An Invitation to Community

This past weekend was a weekend we had been waiting for, planning for, and praying for since about October...and it was finally here! For his internship project at our church my husband had been tasked with creating a confirmation program for our students, something that had not been done in years at this particular church for a variety of reasons. He really was given a lot of freedom to brainstorm and dream about what this might look like and his first task was to form a committee. (Duh, we're Presbyterian, that's of course what we'd do first!) Being his favorite Presbyterian I immediately was recruited :) Which means the two of us have been talking about this and planning this for months now. We felt it was really important to start with a big event, we didn't want to just pitch this as "another program you can come to." We really view the confirmation process (when done well) as the opportunity for a young person to begin to really grab hold of their faith and make it their own, to go deeper in community, not just with the youth but with the church as a whole. So we wanted to create a weekend retreat to begin it all that would demonstrate to these students that the community is genuinely excited about welcoming them into their midst, and dearly loves them and cares for them. It was a TON of work, but I have to say, I am SO proud of how it turned out and I know he is too. We got each adult Sunday School class to adopt a meal, and serve it to the students restaurant style (no camp food for our kids!) at tables with candles and flowers. We had the congregation write letters of encouragement to the students which we surprised them with on Sunday morning (each kid had a giant envelope of letters just to them from members of the church, they were pretty impressed!), and Saturday night we had members of the church show up to surprise the kids with a candle light worship service. We took them on a hike Saturday afternoon and asked them to do the first half in silence, giving God space to speak to them, which I'm not sure they loved, but they at least obeyed :) It was a very fun weekend. I am definitely tired and have spent most of today trying to recover a bit, but it was totally worth it. Confirmation starts next Sunday, so we'll see who chooses to go through the next 7 weeks with us and who really wants to commit to this process. Here are some highlights from the weekend:

Part of our youth space, which we decorated with drapes, lights and crosses to change it up from the normal Sunday morning.

Friday night we had them nail their sins to the cross, which was so powerful. To hear the pounding of nails echoing in the silence is really moving.Every time we had to move from one room to another, our Pied Piper, Ben, led us with a song he wrote for our kids and this weekend. The kids didn't have a schedule, or watches/ipods/cell phones, so they had no idea what time it was or what was next which was a leap of faith for them to trust us (but worked well when we told them to go to bed, for all they knew it was 1 AM) :) Of course there was play time :)Our silent hikeThe 4 leaders--George, me, Ashley, CharlesOur whole groupAt every meal we ate with our assigned table teams and had trivia questions to answer. Our team lost miserably, but it was quite fun. Here is George, our master trivia creator, reading our questions.