What the catechumenate teaches us about community
Photograph by Marcos Paulo Prado via Unsplash
Rev. Clint Schnekloth
Our Easter service this year included four adult baptisms and two teenage baptisms. We also received two dozen new members who had been part of our catechumenate process during the Lenten season. In the weeks leading up to Easter, two babies were born into the congregation, which meant first of all arranging some meal trains, but then it also meant, given these families come to us from a range of traditions that connect to baptism differently than Lutherans, a different set of conversations: conversations not centered in belief or unbelief exactly, but in questions of agency, consent, family tradition, and what it means to bring a child publicly into the life of the church.
If you think about the kinds of “initiation” that occur with many societies, and historically with some religions, you might notice how “public” the catechumenal process is in our church. There are of course many public invitations, but also most of the Christian formation is conducted around shared meals, and the baptisms or affirmations of baptism take place in our biggest public event of the year: Easter service.
None of this is visibility in the sense of spectacle or production, but visible in the older liturgical sense: these things happened in the assembly. In public worship. In front of people who had prayed with one another, eaten together, mourned losses together, and spent months or years learning one another’s stories. The baptisms were not private spiritual achievements. They were communal acts. The congregation made promises too.
For years at Good Shepherd our catechumenate process was called “Our Lives, This Text,” a name that tried to communicate something important about how formation happens, our lives brought into conversation with the biblical text in the expectation the Holy Spirit might do something.
We were not interested in running people through a curriculum as quickly as possible or getting them to a place of doctrinal certainty before they could belong. The point was to create a space where Scripture, worship, theology, and lived experience could encounter one another honestly.
This was a departure from the new member classes that had been the bread and butter of the church of my younger days. But over time in pastoral ministry, I realized many people arriving at church were not primarily searching for answers. They were searching for conditions under which questions could safely be asked.
When I happened upon some wonderful resources for the catechumenate produced by Lutheran pastor Paul Hoffman, I was inspired. We initiated an annual catechumenal process in our church and haven’t looked back. 2026 marks a dozen years of such formation.
Many of the adults who come through our catechumenate are carrying complicated histories with Christianity. Some grew up in conservative evangelical churches where questioning was treated as rebellion. Some come from traditions where the church became entangled with political ideology or shame. Some have experienced direct religious trauma. Others simply drifted away years ago and are unsure whether they can trust church spaces again at all. And a surprisingly large number are coming from no religious tradition at all but a curiosity to connect with ours.
Increasingly, people arrive asking not, “What do Lutherans believe about X?” but instead asking things like: “Will I be pressured here?” “Can my kids ask hard questions?” “Do I have to pretend certainty?” “Can I participate before I have everything figured out?” “How will they handle my neurodivergent way of communicating?”
Historically, catechumenate processes in the church were always public in character. People were formed gradually within the worshiping community through prayer, Scripture, shared meals, acts of mercy, and participation in the liturgical life of the church.
Historically, catechumenate processes in the church were always public in character. People were formed gradually within the worshiping community through prayer, Scripture, shared meals, acts of mercy, and participation in the liturgical life of the church. Christianity was not understood primarily as private conviction but as a way of life learned alongside other people.
Maybe this is obvious, but people learn how Christians pray by praying with Christians. They learn confession and forgiveness by participating in communities where those practices happen. They learn what baptism means not simply by hearing explanations of baptism, but by watching baptisms, remembering their own, and accompanying others through the process. They learn to commit to justice and mercy as a core aspect of Christian identity through the church committing itself to movements for justice and mercy.
This is one reason public worship matters so much in our catechumenate (and the church more generally), and why aspects of the catechumenate are especially hosted in liturgical space. The questions people carry are not solved abstractly. They are worked through in the middle of an embodied community, and worked through over time, the only way trust can be built.
One of the things I have learned as a pastor is that trauma recovery in religious spaces rarely happens through argument alone. People may intellectually agree with a progressive theology and still remain deeply anxious in church settings. Their bodies remember. So do nervous systems. Sometimes what people need first is not persuasion but a different experience of Christian community altogether. Quite often I’ll hear people say that although they grasp intellectually that one commitment is clearly central in religious space (for example, inclusion) nevertheless old scripts or patterns around exclusion run through their entire intellectual and emotional system.
