Confirm not Conform

This is one that people forget about, but it’s good to remember to build partnerships with your parish leadership. Especially when Confirm not Conform is a new program, you’re going to want the vestry’s support. Otherwise, when you get to the end of the program and the kids are making their presentation, the vestry will say, “What’s this about?” and it will take a lot longer to get the church leaders to understand and buy in to what you’re doing.

One of the things I am constantly telling mentors is how important they are, but that the kids don’t give a rip about them. Mentors become mentors thinking they’re going to be best friends with the kids. If they keep thinking that, they’re going to be disappointed the first time a kid doesn’t return their phone call or flakes out and doesn’t show up for a meeting.

Laura asked me to blog about what can help you get off to a good start with your CnC program. I think part of it is really educating the parents, mentors, and vestry. I wanted to talk about each of those partnerships with a short post, starting with the parents.

In general, I think it’s really important to find the time to provide an education for the parents about what you’re doing, and that’s hard to do because they think they know. And then the year starts to get super busy and suddenly you’re getting calls from parents saying, “Why did I sign up for this? It’s so time-consuming.”

Last week I wrote about some practical suggestions for running the CnC retreat and promised I’d talk more about the interpersonal stuff. Here’s the thing: even if all of the activities you do totally bomb and the youth still bond with one another, then congratulations, you’ve had a good retreat!

Really, the overall goal here for the retreat is not so much the information as that the youth will bond with one another. So here are 6 suggestions for making that more likely to happen.

The first thing to know about the retreat is not to panic. The material that we have for the retreat is put together in such a way that you really don’t need to worry about it. It’s all right there. That being said, here are some suggestions on the practical side of things to have a successful retreat. I’ll have another entry later with thoughts on the interpersonal dynamics and how to have a successful retreat with that.

Those of you just starting out with the CnC program may wonder what kind of impact this has in the long run. Does it keep kids in church? But maybe there’s a bigger question of what do the kids who have been in our youth groups and confirmation classes need from us once they are young adults, so that’s what I want to talk about.

One of our CnC alums (who is heading off to seminary) and I sat down and thought about who was part of the parish as a youth and are now living back in town as adults. We tracked them down on email or by Facebook and got them together just to talk.

Just to tell you where I’m coming from: I’ve been teaching CnC for probably 10 years now. Every year I’ve talked the talk about how youth and parents need to make a commitment to attend CnC classes. Yes, youth are busy; yes, they have soccer and drama and all the rest. But if they want be part of the CnC program, they need to make the commitment to be there.

And now my daughter is old enough to be in CnC and I’ve had to walk the walk.

OK, so I talked about the very basics of the iConfirm service and then why we do it this way. Now I want to talk about some of the real nitty-gritty details about the stuff in the service, stuff we’ve learned through trial and error so you won’t have to.

Basic behavior

Hey, there, Happy Easter, everyone! I hope it was great but now I know you’re all ready to get going on the rest of your confirmation program. Deep breath! It’s all going to be OK.

Before Easter, I gave you some very basic stuff about the iConfirm service: the who, what, where stuff. Today I want to tell you a little about the why and the how.

One of the big differences between Confirm not Conform and other confirmations you've done is the iConfirm service. The iConfirm service is different from a confirmation service, though it can include the confirmation itself. The iConfirm service is more a chance to focus on the kids and what they have learned and thought about during the CnC program. It's maybe the biggest opportunity the congregation has to hear their voice and celebrate the work they've done. Good planning makes things less stressful for everyone and makes the iConfirm service the celebratory event it's meant to be.