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.
A lot of the kids in our youth program at St. John’s in Oakland had been going to friends’ bar and bat mitzvah services and asked us why they couldn’t have a party after confirmation. We thought, well, why not? And why couldn’t they invite friends to come and celebrate this event in their lives? And why couldn’t they stand up and recite a Bible passage and say what it means to them? And why couldn’t they receive some symbolic gift of their taking their place as leaders of the assembly? And thus the iConfirm service was born. Although at the time and for a number of years we called it “Confirmitzvah.” (“Why ‘Confirmitzvah’?” Scott Denman was asked. “Because it sounded better than ‘Barfirmation,’” he said.)
The party is not the main part, though. The main thing is that whatever they’ve learned and gained from the program and their thoughts is heard and respected. And that goes for everyone, whether or not they’re being confirmed. Some kids think if they don’t want to be confirmed, they don’t need to go through the iConfirm service. It needs to be reiterated that these are separate. The iConfirm part of the service is not the confirmation itself, but the part of the service where the kids’ work is recognized. Whether or not they are getting confirmed, all of the kids have worked hard to get to this point and that needs to be acknowledged for everyone.
The biggest part of this is the part of the service where the kids recite the Bible passage they have memorized and talk about why they chose it and what they learned from it. The kids, when they’re told that they’re going to give their Bible passage and teach on it, they think it’s going to be 20 minutes and they panic. Let them know it’s only three minutes.
But it’s not just off the top of their head when they teach. Both the mentor and the staff need to hear why they chose it; you may need to help them tweak it. “Because I like it and I felt sad that day” may have drawn them to it, but you need to help them articulate why they like it and what they learned because of it. The fact that our kids are teaching us and others is really poignant, and yet there’s that fine line between letting them say whatever they want and helping them say what they mean. It goes back to that first lesson of writing their own gospel, the “Well, I like baseball” moment. It’s outlining what this means to them further than just “I believe in freedom of speech.”
When they finally do get up there to recite and teach, the parents will be shocked. It’s not just a rewarding experience for the kids, but for their parents, to see their kids say something thoughtful and interesting and not just roll their eyes. (I can hear my daughter roll her eyes over the phone now.) You’ll be shocked, too, when you hear what they have to say. You won’t believe how insightful they are. You’ll learn something, too.
OK, that’s enough for now, but more on the details will be coming up. Hang in there!