Cultivating Teen Faith: Insights from the Confirmation Project

By Richard R. Osmer and Katherine M. Douglass

What are churches doing to form the faith of their young people? Many church denominations that practice infant baptism offer confirmation or an equivalent ministry when children reach adolescence and enter a new phase of spiritual growth—but all churches, regardless of tradition, wrestle with how to get young adults to actively join the church. What really works? 

In this book twelve authors draw on a three-year study of more than three thousand US congregations across five denominations—United Methodist Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Presbyterian Church (USA)—to answer this pressing question. They tell stories of excellent and innovative confirmation programs that work and that show, above all, what good discipleship with young people looks like. Youth pastors, church leaders, and parents alike will benefit from the practices and new ways of teaching presented here that have proven helpful in forming and enhancing the faith of youth. 

Contributors: Joy L. Arroyo, Reginald Blount, Kenda Creasy Dean, Katherine M. Douglass, Terri Martinson Elton, Lisa Kimball, Gordon S. Mikoski, Kermit Moss, Richard R. Osmer, Kate Harmon Siberine, Jacob Sorenson, Kate O. Unruh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781467452205

Book preview

Cultivating Teen Faith

Insights from the Confirmation Project

Edited by

RICHARD R. OSMER AND KATHERINE M. DOUGLASS

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Courth SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

© 2018 Richard R. Osmer and Katherine M. Douglass

All rights reserved

Published 2018

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 181 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-0-8028-7660-7

eISBN 978-1-4674-5220-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Osmer, Richard Robert, 1950- editor. | Douglass, Katherine M., 1981- editor.

Title: Cultivating teen faith : insights from the confirmation project / edited by Richard R. Osmer and Katherine M. Douglass.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025302 | ISBN 9780802876607 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Church work with teenagers. | Confirmation. | Church membership.

Classification: LCC BV4447 .C85 2018 | DDC 265/.20973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025302

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

Foreword

KENDA CREASY DEAN

Acknowledgments

Introduction

KENDA CREASY DEAN AND KATHERINE M. DOUGLASS

1.Learning in the Image of God

Encountering God in Body, Mind, Spirit, and Relationship

KATHERINE M. DOUGLASS AND GORDON S. MIKOSKI

2.Mentoring

Building Deep Relationships That Matter in Confirmation

LISA KIMBALL AND KATE HARMON SIBERINE

3.Deep Rhythms of Faith Formation

Separation and Reintegration in Summer Camp and Retreats

KERMIT MOSS AND JACOB SORENSON

4.Parents and Confirmation

The Role of Families in Faith Formation

JOY L. ARROYO AND KATE O. UNRUH, WITH KATHERINE M. DOUGLASS

5.A Spirit-Led People

Traditioned Innovation for Confirmation in Congregations and Denominations

REGINALD BLOUNT AND GORDON S. MIKOSKI

6.A Summary of Our Findings

Theology and Empirical Research in Conversation

TERRI MARTINSON ELTON AND RICHARD R. OSMER

7.The Confirmation Project as Practical Theology

Embodying Faith in Contemporary Christian Life

KATHERINE M. DOUGLASS AND RICHARD R. OSMER

Appendix: The Confirmation Project Opinion Questionnaire

Bibliography

Contributors

Notes

Index

Foreword

The word confirm comes from two Latin roots: firmare, to make strong or steadfast, and con, together. In other words, confirmation means to make strong or steadfast, together.

We can work with that.

The Confirmation Project is the largest study of confirmation practices ever undertaken in the United States. How do churches help young people strengthen their faith? How do congregations come together to help youth become steadfast in their commitment to God—or, more accurately, help them recognize and experience God’s steadfast commitment to them? Of course, congregations have both helped and hindered such experiences for centuries, often without practicing confirmation at all. Yet the practice of confirmation—theologically, a practice that recognizes God’s gift of divine grace aimed at strengthening one’s commitment to, and ability to, live out one’s baptismal identity—remains a time-honored rite of passage for teenagers in many American congregations.

