Tag Archives: Discernment

Not Gatekeepers, but Gateopeners

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There, squirming in such a comfortable chair, made to feel prickly by the moment and its intensity and not the leather or the cushion, it is not my ass, but my brain that is jittery.

As a priest, interviews are a whole different beast.

This moment, as I recall was the most agonizing for what it did to my weak mind and strong heart. Crippled by conviction. Angered by intention. And my adversary doesn’t cut the imposing figure. I have nearly a foot on her and easily outweigh her by 100 pounds. But it is her logic, her sharpness, that carves me up and serves me in seconds.

She takes my resume, my writings, and she picks out words that clearly hint at my theological leanings. Words like “prophetic” and “transformation” reveal to her what container to place me in. And she swiftly dispatches with my protests, as she closes the lid, having so easily stuffed my body into so small a box.

My arguments are weak. I am unprepared. My need to defend my convictions atrophied from lack of use.

Then the humiliation turns, and I realize she isn’t intending to eviscerate me, but open me. Reveal me. Perhaps to her curious brain as a sort of dissection. Perhaps more so to the room itself, that the true me might by psychically revealed, disembodied, so that the two of us might examine my theology, my practice, my very faith.

I recall the sudden rush of joy as the truth of her new line of questioning becomes clear: I will leave here changed.

It seemed simple enough, a question about confirmation preparation, I think. She asks, not so much the specifics of what I do, but the character and expectation. I am riding high from the discerning process for confirmation in Western Michigan and was convinced that we needed more training and conviction around the sacrament.

Then she asks

“What about baptism?”

She pauses.

“If the Spirit brings someone in to be baptized, I say we baptize them on the spot.”

My heart rescued my poor brain, as she introduced a fidelity to the very nature of the sacraments lost to most of our teaching. An idea of Spirit-led discernment and consistency, that I didn’t recognize in my own sacramental theology. In turning from confirmation to baptism, she exposed my own flawed understanding and hypocrisy.

She injected me with a dangerous idea. And it spread through me.

What if we are less controlling of the sacraments and more spontaneous? What if our expectations for “preparation” matched our belief in the Holy Spirit? And what if we treated each of the sacraments (and sacramental rites) as if they were not human controlled, but Spirit-led?

What if we stopped being gatekeepers and started being gateopeners?

It is what my generous heart has longed for the whole time.

 

Check out last week’s series on the sacraments

What It Takes To Be Family

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a Homily for Proper 5B

Text: Mark 3:20-35

Jesus is surrounded. He’s trapped. No way out.

This morning’s story opens with a claustrophobic scene. This enormous crowd that has been following Jesus is getting out of hand. He has already feared getting trampled. Now they are closing He and his disciples in. They can’t go anywhere. He can’t leave or do anything. He is trapped.

Then some Jewish leaders, who have heard that Jesus is home, come down to badmouth Him to the crowd. The crowd has already started wondering if Jesus has gone off his rocker. But they go further than “Yo’ Mama” jokes and stories about messing around with interns. They say Jesus has gone crazy—because the devil got in.

Jesus just wants to eat lunch with his disciples, and they can’t even do that. So He stands up and he starts teaching. This is a strange moment, but see the tension in it: one group of people is outside the circle. They are impugning the character of Jesus and are desperate for more miracles and personal saving. Inside the circle are Jesus and his closest followers, simply trying to take a break and have lunch. This is a highly symbolic moment of outside and inside. And into this division and strife wades Jesus’s family. His mother, his brothers and sisters, and they come and call to Jesus.

I imagine them saying: “We’re here, Sweetheart! Let’s go home! We’ll keep you safe! Just come home with us.”

My loving family

This request must be tempting. I’d be tempted. Go home. Escape this craziness.

Jesus doesn’t. He flips the script. He says This is home. This is my family.You, out there aren’t my real family. Perhaps because they are out there and not with Him.

This story is a punch to the gut, isn’t it? I’m lucky that I have never been estranged from my family, but two of my cousins have lived it. Not having a Mother or Father as Mom and Dad. Leaving a sister to wonder if she would see her brother on her wedding day.

