Pray for Our Confirmands
We are excited to be welcoming a new class of Confirmands to the church on October 15th. You may remember that we have traditionally done Confirmation in the Spring but beginning this year we have made a shift to a Fall Confirmation instead. Offering Confirmation to our students in the fall gives them a chance to dive right into the Student Ministry specifically bonding with other 6th graders in the same season as them.
If you have been around Creekside for any length of time you may know what Confirmation means but for those of you who may not, I will give you a quick recap. Confirmation is when we give our students (typically in 6th grade but whenever they’re ready) the chance to “confirm” their baptism and share with their church family that Jesus is the Lord of their life and they want to follow him. The formal process of Confirmation looks like our students going through a series of lessons/classes that review the foundational pieces of our Christian faith up to and including the importance of being an active participant in Christ’s Church. It goes without saying just how important this process is to the life of our students, and to our whole church.
When I was asked to write this blog for Confirmation I didn’t know what direction I wanted to take it until it hit me that I wanted to challenge the people of Creekside to pray...like to really pray. Why am I asking you to pray? I believe in the power of prayer, and I trust you do too. I don’t know about you but it seems to me that these young confirmands need our prayers because they are about to enter into the sanctifying process of their faith from now until the day they meet Jesus face to face. Sanctifying grace means that they are becoming more and more like Jesus and that most certainly means they will need our help. What better way to help someone than to pray for them?!
While I trust these students have accepted Jesus as the Lord of their lives and sincerely want to live for Him in so far as they can understand, you and I cannot make them commit to Christ day in and day out no matter how deeply we want that for them. We cannot make them understand that making that decision each and every day will be the most rewarding choice they will make. And we certainly cannot make them be active participants of the church. They have a choice to make. And we all have choices to make each day regardless of how long we have been following Jesus. And so church family, since God is the one who pursues us, who saves us, and who has the power to KEEP us all the days of our lives, I ask you to join me in praying for our confirmands. Pray that they are truly and authentically ready to make this decision, pray that the Holy Spirit lights a flame inside their hearts, pray that they would do this for Jesus and only Jesus, and finally, I ask you to pray that our students would remember the day of their confirmation and their new identity as a member of God’s family!
Our world is falling apart as we follow every whim and desire of our flesh, and the last thing our world needs are lukewarm Christians. Please join me in asking our Lord that these confirmands would be filled with the overflowing JOY of their salvation so it may carry them through all the days of their lives and most importantly into a broken and hurting world.