This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
The History and Impact of The New City Catechism
In this episode, Collin Hansen shares about Tim Keller's vision for The New City Catechism before his death in 2023, why this resource has been so well received, and what it might look like for individuals, families, and churches to use this catechism to go deeper with the Lord in an increasingly secular world.
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Topics Addressed in This Interview:
- The Vision Behind The New City Catechism
- Why Theological Instruction Is Central to Discipleship
- The Communal Aspect of Catechesis
- Songs from The New City Catechism
- A Devotional Based on The New City Catechism
- Practical Use for The New City Catechism
01:16 - The Vision Behind *The New City Catechism*
Matt Tully
Collin, thanks so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.
Collin Hansen
It’s always a privilege to be here. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Tully
Collin, since we first published The New City Catechism way back in 2017, I was just looking at the numbers recently, and we’ve sold over half a million copies of the catechism in its various forms, with nearly half of those being the small kid’s edition that was specially designed for children to hold in their own hands and read themselves. So I wonder—just big picture—are you surprised by the way that The New City Catechism has really taken root, certainly in the American church in certain quarters of American evangelicalism, but even around the world?
Collin Hansen
I’m definitely surprised, Matt. Pleasantly so. We did not envision this kind of success. This was a convictional project. It wasn’t a marketing/sales project. From the beginning it was a belief that this is something that’s good, biblical, historical, and relevant. But there was no discernible momentum at the time when we were working on this to broaden the practice of catechesis with young people in particular (children) outside of the places where it had typically thrived. So you still had Presbyterians who would practice this. You still had Catholics, of course, you had Lutherans who would do this, and Dutch Reformed. But especially among free churches—non-denominational churches, Baptist churches—this was not a practice that was widely known. And so the success and especially the success among those non-Presbyterian or confessional traditions has been especially exciting. But certainly, the numbers and the positive feedback that we’ve gotten consistently over the years in that project has exceeded all our expectations and is cause for great praise to God.
Matt Tully
I want to spend a little bit of time in a minute talking about the origin story behind this project. Tim Keller was at the heart of that with his passion and his vision for what this resource would be. But lest our listeners think that, again, the sales are the main driving force behind this, even though, again, we’ve sold a lot of copies of this, one of the things that I think was so important to both TGC and Crossway as we worked on this project together was making it freely available as far and wide as possible. The whole catechism is available for free on newcitycatechism.com. There’s a free mobile app for iOS and Android where you can access the entire content of the catechism. As of today, it’s been translated into at least twenty-two languages, all of which are free to download on that website. So what was behind that vision to give this thing away as much as possible?
Collin Hansen
Well, that’s the way it started. It started as a church project of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. It was one that they had undertaken under Tim Keller’s leadership, under his initiative, and then working with one of his colleagues at the time, a woman named Sam Shammas, Sam was a wonderful partner in this project. She had previously worked for John Stott, and, fun fact, she had also previously worked on casting for the miniseries “Band of Brothers.” Anyway, fun little story there. The original project was conceived for that church and as an adaptation of Westminster, Heidelberg, and Geneva catechisms—the classic Reformed reformational catechisms. And then the innovation that came about in there was not only bringing all of them together but then moving it into a 52-week format, which certainly is a condensing of those catechisms. So it doesn’t have the same breadth and depth necessarily, but it still covers a lot of ground and the essential ground you need to cover. That was the first major innovation in terms of the conception of it. The second innovation was that it could be done with the full answers for older children or adults, or there was also a kid’s version that would condense each one of the answers and make it easier for them to begin to undertake. That was the church project, and from the beginning, it was designed by the church and by the Gospel Coalition for wider distribution as a digital resource that would be available for free. And really what happened subsequently was a recognition of the benefits that would come from bringing it into a print product. You mentioned one of them right there, Matt, is the ability for the kids to hold it in their hands and the parents to be there in the bed or around the hearth or around the table—wherever they’re doing the catechesis—but also to keep it available for free. But then on top of that, of course, the huge innovation that Crossway brought about was the beautiful user design of the app and of the website and so many of the other subsequent resources as an entire suite of products and resources that you could use. So it started out being a free resource, and it remains that everything that was free is free, but now you also see a lot of other things, like the curriculum, for example, that’s not free, but it continues to benefit many different people and was a major undertaking by the Gospel Coalition and Crossway.
