The Heart of the Matter

Part 2: Keep the Kids Around After Confirmation Day

With Head to the Heart, we want to keep the content and the kid.

Think of it this way: if a business had a two or three-year training program where, at the end of the training, ¾ or more of the trainees left, they would scrap the program and try something else. In the Lutheran world, we call this training program Confirmation, and we’re pretty much OK with this massive attrition.

The H2H approach comes from our Christian camping background – form small groups with a caring parent/adult in the middle. Quality and quantity bonding time is the key.  Mix in a bit of active learning, regular fellowship events, and intentional service opportunities (all out from under the church roof), and you’ll have provided each group with the opportunity to bond and given them the ability to tell good stories about one another. This all takes time, but a bonded group is a closer group, and is more willing to share and discuss back in Confirmation class.

A close-knit small group is much less likely to dissipate when Confirmation is over, especially if provided with an opportunity to continue meeting on a regular basis. Does your Sr. High program provide for this?

Some tips on small groups:

• The small group needs to be no larger than 3-4 kids. This is for communication issues, but also for travel issues. Remember, we want to get groups out into the world to serve and play together.
• The small group should be consistent (no changes of members and leaders, if it can be helped) so the group can slowly bond over time. If you have enough kids, keep the groups grade-specific so you’re not losing a part of the group each year.
• The small group can be led by a parent, parents, or any other adult who is relentlessly curious about getting into the life of the kids in the group. (Keep in mind, you need to know who your group leaders are before you give them a group.)
• Boys and girls as a mixed group? We recommend keeping genders separate due to different learning styles of girls and boys, and sharing styles of girls and boys. Your mileage may vary, as you know your kids better than anyone.

H2H is not only a first-rate curriculum; it is an approach to Confirmation set up to help turn the traditional  ¾ loss rate into a ¾ retention rate. It is done by challenging churches to change Confirmation instruction into Confirmation ministry.

Back to the Future: "Conformation (sic!) is Dead" from 1993

I've received a couple of requests for the original article that started us at Faith Inkubators down the road of relational, small-group, confirmation ministry. It was an article written by Rich Melheim originally published in Lutheran Partners magazine in Spring 1993 called "Conformation (sic) is Dead." (It was also turned into a major, cable-access quality, early ninety's VHS tape starring yours truly, which is thankfully out of print. I'm still waiting for my big fat royalty check and Golden Globe nomination, Rich.)

 Anyway, it's good to look back on occasion to revisit why you're doing what you're doing. One paragraph from the article in particular has helped me refocus:

 "Confirmation in the Lutheran church is not working. These unique kids of the 1990’s need something more than we are giving them. They don't need programs and materials. They need to know that God is real. That's awfully hard to get from a workbook. It has to come in person. Change is always a risk. But sometimes the decision not to change is the greater risk. There is no stopping the changes the 90s will invoke in our children. Will our vision adjust to meet the changes?"

 (Feel free to replace "90s" with "2000s" -- things have not gotten much better in 16 years.)

 You may find it worthy of a re-read, or a first read. Download a complete copy of the article here.

Confirmation: How to Begin the Change, Part 1: Teach Better

I’ve received a couple of responses to my last entry about why traditional confirmation has to change. The common theme of these responses as been, “OK, so how do we tackle the issue?”

I’d like to address this theme, but before I do, let me back up for a second.

In 1991, I was a new Jr. High Youth Director at a church with more than 200 kids in confirmation. Rich Melheim was the pastor in charge. Because we had both come from a background of camping ministry one thing was immediately clear to us: camping ministry was infinitely more effective than virtually every church confirmation program we had ever seen.  With this in mind, we slowly began to recreate our confirmation program by identifying the elements of summer camp that worked and could be repositioned into a church confirmation setting. That confirmation program served as the genesis for Head to the Heart.

Since that time, with the help of thousands of like-minded churches literally around the world, Head to the Heart was slowly and steadily developed to make Confirmation ministry more effective. After almost twenty years, we’ve come to the conclusion that the “recipe” to make confirmation more effective is this:

Teach better. Keep the kids around after Confirmation day. Equip parents for ministry at home.

Teaching better: I don’t know about you, but my Lutheran Confirmation experience consisted of a lot of classroom time with stale lectures. I don’t remember seeing a lot of visuals, I don’t remember having a lot of variety,  and I don’t remember a lot of what I was taught. I don’t blame my pastor—most of the confirmation materials available were lecture-based. It seemed to me that I was being taught as my pastor had been taught in seminary, which would have been fine, except I was in seventh grade. (As far as I know, there aren’t a lot of seventh graders in seminary.)