And in college, these types of stories were more common with my friends. None of us could assume any of our friends represented the nuclear family. They could have had between 1 and 4 parents. Or perhaps even six or more. Brothers and sisters they have met only a few times. Some that found their way back into their parent’s life, only to disappear again.

To speak of family as Jesus does here must be hard for many of us to hear. Because Jesus rejects His own family and gives that new honor to this group. If any of us did this, we’d say that this person has joined, or worse, founded a cult. This is my family. Those that do God’s work are my family.

In another part of scripture, Jesus warns that your family may not be coming with you. To connect it to this text, when you become one of those people that is inside with Jesus, you may have to do it without your family. You may have to leave them outside.

The highly visual nature of this story is great for us, I think, because the visual demonstrates something powerful and important. These people are truly separated from Jesus; they are made far from Him. But it doesn’t say the way in is barricaded or that there is violence. I’m sure the people could come to Jesus. They don’t. Not even Jesus’s relatives: his birth family. None comes in, they expect Him to come out.

We also have this idea that Jesus and his followers couldn’t even eat lunch, the crowd was too close, too grabby, too demanding of attention. They want Jesus, the Magic Man to do more crazy stuff: heal more people, make the demons dance like puppets, show off that power. This enormous crowd isn’t following Jesus for God’s reasons, but for their own. This can be pretty condemning.

It can also give us something incredibly different. We can come inside and join Jesus for lunch. Not expecting magic, not demanding personal miracles, or seeking some sort of payment for our faith. No token or gift. We can come and eat, with friends and family.

Jesus says:

‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’  (vv.33b-35)

He establishes this great standard of family for all of us. This idea that family is made up not simply of some blood bond or some legal standard, but of an open, inclusive sort. He tells his closest friends and followers that there are two reasons they are family: 1) they are with Him and 2) they do the will of God.

For us, this is both a liberating and demanding moment. That family is not oppressive or restrictive or exclusive, but truly where our heart is: for Jesus, that means our hearts match the great commandment of loving God and our neighbor. That our work of love defines us. Not as doctors or lawyers or sales professionals but our work for God makes us family, and gathering around the table together makes us family. That family is defined by our work and our community.

This challenges us to see our table fellowship –our gathering in Christian community—as equal and necessary to our doing God’s work. He doesn’t say they are family for living a good life or for being good people. Nor does he say they are family for being born a certain way into a certain group. For Jesus, family is about God’s work and gathering together.

As we gather here as family, let us raise up our commitment to God, one another, and God’s mission: these are the responsibilities and expectations of this family.

[NOTE: There are several other ways to tackle this Scripture. In this video from last week, I tackle another perspective; that the main question isn't what makes up family, but what makes up the crowd.]

Sometimes They Do Equal 5

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I do think that sometimes 1+1=5.  That doesn’t make me crazy.  It means that we ought to account for our own blind spots.  To help me explain, I’ve recruited my own daughter.

1 = 1 + 1

As you can see, she has written an interesting equation on the white board.  She is so proud of it, she wrote it over and over again:

1=1+1

People fall into two camps when they see this: Continue reading →

4 keys to engaging children in church

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At a lecture in Atlanta recently, the Rev. Sam Portaro, author of Brightest and Best points out that

“Children are actually written into Scripture.”

They weren’t supposed to be seen.  They were property.  But Jesus spoke to them, healed them, accepted their donations, and told His disciples to be like them.

We never take that last one seriously.  Don’t act your age: act like a child.

Jesus elevates children to full personhood and uses them as a foil for the disciples’ ineptitude.

So here are four ways we can better engage children in church.