Matt Tully
We’ll talk about the resource that you edited as well, a devotional based on the catechism. That’s another really wonderful resource that people are using. Just going back to that kid’s edition, each of my three kids has a copy for themselves. It’s this really cute, little, small book. It’s not very thick. It’s not very big trim size, but it’s perfect because the kids can hold it open right there and they feel like they have their own little thing that they get to cherish and read from and write their name on. They were designed from the beginning to be pretty low cost so that a church can buy a bunch of them and give them out to kids. But let’s go back to that origin story a little bit more. Collin, I know that you, before Tim Keller’s death in 2023, you were close with him. You spent a lot of time with Keller—a lot of time talking and casting a vision for TGC and for the impact that you all wanted to have. And so I wonder if you could speak a little bit to what was the motivating force behind Keller’s vision for this project? What first prompted him to consider, “I want to write a new catechism for my church and then for the wider world”? Where did that idea originate?
Collin Hansen
It’s classic Keller because it’s both normative, historical—it’s just nuts and bolts theology from a confessional Reformed perspective—but it’s also situational. The thing about catechisms is that they’re all written at turning points in history, because the whole point is that there are important theological beliefs (there are certain ideas) that maybe have been forgotten, they’ve been lost, they’ve been contested, and they need to be remembered. And so it’s not always or even usually from a position of strength—“Hey, everybody already knows this stuff, let’s make sure to codify it”—it’s more like people don’t know this stuff, and they need to. So that’s both a recognition of two different factors there. Number one would be the ongoing secularization in the United States—the de-churching, the massive turn away from the church, and a recognition that we need to be able to help keep people following Christ and help younger generations by catechizing them—but also it’s a recognition that as people are leaving the church, our beliefs are that much more contested by the culture. They’re that much more challenged by people who don’t agree with us, whether they’re of different religions or no religion or hostile or indifferent. So it’s very much an evangelistic or an apologetic project as well. So those are two of the major hallmarks of Keller’s ministry, and bring those together in New York City where those issues had been seen more clearly there for years. I go to a non-denominational church, and people come from all kinds of different backgrounds. And so one of the reasons that The New City Catechism has been helpful for us is because it gives you a shared theological framework from Scripture to work through. If you look at New York City, even though Redeemer is a Presbyterian church, they attract people from so many different backgrounds. And so one of the secrets that you guys know from publishing children’s literature is that as you’re teaching the kids, you’re also teaching the parents. So The New City Catechism is a way of helping to build that theological unity among the parents and other members and leaders of your church, and build that consistency, even as you’re discipling the next generation and raising them that way. Now, I should point out something that is quite significant also about The New City Catechism that makes it an especially appropriate undertaking for the Gospel Coalition and for Crossway. That is that it’s a Reformed project, but it’s not specifically Presbyterian. So even though it was undertaken by Redeemer Presbyterian Church and everything that’s in it is consistent with Presbyterian thought, it’s not exclusively so. So it doesn’t take a position on, say, baptism. It talks about what baptism is, but it doesn’t go further than that to differentiate some of the different modes. Similarly, on the sacraments it has a certain Reformed Calvinist perspective, but it doesn’t go beyond that in some of the ways that would divide on some different Reformed communities. It does definitely tend toward Calvin’s view over Zwingli’s view, but not in a way that you couldn’t use it if you had more of that memorialist view. So that’s an important aspect of the catechism as well that I think has helped it to be more widely adopted by people. Also, I tell churches all the time that if you want to go further for something that’s specific to your church, that’s no problem at all. Feel free to go ahead and do that. But that’s also keeping with Tim’s broader vision of wanting to build up a broadly evangelical, broadly Reformed church and also with his own Presbyterian convictions. Those were important to him, but he tended to prioritize things that were broadly evangelical and then broadly Reformed, like the Gospel Coalition of course.