Does confirmation actually strengthen young people’s faith? Does the practice of confirmation matter? The research from the three-year multidenominational Confirmation Project pointed to one confident conclusion: it does. Amidst much hand-wringing about the state of adolescent faith in American culture (one recent study using data collected from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk found that out of eleven options young adults—only a few years after their confirmation years—ranked spirituality as the least important among their core values),¹ scholars scoured the testimonies of thousands of teenagers, parents, and youth ministers and found good news. Young people engaged in confirmation practices were more religiously interested and committed than the rank-and-file American teenager, whose default religiosity has been described as moralistic therapeutic deism.² In short, the practice of confirmation does, in fact, seem to bring young people together in ways that make them stronger and more steadfast in both their faith and lives.

Two caveats are in order. First, while the Confirmation Project studied a national sample of young people, parents, and youth pastors, it did not study a random sample. The study was actually a census, which invited every congregation within each of the denominations to participate. The twenty-four confirmation programs that were visited were also not random. Instead, researchers (full disclosure: I was one of them) intentionally sought out young people who had been confirmed and confirmation programs deemed effective by their denominations and church leaders. In other words, people observing these programs believed that they accomplished something good in the lives of the young people, though what good looked like turned out to be wilder and woolier than many of their champions had expected.

The second caveat is the simple recognition that, unlike some countries in Europe, where confirmation functions as a civic or cultural rite of passage as well as a religious one for the majority, just under half (46 percent) of Christian American teenagers go through a confirmation program.³ As American religiosity becomes increasingly personalized, and as American church life becomes decentered from the mainstream culture, so too does the experience of being confirmed in a faith tradition. Making a personal commitment to God is often perceived as profession enough, to the extent that many congregations—particularly those that engage in believer baptism or that are part of nondenominational networks—do not offer confirmation at all. In many congregations, youth ministry as a whole functions as a de facto confirmation program, where teenagers’ experiences in youth groups, camps, mission trips, and so on provide a communal faith strengthening workout analogous to confirmation, down to the recognition that the Holy Spirit seals the deal by imparting grace in these experiences (without requiring that a worshipping community be present to witness it).

This means that, in the United States, young people who do go through confirmation may find their faith strengthened because they were already religious to begin with—or at least they had faithful parents who cared enough to sign them up for confirmation. Given the high correlation between parents and teenagers in terms of religiosity,⁴ it stands to reason that young people whose parents think religion is important enough to schlep them to confirmation class would, in turn, find that the practice strengthens their faith. At the same time, some practices do seem to play a powerful role in shaping faith. Testimony, worship, servanthood, searching Scripture, and prayer all come to mind; all of these practices are potent identity-formers, and they all factor into the confirmation process across traditions in various ways.

So the question is, "Does God use confirmation in some way that prevents it from being merely a tool that socializes religious young people into congregations they already love?" In other words, is confirmation, like practices of prayer, or worship, or self-giving generosity, a way young people can participate in the life of God and not merely in the life of good people gathered in God’s name? Is confirmation, like other faith practices, a means of divine grace, an occasion when God imparts holy power to make living a life that looks like Jesus’s life more possible—a life marked by love, and courage, and mercy, yes, but also by a concerning disregard for mainstream power structures, and a worrying willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s friends?

I wish, as a parent, I had signed up my kids for confirmation to help them look more like Jesus. I didn’t. I wanted them to experience a congregation who loved them, to appreciate the tradition in which they were being raised, and to have some other faithful adults to turn to for that inevitable moment when Mom and Dad (mostly Mom) became too insufferable to manage. In sixth grade, our son Brendan dutifully went through the motions, endured an emotional confirmation service that moved his mom more than it moved him, and today is a very thoughtful none.⁵ By the time it was our daughter’s turn, we were in a different community and a different church, but Shannon also dutifully went through the motions, endured a sterile confirmation class, bonded with a wonderful faith mentor, and then refused to be confirmed in the end.

This event led our family to a far messier, but much livelier, congregation where—without telling her parents—Shannon asked to be confirmed by a pastor. Since it was a congregation of about twenty members, and Shannon was the only confirmand, a seminarian attending the church volunteered to walk her through a confirmation process. As I recall, it involved lots of bubble tea dates and conversations about John Wesley amidst the whir of two sewing machines at either end of our dining room table, as Wendy and Shannon sewed bags for refugee kits. When Shannon thought she was ready to be confirmed, Wendy disagreed, refusing to recommend her until she thought Shannon knew better what she was getting into. Today, being a practicing Christian matters a great deal to Shannon. If you ask her about an occasion when she truly experienced the presence of God, she will tell you about the time an entire congregation (all twenty-two of us) laid hands on her at the altar on the day she was confirmed.

