> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Heart of the Catechist - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-heart-of-the-catechist/ - Published: 2026-09-09T11:00:15.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-09T11:00:15.000Z - Description: Teaching with joy requires humility, attention, and faithfulness. - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: Church, Formation, Alex Fogleman Around the year 400 A.D., a young African deacon named Deogratias, whose name means “Thanks be to God,” wrote to a nearby bishop about a recurring problem he was having with catechesis. The problem was simple: It was utterly boring. He was tired of going over the same well-worn stories, the same passages of Scripture and creed. He was boring himself, and he suspected his catechumens weren’t faring much better. What should he do? The bishop who received that letter, whom history would know as Saint Augustine of Hippo, responded with a little treatise called [*Instructing Beginners in Faith*](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1303.htm?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* It’s an illuminating account not only of the practical methods of catechesis but also, and more importantly, the heart of the catechist. Augustine honored Deogratias’s request and gave him sound advice on learning techniques. But the real issue, Augustine knew, was not tactics but the catechist’s own delight. “We are given a much more appreciative hearing,” Augustine writes, “when we ourselves enjoy performing our task.” When we enjoy what we’re teaching, he writes, “the texture of our speech is suffused with the very delight that we take in speaking, and our words flow more easily and more pleasingly.” And so, Augustine, concludes, > The difficult part of our task is not in giving rules about where to begin and where to end the historical exposition … or about how the historical exposition should be adapted to \[different\] circumstances … or about when to use the shorter and when the longer form. No, our greatest concern is much more about how to make it possible for those who offer instruction in faith to do so with joy, for, the more they succeed in this, the more appealing will they be. Isn’t that good? The most important thing for catechists is to teach with *joy*, for the more they do this, the more appealing they will be. How do we make it possible for those who catechize to do so with joy? That’s the issue. While technique and curriculum are all important, the crux of the matter is this: the heart of the catechist. The proclamation of the gospel, I would go so far to say, entails a normative posture of joy. This does not mean that there’s no place for judgment, critique—even righteous anger. But the first word is not negative but positive: it is joy. We *rejoice* in the gospel of God through which we’ve been saved. We all have ideas about what makes a good teacher. You may think of a winsome communicator—someone who always has well-crafted thoughts, who never stumbles over his words. Or you might think of a brilliant theologian—a PhD in theology, inhabiting a study with rich mahogany shelves and many leather-bound books. I would love it, of course, if more people cared about language and graduate degrees in theology. But I’m not sure these are the hallmarks of a good catechist. I’m going to propose three traits instead that I think are essential to becoming a catechist who teaches with joy, who hands over the faith and help others find their footing in the church’s one foundation of Jesus Christ our Lord. These three traits are ***humility***, ***attention***, and **faithfulness*.* Faith comes by hearing, Paul writes in Romans 10:17, and hearing by the Word of God. Christ comes to us in humility, the eternal Word in swaddling clothes, and it is that humble Word, in turn, who enables us to *hear* and to walk in *faith*. ## **Humility** Humility is perhaps the first and foremost trait of the catechist. This theme recurs in several key works of some of church history’s finest catechetical writings. Let me mention just three. First, there’s St. Augustine again. Augustine tells Deogratias that the way to resist boredom is to be cheerful. But I can’t simply pull up my bootstraps and “be joyful.” What lies underneath joy is humility. One of the main reasons we get bored, Augustine explains, is an untoward love of novelty. We crave the new insight, the intellectual high. How dull, how trite, to go over the same topics like the creed and the Lord’s Prayer again and again, year after year. “One reason for discouragement,” Augustine writes, is “that our hearer does not grasp our insight, and so we are compelled to come down, as it were, from the pinnacles of thought and delay over each slow syllable in the plains far below.” Isn’t it so much more interesting to think new thoughts? And so how difficult it is for us to come down into the plains below. Augustine is like a competitive runner who has to break his natural pace to slow down for the new runner. He’s a master orator who has to translate every three-syllable word to a one-syllable word so that his catechumens can keep pace. But if we think that’s a kind of descent, Augustine reminds us, what about Christ? For, however far removed our spoken words are from the liveliness of our understanding, much greater still is the distance between our mortal flesh and \[Christ’s\] equality with God. And yet, even when he was in that state of equality, *he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave*, and the words that follow, down to *even to death on a cross* (Phil 2:6–8). Our going down into the lowly plains of slow speech is, Augustine thinks, a pale imitation of Christ’s descent into mortal flesh, and death on the cross. Here’s another example. Martin Luther was, of course, one of the great proponents of catechesis as part of the renewal and reform of the sixteenth-century church. For Luther, too, catechesis was closely tied to humility. At the beginning of his [*Large Catechism*](https://thebookofconcord.org/large-catechism/preface/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), the ever-colorful Luther aims his attack against those who deem themselves too good for the catechism. He expresses in no uncertain terms the disrepute of pastors who neglect catechesis, whether because they’re too busy with more important lofty matters or “from sheer laziness and care for their paunches.” He describes this neglect as stemming from a false sense of “security and satiety.” These lay paunch-caring pastors think they can read the catechism once, understand it all, and then “throw the book into a corner, and be ashamed, as it were, to read in it again.” Against such presumption, Luther sought to remain a “child and pupil of the catechism.” He railed against the hubris of thinking one had mastered the basics of the faith and no longer needed to return, again and again, to the humility of faith. Let me point to one more example of humility, this one from the Anglican priest-poet George Herbert, writing about a century after Luther. While mostly known for his great poetry, Herbert also wrote a lovely treatise on pastoral ministry called [*The Country Parson*](https://anglicanhistory.org/herbert/parson.html?