This Sunday, we look forward to welcoming 19 young people into adult membership in the life of our congregation. They have worked over the past year in Confirmation class to gain a deeper understanding of the history and basic tenets of the Christian faith, as well as what it means to be an active part of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church.
It has been a great privilege for me to have spent this past year as their teacher. It gave me the opportunity to return to the Confirmation classroom, which had been a significant part of my ministry during my first call in South Bend, Indiana. It also allowed me to reclaim the joy in ministry that comes with teaching a young person the things that are most essential about not just who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ, but in particular, what it means to be a Presbyterian.
I always say, and I will remind us all of this again on Sunday, that my primary goal in any Confirmation class is NOT to teach adherence to a particular set of beliefs or to even test a student’s level of knowledge of the Bible or theology. The goal of Confirmation for me is teaching students how to ask and answer questions – to reflect on how the church has done that in the past, how we do it as BMPC, and how they will do it throughout their entire life of faith.
It was once a tradition that Confirmation students were taught through the use of a catechism – a predetermined set of questions and answers that were to be memorized to teach the essentials of the faith. The problem with this as the sole teaching tool is that it doesn’t always help us learn to ask the new questions that every person and church faces in a changing world, or to know how to find new answers.
We also spend time in Confirmation Class reflecting on another kind of question – the questions that are asked and answered when any of us makes a public profession of faith and commits ourselves to the life of the church. Helping these students be comfortable and confident in their answers has also been a focus of our year.
Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world? I do.
Who is your Lord and Savior? Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.
Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his word and showing his love? I will.
Will you devote yourself to the church’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers? I will.
We as a church will also be asked a question this Sunday about our continued commitment to these students, but I would hope that hearing the questions put before them and listening to their joyful answers will be an important moment for all of us.
At this moment, we won’t just help them reaffirm their Baptisms, but we will all ask ourselves these questions as well; we will reaffirm our own faith and our own commitment to the life of the church in the world.
Mostly, I hope that this Sunday we will all reaffirm our commitment to asking and answering new questions of ourselves and one another as we seek to be the Body of Christ together.