Was it God, or was it Wendy? Was it a family or a tiny congregation that surrounded her with love, or was it also the Holy Spirit who confirmed her faith as Shannon opened herself to receive God’s gift of grace? What strengthened Shannon’s faith that day—the triune community of God or the human community of a church? Or were all of these things at play? Is confirmation, like other practices that have taken shape in the church over the centuries, a human ritual that forms us into recognizable members of the Christian family tree? Or is it also, like other practices that have taken shape in the church over the centuries, a crack in the heavens where we hear God claim us: This is my beloved daughter, with whom I am well pleased? Is confirmation merely a personal decision to join a church community or to live one’s life for God? Or is it also a rite that leaves the door open for the Holy Spirit to enter our lives so that we, like Mary (theotokos), become God-bearers in our own right?

Questions like these lurk beneath the surface of this book, because confirmation practices take place amidst countless tensions: liminality and immersion, tradition and innovation, instruction and formation, parents and pastors, divine grace and human determination, communities of belonging and communities of disruption. All are part of Jesus’s story and therefore part of our story too when we participate in the life of God. Strengthening young people’s faith is a task that lies well beyond the capacity of mere mortals; God confirms, not us. Rather than creating programs designed to shape young people into the mini-me’s we secretly and deeply hope they will become, the best we can do, if we’re honest, is create learning environments rich in opportunities to encounter the holy, ponder the favor God greets us with, and choose to profess, or not, our willingness to place ourselves at God’s disposal.

Youth ministry has begun a long overdue shift that veers away from high-octane programming towards what I call the slow youth ministry movement, in which impact matters more than activity, mentoring matters more than youth group, and practices like prayer, and service, and fasting, and justice—things that help young people recognize God’s presence among them—are what we aim for, with youth programs serving only as means to that end. This shift, of course, is not a trend but a return: this is how ministry was always done before we bathed it in therapeutic consumerism. The point, after all, is not to get teenagers to come to confirmation or any other analogous youth program. The goal is to get teenagers to recognize God’s confirmation of them and to profess their desire to live their lives dusting for divine fingerprints in the world. All the camps, classes, service projects, and mentoring in the world cannot make faith more steadfast apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, whose unstoppable presence will not be deterred by parental good intentions or ecclesial malpractice. The Holy Spirit can, however, be given more space, and confirmation is a space-making practice. If Scripture is any indication, God seems to take special delight in working through young people to enter the world: emboldening them with grace, confirming their call as God’s beloved ones, sending them into the world as the Body of Christ. Thanks be to God—they do not shy away.

KENDA CREASY DEAN

Ocean Grove, New Jersey

May 29, 2018

1. G. Metzler, M. Krogstad, P. Yost, J. Keuss, and M. Allison, Church Differentiators: The Unique Role of Faith Communities for Young Adults, (unpublished paper, Department of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington, 2018).

2. See Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

3. Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 46.

4. This is a major finding of Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, among others.

5. Cf. Pew Research Center, Nones on the Rise, (Oct. 9, 2012), http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/.

Acknowledgments

This book represents over five years of collaborative, joyful work by a team of faithful researchers. The work of practical theology involves not only gathering empirical data but also theological reflection, interdisciplinary dialogue, and constructive practical theology. In addition to the authors of this book, our research team included Peter Bauck, Sylvia Bull, Neil Christians, Jessicah Duckworth, Wesley Ellis, Kelsey Faul, Kristie Finley, Shonda S. Gladden, Annie LeCluyse, Julie Peterson, Rollie Martinson, Charissa Mikoski, Johnathon Reinink, Caroline Newman Sell, and Samuel Yenn-Batah. Kristie Finley was also our outstanding project manager and the glue that held this project together. Our research was enriched through consultation with William F. Lewis and Kate C. Prickett. Sarah Hong ensured that our logos and online publications were clear and beautiful. Sarah Bixler helped to edit and compile the final manuscript, as well as put together the bibliography at the end of the book. The Smart Church Project cofounders, Brian Miller and Michael Geweke, created and curated an engaging online presence and active community around this project.