Matt Tully
One of the questions that Crossway has received over the years from people who are exploring The New City Catechism is wanting to know what’s behind the name. Where did that idea for The New City Catechism come from?
Collin Hansen
That was really fun, and I got to participate in that process, which was really special. Catechisms are typically named for where they were written. We just mentioned right there Westminster, Heidelberg, Geneva. So the thought here is, of course, where it’s written was New York City, but we thought that that would probably be fairly exclusive, that it would make it sound like it’s a catechism for New York City or it wasn’t for the rest of the world. But there’s a slight twist, of course, on that which is it still does allude to the fact that it was in a city, and “new” of course alludes to New York, but there’s also a perspective in which it’s helping us to anticipate the New Jerusalem, the new city that we are anticipating that comes with Christ’s return, where we will all dwell with Christ forever if we believe in him. So I think that’s one of my favorite parts about the entire project and certainly about the entire process. Sometimes a name comes together in ways where everybody just looks and says, “Oh yeah. That’s a good idea right there.”
13:10 - Why Theological Instruction Is Central to Discipleship
Matt Tully
I love that story because I think it does illustrate just the broader truth that there is so much intentionality put into this. Anyone who spent some time reading through this and even seeing how, as you mentioned before, there’s the full version of every question and answer, and then embedded within that—without actually rearranging the words but just removing certain words—there’s this shorter version that then kids or other people who prefer a shorter, more succinct edition can pull out and use. There’s just so much intentional crafting that clearly went into this, and I think it’s what’s made it have a certain staying power. You mentioned a minute ago that one of the motivating forces is this increase in secularization around us. We’ve all talked about and heard about the de-churching that’s happening, where more and more people are walking away from the faith. They don’t feel this tie to their historic faith, even of their parents or their grandparents, and they’re just open to considering new things. And that raises the important topic of discipleship. There has obviously been a lot of talk about the need to disciple children and young people in the faith so that they have a strong foundation for going out into the world. But sometimes in our discipleship, the focus can be on things like prayer, Bible reading, fellowship with other Christians, even fighting against sin and temptation. And that can be the emphasis, and topics like theology and theological construction can fall by the wayside and maybe even intentionally be deemphasized because it feels like it’s maybe missing the heart of what it means to follow Jesus and to pursue a heartfelt love of Christ in our own lives. But that’s different than how Keller and how you all, as you worked on this, saw the task of discipleship in catechesis. So I wonder if you could unpack why the theological instruction is so central to discipleship.
Collin Hansen
Everybody’s developing a theology, whether they recognize it or not. And one of the major challenges of secularism is the turn toward the self. And evangelicals can participate in that turning inward toward the self without even recognizing it. And one of the ways we do that is through substituting emotivism for faith—a sense that if it doesn’t feel right to me, if it doesn’t feel good, if it doesn’t benefit my sense of emotional well being, then something must be wrong. That’s a very difficult attitude to bring to Scripture, because Scripture and, of course, the God who is behind Scripture seems very much to care about that aspect of us, but not the ways that our culture today of expressive individualism teaches us that we should. So we go into Scripture thinking, I need to find some things that will make me feel good today. And then you read Scripture and you think, Boy, I’m working through the book of Ezekiel right now, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to find here that makes me feel really good. We’re trying to help elevate your perspective theologically to understand maybe that’s not what the Bible is about. And the very first message Tim Keller gave at the Gospel Coalition’s first national conference in 2007 was “When the Bible Is Not About You.” It’s not about you. So one of the things that a catechism does is it takes you out of yourself, into God, and into the way that he has ordered things and revealed himself in Scripture. But the thing about the best catechisms, and we’re working from the best ones that we know in The New City Catechism here, is that is our ultimate comfort. That is our ultimate hope. And that’s why Heidelberg starts out on that note of “My comfort in life and death . . . .” And that’s what we borrow from in The New City Catechism. What are we here for? We’re here to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That is the ultimate comfort, and it does become very personal. But it becomes personal on God’s terms, not on what we sense that we should feel. So it’s a way of getting to the same goal of that passionate pursuit and emotional connection with God, that relationship with God that he makes available to us. The Bible is a very emotional, passionate book—going back to Ezekiel again. That’s extremely emotional. But it’s within a broader theological framework that helps us to understand that we are caught up in God’s plan, not God sort of shrunken down into our little self-conception.