  1. Treat children as full members.  Stop counting them separately, cutting them off from ministries in the church, or treating them as commodities.  They essentially get voice and vote at baptism, even if they can’t talk or write yet.
  2. Accept Jesus’s teaching that children have much to teach adults.  In other words, adults must not talk at children–don’t only teach, but learn.
  3. Recognize the needs of children in all areas of the church.  Here are just a few of my ideas.  There are certainly many more, but three groups of three should do it.
    1. Worship
      1. Children are short, so the typical worship space means they stare at someone’s back.  Seriously not cool.  We need to change how we gather.
      2. Children have shorter attention spans, so less essential elements of worship keep them from actually engaging in the good stuff–and they will.
      3. Children get excited and speak up.  Perhaps we could have a more responsive experience of worship that don’t cherish silence above everything else, but instead encouraging spontaneity.
    2. Formation
      1. Children need to learn worship, not just Bible stories and morals.  We need them in with all of us for the whole thing.
      2. We must engage not just the “whats” but the “whys” like “why is this important” with “this” meaning church or perhaps even faith.  To be able to answer this question, we ought to be prepared to answer it to anybody.  I’m just sayin’…
      3. We should admit that we don’t know everything and that Christian formation is a life-long process.  This might mean that adults have to realize this, as well.  The 6 that regularly show up to the adult forum seem to be the only ones that get this.
    3. Leadership
      1. Let children have a say in what we do.  Shock!
      2. Make space in the parish’s identity for children.  Church isn’t only about organ recitals, pot lucks, and annual Easter egg hunts.
      3. And for God’s sake, allow yourself to learn from children.  Jesus couldn’t be clearer on this one.  It’s Paul that got it wrong.
  4. Become different because of children.  There’s no point in listening if you don’t allow yourself to become something new because of it.  This isn’t just about kids, its about making you, and us, better.
Portero, in his lecture at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta two weeks ago, spoke extensively on his work in vocational discernment.  He said that discernment should be done by every age group according to their development.  He then broke it down by age group.  I had already planned a series on engaging different age groups, so I have merged the concepts.  There will be much more to come!
Questions
How else might we be better by being more like children?
What other ways might we allow children to change us?
© 2011 Drew Downs.  All rights reserved

changing my name

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Maybe I shouldn’t, but I just did.  I changed the name of this blog.  Same address, new name.

The Original Name
When I first started blogging with WordPress, I began with a simple notion: that our approach as the church in planning for the future was MAD (mutually-assured destruction).  My argument (which I still believe) was that we all collude to maintain an ineffective status quo.  For some, the argument goes that we haven’t worked hard enough to transform the entire world to orthodoxy.  For others, it is attachment to a mid-20th Century approach to church to the exclusion of all other visions.  And for still others, it is simple ignorance to the simple truth that there are other options.  Our collusion may not be intentional, but it is still there.  So I called the blog “uncollusion”.

This spring, life for me changed.

The New Name
I did not retire.
I am still active in ministry.
I just don’t have a church home.

My position at the church vanished and suddenly I became a stay-at-home Dad while also discerning a call to new ministry with a new congregation.

The tradition tells me I shouldn’t write about this.  It also says that I should have a job before I look for one…and yet that ship has sailed.  The tradition wants me to at least pretend to be some power-player, glad-hander whose ministerial chops are unassailable.  We all know that’s bologna.  What we need is a bit more candor and a bit more introspection.  Because everything about transition ministry is terrifying and challenging for everyone involved and we pretend its not.

And yet, where can we find more hope than in a beginning; a new relationship?

I won’t write about my previous church, nor will I write about my daughter, who deserves her anonymity.  What I will discuss is my experience and the challenges I am facing.  So, for the foreseeable future, this is a blog about being a minister searching for ministry and a Dad stretched to the limit.

If you want to follow, I think things are about to get bumpy.

Go with the flow

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We make it too easy on ourselves to forgive the avoidance of making difficult decisions.  We choose the status quo over the tremendous restructuring of our world and the expectations we have for society.  As Christians (and/or Jews) many of us should know better, especially in light of what Scripture tells us are GOD’s desires.  For atheists and agnostics, we do it despite the obvious rational opposition.

