Cultivating Teen Faith

Insights from the Confirmation Project

Richard R. Osmer, Katherine M. Douglass, Richard R. Osmer, Katherine M. Douglass

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802876607
• eBook ISBN: 9781467452199
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

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.

CHAPTER 1

Learning in the Image of God

Encountering God in Body, Mind, Spirit, and Relationship

KATHERINE M. DOUGLASS AND GORDON S. MIKOSKI

A Picture of Holistic Faith Formation

Pink, green, yellow, red, and blue picados (banners with snowflake-like cutouts) were strung around the room for the Dia de los Muertos celebration.¹ Latinx² youth with floral bouquets and white dresses or trim suits and patent leather shoes were the most relaxed out of the fifteen youth and five adults from six congregations gathered for this confirmation service at St. James Episcopal Church in Oakland, California. The youth from St. James stood against the walls, talking to one another in English while their parents straightened their hair or buttoned a suit while addressing them in Spanish. When Bishop Marc arrived, youth and adult confirmands from other churches in the Bay area jumped at the chance to help set up folding chairs before making a name tag and shifting straight into the confirmation service.

In the redwoods of Sonoma County, “eco-confirmation” links youth and adult confirmands to the passage of time with a cosmic orientation to environmental activism that is rooted in the waters of baptism and the words of John’s Gospel. This new orientation began in 2014 and drew national attention. That first year, the confirmation service included a fourteen-mile hike that raised awareness about climate change along with money for health camps. Since this shift, the bishop has retained a cosmic orientation, grounded in Scripture, and linked with activism. For the confirmation service,

A large basin of water, sitting in the center of a spiral of red rope on the ground, was blessed before an abridged version of the history of the universe was read. The red rope emphasized the presence of the Holy Spirit for the occasion of confirmation.

The Prologue to John’s Gospel began the stations of the Cosmic Walk, and after the lesson from John, a reader shared the story of the Great Flaring Forth at the beginning of time. Other events noted in the history included the creation of stars, galaxies, and our sun; the formation of the Earth’s atmosphere; the appearance of redwoods; Jesus’ birth; and the founding of St. Dorothy’s Rest. At each station a walker poured water from the baptismal basin into bowls marking the passage of time between each event.³

Rosa, the youngest and the only girl in the confirmation class this year, said, “When they started throwing the holy water, I got the chills. And then we walked around everyone and blessed them.”⁴ Jennifer Snow, the associate for discipleship ministries in the diocese of California, knows that making disciples is about much more than the transfer of “Christian information,” and the confirmation service led by Bishop Marc reflected this. In the Episcopal tradition, the bishop confirms youth who are presented by their families or priests. This means that while one congregation hosts the service, many are present and the event is planned at the level of the diocese. According to Jennifer,

Confirmation preparation should be the holistic formation of body and soul. Every confirmation service should be multicultural. Music from around the world shows people they are part of a church that is bigger than the people who are gathered. It should be a celebration of great joy, with a party afterwards, and an element of community service.⁵

Effective faith formation is holistic and grounded in the recognition of the image of God (imago Dei) in each person. This means that the spiritual, bodily, and social reality of an individual and the community within which they are embedded are taken into account as a part of faith formation.

The diocese of California and St. James Episcopal Church were not the only places where our team saw holistic faith formation taking place. In this chapter we give special attention to teaching and learning that is holistic, attending to relationships, ideas, emotions, bodies, and communal realities. Our research indicates that a shift has taken place in confirmation education toward teaching that is collaborative, interactive, and participatory. We hope to clarify the theological and scientific rationale for this shift and point to ways it might become more intentional in the future.

Teaching and Learning as Holistic Learning Faith Formation

New developments in theology concerning the imago Dei as well as the human sciences offer a more holistic way of thinking about teaching and learning for confirmation and equivalent ministries.

New Developments in Theology: Rethinking the Imago Dei

For centuries, Christian teaching about what makes us unique among creatures focused on rational capacities. Theologians and catechetical teachers interpreted the biblical affirmation that we were made “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26) with the ancient Greek philosophical idea that discursive reason distinguishes us from the rest of the animals. To be in the image of God was to be rational. This had enormous implications for a wide range of further beliefs and practices. For instance, this way of thinking about the imago Dei tended to support patriarchy, racism, classism, and colonialism since only adult, white, upper-class European males were thought to have the fullest version of rationality. In addition, this way of thinking about theological anthropology tended to relegate emotions, the body, and cultural differences to secondary status.

