In providing a theologically based plan for ministry, I would like to focus on our confirmation program because it provides a unique ministry opportunity. Parents and students tend to treat confirmation as having great importance. Confirmation also presents an opportunity to lay the groundwork of lifelong faith because of the age that it occurs in our church, seventh and eighth grade. Thus, I see the reworking of confirmation as the most poignant location for trying to modify our ministry in relation to the contextual issues and theological convictions espoused above.

Currently, confirmation fits the widespread education-style paradigm, with heavy emphasis on Bible and doctrinal teaching and discussion. However, if Christian faith is best described as trust in Jesus (rather than in truth-claims), relational place-sharing (instead of programmatic efficacy), and concerned with action (as opposed to only right thinking), then some change is in order. The primary action I would like to put in place is the inclusion of adult mentors within the confirmation program. These mentors would be assigned one or two students as they enter confirmation and be charged with being the primary minister to their specific teenagers. Where this idea goes beyond typical conceptions of relational ministry and attempts to truly attend to the humanity of the teenagers is by continuing the mentoring relationship at least through the high school graduation of the adolescent. Instead of a one- or two-year mentoring relationship that is entered into as a requirement for the program, the mentor and the teen are given the time and space to develop a relationship outside of the programmatic emphasis of confirmation.

One of the goals of the mentoring relationship will be for the mentor to ask the adolescent to articulate their Christian faith in a meaningful way as it relates to their lives and situations. This should help to correct the troubling statement made by researchers in the National Study of Youth and Religion: “it was our distinct sense that for many of the teens we interviewed, our interview was the first time that any adult had ever asked them what they believed and how it mattered in their life.”

As adolescence is naturally a time of individuation, these mentors can provide some adult wisdom and guidance during a time when teenagers are naturally pulling away from their parents. Teenagers are not afraid of adult input and advice, but they are often wary to find it from within their own family systems. Since adolescence is a common life-stage for a person to experience an ex nihilo event (divorce of a parent, loss of a grandparent, rejection in school, breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend) the mentor will already be in place and ready to become a place-sharer during such times.

These relationships would also foster accountability in another new addition to the confirmation curriculum: Christian practices. Rather than teaching Bible studies on prayer, mentors would pray with their pupils. Rather than teaching about reconciliation, mentors would guide students into reconciled relationships with their friends and parents. Rather than speaking about helping one’s neighbor, mentors and confirmands would serve side-by-side on mission trips and service projects. The mentoring relationship will go a long way to move Christian formation out of an education-based model of ministry and towards a concrete, practice-based model of ministry.

These relationships should continue regardless of the student’s behavior or participation in the church community after confirmation age. Openness to these teenagers must be unconditional because, as Miroslav Volf says, “the will to give ourselves to others and ‘welcome’ them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity.” If the church is to offer the eschatological hope of Jesus Christ, it must also be willing to embody such hope in the act of place-sharing. Since the church is the location of God’s action in the world, “[b]efore adolescents can take seriously the gospel’s claim that Jesus will ‘be there’ always, a community of affirming others must ‘be there’ for them, demonstrating steadfast love on their behalf.”