17:52 - The Communal Aspect of Catechesis
Matt Tully
One of the things that Keller emphasizes in his introduction to the catechism is that catechetical instruction is less individualistic and more communal than other types of instruction or other ways of discipling somebody along. I wonder if you could explain a little bit more what he means by that and why that might be a good idea and helpful as we think about the value of catechesis.
Collin Hansen
I think, Matt, about two different ways that I’ve seen the catechism used just in my own context. The first, of course, is the communal learning of a family. All three of my kids, who are nine, six, and three, are all learning the catechism together in different ways and in different stages. My oldest has been doing this since he was three, so we’re working on six years of this, and he knows everything—he knows all the questions and answers, for the most part. We have to always review and things like that. But then my six-year-old knows most of them, and maybe should know more than she does, but she’s learning it communally with her brother, with her parents. And then of course our three-year-old is listening in and picking up what he can, and he can remember some of them. And I think a key element here, though, is, and we can touch on this a little bit later if you’d like to, but the music, of course, which is another major aspect of this project. So there’s communal learning of the family. That’s number one, but then there’s the communal learning that I see with the devotional. I just met with our college minister recently, and our church uses this to train college student leaders involved in our ministry. So there’s a communal process. They learn all of the questions and answers together. And there’s a little bit of, “Really? You’re going to have us do this?” “Yes, we’re going to do this together. We’re going to learn this. You can handle this. It’s not a big deal.” The communal aspect of working on it week after week for the fifty-two weeks of the year is very helpful in being able to emphasize the continuity, the consistency, the integrity of the project, and ultimately a broad-based theological unity that helps us then to approach Scripture with an understanding of the whole when we’re looking at any specific aspect of revelation. So that’s what I think I see work pretty well with the communal dimensions. I’m sure there are plenty of others because I didn’t even mention the curriculum, of course, which is another form of communal learning but with younger kids in a Sunday school type format. But we designed this for a communal setting. I didn’t even really think about individual use when I was putting this together. It was always in a communal setting.
20:38 - Songs from *The New City Catechism*
Matt Tully
I just think there’s something so fitting about that question and answer format. You could certainly read it on your own and do it just yourself, but it really just lends itself towards two people standing face to face, one person asks the question, the other person answers the question, and you kind of go back and forth. My kids are able to do that just with each other. You don’t have to know the right answer, so to speak, to be able to ask the question. And there’s just this natural dialogue that happens. And that is such a powerful, powerful dynamic that can help us to learn these things and have that common foundation together. You mentioned the songs. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that. What was behind the decision to create a song for each of the shorter versions of the questions and answers aimed at kids?
Collin Hansen
So this is a fun connection between the catechism, Crossway, and another TGC partnership. The person behind the songs is really Betsy Howard, who’s also behind the TGC kids series, or as we call it, the Arloverse. All the stories about Arlo.
Matt Tully
Some of our listeners are familiar with Arloverse, I’m sure.
