For many young people the ‘Confirmation Service’ is their graduation day from religion. Forced to go to Sunday School they endure it until they are confirmed. Then, given the choice-the choice between compulsion and freedom-it is little wonder so many choose freedom.
In different denominations and congregations, the age of confirmation (or adult baptism) has varied. Some confirm children while still in primary school. Others try to hold out until the youth is fourteen or sixteen. Certainly, the young person must be old enough to answer for himself, but the age of discretion is hard to determine. Today we are able to vote at eighteen, drive a car at seventeen, earn a wage at sixteen, leave school at fifteen and divorce our parents even earlier.
Usually, we run some kind of confirmation programme in which we prepare the eager candidates for the great day. When that auspicious occasion finally arrives, the relatives gather in beaming assembly and the believers look sadly on, knowing that it will be last time we see either the young person or their relatives.
Perhaps the problem lies in the institution itself. Herding young people together for such an event does detract somewhat from the sense of personal commitment that confirmation is supposed to embody. Perhaps our mistake has been to connect confirmation to a certain age, or part of a youth programme. Maybe if we attached confirmation and teenage baptism to conversion it would become more meaningful. If we confirmed young people when they expressed faith in Jesus then we would be truly ‘confirming’ them in the faith of their fathers.
Can you imagine bishops giving up their right to conduct confirmation Services?
But hang on, this would mean holding confirmation services intermittently, on an almost ad hoc basis. We would hold a confirmation or adult baptism when there was actually someone interested, rather than settling on a date and then trying to rustle up some candidates. We might hold three confirmations in one month and then none for another three months, depending on the number of people becoming Christians. It would mean that the ministry of confirmation for adults would be much the same as for young people. Whenever someone came to Christ we would get them to stand up and profess their faith, and confirm them within the congregation.
All this presents us with a serious problem, at least those of us in the Anglican set-up. I know you’ve been thinking the same thing: “If we were holding confirmations all over the countryside, imagine how many more bishops we’d need!” If people were being converted and then confirmed say, the following Sunday, you’d need to have bishops on standby, ready to lay on hands at a moment’s notice. This is a dread thought, made more frightening by the prospect of having bishops in your church every second Sunday.
There are two solutions to this obviously untenable Scenario. One is to consecrate a bishop for each congregation-bishop in residence, as it were-so that whenever anyone needed confirming you’d have a bishop ready on hand. The alternative is to remove confirmation from the realm of the bishops altogether, so that the local pastor could confirm people in his congregation as he sees them converted.
Yes, the idea really is a lead balloon. Can you imagine bishops giving up their right to conduct confirmation services? It would never get off the ground. Mind you, the idea of having more meaningful confirmation services is like a lead balloon in another sense-very hard to prick.
