I didn’t go through confirmation. I was raised in a tradition that didn’t practice confirmation. Instead, I was asked to accept the teaching of my pastors and teachers and simply hit “copy,” and “paste,” into my life. That didn’t really work for me.
I got to college and was faced with hard decisions and conflicting narratives about the world around me. The beliefs I had “pasted,” into my life became brittle and cracked. For a while, I walked away from the whole thing.
That is why I love our confirmation program. Our adult leaders and student mentors take a group of students and give them the tools they need to question, challenge and own their own faith. These beliefs won’t be brittle and will be able to stand up to and adapt to the pressures of the world they will enter when they leave our church family and walk into a great big world.
Would it easier to give confirmands a rigid set of beliefs they must accept wholesale without any doubt? For sure. But we see in 1 Thessalonians a much higher and difficult calling for us and for our students.
Please pray for our retreat next weekend. We want to see every single one of our students accept Christ as their personal savior on this retreat, we also want to see them take hold of the faith that was promised to them in their baptism.