Collin Hansen
Exactly. And Betsy had published also Seasons of Waiting, her first book with the Gospel Coalition and Crossway. So she was really the person, along with her brother-in-law, Dan Olson, who were behind the songs. Not the producing of them, but the conceiving of them and ultimately the very, very significant fundraising and granting that came with the songs, because a lot of the vision behind the songs was not only be able to help remember—simply put, they’re great at facilitating the remembering for everybody. And that, I think in fact, this college ministry I just mentioned, even though the songs are for kids and definitely sound like they’re for kids, they will still use the songs as well to remember. They’re catchy enough to be able to do it. And I think they hold up pretty well 10+ years later. So yeah, that was the vision to help remember. But then beyond that, there was also a broader vision of how catechesis and the singing and the communal learning fosters character. And that’s another connection people don’t necessarily pick up on. Character is formed deliberately. It’s a discipleship element where we’re seeking to inculcate certain virtues. We’re learning about God, but as we learn about God, just like Calvin would have said, it’s a dual process. We’re learning about God and learning about ourselves and learning who we ought to be. And that’s an important part of what we’re trying to do for children especially. It’s not just to tell them this is who God is, but then in light of that, this is who you are and this is who you ought to be. Walk in these ways. Just like most catechisms, there’s a heavy emphasis on the Ten Commandments and the Apostles Creed and things like that. We walk systematically through the Ten Commandments in a couple of different ways in the catechism there. So the songs help quite a bit, and I think I could sing almost all of them on demand. I’m not asking you to do that, but if my son has six years in this thing, I’ve got a good six years in this thing.
Matt Tully
Maybe we’ll have a bonus episode of you singing through some of those songs.
Collin Hansen
Everybody demands it! Readers, listeners, watcher, viewers—they’ll all demand it, Matt.
24:06 - A Devotional Based on *The New City Catechism*
Matt Tully
Well, something that you did do in relation to this resource is you edited The New City Catechism Devotional. I wonder if you could just briefly explain what you were trying to accomplish with that and how that fits into the broader suite of resources.
Collin Hansen
It’s another thing that’s traditional with catechisms; they do come with commentaries. We have commentary on it, but of a devotional nature. And so we have historical commentary in there from many reformational and other Reformed figures throughout history. It’s once again emphasizing the continuity of the church, the consistency of theology over time. But then we also engaged the council members of the Gospel Coalition. Most of those devotionals started out as videos that we recorded. In fact, those videos are still available through all the different ways that you’ve mentioned there—the app, YouTube, the Gospel Coalition site. You can still find all of those at newcitycatechism.com—the videos that council members had recorded there. But then we also adapted them. Betsy Howard, once again, played a key role in this. We adapted them in editing for the devotional. So it just makes it very easy to walk through to say, “Okay, I’m learning something, but that learning is transferring from my head to my heart. I’m devotionally engaging with God theologically.” And I certainly had high hopes for this project, but there is a significant number of people who have been very excited about this book. And I’m very eager to tell people of all the different books that I’ve been a part of over the years, but the one that consistently sells the most every month, even all these years later, is that devotional. And the consistent thing I’ve heard has been that especially late teenagers and twenty somethings using this devotionally. And they basically, Matt, they can use it as a devotional, or they can use it as a small systematic theology. It works great in both capacities.
26:10 - Practical Use for *The New City Catechism*
Matt Tully
As we wrap up here, I’d love for you to speak directly to three categories of people. Paint a picture for how, very practically, how they could use The New City Catechism in their own day to day lives. First, speak to the individual Christian, the adult, who would love to incorporate this resource in order to beef up their own theological understanding, to maybe go deeper in their walk with the Lord through these questions and answers. What might it look like for them practically to actually use this resource day to day, week to week?
Collin Hansen
I think we just said it right there. Just grab the devotional. Use it once per week for fifty-two weeks. Grab it once per week and just read through that, ruminate on it, maybe reread it in there. But even though we’ve said that it was designed for communal learning, the devotional is the one that lends itself more transparently to individual learning. So I’d commend the devotional for sure.
Matt Tully
And then how about for parents who want to help their kids and want to use this with their kids, whether their kids are five-years-old or ten-years-old? What might that look like? What’s worked for you with your family?
