Does Confirmation Still Matter?
I know this seems like a heretical question, especially for those of us who teach confirmation but also, I suspect, for any of us who went through it. It is, after all, perhaps the most significant religious right of passage in mainline Christianity.
But that’s precisely what I want to question: confirmation as a rite of passage. As ample research has shown, confirmation functioned something like graduation for previous generations of Protestant mainline Christians. It was the end of required attendance, and when our kids left our churches in droves we didn’t worry too much about it because we could count on them returning once they’d married, settled down, and started having kids of their own.
No longer.
Now, in a virtual marketplace of ideas – including religious ideas, viewpoints, and options – and living in larger culture that no longer places any particular value on attending church, confirmation has marked the end of significant church involvement for many.
Why is this the case?
Kenda Creasy Dean, in her important book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church
While Dean suggests that a major cause of the superficial faith of our kids is the failure of their parents to show them why their own faith matters, I’d point out that today’s parents – even committed church-going parents – never received this kind of instruction from their parents or pastors. Why? Because in a nominally Christian culture everyone knew enough of the faith to make sense of it while simultaneously not needing to employ that faith to navigate significant elements of their lives. After all, when most people went to church, what serious other options were there for how you would spend your Sunday mornings?
Which means that on one level confirmation should be more important than ever. If our kids, that is, don’t learn not just the content of their faith but it’s actual value to help them shape productive lives, they will undoubted find better things to do with their Sunday mornings.
Yet I’m not sure our practices for teaching confirmation have changed significantly. Sure, you can get cartoons and cool animation from products like Reform by Sparkhouse (a division of Augsburg Fortress), but while this may be a more engaging way to transmit information about the faith, I’ve been approached many pastors who are still searching for resources that help make the faith not just understandable but relevant to their kids and their parents.
There are exceptions. One of my nieces had a tremendous confirmation experience that included a final project demonstrating not just her knowledge of the faith but also testified to how it shaped her life and decision-making. Significantly, that experience has been augmented by mission trips (at her church and other congregations) and regular summer church camp. But my sense is that her experience is increasingly the exception, not the norm.
About a year ago I attend the Bar Mitzvah of the son of some friends of ours. The process leading to that day involved not only the typical review of faith-related materials but also a significant year-long project where each of the candidates was assigned a challenging passage in Scripture, asked to research it in depth, and then wrestle with its significance for life today. Then, one of the parents was assigned not only to read the product of their child’s labor but also to provide a response. Both of these were read at the service. I was blown away by the maturity of the final product of the candidate and the thoughtfulness of his mother’s response. Interestingly, while the father is Jewish in this family is Jewish, the mother is Unitarian Universalist; yet all entered into the process with diligence, care, and thoughtfulness.
So maybe the question isn’t “Does confirmation matter anymore?” but rather, “How can confirmation matter?” Or, “How do we do confirmation in a way that it is not largely a rite of passage but a significant process by which a whole family wrestles with the relevance of their faith?” If we don’t answer questions like these, I’m not sure confirmation has much of a future. Which may mean that our faith doesn’t have much of a future.
So let me hear of your experience – highs and lows – as a participant, teacher, or parent. And please share, if you’re willing, the good resources and the not-so-good ones you’ve encountered along the way. Thanks very much.
Dr. Lose–I appreciate it when parents thoroughly engage in the confirmation process and have seen it done well, and cases in which extended family took the place of the parents in such engaging. However, I question doing this when kids whose families are not at all involved in the church are in confirmation class.
I suppose an answer to this would be confirmation mentors.
I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.
Thanks!
Your post was so timely! My confirmation mentee and I were just talking about this today. Her family is only nominally supportive of her involvement in church, so I’ve ended up taking on much of the role of “parent,” at least in the spiritual sense for her. As much as Luther advocated for the whole family involvement, I think it’s really hard for teenagers. They’re not always speaking to their parents much anyway, much less about something as confusing and personal as faith.
I know another thing I really struggle with is that faith looks so different for many of us. My boyfriend treasures the time to “disconnect, recharge, and be still.” I love the liturgy and digging into the Hebrew and Greek and trying to figure out how these beautiful words translate to our lives today. Another friend of mine takes comfort in hearing stories–but doesn’t analyze or really “think” about faith in the same way. When we have teenagers who are still discovering who they are (not that adults don’t do that too, but in a different way), how can we reach even a few of them? How do we give them “real faith” and “real meat” in a way that they can handle? How can we give parents and lay people the empowerment that they too have something to offer and the courage to pray out loud?
I really wish I had a clearer answer to this, and look forward to this discussion.
Here are things we’ve found helpful along the way:
1) Retreats, particularly the Urban Immersion one in St. Paul because we are in a rural area. This has also led to some really interesting discussions on the role of Christianity and poverty. We also led them through the “game” playspent. org, which seemed to make an impact.
2) Faith interviews. In the weeks before confirmation we have students interview their parents and their godparent/confirmation mentor/another adult in the congregation they respect about their faith lives and journeys. This seems to really connect kids with how faith and life interact.
