A catechist who was far worse comes to mind. She also works with several parishes, though not primarily with ours. She conducted a class on the Gospel of Luke. We'd come out of a class from Ascension Presents on the Epistole of James, which had outstanding class materials and a very good DVD from Jeff Cavins. My wife and I were sort of led to expect we'd get something similar from the class on Luke, since the class materials were also very good.
Instead, the catechist turned out to take a very condescending tone to our class full of adults, nearly all of whom were over 50. She decided we should have an "icebreaker" in which we'd get into small groups and tell each other about our "favorite Bible story". I was taken aback. I suppose I have some passages in the Old and New Testaments that I often come back to, but I wouldn't call them "favorites", and they might be hard to explain to strangers.
Not only that, but I saw this as an invitation for everyone to shift into Total Phony mode, in which everyone outdoes each other to think of the most goopy sentimental story they can and tries to outdo each other. "I like the one where Christ healed the leper". "I like the one where He healed the blind man." "I like the one where Elijah brought the boy back to life." And so forth.
I would be tempted to say, "I like the one where Eleazar slew the war elephant, but when the elephant died, it fell onto Eleazar and squashed him," or "I like the one where Achan and his family hid the silver they'd taken from the Canaanites in their tent, but Joshua had them all stoned and burned with fire." But that wouldn't be an icebreaker, I suppose.
My problem would be that even if I just sat and politely listened to everyone else being a phony, it would still be a huge waste of my time, when I was actually expecting serious Bible study. And finding sentimental goop in the Bible defeats the purpose.
The catechist then proceeded to give us an example of what sort of Bible stories we should tell, and predictably, she came up with "suffer the little children to come up to me" or some such. So I raised my hand and said, "I'm sorry, but I came here assuming we'd be studying the Gospel of Luke."
"She replied, "Well, but this evening, it's important that we have an icebreaker. This is just to break the ice."
I replied, "My ice is already broken," and my wife and I left.
The catechist more or less said the usual, "Have a nice evening, sir." One of our friends has taken me to task ever since for doing this. He thought the class wound up being good. Who knows? It certainly wasn't my style to be treated like an eight-year-old.
But this goes to whether I have an unrealistic view of diocesan catechists. I did think this episode through, and I decided this wasn't a hill I wanted to die on with the deacon responsible for our Bible study, and I just avoid anything where this catechist is involved from now on. I'm sure she'd prefer to avoid me, too.
The question I have for the visitor is twofold. First, what's the alternative? Even this phony lady did use good class materials, which I was able to read profitably without going to the class. And I keep imagining a class led by, for instance, Mrs Gyapong. It might not go into goopy Bible stories, but it might instead go into the precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony, which might well be even more misleading. And I would in fact prefer a level of commitment that comes from going through a diocesan formation program.