A special thanks to Chris Coble and the Lilly Endowment, Inc., who funded this research. We also want to thank President Craig Barnes, the Board of Princeton Theological Seminary, and Caryl Chambers for hosting this project and providing support every step of the way.

This book reports the findings from the Confirmation Project, which gathered information about confirmation and equivalent faith formation practices in congregations across five denominations through a national survey and congregational or camp visits. The national survey had nearly seven thousand parent, youth, and leader respondents. We used a research method called portraiture to visit and report on twenty-four congregations and camps involved in confirmation and equivalent faith formation practices. If you are interested in this dimension of the project, please see chapters six and seven. The full portraits of the congregations and camps we visited are available at www.theconfirmationproject.com/gallery.

This book is dedicated to youth who risk vulnerability, challenge tradition, and ask the hardest questions—all in pursuit of knowing the one who created and loves them. May God bless these youth as they follow their Savior.

Introduction

KENDA CREASY DEAN AND KATHERINE M. DOUGLASS

A voice cries out in the wilderness: ALL CLEAR?

ALL CLEAR!

Then: Woohoooo! And with a progressively louder z-z-zz-zz-zzz-Z-ZZ-ZZZ-ZZZ! legs, elbows, hair, face—flush and flailing and alive with giddy delight—burst through the branches, swoop behind the altar, and fly past a rough-cut cross on a zip line.

At Lutherlyn, a Lutheran (ELCA) camp nestled in the forested hills of western Pennsylvania, this is confirmation.

The exuberant life we saw on display in confirmation programs across the United States and the inertia that weighs down many American congregations on Sunday mornings almost defy comparison. To be sure, for our research for the Confirmation Project, we looked for life-giving confirmation ministries, where young people were being ushered into lives of discipleship in meaningful, three-dimensional ways. The good news is, we found them—lots of them. Not every Christian community practices confirmation with young people (which is why we asked churches to tell us about confirmation or equivalent practices)—and among communities that do engage youth in confirmation, the practice has many different meanings.¹ Of course, some confirmation programs struggle, and many—very many—confirmation leaders wonder if they are making a dent in young people’s faith over the long haul. Yet despite churches’ complaints that they feel close to death, in the five denominations we studied (the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church) confirmation and its equivalent practices are alive and well.

Confirmation is a practice and rite of the church most often associated with God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, a gift given to every disciple to empower that disciple for the life of ministry.² In the East, confirmation generally follows immediately after baptism (called chrismation). In the West, however, Protestants—especially those who practice infant baptism—tend to understand confirmation, and the gift of the Holy Spirit, as sealing the promises of baptism, affirming or confirming the baptismal vows. In this way, Christians understand confirmation to be a means of grace. It is sacramental (some Episcopalians still view confirmation as a stand-alone sacrament of the church, rather than a pastoral office as the Book of Common Prayer defines it) in that God uses this very human practice as a sacred portal, an opening for the Holy Spirit to enter the world and bestow upon us the grace necessary to live as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Historically, Protestants look to confirmation as the beginning of youth ministry. Although as a rite it has always been available to adults and, in the Eastern Church, chrismation is part of the infant baptism ritual, confirmation and its equivalent practices normally focus on young people. Especially after the Reformation, when catechisms became associated with the Christian formation of children, confirmation became one context in which pastors seriously addressed young people’s theological questions. That said, one of the key findings of our research—underscored in this book—is that not all confirmation ministries are created equal. In human hands, every practice of faith can either clarify or obfuscate God’s presence. Just as there are better (and worse) practices of preaching and prayer and teaching, there are more (and less) effective approaches to confirmation. In fact, if we were to boil down the central finding of the Confirmation Project’s research into one sentence, it would be this: confirmation fulfills its faith-forming potential most effectively when it is approached not as a program with requirements to tick off but as a process of formation that is connected in multiple ways to the broader congregation’s relationships, practices, traditions, and experiences. In other words, confirmation and its equivalent practices are best understood as part of an ecology, a collaboration of many systems—families, congregational relationships, educational curricula, worship, camps, and conferences—that are all focused toward one end: the formation of disciples.