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)*.* There, he writes about the various duties of the parson: prayer, preaching, housekeeping, and much else. He also has a tremendous section on “the parson catechizing.” Among a wealth of catechetical gems, he has this to say about the particular value of catechesis for the one catechizing. In catechizing, there is a humbleness very suitable to Christian regeneration, which exceedingly delights him, as by way of exercise upon himself and by way of preaching to himself for the advancing of his own mortification. For in preaching to others, he forgets not himself but is first a sermon to himself, and then to others—growing with the growth of his Parish. There is a humility in catechesis that is “very suitable to Christian regeneration,” and this proves to be “exceedingly” delightful for the priest. By returning again and again to the core tenets of the faith, the ground of faith and belief, the minister performs a kind of exercise upon himself—preaching the gospel to himself first of all and then to those in the parish. In this way, he enters into the parish, not seeing himself as standing above it, but going down and growing with them—“growing with the growth of his parish.” One can see, in just this brief passage, a wealth of wisdom in terms of how the priest envisions who he is and what his role is in parish life. ## **Attention** A second aspect of the heart of the joyful catechist is the quality of *attention*. By attention, I mean the capacity to direct one’s consciousness towards that which lies beyond the surface of things. Theologian Carol Harrison refers to patristic catechesis as a process of cultivating “literate listening.” It is a patient listening that involves, first of all, attention to God revealed in Christ, and second, attention to the spiritual lives of catechumens. Attention to God, attending to our neighbors: It is simple, but also, for many reasons, the hardest thing we may be given to do. I probably don’t need to list the many forms in which attention’s opposite—distraction—takes in our world. Even beyond the constant pings of my phone or email, there is the more fundamental distraction of the divided heart. In Book 11 of the *Confessions*, Augustine describes, in lucid prose, a concept that he calls the *distentio animi*–the distention of the soul. If true knowledge of God comes through *attention*, cleaving or clinging to God—a kind of holding on to God—then *distention* is the spreading out, the diffusion and dispersal of our thoughts, our loves, and indeed our very selves. Alluding to Philippians 3:13, where Paul writes of “straining” and “stretching out” to what lies ahead, Augustine writes this of the Christian state of attention: > In him \[Christ\], your right hand holds me fast, so that I may grasp that for which I have been grasped myself, and may be gathered in from dispersion … to pursue the One, forgetting the past and stretching undistracted not to future things doomed to pass away, but to my eternal goal. With no distracted mind but with focused attention I press on to the prize of our heavenly calling, to that place where I yearn to hear songs of praise and contemplate your delight, which neither comes nor slips away. We are scattered and fragmented, down to the deepest places of ourselves. We long for someone to gather up the crumbs of our lives and to remake us into one body—into Christ’s body—and be made whole again. Attention, therefore, is not something we can muster up and achieve by turning off our phones. We learn to attend to God by opening up our lives to the Christ who is first holding us through the Spirit—who is attendingto us. Attention is first a movement of grace that gathers up the pieces of our lives and holds them together in the two steady hands of the Son and the Spirit. This movement of attention comes from the Word shattering our deafness so that faith may come through hearing. *Hear,* O Israel, the Lord your God is one. The kind of gospel hearing that begins the movement of faith starts first with God breaking in our self-enclosed walls and making himself known to us so that we may in turn attend to him. Second, though, attention extends to those we’ve been called to love and serve through catechesis. The mark of a good catechist is not simply that she knows the right words to say but that she knows the right words to say to *this* particularperson or this group of people. This is why no two catechesis courses are ever the same, even though God never changes and there is no shadow of turning in his eternal truth. The words of the catechism may be the exact same from year to year, but the people being catechized are always changing. I’ve been wondering for some time whether the catechist isn’t perhaps more like a spiritual director than what we normally think of as a teacher or professor. The professor holds forth before the lecture hall and gives the same brilliant lecture each semester. The spiritual director, though, attempts to listen to what the Spirit is doing in the life of the directee. The spiritual director is a mediatorial space in which the person receiving direction can listen to the Spirit. Practically, this means that the catechist makes time to get to know the people that are coming to catechesis. Augustine does this very thing in his letter to Deogratias. He encourages him to ask people questions about themselves: Where did they grow up? Where did they go to school? What kinds of books have they read about the Christian faith? All of this goes into catechesis. There is a patient attention to the particular lives before us—each one a holy and sacred