I disagree with the notion that our kids nowadays don’t want to go to church.
What they want is to know is that if they’re investing the time each week, they want a church and a church leader to value them and show that they care.
Let me share …
This year, our older students, both those who are in confirmation classes and our graduates participating in LYO (Lutheran Youth Organization) -- essentially our version of a youth group -- have been working very hard since October to raise funds to take a July trip to the ELCA’s National Youth Gathering in New Orleans in July.
The kids -- and their parents! -- have put in countless hours of planning and execution on dozens of fundraising events, including participating in a series of skits about the life of Moses all through our Lenten services, capped with an Easter morning brunch served by the youth and their families.
At that point in our church programming year, I decided to forego the rest of Wednesday night confirmation classes, which doesn’t include all of the kids, the older LYO youth already having graduated from confirmation. But most of our confirmation families have kids both in confirmation and older siblings who had worked so hard.
So, I decided that all of the students and families had earned the right for confirmation to be done for the year after Easter.
I never anticipated the swift and negative response for our confirmation students! … They let me have it in the most polite of ways! But the unanimous consensus was that they were not going to give up the year-end confirmation tradition of the walk to the park!
The cry was loud and vehement! … There must be one more confirmation class! … Now, mind you, this included three students who were confirmed in April, and so they never, ever would have had to come back to class.
But they wanted to, and all of the students insisted on it. And so we did have one last class so that we could have the year-end walk to the park tradition.
What is that, you ask?
Well, let’s rewind five years ago when I started teaching confirmation. It was my very first year, and adding this weekly duty into my “half-time” pastor duties was an eye-opener. I never anticipated the extra hours it would take to teach a 90-minute confirmation class each week from late fall until spring.
And so, as we crawled into the spring classes that year, I was dog tired. And on the final night, with the kids squirrely with spring fever, I made the call that rather than sit inside, we were going to take a walk.
Once I got the grumbling teenagers out on the streets of our little community, they blossomed! I asked them where they saw God around us, and what their highlights of the confirmation year had been.
And finally, without planning, we ended up at the little playground that sits adjacent to the three-story, brick schoolhouse in town that hasn’t been used as a school in many decades.
Seeing the opportunity of a playground laid out before us so serendipitously … I told the kids to go play and just be kids. … And play they did. Games like tag, and “The Ground is Lava” and “Grounders” and others. … And the kids spent most of the 90 minutes of the class running around just being kids. And it was glorious seeing them run with abandon!
At the end of the class time, we took a big group photo with me in the foreground and the kids in the background hanging off the jungle gym apparatus. … A tradition was born!
Every year since, this has been what we have done on the last confirmation class of the year. And the photos have been epic!
And there was no way this year’s students wanted to miss the year-end tradition this year!
So, even though I had canceled the remainder of confirmation classes for the year, and the graduates never would have had to come back … we had class so that we could have our year-end tradition anyway.
Which brings me back to my original point: Kids don’t not want church. … They just don’t want a superficial church that superficially tells them to be upstanding people but never cares about them as individuals.
Admittedly, my confirmation students don’t have Luther’s Small Catechism memorized, and we do very little scripture work most years, or other staples of the old confirmation curriculums, for that matter.
But I will tell you that my students know for certain that this pastor loves them for who they are and cares about what goes on in their lives day to day. And if that keeps them coming back to church for more, that will always be enough for me.
I will never, ever try to cancel the year-end walk to the park ever again!
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