3) The Joan of Arcadia TV show. They LOVE it, and it seems to also consistently lead back to discussions that they find meaningful.
4) Small group wrap-ups: end each class period with one high, one low, and one place you either saw God or got to “be Jesus” for someone that week.
5) Mentors. This is certainly a work in progress, and it’s often hard to get an adult and teen who are both committed to the program and who really connect. That said, when it works, it seems to keep kids in church because they have a Christian adult–other than parents–who can hold them accountable and be a model. Our program still has a long way to go, and I’d appreciate any ideas here too.
With mentors, I found that putting two sets together works best. Two adults with two youth – there seems to be less pressure when there is another adult and another youth in the discussion. I also found that scripted discussions with a written discussion guide – one page worked well. Most questions were just for discussion but there was always one that each person had to write something. All four had to sign their names and turn in the discussion sheet. They were encouraged to do other activities together as well but that did not always happen. At least the faith talk happened each week for six weeks.
Dave, I hate to say this, but I agree with you yet again! (tongue-in-cheek of course) But you are right, Confirmation when it is about memorization, learning the books of the Bible, tests, etc. it is completely pointless if the kids do not know Christ. I love the idea you mentioned about the Bar-Mitzvah, in church, in faith, as in all aspects of life, you get out of it what you put into it. The problem with education, public and Chistian, is I think we set the bar so low in order to have everyone go through the rite of passage or graduation that it becomes a means to an end instead of a means onto itself.
I think the only way out of the hole we have dug for ourselves is….(If I had the answer to this I’d be rich!)
Peace,
All three of my daughters were confirmed (one of them twice–once in the Lutheran church, once in the Episcopal church before CCM). None currently belongs to a church because they don’t want to deal with the “nastiness”, yet they all get to the “high holies”. I believe that infant communion and confirmation at a later age, without “graduation”-like ceremony, but more an induction into adult responsibility & membership is a much better model. And, yes, mentors are essential, as are church camps, youth participation in all areas of church life (not just Sunday School), participation in gatherings, both local & national, as far as I have experienced, the best ways for kids to “catch the faith.”
I have thought for many years now that the church falls short of adequately teaching the faith to children/youth. At some point the church quit taking seriously teaching adults the faith. As I recall, Martin Luther wrote the small catechism to be a tool for parents who then had a responsibility to teach their children. I am not suggesting that confirmation is hopeless or useless; however, it is less effective if engaging adults in meaningful faith-filled conversation doesn’t take place first, or simultaneously. Too many adults don’t have the tools, experience, or confidence to be a mentor, making it difficult for them to have the kind of conversation with youth that is expected of them. The question then becomes how to engage and teach adults. There are some confirmation programs that require parent participation, which may be helpful for some and not for others. There is no “one size fits all” program for youth or adults. What works for you as pastor/teacher and make it yours. If you can get excited about it, then your excitement and passion just may rub off on your students, no matter what age.
The question is not a heretical one, but rather an essential question that we need to continually ask. As an AiM, for the last 15 years I’ve been the primary leader and planner for confirmation in the congregations I have served. At it’s best, confirmation should be a time to take all the information about their faith they have learned over the last 11-12 years of their life and really begin to work on what that means for them. This engagement and struggle for meaning is what brings relevance.
The challenge is that I would have folks who came from homes where sermons and scripture were discussed each week, who were in Sunday School for the last 5-6 years, who knew the basics of the faith and could actually begin to engage that faith, to push and test it against what they saw and heard in their daily life. I also had others who had the kid baptized and then show up a decade or more later for confirmation with no faith experiences to speak of in between. I had a session once where the parents were asked to attend and set them the task of talking with each other about a favorite bible story. I went off to give them time to talk and came back to hear all three sets of parents/kids say they couldn’t think of a story, much less a favorite!
How do you best deal with this dichotomy? How can you engage faith, have it be relevant, when you don’t know the content of that faith? Or worse, when what you think you know is based on what is in the culture, not what is in scripture. To try and develop faith based solely on that leads people to something other than the Gospel.
We need to recapture the sense in our congregations that we are always Affirming our faith. That each day all believers test that faith against what we run into in the world and Affirm that faith. This moves confirmation from something that is exclusively for the 6-8th grade set, to what it really is, a lifelong process of learning, engagement, and growth. When the whole congregation is engaged in that process, then you have a multitude of models for youth to see in action, to explore with these people of faith how they live out their faith in the world. Then the rite can become what it is at it’s best, a celebration of a movement of a brother or sister into a more independent faith, one in which parents and others still play a role, but where the child is the one saying “This is what I believe”.
This is not easy because it demands that those in the congregation take their faith seriously. How do you speak to this as a leader in a way that people will hear it?
