C is for CATECHISM

Our church hall was a mixture of the original building that had stood on the site for many years before I was born and, at one end, an extension that was added, probably in the late sixties or early seventies to provide a toilet block and a kitchen for catering. The hall lay perpendicular to the church caretaker's home with just a small, dark alleyway in between and beyond the house were a few sheds leading around to the side of the church and an old stable where the men used to congregate before the service for a smoke and a chin wag.

There was an old gravel drive up to the front of the church and halfway up on its left side was a small, tarmac path that led to a gate and beyond to the church hall. It was a grey building with a small porch that was reached by climbing two steps and where most people left their coats before entering. The only furniture I recall in the porch was a small, brown, wooden table that was used more as a seat than for anything else. The entry door into the main hall had one of those ball type fasteners that clicked each time it opened and inside, a single row of red metallic chairs with wooden seats and backs circumnavigated the room with the line only being broken for doors and also where the old pedal organ sat in the top left corner. On the wall, facing the door was a long notice board on which was information about different missionaries around the world and also notices about the church CE meetings and Campaigner organisation. There were six large windows dotted around the two long walls and on the short wall, closest to the caretaker's house, were two pictures, one of which I vividly remember as portraying the Broad and Narrow Roads. Some years ago, when the church hall was being demolished to make way for a new building, I acquired the picture and hope to get it restored to its former glories soon.

My whole childhood social life centred around this building with CE on Friday nights, Campaigners on Monday nights and Sunday School just before church. At Christmas, socials and parties were held there and occasionally the hall was used for a local mission, but it's probably Sunday School for which it is best remembered.

There was a time when there were up to six classes on a Sunday morning, which began with a hymn on the old organ followed by a prayer by Billy, the Superintendent or, in his absence, one of the other leaders. Everyone sat in their respective groups dotted around the walls of the hall and then the teacher of each group would check that lessons given the previous Sunday had been learned. These usually involved a verse of a hymn from the church hymnbook and then one or two questions and answers from the Catechism. All the answers were rote learned and each child in the group had to answer individually. After this there was usually a Bible story by the teacher and the whole thing was wound up with another hymn and a prayer before everyone raced off to the church building beside.

There were two catechisms in operation, the first, a white booklet that was called The Children's Catechism and which you began to learn shortly after arriving in the youngest class. There were nearly one hundred and fifty questions to be answered but they began simply enough with question one asking, 'Who made you?' and the one word answer, 'God'. This was a great boost to the confidence right at the start and even by question ten, things hadn't really got much more difficult when you were asked, 'Where is God?' with your rote reply being, 'God is everywhere.' However, by question twenty eight, the more searching question of , 'What is sin?' required a bit more use of the old memory to reply, 'Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of the law of God.' even if we didn't totally understand all the words in the sentence. And so it went on, learning each of the ten commandments, the Lord's Prayer and all the other basic doctrines of our church. Somewhere in the middle of my Sunday School years, we graduated to the blue covered booklet that was altogether a much more complex reading and learning process. This had just over one hundred questions and, interestingly, included many of the same ones from the first Catechism. Although many of them have been lost from memory now, it is funny how a few still hang in there for instant recall, like question five, which asked 'Are there more God's than one,' to which the exact reply was 'There is but One only the living and true God.'
When mum went to Sunday School, she managed to learn all one hundred and seven answers off

by heart and had to repeat them for an exam, for which she then got a certificate. That was quite an achievement and by the time we were in Sunday School, it had been replaced by a Scripture exam which only required us to learn a certain number of the answers, several hymns and some passages of the Bible. It was a written exam that lasted about an hour and a half and which was then marked externally with a medal and certificate presentation later in the year. Somehow I managed to get a few medals from that test but in the intervening years, I have come to learn that faith is not all about head knowledge at all, but about what is in your heart. That's why the writer of Proverbs says, 'Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding' and why Jesus says 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.' It's also why the Bible has five times as many references to the heart as to the mind.

To finish, I return to The little white booklet where I started many years ago in Sunday school. Question thirty nine asks, 'What is a change of heart called?' The answer is only one word, 'Regeneration.' My thesaurus calls it rebirth, adaptation, innovation, progress, transformation, reorganisation and many other words but essentially it means to change. Faith? Head or heart? A lot of both I think!