In short, confirmation ministries that significantly shape young people’s faith cannot be reduced to a one-time program or experience. The confirmand, instead, is more of an apprentice, someone intentionally immersed in a community where people are rowing together toward God, and they must ready new rowers. We found ourselves resorting to metaphors to get at the significance of this radically immersive experience. Confirmation, some of us said, seemed to function more like a trapeze school than a Sunday school, offering multiple ways to swing alone or with a partner, opportunities to take risks and fly, with the net of a supportive Christian community underneath to catch you if the trapeze rigging fails. Others on our team preferred biological metaphors, and thought of confirmation, like the body of Christ itself, as consisting of multiple essential organs that can function only because of the network of arteries and veins that connects them. We run into trouble when we emphasize the importance of kidneys and hearts and neglect the all-important systems that connect them—forgetting that these organs can work only when blood flows between them. Likewise, confirmation programs really work well only when the systems that connect them to the broader faith community are strong and the vessels that bring life to the whole body carry God’s life-giving Spirit into the practice of confirmation as well.

As we began to reflect on all we have learned through our research, a new metaphor emerged based on the insight that confirmation and equivalent discipleship ministries function like a prism. They are multifaceted and refract divine light into the lives of youth. Like a prism, the light emerges from youth differently than it entered. This is one of the most amazing things about a prism. A clear beam of light passes in; a rainbow of color passes out. A plurality of colors has been there all along, but only now can it be seen. In our research, we have discovered some of the facets of faith formation in confirmation. Each refracts the divine light in different ways. These facets include passionate leaders, creative teachers, trusted mentors, immersive camp experiences, and faithful parents.

An Introduction to the Confirmation Project

The Confirmation Project was a three-year study of more than three thousand US congregations across five denominations (the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church [USA], and the United Methodist Church). You can read more about our methodology in chapter seven, but we used mixed-methods research, gathered both quantitative and qualitative data, and even had our own international hacking scandal to add to the drama (that’s in chapter seven, too). But while these data inform every paragraph you are about to read, this book is not primarily about data. Our aim is to highlight the stories of twenty-four congregations that in some ways stand out, and in some ways are quite ordinary, that are helping us rethink the historic, and surprisingly resilient, practice of confirmation as they shape the faith of the young people they love.³

The big story here is diversity: there is no such thing as a typical confirmation ministry in the United States. Every congregation that we visited had a particular identity, a particular culture, a particular theological lens, and, therefore, a particular stake in forming young people’s faith in particular ways. The leaders of the very best confirmation programs were quite aware of this. Their programs were custom designed and richly textured with local flavor:

A coffee shop ministry, birthed as a United Methodist church plant for young adults in Dallas, jettisoned the word confirmation altogether, and—using a process reminiscent of the ancient catechumenate—invites college students to recommit their lives to Jesus through a confirmation-like process every year!

A thriving African Methodist Episcopal church in Las Vegas is reclaiming confirmation as a ministry that lay dormant, deep in the memory of the AME church, for decades.

A Korean American Presbyterian church in New York assigns homework as a part of confirmation and has student-led discussions each week based on the new Presbyterian Study Catechism.

A white, liberal Episcopal church in Fort Collins does confirmation with parents who learn about faith alongside youth.

An urban, multiethnic Lutheran congregation in Tacoma provides a haven for youth in a setting where gangs are active.

An enormous, predominantly white church in Kansas City publishes a workbook for the two hundred families who are sending their youth through confirmation each year so that they can learn what their kids are learning.

And so on. Every congregation and confirmation ministry—small, medium, large, or mega—is thoroughly unique. For some, confirmation is a very big deal, a signature experience in the life of a church. For others, it is a small, somewhat unusual moment knit into a larger tapestry of congregational belonging.

Surprises, No-Brainers, and Conundrums

Using a qualitative research methodology known as portraiture, we came to understand each church through narratives, physical observation, and the personalities of those we met. We had to learn to balance elements of context, thematic structure, relationships, and voice in order to gain a cohesive understanding of each program we observed.⁴ We also gathered survey data from thousands of leaders, parents, and youth. This interdisciplinary research method led to some surprises—one of which was that, on the whole, youth were quite motivated to participate in confirmation and its equivalent practices. We were also surprised by the reasons for this motivation. Of all possible motivating factors—religious, social, or parental expectations, and so on—the large majority of young people are motivated to go through confirmation for faith reasons (see figure I.1). In fact, the two most common factors that youth agreed motivated them to be involved with confirmation were to be strengthened in my faith and to learn more about God and faith. About half the students were also motivated by various