Faith Formation: a background and introduction
I’ve been doing this for nearly thirty years if you count vicarage. In the Lutheran Church we confirm students at the eighth grade. Most congregations have classes for two to three years to help prepare youth for this step. According to Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation [Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, MO, © 1986],
“Confirmation is a public rite of the church preceded by a period of instruction designed to help baptized Christians
identify with the life and mission of the Christian community.
“Note: Prior to admission to the Lord’s Supper, it is necessary to be instructed in the Christian faith (1 Cor. 11:28). The rite of confirmation provides an opportunity for the individual Christian, relying on God’s promises given in Holy Baptism, to make a personal public confession of the faith and a lifelong pledge of fidelity to Christ.” [answer to question 306, "What is confirmation?"]
Those words help shape the practice we follow in this time with young students. It becomes move a time of trying to fill their minds with the basics of the faith than to help their faith grow. Helping them grow in their faith is what I would call faith formation.
Just as a freshly-sprouted plant needs all the right nutrients, water, and sun to grow, so people who are “freshly-sprouted” in their faith need the right nutrients that their faith might grow. We believe those nutrients are found in God’s Word. We need to help those “freshly-sprouted” in their faith to grow into the people God calls them to be.
The words I’m using to explain this are dramatically different than I used before but the sentiment is the same. The following was first written, in a slightly different form, back in 1996.
Background thoughts
Wednesday night Workshop (or WnW as it’s better known) began in the 1996-1997 school year. Prior to that I’d tried different approaches and materials for Confirmation Class. None of them satisfied me for two primary reasons.
- After we’d confirm kids we’d “loose” a good number of them. They wouldn’t remain active in church activities.
- Confirmation class was hard to teach since many of the students didn’t want to be there! Its hard to teach a class with bored kids with glazed-over eyes.
I was thinking about these problems when I had an opportunity to attend a one-day conference during February 1996 entitled Conformation is dead (yes, that’s spelled correctly and was actually the conference title). It opened my eyes to some possible changes we could make to help make Confirmation both more meaningful and relevant for the youth.
Confirmation Changes to WnW
So Confirmation class changed. The first year we implemented WnW was in the 1996-1997 school year and we’ve used it as a more successful plan ever since.
WnW differs from our previous Confirmation Classes in five primary ways.
- Confirmation Class renamed Wednesday night Workshop
The first thing we did was change the name from Confirmation Class to Wednesday night Workshop. We did it to reinforce the changes in the system and class materials that both students and parents would see in the workshop classes. Besides, the name carried too much negative baggage for some.
We named it Wednesday night Workshop because it would become more of a workshop that we’d hold (surprise!) on Wednesday evenings.
- Major change in emphasis
To help combat the level at which we’d loose young people from active church participation we changed our primary emphasis to faith incubation. Simply put our primary goal is to grow the faith of these young people. The days in which they are growing up make it very difficult to profess to be a Christian and live a Christian life. In WnW we seek to help build their faith and give them ways to express it.
Our secondary emphasis—please note, still a very important emphasis and goal—is to teach Lutheran Christian doctrine to our workshop participants with the intent that they might choose to become communicant members of the Lutheran Church (and St. John Lutheran Church in particular) at the conclusion of the two year workshop.
- Inclusion of Faith Guides into system
We’d added what we’ve come to call Faith Guides into our system. Our Faith Guides are communicant members of St. John who 
help out in our WnW workshop sessions. They help lead small groups of students, participate fully in WnW activities, and even lead workshop learning activities from time to time.
We’ve included them
• so young people might see faith lived out in life through a variety of adult role models. Since our primary emphasis is to grow their faith we want to give them examples of people who live out their faith in their everyday lives.
• to give more adult role models with whom youth might connect. We believe that our Faith Guides can become friends and mentors to youth, helping to provide role models they might follow as they seek to live out their Christian faith in their everyday lives as well.
We’ve found Faith Guides to be a positive addition to our WnW system.
- Change of materials
We changed the materials we use as we moved from Confirmation Class to WnW. Originally we used a student book entitled My Christian Faith. My Christian Faith has an excellent leader book from which we get some of the best learning experiences we use in WnW. Over the past years we’ve found it to be a valuable resource. It remains so today.
This year, however, we won’t use the student My Christian Faith book. We kept using it less and less as last year went on and started to use more and more portions straight from Luther’s Small Catechism. So this year we’ll use Luther’s Small Catechism as our student resource book. We won’t directly lecture from it (at least very much), but use it as an additional learning resource for our students.
We’ll continue to use the Faith Alive Bible as a student resource as well.
In addition, we use materials called Power Tools which are video-based lessons on the different topics we’ll cover in WnW. We’ve found the use of video (and contemporary Christian music) to be a positive means to help communicate the Christian faith’s truths to our workshop students.
- Change of teaching philosophy
WnW uses a variety of learning methods—auditory, visual, and kinesthetic—to seek to tap into as many of our workshop students’ learning styles as possible. To be honest straight lecture doesn’t keep the attention of our WnW students. Many turn off when a lecture begins. Since our goal is to grow faith and teach Lutheran Christian doctrine we use different ways and means to help reach our students with God’s timeless truth.
The doctrine we teach remains the same. The way in which we seek to share it is different. The end is to grow faith. We believe it works and will continue to use different means.
I tried to bring what I’d done in Rochester, Indiana — WnW — to Pilgrim Lutheran here in Bethesda, Maryland. Due to time constraints and other issues it didn’t transfer very well. Thus, over the past five years, we’ve drifted a bit in our focus until we’ve come back to where I began this journey. It’s “back to the future” all over again:
- After we’d confirm kids we “loose” a good number of them. They don’t remain active in church activities.
- Confirmation class (now called “Youth Instruction Class” or YIC for short) is getting harder and harder to teach since many of the students don’t want to be there. It’s hard to teach a class of bored kids with glazed-over eyes.
It’s time to change. I once read that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. It’s time to refocus on those two key goals instead of falling back to only the second one:
- To build students faith in Jesus as their Savior and Lord, and
- To teach Lutheran Christian doctrine.
It comes back to the words I used at the beginning of this article: faith formation. That’s what we were doing through WnW all those years ago. Back then we called it “faith incubation.” Now we’ll call it faith formation.
So here’s what our new/old goals will be:
- Faith incubation/faith formation—grafting youth into the Body of Christ (aka faith-building or faith formation)
- Inculcating Lutheran Christian doctrine
What will change? How will we get to that point? That’s what the next month will be about. It will be an emphasis on reading, study, prayer, and waiting for God’s direction to help shape the changes that will occur in next year’s classes. One vital concern is the number of students. This 
past year I had two; this coming fall I’ll probably have one. Any changes need to be understood with the reality that we have smaller classes here at Pilgrim Bethesda, at least for the immediate future.
Come back to this area again. You might be interested in the process we’ll go through and where we’ll end up. I know I will.
PJKreft
2009-06-11