This way of thinking had profound implications for the way the basics of Christian faith were learned and taught. Most often, it resulted in forms of direct instruction, like lecture, that emphasized the transmission of abstract ideas from the powerful male pastor to a group of submissive and well-behaved learners. The processes and content of this transmission-oriented approach to teaching basic Christian beliefs and practices tended to reinscribe in adolescent learners beliefs and practices that did more to uphold traditional orders and hierarchies of society than to empower them with the radical and liberating good news of Jesus Christ.

In recent decades, significant developments in both theology and the human sciences have resulted in a fundamental rethinking of the imago Dei. This new orientation has dramatic implications for teaching and learning in confirmation, and it resonates with shifts in confirmation pedagogy we found in our research. First, it underscores the importance of embodiment and emotional engagement along with thinking about concepts when designing learning environments. Second, it brings into sharp focus the relational dimensions of learning.

A resurgence in Trinitarian theology in the twentieth century led to a reappraisal of personhood in both its divine and human forms. Drawing from the dynamic Trinitarian thought of the fourth-century Cappadocian fathers, theologians like Jürgen Moltmann and Catherine Mowry LaCugna brought into bold relief the social character of the three persons of the Trinity.⁶ Each of the divine persons exists in ecstatic relation to the other two persons, yet also with clear differentiation. The mystery of God as revealed to us in creation and Scripture is more like a dynamic dance (perichoresis) of unity among persons than a trickle-down power scheme headed up by the all-powerful, solitary male Zeus of Greek paganism. Greek Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas helps us to see that the mystery of the Trinity understood in Cappadocian terms means that the most fundamental truth of all reality is relational in character.⁷

Moltmann further explored the implications of the revived and revised doctrine of the Trinity for thinking about what it means to be human.⁸ If we are created in the image of God and if that God is Triune, then it makes sense to see human beings as fundamentally relational in character. This means that we, too, exist in dynamic relationship with other persons. In fact, to become a person requires emergence from and participation in a social matrix.

The Cappadocian approach to the Trinity has further implications for the way we understand learners as those who are made in the image of God. One of the divine persons became incarnate in the divine-human Jesus Christ. The word of God became flesh and dwelt among us. God became fully and completely embodied in the humble peasant from Nazareth in the first century of the Common Era. The second person of the Trinity entered into human existence not only in his mind and ideas, but also in his emotions and in the blood that was shed so painfully on the cross. He simultaneously showed us what it means to be God and to be human. The incarnation of the Triune God in Jesus Christ makes a mockery of those forms of ancient Greek anthropology that separated soul from body and emphasized disembodied, abstract rational principles as those which are most fully human or personal. Trinitarian Christology points us to a holistic understanding of what it means to be human in a broader sense and to an approach to Christian learning and teaching that takes account of the body (with all of its gender, racial identity, dis / ability implications) and the emotions in a more pedagogically focused way. We should approach confirmands as learners who are relational, embodied, emotional, and rational creatures. It took a rediscovery of ancient fourth-century theology to precipitate a basic reorientation to theological considerations of what it means to be human and to pedagogical considerations of what it means to learn. Some of our research findings point in this direction as well.

New Developments in the Human Sciences

Parallel with developments toward embodied, interactive, holistic theological anthropology in theology, recent discoveries in several human sciences move in a similar direction. In the field of human evolution, paleoanthropologist Michael Tomasello provides compelling arguments based on available archaeological evidence that what makes humans distinct as a species even from our closest great ape relatives is social cooperation and cognition.⁹ Tomasello and others have shown through carefully controlled experiments that gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos possess reason and logical capabilities like humans do, only on a limited scale. They can make logical inferences (both backward and forward) just like humans, even if only to a lesser degree. These studies of great ape cognition greatly weaken the ancient Greek philosophical notion that reason per se separates us from the animals. According to Tomasello, the thing that truly distinguishes us as a species is our ability to collaborate, to develop and operate with a “theory of mind” in relation to our human partners, and to work from a strong sense of “we.” The truly remarkable thing about humanity is that we collaborate, coordinate, and communicate in ways that have made it possible for us to go to the moon, to engage in synchronized swimming, to develop 3-D printing of human organs for use in life-saving surgeries, and to make music in a jam session. In short, we are relational beings from start to finish. Our design of learning experiences for teaching the basics of Christian belief and practice needs to grapple with this fact of human life and learning.

