Baptist vs. Presbyterian

I remember lamenting as a young adult how much better Baptists seemed than Presbyterians at educating their kids about their corporate beliefs.  For instance, I remember going to a Baptist Vacation Bible School one year as perhaps a young teen and they said, "We're going to do sword drills."  I'd never heard of this sort of thing.  We never memorized books of the bible or made a fun contest out of looking up particular verses.  When they said, "Sword drill," I had to make them repeat it 2-3 times because the word, "sword" sounded so out-of-context.  They finally had to spell it, "S-W-O-R-D" and that didn't help me any because I'd heard the word correctly but still had no context.

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So, then they called out the first verse and I flipped my Bible open to the Table of Contents and started searching and one of the little Baptist girls shouted, "Got it!" I thought to myself, "No way!  She must have cheated!"  But sure enough, those guys were all flipping their Bibles open right to the verses that were being called.  I was impressed.

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But on the other hand, the Presbyterians do catechism with their kids, something that Baptists rarely do.  And Presbyterians are serious about catechism.  A preacher told a story a while back about a Civil War officer who was assigned to some uprising or chaotic situation somewhere because he was reknowned for remaining calm and collected under fire.  Well, this officer was strolling down the street calmly surveying the situation while people were running and buildings were burning and people were shooting and being shot, and he saw another junior officer calmly strolling down the street going the other way.  Impressed at the junior officer's resolve, he stopped him and asked the younger man, "What is the Chief End of man?"

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The junior officer immediately responded, "Man's Chief End is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever."

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The higher-ranking officer nodded, "I knew I'd seen a Shorter Catechism man!"