I was listening to a radio story about California, which is moving heavily from electricity produced by coal and natural gas and toward electricity produced by natural (greener) technologies like wind and solar.  This is good news!  Concerns arose over the less “dependable” nature of these energy producers–as long as we define “dependable” by on-demand predictability and not long-term sustainability.  Personally, I would prefer to live with a couple of brown-outs because its overcast, knowing that we’ll have electricity tomorrow.  But my Mom tells me I was good at delaying gratification when I was growing up.

The debate, which we say is about power sources, is really about something else: are we a people that must have instant gratification or are we a people that adapts and innovates?  Does sustainability take a back seat to instant comforts?

Many pundits bemoan the state of young people and the world we are living in–saying that we don’t know how to sacrifice and work hard.  As the argument goes, those of us in the Internet generations don’t know how to work and therefore are a burden (and failure) in the eyes of our parents.  And yet, it is the world that they have passed down to us that gives priority to strip-mining and devastating extraction methods to produce constant and consistent electricity from which we all benefit.

Because we all seem to want this, it means that we all need to decide to want something else: a tomorrow.

I’m reminded of an argument Theodore Hiebert makes in The Yahwist’s Landscape.  He argues that our typical understanding of humanity’s role to be good stewards of creation comes from the Priestly writer’s creation story (Genesis 1), which was written in the 500s BCE.  The earlier righter, know as the Yahwist (perhaps writing 500 years earlier), who is responsible for the creation story in Genesis 2-3, described a different responsibility.  Verse 23 says:

therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.

This image is not of steward, subduing creation, as if it is for humans to control the fate of the world.  Instead, it is the image of the farmer, charged with tilling the ground owned by someone else: GOD.

The difference in descriptions is subtle, but substantive.  The world’s resource aren’t ours to use and abuse–but to make grow responsively.  If you think about it, when the land grows week, the farmer gives it a chance to refresh before planting new seeds.  When water is needed for the land, humans don’t pretend to be gods, but we bring sufficient water to the land.

Our religious traditions are based, not on subduing the environment and bending it to our will–blowing off the tops of mountains or drilling for miles sideways under the ocean floor–but on doing enough for us and responding to the needs of the earth and people equally.

The coming energy wars will be a waste of time and life if we don’t first deal with appetite and the human need to dominate.  That is real root of the conflict.

Saturday

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I played around with the idea of leaving a blank post.  Get it?  Absence…I decided that doing that would be perhaps a little too cryptic/existentialist.

Yesterday we dealt with one of the problems of Good Friday, the day God died.  The day we remember the tragedy and triumph of Jesus’s death by crucifixion.  This happens on the first day.  On the third day, Jesus was raised from the dead.  But in between, we have Saturday.

One of my favorite things about the gospels is that none of them attempt to deal with Saturday.  Each covers events at which none of the disciples could have participated.  There are moments in which Jesus is completely alone, and yet we get words on Jesus’s lips.  There are other times in which the only witnesses to the events are people that would be less than charitable to Jesus (Herod, Pilate, for instance).  The evangelists show little restraint in portraying these events.  And yet, nothing but restraint is shown toward what happens on Saturday.  Further compelling is that there is no gospel agreement for what happens on Sunday, taking place in different cities and under different circumstances.

The church has historically attempted to deal with Saturday in a variety of ways.  In the Apostle’s Creed, Jesus “descended to the dead”.  Many medieval stories were told about Jesus going to hell to liberate the Jewish ancestors, leading them out of eternal damnation into salvation in heaven like a metaphysical Moses.

I have been deeply influenced by Peter Rollins and his book, How (Not) to Speak of God.  In it, he deals with the nature of faith and doubt.  The basic tenor of his argument is that Holy Saturday is our moment of greatest faith, as it is only in doubt that we can demonstrate the depth of our faith.  We’ve all heard the saying that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, but fear.  Rollins argues that it is only in our confronting fear and the prospect that we could actually lose faith, that not only is faith tested, it is actually revealed.  Through doubt, we discover faith.  And if we have faith, we can discover doubt—the great discoverer of faith.