mystery unto itself. Of course, some people don’t seem that interesting. They may seem dull or difficult, but, as C. S. Lewis says, if we could but see them like God does, even for a moment, we would find a creature so magnificent that we’d be tempted to fall down and worship them. You’ve never met a mere mortal! If we can attend to catechumens with this posture, we’ll be on our way to rejoicing in the gospel through the ministry of catechesis. ## **Faithfulness** Along with humility and attention, the third trait of the joyful catechist is *faithfulness*. Here again, I think of Romans 10:17: “faith comes by hearing.” Hearing—attention to God and others—leads to *faith*, or as I’m calling it here, *faithfulness*. The catechist has a steady and confident trust in God’s Word that enables passing on the faith in a way that builds strong and lasting foundations. In my book [*Making Disciples*](https://www.amazon.com/Making-Disciples-Catechesis-Theology-Practice/dp/0802883850?ref=mereorthodoxy.com), I describe catechesis as building solid foundations of faith. J.I. Packer, with a slightly different alliteration, calls it being [*grounded in the gospel*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/080106838X?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Foundations, grounding—we could also add phrases like being “deeply rooted”—these are ways of gesturing towards the goal of catechesis. We want to help people become deeply rooted in their faith so that they are not, as St. Paul writes, “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14). Rather, “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15). Or, as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, we want people to build their house on solid rock, rather than sand. That way, when the rains come and winds roar, the house will not be moved, because it was “founded on the rock.” If catechesis is about building up the body of Christ on the deep foundations of Christ, the catechist seeks to embody fidelity and stability in his or her own life. I do not mean that the catechist is stoic or passionless. I mean merely that the catechist’s life evidences a quiet trust in God’s goodness, such that regardless of one’s social and emotional life, there is hope that with God all things shall be made well, and all manner of things be made well. Here, the virtue of faith is closely linked to *hope*. For when our hope is set upon God making all things well in the end, then we really have nothing to fear. There is nothing that can finally undo us. We can stand firm knowing that the God in whom we trust is ever holding us in his care. Once again, I don’t think I need to emphasize how desperately we need the virtue of fidelity today. “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs,” not because you have confidence in yourself but because you have confidence in the gospel, then the ministry of catechesis will offer others an unparalleled balm for the many weary souls hungry for the deep wells of life in Christ. There is so much in people’s lives that is in doubt and in flux. There is so much that people have to worry about and fear. There is so much that is so deeply unstable. The task of catechesis is not merely to teachthe principles of the gospel but also to embody the stability of being grounded in the gospel. There is something resonant in faithfulness, as I’m trying to articulate it, that echoes what Josef Pieper says about leisure. Leisure, as Pieper describes it in his famous essay [*Leisure: The Basis of Culture*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1586172565?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com), is not merely the cessation of the frenzied activity that makes up our world of “total work.” Leisure is a spiritual attitude of inward calm and silence. It is the seedbed of contemplation, the apprehension of being and truth that comes from hearing God in the calm, stillness of silence. This kind of leisure is birthed from attention, and leads—as Simone Weil rightly knew—[to prayer](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0803298005?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=mereorthodoxy.com). One of the key traits I believe that every catechist needs, then, is a kind of faithfulness that comes from humility and attention. Catechesis cannot be hurried, and while we live in a world of hurry, we can begin to counteract this by cultivating the habit of patient presence. By embodying this kind of steady sense of God’s presence in our lives, we will give others the space to slow down and hear God’s voice as well. ## **Conclusion** Let me return to Romans 10:17\. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. The Word of God comes not in the tyrannical power of violent force but in the quiet, patient womb of the humble virgin. The Word, exalted on high, stoops down to make God known to little children like us. The Word is humble. From the humility of the Word, second, comes hearing, or literate listening. The Word calls forth the discipline of *attention*. And finally, from hearing the humble Word comes *faith*. Faith grasps what will one day give way to sight. But for now, faith remains steady, faithful, grounded. Humility, attention, and faithfulness. These are three virtues that I think well characterize the heart of the catechist. Again, I’m not opposed to studying theology or learning how to speak well. But the ministry of catechesis, if it is indeed a genuinely Christian ministry, is not merely a one-way directional conveying of information. This is also, incidentally, why catechesis not only *should not* but *cannot* be offloaded from people to digital tools. There is no such thing as AI catechesis. The heart of catechesis is patterned off the humility, attention, and faith of the true Word himself, who though he was in the very form of God, did not think God-likeness was something to be exploited but shared with God’s creatures made in his image. And so Christ humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, going down all the way even unto death. The humility, attention, and faithfulness of the Word, I suggest, is underlying what it means to “rejoice in the gospel.” Joy, again, is not a façade or a feeling. Joy is a sharing in the beatitude of Christ that we receive through the power of the Holy Spirit—extended to us because God first loved us. May the kind of catechesis that rejoices in the gospel follow after the pattern of our Savior.