The last two years
on Confirmation Sunday we’ve read about Solomon’s Temple, which is a nice bit of scripture for
Confirmation because it provides an opportunity to talk about the difference
between church buildings and being
the church. But today we have something even better: this early story of
Solomon as ruler over Israel
is the perfect opportunity to talk about something that is sincerely lacking in
our confirmation curriculum: the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
The truth is: we
have a Confirmation problem. We have a system that does a wonderful job of
keeping youth in the building for these few years and a terrible job of
cultivating lifelong faith formation. If you look at the data, ELCA Lutherans
have a higher percentage of Junior High kids in a church learning environment
than any other major church body in the United States. 70% of our youth in
grades 7-9 are involved in Christian Education; that’s more than any other
denomination, period. Locally, we’re even higher than that. Right now, at Grace-Red River we have 100% involvement in Christian
Education amongst our Junior High kids. We can pat ourselves on the back for
that.
Oh, but there’s
one little problem. As a church body on the whole, we’re first amongst Junior High
participation, but last in
High School participation. And we’re nearly last (ahead of only the UCC) in
adult participation. This is astounding if you think about it. There’s a cliff
at the end of Confirmation where we seem to say, “So long! Good luck! That’s
all the education you’re getting until you die and go to heaven. Hope you’ve
got your books of the Bible memorized for when you get there!” We’ve done such
a good job of teaching our confirmands that they don’t have to do a thing to
earn their salvation that they have said, “OK, thanks. Bye now.” And that’s it.
Our practice has been to teach you things during
your Junior High years when studies have shown that this is when you will
absorb the absolute least amount of information of any point in your life; the
time where your hormones are raging, your bodies are changing, and your brains are
quite literally checked out. We’ve chosen that time to load you up with
knowledge about the faith. Sure, we have good reasons for it. It seems like an
appropriate time to respond to your baptism. You can finally begin to think for
yourselves (as we know all 8th and 9th graders are models
of individuality </sarcasm>). And what’s happened over time is that we
have young people who not only do not know anything about the faith (because
we’ve tried to pack knowledge into heads that can’t hold it), but they also
have no wisdom because in our hurry to pack in that knowledge we’ve had no time
to actually practice faith. Instead of faith we teach doctrine, but even the
doctrine we teach is generally shallow, so information-based, and so little
lived that we might as well have been teaching them how to cook communion
bread.