Dave, again you articulate so well and ask the tough questions that many are thinking. Right now I am teaching confirmation school in our small suburban congregation. Confirmation school is something I inherited when I was called as pastor here. Instead of taking a Wednesday night once a week during the school year for confirmation, we have a 2 week intensive in the summer that runs from 9 am to 1pm for ten days. This is preceded by a full week at camp together. It’s a two year program and my ultimate goal is that at the end when our young people affirm their baptism, they have the foundation of a faith that informs their lives and all the decisions they face
I loosely use the re:form curriculum in consort with the Small Catechism to engage our young people in fun, tough, thoughtful conversation. Hopefully they are becoming critical thinkers. Tomorrow we will spend the day doing an Urban Plunge and service project where I HOPE the Lord’s Prayer begins to take on flesh for them.
I thank you for your thoughts and ideas as they spur me to also ask the question “How might this become a family learning experience?”
I know this article is a bit old, but I wanted to add a comment here in for others who might see it. On your summer program, I see that it ends at 1 PM. Unfortunately, this puts parents in a bind if both of them work outside the home. I know that my wife would have loved to send our son to her Lutheran church programs when he was younger, but they all ended in the middle of the workday.
You might want to consider extending the program to 4-5 PM.
Dr. Lose,
I just had my first conversation with a joint parish council re: confirmation practice and efficacy. I am very concerned, since their chief complaint is youth not returning post-Confirmation. I suggested that perhaps we stall the upcoming students for a year to re-work the program, while finishing out the current program with the students who are halfway through it. I was firmly told that was not an option, as they feared the upcoming students wouldn’t stick around and “wait.” I proposed shifting it to 9th-10th grade students, or making it an individual decision. One was met with a bit of shock, the other with blank stares.
The current policy has a lot of memorization, with some service project hours, and worship/sermon notes. The chief complaint is the parents/children don’t make the church a priority, as if the congregation itself has no culpability.
I really envision a more relaxed, relational, conversational approach to exploring the “required” topics and what they might mean in the 21st C. world, but I am working within/against a system that requires quantitative results. I want to figure this out, but I’m only 4 weeks into first call and hesitant to press too hard.
Thanks for giving voice and ear to a continuing concern.
Hello! I found your blog post via Day One via Twitter. As the Managing Director of Confirm not Conform, I had to throw in my (very biased) 2 cents.
At CnC we firmly believe that if confirmation is simply going through the motions then it really doesn’t matter. I just saw an article a couple of days ago that a woman now in her 30’s wrote, remembering when she told her confirmation teacher, “I don’t think I should get confirmed since I don’t believe any of this stuff.” Her memory is that her confirmation teacher sighed and said “Just do it.” No wonder confirmation doesn’t matter. We keep acting as if it doesn’t!
The key difference, I think, about Confirm not Conform is that we insist from the outset that for confirmation to be meaningful, it must be chosen. We make sure parents, youth, and church members all know that saying, “No, I don’t want to be confirmed” is a legitimate choice, and that this choice, made thoughtfully, will be respected.
I encourage you to check out our website http://www.confirmmnotconform.com. The program was written by an Episcopal parish and at the moment is pretty Episcopal in focus. However, we are working on an ecumenical version which should be available in 2013 from our publisher, Forward Movement. You might also want to check out a sample session: http://www.forwardmovement.org/Content/Site170/BlogEntries/3183CNC1IntroFA_00000020674.pdf I would love your feedback!
Thank you for this post. I look forward to hearing more.
I appreciate this article and the dialogue following. I have a strong passion for engaging with this question. I wrote my dissertation about teaching Lutheran Confirmation this year to earn my Ed.D. It is available digitally here:
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/teachlearnstudent/17/
I share it simply because I sense it might be of some good to the right reader. Maybe someday it will be published, but for now here’s my contribution to this intriguing and (what has been for me) faith-bolstering conversation.
I have been working on models of Lutheran confirmation every day for the last 20 years, and am happy to share my ignorance with anyone interested. I have three observations as I enter my third decade:
1. We lament the fact that three fourths of our students don’t come back after confirmation.
2. I don’t think they were ever there.
3. You can’t come back to a place you’ve never been.
I appreciate the honest wrestling with confirmation and its role in a life of faith. I often think it has become an unofficial sacrament for many people. Your comment, “It is, after all, perhaps the most significant religious right of passage in mainline Christianity” brings out this fact nicely. Confirmation, in many ways, has become an event that overshadows baptism instead of being the chance for a confirmand to affirm the promises God made to them in baptism.
I would add to the discussion Christian Smith’s “Soul Searching.” He, like Dean, analyses teens and their beliefs concerning God and discovers most do not espouse an orthodox Christian faith, but a malformation of those beliefs. He points, as you have, not only to parents that have transmitted this twisted gospel, but also to clergy and church institutions that unwittingly propagate such a skewed view of God.
I also found your desire to ask more basic questions about confirmation helpful, but I wonder if the questions need to be even more basic. I think we should ask ourselves, “What is the goal of confirmation.” I think the question is often times unanswered or the answer is assumed and not made explicit. So, what should the goal of confirmation be? Or, what is the goal of your confirmation instruction/program?