Catechism on a new wicket

The success of the South African cricketers in Australia recently will undoubtedly increase the interest of our youth in this great game.

It also reminded me of a quite remarkable project involving cricket which sought to demonstrate the fundamentals of Christianity to a group of youngsters.

A project that makes even more sense to me now, given what I perceive to be increasing sentiment within various levels of Catholic hierarchy regarding the biggest challenge facing the Church: the education of the laity. There is more than just a feeling that many Catholics, particularly the young, simply don’t understand what the Church is all about.

One would hope that any such education programme would not be a one-way street. People are living at an evermore hectic pace, and their attention is being increasingly sought after and distracted by movies, sport, an all invasive Internet, and the hedonistic temptations of the corporate sector, so religious organisations are desperately in need of understanding what motivates modern mankind.

Trending

Mental Health Matters To Us All

I have often mentioned in this column the need for churches to understand the marketing process. Not the seedy side of the discipline generally portrayed by second-rate, shock-tactic advertising, but its basic fundamental of motivating consumers positively in a specific direction.

A classic example of how marketing can play a constructive role in the Church is an experiment conducted in a Durban parish about 30 years ago.

It all started with catechism and a parish priest who simply refused to accept a situation where mothers of Catholic children attending government schools would drag their offspring kicking and screaming once a week to attend catechism classes at the church, where those same offspring cared not a jot about who made them, nor about apples, the Garden of Eden or loving their neighbours.

x

That is something that still happens a lot today, not just among kids but also among adults who arrive for Mass on Sunday with nothing else on their minds other than the previous day’s sport, hassles at home, or goings-on at the office. Mass has become to many a Sunday routine with about as much religious or intellectual stimulation as an afternoon stroll around a shopping mall.

Somehow those catechism classes all seemed so pointless. The kids clearly didn’t want to be there. Their parents found it a pain in the neck to fetch and carry and only did so because they didn’t want to burn in hell.

In desperation the priest asked some marketers in the parish if they could offer some sort of help in terms of making the kids look forward to catechism and to learn something about what it meant to be a Christian.

A plan was hatched, and after catechism one day the kids were asked to bring their cricket kit the following week.

Word got around and suddenly there were more kids than normal. Catechism took place outside and the kids were introduced to a session of “Christian Cricket”. It was just like the normal game, only the objective of the exercise was that every child had to concentrate 100% on making sure that every other kid was having more fun than they were.

They took to it like ducks to water. The good players insisted on the poorer performers having more chances to bat and bowl, and instead of howls of derision when catches were dropped, the guilty player would be surrounded by all the others and there would be pats on the back, assurances that even Springbok cricketers dropped catches, and genuine offers of help and coaching. Shy and self-conscious lame ducks were made to feel like princes by their peers.

Suddenly a bunch of self-centred, uninterested, dragged-to-catechism-by-their-ears Catholic kids had discovered the joy of giving, the  very fundamental of Christian and Catholic life.

And so the catechism classes grew, and alternated between “Christian Cricket” one week and a lesson in the classroom the following, where instruction from the catechism book relied on cricket analogies to get points across.

It succeeded beyond all measure in creating Christian understanding. Sadly it was eventually abandoned because more and more mothers complained that they didn’t drag themselves away from shopping sprees and tea-parties just for their kids to play cricket.

This sort of knee-jerk misperception of what  the Church was doing then still exists today, and it why there is a crying need for a long-term programme of education by clergy for laity.

But there is also a desperate need for the Church to apply those same marketing methods that turned Christian Cricket into meaningful catechism, to bringing about a closer more relevant appreciation of the Church by a currently very distracted and lackadaisical laity.