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Catechism Anyone?

Ephesians 6:4 (ESV)
4  Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. 

I grew up in the Lutheran church.  As such I was put into Catechism classes where I was instructed in what the Lutheran church believed so that after Catechism I could become a communicant.  I went through all of that with little fervor.  I went because I had to, and after it was all over with I drifted from the church and faith for about 8 more years.
Was the problem catechism?
No,
The problems were my age - way to young to understand or appreciate what I was to learn;  and, my purpose in being there - I had to go, and I didn't therefore want to learn.

I don't propose we go back to instruction through Catechism instruction; but I do think there is much to be gained by reading and understanding the historical Catechisms.  The people who wrote these lived at the time of the Reformation and their understanding of faith was not merely intellectual, but filled with a sense of the need to change the prevailing religious culture.  In other words, they came to a generation of religious life that had been controlled by the culture of Catholic institutionalism that preyed on fear and false ideas of salvation and eternal life.  

We live in a culture that is beset with ignorance, at best, and out-right rejection, at worst, concerning matters of faith.

So, perhaps the answer is something that takes these great statements of instruction from the past and contemporizes them for the sake of growth in understanding our faith.
For example, look at the Heidelberg Catechism's opening words:

1. Q. What is your only comfort in life and death?
A. That I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, wherefore by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

2. Q. How many things are necessary for you to know, that you in this comfort may live and die happily?
A. Three; the first, how great my sins and misery are; the second, how I am delivered from all my sins and misery; the third, how I am to be thankful to God for such deliverance.

From the second comes not only the outline of the whole document, but a summary of the Bible and of the whole of the Christian life: GUILT, GRACE, GRATITUDE. 
That is well put.

Peace

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