Baptismal Integrity Resource Pages

Introducing "On the Way"

"Towards an integrated approach to Christian Initiation" (CHP 1995 - GS Misc 444) introduced briefly by John Hartley.

Michael Vasey, Paul Bradshaw and Mark Earey have all told me that On the Way (OTW) is THE report I have to read to see where the initiation liturgies in Common Worship are coming from. I guess Michael Vasey would have been the writer to unpack it for Update, but in his absence I resolved to read it myself and offer a guided tour. However, it is harder-going than I feared and I still haven’t figured out a lot of what it says. If you know someone who can help me, please write in!

OTW is “a detailed study of Christian initiation and in particular of the plan of the catechumenate” (p1). What a long word! But don’t worry, because OTW says good Anglicans should use the word “enquirer” instead (p40 & p99). “Most people experience coming to faith as a gradual process” (p21), and they “need bridge situations in which they can explore in depth very basic aspects of Christian life, belief and practice” (p24).

The report looks in detail at what it might mean to adopt the catechumenate over the whole church. We need to wrestle seriously not just with “enquirers’ groups” but with an ethos of active nurture of enquirers as “one of the most important tasks that faces the Christian community” (p11).

Full marks for this basic statement of what church is all about! The main strength of OTW is that it takes adult conversion seriously - something which the Church of England, with the Prayer Book’s vision of Christendom, has always been a bit weak on.

OTW begins with some stories of “spiritual journeys”. Then come some thoughts on Acts 9 and how far Paul’s conversion is normative or helpful for thinking about conversion today. There’s a helpful analysis of faith-patterns in Britain today, taken from John Finney’s Church on the Move, and some descriptions and evaluations of catechumenate experiments world- wide. OTW then looks evangelism, education, liturgy and ethics. These four have come unravelled, says OTW, but let’s hope they can be brought together again, even if this hope is beyond us now (p50).

The parts about baptism (p26-27, p41-44 & ch5) and confirmation (p63-69, p90-96 & ch7) raise a good many questions for me, and I hope to amplify these in future articles. In fact, I must confess they took the cream off what I’d hoped would be a tasty cake. But let’s be thankful for a report which does much to bring us back to the basic task of the church.