Faith Inkubators

Pastors will tell you that the day the confirmation class meets is their most dreaded day of the week.

Here's the picture: A pastor walks into a room on a cold winter day and is confronted by a roomful of uninterested youths who have been forced into an educational program that does not fit them, takes no interest in their welfare and keeps them away from all the things they want to do.

Or as the Rev. Rich Melheim says, "Confirmation is dead; we just haven't had the decency to bury it."

Melheim has set out to change that decades-old weekly torture session for youth through his Faith Inkubators Project. Melheim was a youth pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Stillwater, MN at a time when 300 young people were enrolled in the three-year confirmation program. With classes that big, traditional lecture-method confirmation prevailed. Youths usually were herded into a hall where the pastor lectured them for an hour.

Melheim could see it wasn't working. So he broke the huge classes into small cells with no more than six young people each. He asked parents to volunteer as mentors, not teachers. And he told his mentors to emphasize three things: learning, service and fellowship.

The failure of traditional confirmation education is so obvious, Melheim said, and yet congregations seem unable to make significant changes.

"If a company had a three-year training program and three-fourths of the participants quit," Melheim said, "wouldn't that company make some changes?"

That, he says, is what's happening with confirmation. "Three-fourths check out as soon as they're confirmed. They come back for their child's baptism and check out again."

Melheim knew his confirmation plan would work in any setting. He devised a two-day seminar, quit his parish pastorate and hit the road telling parents to dream about what kind of relationship they want with their children. In four years, he has done 240 seminars, has 1,000 churches using Faith Inkubator materials and has signed up 10,000 parents as mentors.

"Three things always surface during the two-day seminar," Melheim said. "Parents are concerned about sexuality, drugs and economics. But the sex and drugs are the biggest because both are more available than ever, and both are more potent.

"Parents today say they can't talk to their kids about drugs because they once used drugs themselves. They feel it would be hypocritical to get moralistic. But you can find drugs anywhere today. Sex is more potent because of AIDS. And, by the way, the favorite time for sex is three to five in the afternoon. Favorite place, Mom and Dad's bed."

The third concern is economics, Melheim said. "Parents worry that their children won't have the skills necessary to make a living. There are 11 million adults who are still living at home with Mom and Dad. There are six million in their 20's. That has extended adolescence. You don't ever have to grow up. Adolescence now begins at 8 or 9 and keeps going until you decide to grow up."

But Melheim's program draws youths into discussions of these big issues and the impact they can have on youths' entire lives. The question, according to Melheim, has to be: Is the confirmation program giving young people a stronger, more committed life?

That's where the service part of the program comes into play. Melheim says many small groups choose service projects rather than fellowship events such as hayrides and bowling parties.

Isn't it amazing that in a child-oriented society, the chance to be of service to others may be the one thing modern parents have denied their children?

Clark D. Morphew

Oct. 19, 1997