Worship Together: A Confirmation Workbook for Worship
One of my concerns with confirmation is the pattern many of us in the mainline church have fallen into of expecting youth who have often been pulled from worship for a children’s time or have not attended worship much to suddenly, during their confirmation process, understand what’s going on in worship.
So, for my confirmands, I wrote a series of lessons, essentially workbook entries, that are a guide to the five major parts of the worship service: Gathering; Word; Response; Meal; Sending.
Each of my confirmands is working through one of these sections a week with an adult mentor (mentors have the same workbook as confirmands). They meet for a few minutes before worship, sit together during worship (and are encouraged to whisper to each other about the unit they are working on that week), and then spend about 20 minutes together after worship following up. (I suspect the mentors are also accidentally learning a bit about worship, as well!)
Seeing these pairs of mentors and confirmands sitting together in worship is one of my favorite things right now. I’m calling it “Worship Together.”
I’ve linked to a PDF of the materials I created for this. While it’s written for my context (a Lutheran congregation), I suspect it could be adapted pretty easily for other congregations, and even for other traditions (after all, I am a Presbyterian minister trained and ordained in a Reformed tradition…) If this might be useful to you in your ministry, please use it! I only ask that you give me credit and let me know that you used it. (It’s protected by a Creative Commons License.) If you really want to make me happy, let me know how it worked for your group!
Click here to find a PDF of Worship Together