Confirming Faith, Building Community

CONFIRMING FAITH

Building Community

BY MELANIE JACKSON, CONFIRMATION COORDINATOR

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

had been exposed to a Jewish service. Much of the conversation centered on not only the Jewish faith but also the Jewish community and how they support and love not just one another but our world. The next day, we visited the Holocaust and Human Rights Museum in downtown Dallas. The museum does an outstanding job of pointing out who the upstanders were during this time - who stood up for what was right, who gave a helping hand when all seemed hopeless. Once again, they saw how community matters. Community carries us in time of pain. Community is whom we can rely on when we can’t rely on ourselves.

I’m very happy that we were once again able to have Confirmation class after not being together the year before. A community, especially one of faith, is not something to be taken lightly. These kids had to relearn that concept of community, what it means to worship together, and to rely on the people around them. Slowly but surely, we are rebuilding our community in Confirmation. We ask the kids to participate in worship, to do community service, to understand one other, and most importantly to be at church. All of these are aspects of a healthy community that we now understand is vital to our well-being and sometimes even our humanity.

This year’s Confirmands hold a special place in my heart as I relearned lessons I thought I knew but that I now understand with more clarity. They’ve challenged me to understand and re-engage with my church community as a vital aspect of my faith. Faith does not stand alone; it stands alongside one another, and as these Confirmands move forward into their own faith journeys, I hope they know that FUMCR is always alongside them in their faith, no matter the doubts or the questions. They have community here in us, and this church is always here to remind them they are important, they are special, and they are loved. Confirmation teaches many things about our Methodist faith, but the most important of these is love given in small tokens of appreciation, which in this case was a small, green origami heart.