As you all know by now, this is one of our favorite times of the year at Saint Nicholas. Certainly there is the beauty of spring as the world wakes up from winter and in this part of the world, spring comes with particular loveliness. There is also the hint of summer as we look forward to schedules that are a little less packed and a little more leisurely.

But more than anything else, for me, the season of Easter is the prelude to the feast of Pentecost and Confirmation Day. Our young people work very hard to get ready for their confirmation. In the eighth grade alone, they have learned about and read the Bible and the creeds and confessions, they have prepared a worship service, interviewed our Synod’s Bishop and our congregation’s president, they have put together a timeline of the congregation’s history, memorized Bible verses, prepared and delivered a statement of faith, made banners proclaiming their names and symbols that are important to them. This is not your father’s confirmation class.

Each confirmation class is a little different. Some classes talked all the time and it was hard to get them to settle down. This class was a little more quiet, a little more thoughtful. That may be because it was a little smaller – 8 confirmands rather than the 18 we had the year before and that we expect next year. But perhaps because of that, I got a better sense of the young people themselves as they began to blossom. They were well worth the effort of getting to know them better.

A few weeks ago, the Lutheran clergy in this part of the world met, partly to discuss the upcoming Synod Assembly and partly to catch up with each other. We talked about young adults, people between the ages of 18 and 30, who are in very short supply in most mainline congregations (including Saint Nicholas). We talked a little about who they are and what they value and how to attract them to our churches.

If our confirmands tell us anything about young adults (and I’ll admit this is a bit of a stretch), we’re in for a wonderful but challenging ride as a church. Not so much rebellious as thoughtful, not so much sarcastic as guarded, this confirmation class seemed to me to illustrate things that religious leaders say about the people who are forming the Emergent Church movement. This Emergent Church movement is the expression of the “post-evangelical” era, and it is fascinating. Highly liturgical (that is, with many formal movements and with a set worship order), willing and even eager to participate in mystery and symbolism, fiercely intelligent, both inward-looking and socially conscious, the Emergent Church feels to many (and to me) as a kind of return to the very early church. The new buzzwords are “authenticity” and “experience.” For me it brings to mind the prayer vigil that we had at Saint Nicholas after the deaths of Ryan and Aly Purvis. The air of the nave was so charged, so full of suffering and pain but also full of the healing presence of God. This was a unique worship experience, one I’ll never forget.

It seems to me that to keep the interest and the sheer liveliness and thoughtful devotion of our young people, we will need to be a community that not only loves them but also values them and their unique perspectives, listens to what they say and offers them opportunities to live out their spiritual discoveries, even if those discoveries are different from what is familiar to us. To be sure, our confirmation process is a challenging one, but we need to be open to being challenged by our confirmands as well.

Congratulations to the confirmation class of 2008!

Pastor Greg