It's not often you have 7th graders asking their parents if they can join confirmation at the local church, but BLC's confirmation program has such a good reputation that even kids who aren’t members have wanted to participate. The Faith Inkubators curriculum says that young people need to connect with adult members in a fun learning environment, and BLC has been lucky to have strong leaders who take an interest in the kids.
The 2007-08 leaders are (front row): Cindy Reeson, Shelly Lee, Cindy Mueller, Missy Lease; (back row): Jen Bronsdon, Dennis Baumann, Kurt Hodgson and Jeff Ziegler.
Confirmation meets on Wednesday nights from September to May. On the first and third Wednesdays, the kids meet at the church from 6:00-8:00. The first hour is spent in "large group," with songs, skits and a PowerPoint presentation of each week's lesson.
The next hour is spent in "small group," where groups of about 5 kids meet with a leader to further go over the lesson. The small groups of kids and a leader are the same for the entire year. On the second Wednesday, each small group plans either a "fellowship" night at someone's house or plans a community service project.
We conclude with large group prayer around candles in the narthex, and each leader gives the child in each group a blessing. (Sometimes the kids also give the leaders blessings.)
Community service projects have included:
- Making health kits and school kits for Lutheran World Relief
- Trick or Treating for the hungry
- Cleaning up trash on the bike trail
- Making cards and cookies for people in nursing homes and hospitals
- Making cards for people serving overseas
- Habitat for Humanity fundraiser
- Ringing bells for Salvation Army
The Faith Inkubators' curriculum takes this perspective about young people:
What do we want to retain on confirmation day? A few facts in a kid's head? The kid? If we are going to retain both information and the teen, we've got to shift from a focus on information to a focus on faith formation and from teaching classes to building communities of faith. It's time we head to the heart. To do that, we need to take a long, hard look at what we've been doing, how we've been doing it and what we're trying to accomplish.
Faith Inkubators is in the process of building a national learning organization to tackle the largest problems of Christian education, starting with the toughest - adolescent confirmation ministries. This Head to the Heart system is the product of a decade of testing and tweaking in thousands of churches coast to coast. (We now have our first churches in Hungary and Beijing.)
It has one focus, to grow junior high small groups into senior high small groups by injecting the DNA of Jesus into the nucleus of every cell through the love, care and attention of one or more caring Christian adult mentors for every carload of kids.
We build our small groups with care in mind, mix in high school youth as Junior Guides and set about the process of bonding living cells together so confirmation day isn't graduation day. It is the day the living cell is ordained into its chosen ministry in the life of the church.
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