When Head to the Heart was first beginning, we knew that we had to prepare lessons and teach in a way that would engage and involve the kids, just like we did at camp. In short, we needed a way to make the content “sticky” to young minds. In order to begin this process, we borrowed a lot of great data from educators in schools and began to research all we could about how the adolescent mind actually learns. It turns out that lecture is the least effective form of education. It is a good way to begin, but a lousy place to end. What the adolescent mind needs in order to learn effectively is multiple teaching options that hit multiple parts of the brain in multiple ways.

Consider an analogy involving  Sylvester Stallone. Well, not exactly Stallone himself, but a Stallone movie from back in the early 1990’s: Cliffhanger. On this movie poster, Sly was hanging by one hand from a ledge. I’m pretty sure if I was in that situation, I’d want to hang off that ledge with more than just one hand. I’d want two hands, duct tape, super glue, Velcro, bolts—whatever was available. It’s the same with teaching. If we’ve got a point to make, it’s silly to make it in just one way (hanging on by just one finger, to overextend the analogy). If we’re going to get the point home, we need to present it in multiple ways so kids van “hang on to it.” We do this with lesson sheets and Bible stories, but also with active, hands-on object lessons, PowerPoint, art, music, movie clips, skits, gameshows, and more.

This is why we’ve created the teaching materials of Head to the Heart with multiple options for pastors/teachers to easily present each topic in a variety of ways—ways that involve the kids, not just lecture to them.

Take a look at some samples and see for yourself.

Coming Soon: More of the approach of Head to the Heart and how we can set up Confirmation ministry to keep kids around after Confirmation Day.

 

Ten Reasons Why Traditional Lutheran Confirmation Has to Change

1. A recent study commissioned by AAL suggested that 2.5 million Lutherans will be leaving the church in the next decade if present trends continue.
2. The last time when a few hundred thousand new Lutherans came over on a boat was 1880. (We aren't expecting a huge influx from Norway soon.)
3. By using lecture as our primary method of education we are teaching only 1/2 of the brain. (Lecture is the least retentive form of education.)
4. Parents are Biblically illiterate.
5. Three fourths of our youth are walking out the door on confirmation Sunday and not coming back. If any company if the country had a three year training program that lost three-fourths of the trainees one month following graduation, that company would scrap  the program and scramble to find something else that works.
6. Kids hate it.
7. Parents hate it.
8. Pastors hate it.
9. If you look at Search Institute's study of what kids need to turn out OK, our traditional method of confirmation instruction influences about categories to guarantee that our children will all grow up to be delinquent.
10. Confirmation is dead. We just haven't had the decency to bury it yet and get on with a resurrection.

I'd like to take credit for this list, but I can't. It was originally written by Rich Melheim when Faith Inkubators was just getting off the ground.

In 1996.

Rhetorical question of the day: Have we made any progress since then?

H2H Download Area is Up and Running

Just a quick note to let you know that the Member Download Area for Head to the Heart is ready to go. If you have purchased or renewed an H2H membership for 2009-1010, you will have access to this website.

What's the H2H Download Area?
This is a special download area where all of your H2H files are backed up for easy access. We send out H2H on CD-ROMs and will continue to do so because for most people, this is the quickest, most efficient way to access your H2H files. However, there comes a time when you're at home and the discs are at church, or others in the program my like to have access to H2H resources. This is where the H2H Download Area comes in. Sign in to this area by clicking on the "Membership" tab in the upper right-hand corner of our homepages at www.faithink.com. You'll be given the option to browse files by theme set, and even set up sub-accounts for other staff members, Guides, and othere volunteers in your program. They can then sign in as they wish to access files.

What is New to the Download Area in 2009?
We've continued to beef up our committment to users of Macintosh computers and the Mac version of PowerPoint by offering all of our theme songs and theme set songs in QuickTime format. Although all of the standard Bible verse songs are already included in QuickTime format on the H2H CD-ROMs, the theme set songs, QuizMania/Weakest FINK jingles, and the "Hebrew Matrix" that begins each H2H PowerPiount presentation are available for download from the H2H Download Area.

Several of our Support CD-ROM files are available also, including our Member Manual and Guide Training Manual. These files are invaluable tools to get your H2H ministry up, running, and humming along smoothly.

As always, if you have any questions, please send an email at mlysne@faithink.com.