Do you know what the Heidelberg Catechism is really about?
It’s about youth ministry. Yeah, that supposedly stale old thing collecting dust in so many churches (and kind of in our denomination as a whole) is actually about youth ministry.
It’s called the Heidelberg Catechism because it was published in the city of Heidelberg in 1563, which was the capital of a region called the Palatinate, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as a side-note, wasn’t really holy, Roman, or an empire, but that’s beside the point.
The point is this. The ruler of the Palatinate in the 1560s, Frederick III, commissioned the Catechism to be written so that there would be a standard for the religious education going on in churches and schools in the region.
The tone, subject material, structure, and language of the Catechism all contribute to and reflect that aim. And, thus, the Catechism became a teaching tool for teachers to use with the children of the Palatinate.
You see, Frederick III and Zacharius Ursinus and Caspar Olevianus (the two main authors of the Catechism) understood something important. They understood that in order to do ministry well, we need to do children’s ministry well. In order to really have communities of faithful Christians who actually know their faith, the people who make up those communities need to be taught that faith as kids.
It has to start somewhere, and it has to be strong.
If we can’t hope to teach children about Jesus, we can’t hope to do our mission. If we can’t convince those who still have the possibility of a childlike faith to nurture their faith, we can’t hope to do much with those who have already aged into skeptics and cynics.
It’s about youth ministry.
It’s about the kids.