Collin Hansen
I want parents to know this is not an either/or proposition. I’m going to be a walking billboard here for the amazing Crossway products, but our family uses The New City Catechism, of course, with the songs to go through. We also use Kevin DeYoung and Doug O’Donnell’s The Biggest Story Curriculum. We use the family devotional to go through that. We also use those videos, which I hope people can just grasp how amazing those videos are.
Matt Tully
The Biggest Story videos.
Collin Hansen
The Biggest Story videos are just absolutely amazing. And just like we’re saying about the usability of The New City Catechism digitally, The Biggest Story works so well. I’ve got a QR code on each page, or I just leave it open in there to look at you to look at it on YouTube. Those videos—I’m often just personally moved when I’m watching them. So we’ll use The Biggest Story, we’ll use a story Bible or even a curriculum with that, we’ll use The New City Catechism there as well. I’m even going to give—and this is not planned, and it’s not to compensate it either, so people can know it’s genuine—we’re using an old Methodist hymnal to sing out of from my family’s tradition. I love doing that, but the thing is falling apart. So if only some publisher were producing a new hymnal coming out next year in 2025, I would just love to use that as well. Of course, that’s a shout out for the Gettys who are coming out with a hymnal next year. You can use all of these different things. If you’re thinking, I don’t know, that sounds pretty boring. I prefer this, or I would rather just read the Bible, that’s what you probably should be doing, but you can use these different things in conjunction as a family. And I’ve had very few protests from my kids over the years, which is one of the advantages of starting young is that they just don’t know any better. They think everybody’s doing this.
Matt Tully
And I think that’s such a good reminder that we can use resources. Sometimes we can feel a pressure—maybe not everybody, but certain types of people—can feel pressure to come up with something fresh on their own, to have whatever they’re teaching their kids be something that they themselves have spent the time to develop and think through carefully. And I think, obviously, we want to be thinking carefully about what we’re talking to our kids about, but there are great resources that people have invested significant time and resources into, and it’s okay for us to use those and benefit from the work that others are doing as we the church helps itself. We help each other with our different gifts and abilities. I think it’s the one thing that The New City Catechism does so well. Maybe a final question, Collin, for you; a final person to speak to. What about pastors? What might it look like for a pastor to, if they recognize that this idea of catechesis—of careful, intentional, theological instruction in a very systematic and organized way—is not really happening as well as it could at their church, how might they use The New City Catechism in that context?
Collin Hansen
This might be my favorite question or my favorite one to answer here. And I’ve seen this implemented, and I didn’t really think of this when we were putting this together. But especially if you’re the kind of church that does any kind of responsive readings, and I encourage you to do so liturgically (you don’t have to be a high liturgical church to do this), it works perfectly to use these every week, or at a service. The pastor reads out the question, and the congregation reads the answer together. So you can do that through your whole calendar year. That’s an easy way to do it. Another way, though, is to encourage your children’s ministry to use The New City Catechism curriculum. This was an initiative that was written by Mel Lacy, who’s probably the expert in theological education for children. She works out of the UK, and she teaches this professionally. I thought she did an amazing job with that curriculum. It’s a huge undertaking and continues to be very popular all these years later. So that’s a couple of different ways that pastors can use these in their church.
Matt Tully
Collin, thanks so much for giving us a little insight into the backstory of this incredible resource. It’s one that, as you said, even decades later since it was actually originally first published by Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian, it continues to have this incredible impact and legacy as Christians around the world are using it with their children, with their churches, and on their own. We appreciate you taking the time.
Collin Hansen
Glad to do it. I want to give a special shout out to the person I worked with from the beginning on this, and it’d be Josh Dennis. Really, his vision, especially for the digital resources, that has just blossomed through The Biggest Story and other work that Crossway does has really been remarkable, and it’s been a huge blessing to me, my family, to The Gospel Coalition, and a keystone of our partnership together. So I just want to shout him out specifically.
Matt Tully
Thanks, Collin.
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