An open catechumenate creates room for this in an expansive way. People are allowed to linger. To observe. To participate partially before fully. To say “I don’t know.” To disagree. To leave and come back. Or to leave altogether (which really happens, and I’ve grown to expect it). To build trust slowly.
Frankly, I think this is one reason adult baptisms have become so meaningful in our congregation. They are not impulsive moments. They emerge from long processes of accompaniment. By the time someone steps into the waters of baptism at Easter, the congregation usually already knows part of their story, and the person being baptized has already experienced the church as something more than an institution demanding assent. Often, they are also navigating other transitions in life as well, including gender identity transitions or moves into new chosen families, as they are baptized.
What’s caught me most by surprise, given how definitively I was raised in a tradition that championed infant baptism, is how the conversations around infant baptism have shifted too.
As Lutherans, we traditionally frame baptism as God’s action (it’s a promise and a gift!) rather than our decision. Historically, our debates with Baptist traditions focused heavily on belief: whether baptism follows a profession of faith or whether baptism itself creates and nourishes faith within the community.
But younger parents today are often asking somewhat different questions. They are less concerned with the order of belief and more concerned with consent and agency. What does it mean to baptize a child before they can choose it? How do parents avoid imposing religion coercively? How do families honor a child’s future autonomy while still claiming a religious tradition publicly?
I do not experience these questions as threats to my somewhat long-held commitment to infant baptism. If anything, I think they reflect a generation trying very carefully not to reproduce forms of domination they themselves experienced. These conversations have challenged me to rethink some of my core convictions around the relationship between receiving a promise from God and consent.
Adult baptisms have become so meaningful in our congregation, because they are not impulsive moments. They emerge from long processes of accompaniment.
What the catechumenate has taught me is that baptism makes the most sense inside a trustworthy community.
If a congregation cannot make room for questioning, growth, repentance, disagreement, and freedom, then baptism can begin to feel possessive. If you pay attention to some evangelistic efforts, you can see this dynamic. Some organizations like to count “salvations” accomplished. Perhaps my beginning this post with a mention of how many folks were baptized at our Easter service risks something similar, in which case mea culpa. But when baptism is held within a community committed to ongoing formation and mutual accountability, it begins to look less like control and more like accompaniment.
And the accompaniment is public too. We invite congregational sponsors to walk alongside each inquirer or family, and when they are received into the community or baptized, their sponsors stand with them and speak promises, too.
At every baptism, the congregation promises to support the baptized person in faith and life. We promise to pray for them, care for them, and help them grow. Those are not symbolic promises. They are radical social practices you will rarely find in any other context, especially among a people of such diverse age and socioeconomic differences.
By the time we arrive at the baptisms on Easter morning, the church is already loud with life. The fellowship hall still smells like breakfast. Children in bright clothes are barely containing themselves before the egg hunt. Visitors squeeze into pews beside longtime members. The sanctuary feels full in the best possible way.
And then, in the middle of all that Easter joy, we gather around water.
People come forward for baptism, affirmation of baptism, and reception into the congregation. We lay hands on heads. We trace the cross in oil on foreheads. Water runs down and splashes onto the floor slick enough to worry nearby parents, who have towels at the ready, while the congregation leans forward as though everyone understands that something tender and brave is happening in public.
Then comes the acclamation: “We welcome you into the Lord’s family and into the mission we share…” New members and the newly baptized turn back toward the assembly and see a room full of people saying with their voices and bodies: you belong here.
Over the years, I have come to think the catechumenate forms something increasingly rare in American public life: durable trust. Trust that questions can be asked without exile; trust that people can grow slowly; trust that disagreement does not end belonging; trust that faith is deeper than performance or identity management.
For many people arriving at church now, that kind of trust is not assumed. It must be rebuilt patiently over time.
Perhaps that is part of the church’s public vocation in this moment: not simply proclaiming beliefs but becoming communities where people can risk belonging to one another again.
Rev. Clint Schnekloth is pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a progressive church in the South. He is the founder of Canopy NWA (a refugee resettlement agency) and Queer Camp, and is the author of “A Guidebook to Progressive Church.” He blogs as Lutheran Confessions at Substack.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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