I could go on, but I trust you get the point.  What these attempts to get a handle on Holy Saturday show us is the conflict and confusion we feel for what this day means for us.  Growing up, Good Friday was a big deal and Easter was a big deal.  But when I tried to find out what happened on Saturday, I couldn’t get a straight answer.  When I asked why we didn’t go to church that day (after going on Thursday, Friday, and then Sunday), I couldn’t get a straight answer for that, either.  Holy Saturday seemed to be a day of silence.  We don’t know what happened—what happens—so we don’t even speak of it.  Saturday doesn’t get anything out of the deal.

Our silence demonstrates my cryptic joke.  In our silence, Saturday becomes absence.  The donut hole, if you will.  The day that only marks the time between the first and third days.

But what if it actually is about absence: God’s absence.  We are reeling from the death of Jesus and the loss of our Messiah and in our grief and pain, we get nothing from God.  Like Jesus, we might wonder why we are forsaken.  We might ask for mercy on those that are confused and conflicted.  We might help establish relationships between a chosen pair, accepting roles lost: mother and son.  But it is the day after God has died and it is the day that God is gone.

And while we’re at it, Saturday is the Sabbath.  From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday evening.  Hours after the crucifixion, Jesus’s body is taken down and put into the tomb for the Sabbath.  The notion that the disciples lost contact with Jesus, that we might lose contact with God for a day gives something for us to lose.  Remember, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Years after the death of Jesus, followers of the disciples began celebrating not on the Sabbath, but on Sunday; perhaps pairing their sense of faith with the first day of the week, of Easter, and of the spirit of resurrection.  Perhaps it is time to reclaim loss and the separation that comes in death.  Perhaps it is time to reconcile our new life with the old that has passed before.  This is the work of Saturday.

into the wild

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I just got back from a pre-Lenten retreat for presbyters of the Diocese of Atlanta.  The theme was about pastoring in anxious times, and the format was organized around five meditations with free time for reflection or rest.  It was a great experience and had me thinking from the moment we arrived.

To be fair, I’m not usually one that wants to wander off and think about what I’ve just heard, I want to engage it with other people or with action.  I either want to go with some friends to a bar to talk or write a blog post or do a charcoal response as if I were in Godly Play for adults.  This is how I prefer to respond to new thinking.

It was in this environment that I was becoming more obsessed with what connects the people in the room.  What is it that we as presbyters (priests) are?  The base and easy response to this is rehearsed and practiced so readily.  Every one of us had to give a defense of our aspirations at some point prior to ordination.  But what I kept wondering about was not a ‘what do we do in anxious times’ or even a ‘who are we when the times get anxious’, but a presupposition that we are anxious people in an anxious community and what does it mean to be leader in that system.

So then I though back to the previous Thursday, and Fresh Start.  We watched the video about leadership in anxious times by Edwin Friedman—a video I had seen four or five times before—but the synchronicity of these concepts was swimming around my head.  And today I watched this video of Peter Rollins interviewed by Spencer Burke:

And as I was watching, I was profoundly affected by Rollins’ depiction of Paul and his ministry: that we should be people of the Resurrection and that the Resurrection is about “dying, being reborn, transformed”; that our lives lived must be different.  And what all of these things are telling me and pushing me to understand is something I can’t say that I understood before: we must allow ourselves to be transformed.

I know this isn’t rocket science, but living transformed is different than assenting to the principle that we are transformed by sacramental rituals, such as baptism and ordination.  I always got that I had to live differently as a Christian, and I do.  I always got that I had to live differently as a priest, and I do.  And yet, what is always at tension for me as a Christian and as a priest is that the world no longer trusts that difference, nor responds to that difference with reverence or deference.  So that difference has become so codified and defined that it is not truly different, or understood as different, but as an ‘alternative lifestyle’.  And in some ways, an alternative lifestyle that is increasingly uncomfortable with letting go of being the dominant lifestyle.

