haunted by this idea that Christianity was going to fail in the modern western world. Partly this would be the Church’s fault. However this system's breakdown is mostly due to a spirit of aggressive secularism that has convinced itself of an experiment, namely civilisation without Christ.  Progress apparently has outgrown God. The tide, the sea of faith (to paraphrase Matthew Arnold) is receding and there is little the churches can initially do. But the good news is that tides come and tides go out. Perhaps the length of our exile will partly depend on our preparedness now?

What might preparing for exile look like? There are all sorts of facets to this spiritual doomsday prepping (I use the term tongue in cheek) to keep us all busy. Nevertheless, for me the gap in the market is catechesis. This ancient art is the passing on the key tenets of the historic Christian faith in a way that makes it come alive. Catechesis is a gradual process, taking years of mentoring. In the first couple of centuries this is what priests did, they spent years with enquirers. For them making a Christian was like producing a good wine, it fundamentally took time to ferment. Perhaps this goes against our contemporary idea of everything being instant and rushed? Catechesis in this sense is a slower more analogue process. It is also about an investment not only in ideas, but in people, and in our relationship with God. So you can see that this for me is not therefore a bit of academic escapism after fifteen years as your vicar but comes from a pastor’s heart.  

Evangelicals and catholics have a lot more in common than they appreciate.  If we can put aside our historical differences then we may have a chance of making this exile shorter. Surely the prospect of a society which is overseen by pernicious ideologies and a digital all-seeing infrastructure should unite the various factions within global Christianity, perhaps even heal the schisms. CS Lewis in his famous essay the Abolition of Man hoped that this might be the case. He foresaw that the consequence of a loss of transcendence would open the door to powerful technocracies filling the vacuum. These new Conditioners (as he called them) would encourage us to exchange freedom and liberty for the comforts of safety and the pursuit of endless entertainment.  Though Huxley’s Brave New World encapsulates this very well the lesser known dystopia by EM Forsters ‘The Machine Stops’ describes a lot of where we are today. In this short story citizens live in socially distanced rooms where goods and entertainment are delivered to via screens. They need never interact.  

You can see in the light of this, Christians have a lot to say.  Our faith talks of God becoming one of us, taking on flesh. His very incarnation is a tremendous affirmation of our humanity. Yet, how easy it would be for us to feel that as a society we have outgrown that very humanity He, God, took on in Bethlehem. Likewise if as humans we believe that we do not need a saviour to save us then there is a lot that Christians can offer to counter that too. Catechesis is going to involve us retelling the Bible stories so that they can destroy the modern myths that could so easily lead us to digital serfdom. Like Morpheus with his red pills in the seminal Matrix sci-fi movie we are going to help awaken people to the unseen reality of their imprisonment. “You’ve been living in a dreamworld but you don’t have to be.” 

The catechetical book I am working on is essentially twenty sermons covering the basics of the Christian faith in the light of these oncoming troubles. As well as looking at the idea of worshiping the risen Lord and belonging to the Church, I cover subjects like freedom, truth, gender identity, science, evil, the supernatural, and so on. I am making good headway. But, its not all theory. A lot of it is documenting stories, testimonies and conversions. I’m also testing material on people to get a feel of whether this works or not.

I want to conclude by saying that though there secularisation, there is also the shoots of growth. This seems particularly a pattern since Lockdown. There is a definitive migration away from New Atheism, and many young and earnest souls are looking for something deeper which is spiritually and intellectually challenging. A catechism which makes demands of them and offers them the steepest mountain to climb might just grab their attention.