Equally important are new developments in the field of neuroscience. This field has exploded in the past three decades, particularly with respect to learning how learning works. Setting aside a detailed treatment of the complex brain systems involved in thinking and learning, suffice it to say that neuroscience research has made it abundantly clear that nearly all thinking and learning arise from the panoply of signals continuously sent to the brain from the body. Empirical psychologist Wilma Koutstaal sums up the embodied, even sensory, character of knowing and learning this way:

Even thinking that appears to proceed without any overt reliance on such external aids—such as thinking that is highly abstract—nonetheless builds on foundations of mental concepts that are, at least in part, forged through an individual’s interaction with the concrete world of sights and sounds, and embedded actions within it.¹⁰

Even our most abstract concepts arise from metaphors that are built up from a wealth of bodily sensation and neural processing. Ideas such as “faith,” “hope,” and “love,” for example, only have meaning for learners because they are built upon concepts built up from millions of bodily signals that have been processed and emotionally encoded before being sent to the ideational and conceptual parts of the brain. Perhaps what made genius catechetical teachers like Cyril of Jerusalem, Augustine, and Luther so effective is that they connected basic Christian concepts with ordinary experiences of daily life and made rich use of embodied metaphors.

Neuroscientist and therapist Daniel Siegel holds that there is a necessary interplay between embodied brain and social realities in the emergence of mind.¹¹ The newly emerging field of interpersonal neurobiology to which Siegel has made many important contributions holds that the mind is not reducible to the brain. Instead, the human mind emerges as a kind of harmonic that balances and coordinates embodied emotionality and brain function with social interactions in the environment. In other words, the human mind and, by implication, human learning simply do not function apart from the workings of the body, the richness of emotions, and the complexity of relationships with other people.¹² Instead, thinking and learning depend upon enriched and intentional coordination of each of these component dimensions of distinctively human cognition.

Teaching and Learning in Confirmation Today

“Praise God!” the assembly shouted, then stood in rapt silence as their praises echoed from hill to valley among the evening mists of the Great Smoky Mountains. At Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center in North Carolina, confirmation groups from around the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church come for the “Confirm” retreats, which are so popular that they are held ten times each year. The retreats focus on traditional Methodist content, including the church’s stated core aspects of discipleship: prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. But the pedagogy is interactive and immersive. Participants learn about prayer while singing folk songs. They learn about God’s presence with them while doing trust falls. They learn about their spiritual gifts and identity as children of God as they create their own stoles, which will be presented to them on the day of their confirmation.¹³ These experiential and interactive learning styles strike chords for many young people that echo across their relationships and throughout their lives.

In the research of the Confirmation Project, we discovered that many confirmation leaders are teaching in ways that reflect the new developments in theology and the human sciences—whether they realize it or not. In both our quantitative and qualitative research, we found that ministry leaders are using teaching methods where collaboration, coordination, and communication are central. They are teaching ideas to young people but also evoking their emotions, involving their bodies in learning activities and in practicing the faith, and building relationships in which knowledge is constructed through social interaction.

Figure 1.1 offers an overview of various teaching methods used in confirmation programs today. It shows that 96 percent of ministry leaders use the discussion method of teaching to facilitate learning, a highly communicative and collaborative approach. While 67 percent of confirmation programs still use some form of lecture, there is a clear shift toward teaching methods that create interpersonal learning experiences that are sensitive to the social dynamics of learning. If confirmation in the past strongly emphasized the transmission of cognitive knowledge, this is no longer the case. Confirmation education today clearly is more holistic. Over half of all programs indicated using ten or more of the methods shown in figure 1.1. We view this as a positive trend that might be clarified and improved by attending to the pedagogical implications of the new developments in theology and the human sciences noted above.

Our research also discovered that this trend toward more holistic teaching takes different forms in confirmation education today. We found that congregations tend toward ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• 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