Pilgrim Place

The purpose of our Youth Instruction Classes is to assist 7th and 8th grade students to find their place in God’s story. As God’s children, God has a plan and purpose for each of them. These classes seek, over a two-year schedule, to help these students better learn the basics of the Lutheran Christian faith and, as we build upon those truths, find ways to begin to express their faith.

This year our sessions began on Wednesday, September 5th. Our last session is scheduled for April 30th, 2008. Confirmation will be held on Sunday, May 4th. Each session begins promptly at 4:45 PM and will last one hour.

During the 2007 – 2008 school year we plan to cover the following topics:

• God’s revelation to man, the Bible
• Sacraments
• Baptism
• God the Father, the Creator
• God the Son, the Redeemer
• God the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier
• The Source of Salvation: Law and Gospel
• The Lord’s Supper
• Prayer: Our Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer
• Our Worship of God
• Serving God and our fellow humans

If you’ve had a child involved in YIC previously you’ll notice that we’ve dropped a couple of elements we’ve experimented with in previous years—the Visual Catechism project and an online component. Both have shown promise yet we’ve had problems fully implementing them. Our biggest problem have been time issues—having enough class time to cover the needed material and having students willing to spend some time outside of class to use the online component. We’ll drop both and seek to focus more on the basics this year.

We’re looking forward to an interesting year of faith development and learning as our students better finds their places in God’s story.