So I lived with this tension and this difference and adjusted to what seems like a domesticated Gospel so as to live the same domesticated lifestyle that is expected of clergy serving a domesticated congregation in a domesticated church.  And I have seen myself as being restricted by all of this domestication and wanting and dreaming and internally screaming for the people to become wild for the gospel and to unleash it to transform our lives and to open the windows for the Spirit to descend upon us like a dove.  And the reality is that I thought that anyone who is born is able to grow wild and that, in baptism, I was given my invitation to grow wild, and that all of the people everywhere can grow wild—but when I put that collar around my neck, the Inherited Church had me, bound and domesticated.  My eyes would blur as the wild outdoors were living without me.  But there is no leash.  The yard is not fenced.  I’m sitting in the front yard because I’m afraid of the wildness and the domesticated life is secure.

Perhaps Paul does serve as the wise guide of wildness.  His ministry was clearly unrestrained.  His emotive style was occasionally disconcerting but always engaging and reverent to the people and place that he was at.  He embodied rebelliousness and even today represents the radical and the servant at their best and most authentic.  This is the wild.

new fortunes

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I have written before about my love of Chinese food and fortune cookies.  And I have a new sequence of fortunes to share.

As a reminder, here’s the drill: you treat the cookie like a Magic 8 Ball.  Ask it something, crack it open, and see what it has to tell you.

Most of the time I ask the same questions: I either ask about vocation or treating my family right.  I went last week and received this fortune:

Wish you a long life.

I tried to determine what that meant in relation to my question, and I couldn’t…mostly because I couldn’t get over that amazing display of grammar!  “Wish you a long life.”  There isn’t even a subject; this statement doesn’t have a noun!  And what does being wished a long life have to do with my vocation or my family other than the obvious–people need me to live a long life!  Way to avoid burn out, Drew!  All you’ve left to do is put yourself in the place of Atlas!

So then I visit my favorite Asian restaurant in town Yumi Asian Fusion.  It’s my favorite because of how I feel when I’m there.  I like the silverware–it’s modern and ergonomic.  I like the decorations–it looks the way I want a restaurant to look.  I can order Thai or sushi or Hunan and Mandarine-style Chinese–they have the best Mongolian Beef I have had since leaving Alpena–some know that this is high praise.  But the best part is that I like the servers.  Mostly the one that treats me well.  So my like of this restaurant is purely selfish.  After my meal was over (General Tso’s Chicken), I opened my cookie to find…nothing.  I had the dreaded fortuneless cookie!

Taking these fortunes together, [someone--presumably] wish[es me] a long life one minute and the other, I have no fortune–no future!  Is that the reason I was wished a long life?  Did the cookie know then that I didn’t have a future, and that it was simply trying to change what it saw?  I’m certain that my death is immanent, so I have to get a new fortune.  Here’s what the newest one read:

Wish you a long life.

The grammatically-challenged fortune-writer returns with the same wish!

I know that my obsession with these little treats is irrational and ridiculous.  I know that they no sooner predict the future than a Magic 8 Ball does or the newspaper’s astrology section, but I really do miss it when I don’t get a proper fortune.  And sometimes I don’t get a fortune in my cookie–I get a statement.  I’m not fond of statement cookies unless they attempt to demonstrate something useful to me.

On my desk next to the duplicate ‘wishes’ are these fortunes:

You will travel far and wide, both pleasure and business.

Be prepared to receive something special with no strings attached.

You will win success in whatever calling you adopt.

I actually received these in Lansing and brought them with me.  I feel like they’ve already begun to come true.  I’m hoping for a little more juice out of them.

Perhaps the biggest question you may be asking yourself–bigger even than why am I writing this–is this: why does he keep his fortunes (or statements or grammatically confused pieces of paper)?  Because they reveal something about myself to me.  I learn something when I read it.  When I read it the first time, of course, I learn about hopes and expectations.  What comes immediately to mind when I get a fortune like one of the above?  For instance, if you were to get this one:

You will cross the ocean soon.

