CO N F I R M I N G FA I T H Building Community B Y M E L A N I E JA C K S O N , CO N F I R M AT I O N CO O R D I N ATO R
As I sit in my desk chair and try to formulate the words for this article, my eyes find a small green origami heart sitting next to my keyboard. One of my Confirmands gave me this heart at the Confirmation Worship Service in April. It is a small token, but it reminds me of our year - lessons on John Wesley, grace, prayer, the Gospels, the Wesleyan quadrilateral, baptism, and then finally how all that relates to being Confirmed. But most importantly, I am reminded what is at the heart of Confirmation: community. Each year, Confirmands spend an entire school year studying what it means to be a Methodist. This includes asking very real questions about God, organized religion, and why faith matters. This past year especially, these questions became poignant as the teachers and I realized that these kids were embarking on a different journey than before. They had questions and doubts, and they expressed a lot of wonder about what we were teaching them, but they were also doing this after having missed over a year of their childhood worshiping in the sanctuary or the worship & arts center or attending Sunday school. Some of the students had been attending church online, but many had not stepped foot in the building for over a year before coming to Confirmation. We not only had to teach them about our Methodist faith, but we also had to go back to why we need faith at all and what a church community offers, especially entering the tumultuous teenage years. These lessons hit home even more when we went on our Confirmation retreat in March. We visited Congregation Beth Torah for a Friday evening Shabbat service. We were welcomed with open arms to their service and then were allowed to ask questions of their faith while feasting on homemade, traditional Jewish cookies and an extremely moist chocolate cake. There were numerous questions as not many of our students