What would your response be?  What would you immediately think of?  My first thoughts jump to the places I want to go and the dreams that I have deferred.  I would think of Ireland or Iceland or Israel.  I would think about how much I want to travel to those places with my wife and closest friends.  I dream about telling my daughter stories about the places we’re visiting.

And when I take the time to read an old fortune, these thoughts become less of a dream and more of an imperative.  It is less about “oh, wouldn’t that be nice” and becomes “I need to do this.”

Perhaps I’m getting older.  Or perhaps my perspective on life has changed.  And perhaps I’m just a teensy-weensy bit jealous of the guy I imagined I’d be at my age.  But I’ve got to tell you, nothing gets me thinking about the future and making dreams into realities like fortune cookies.

Confirmation: Why?

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Having just had a wonderful confirmation service at St. Paul’s yesterday in which 18 were confirmed and another 4 were received into The Episcopal Church, I am now more confused than ever about how to feel about this sacrament.

In seminary, our liturgics professor, argued that confirmation is unnecessary: that baptism is all that is required of Christians and Anglicans.  This dovetails nicely with the baptismal theology of the Prayer Book and Canada’s Book of Alternative Services.  When I told him that I was asked to lead a confirmation class, his response was akin to “don’t” or “why?”.

I’ve also heard that the original draft of the last Prayer Book didn’t have Confirmation at all, but that the bishops forced it back in.  Out of fear that they would have nothing to do, I guess.

But the common understanding of Confirmation today is that it is a mature declaration of faith.  That a “mature” (read: adult) person that was baptized as a child may have a sacrament that affirms their commitment to following Jesus.

At the same time, we have two significant conflicts with fully embodying this principle.

  1. Our tradition is to confirm teens.
  2. Our canons require confirmation to serve on the vestry and seek ordination.

So we have this expectation that as soon as children hit puberty (or before in many cases), we have to start preparing these “kids” for confirmation.  Similarly, some argue that we have to do it before high school or else “we’ll lose ‘em,” which I’m not sure why confirmation would have the desired effect of entrapment.  At the same time, we are saying one thing “baptism is your dance card” while also saying “if you want to have any role of influence or authority in the church, you have to join this special club (for “mature” people).”

As you can see, both of these things are in direct conflict with the theology undergirding Confirmation.  So I say eliminate the conflicts.

But where I’m confused is less the theology, and more the practice.

In the Diocese of Western Michigan, we just completed this amazing practice of taking the better part of last year to write a customary that would be the understood common practice throughout the diocese for confirmation.  These practices fully embody the spirit of the theology and would drive those ‘conflictors’ crazy because the most important part of confirmation now must be maturity and declaration of faith.  This means that the person must 1) take it seriously and mean it, 2) understand what s/he is declaring, and 3) want to do this.  Amazing stuff.  It probably means fewer will be confirmed, but those that are will be the better for it.

The Bishop also practices regional confirmations, meaning all the confirmands in the deanery (grouping of churches) gather for a special service together.  Many of those that have been confirmed in this way swear by it.  The Bishop argues that if he is to do confirmations every Sunday, it detracts from 1) what can be done at the visitation in terms visioning and 2) he only gets to preach one sermon.

Participating in a congregational confirmation service in which some visitors made special trips to attend their loved one’s confirmation in a packed house was pretty awesome.  And the Bishop didn’t preach on confirmation, but stayed pretty close to the gospel.

So here is where my confusion comes in.  I’m still not sure about best practice.  I wore red socks yesterday, because, like an ordination, I wanted to celebrate in the Spirit’s outpouring on these twenty-two Episcopalians.  I found myself thinking that a gospel about John and James jockeying for position at the top of the disciples heap had some good things to say about discipleship, following Jesus, and of course, confirmation.  And that many of our Gospel lessons lend themselves well to the theme of confirmation.  At the same time, few congregations are able to produce twenty-two strong candidates, and the Bishop’s visitation was, in many ways, overshadowed by confirmation.

Perhaps I should just go back to my professor’s base question: why?  I have a feeling our bishops would have enough to do if we stopped focusing on confirmation.