Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Churches through the ages and around the world have the perennial vocation to teach the basics of Christian belief and practice to young people.Along with preaching, celebration of the sacraments, prayer, care for one another, outreach to those in need, and public witness, teaching what it means to be Christian is a core function of the church.While Christian traditions vary considerably on the relative weight they place in pedagogy on nurture or crisis conversation, on experience or reflection, and on appropriation or discovery, they all have the responsibility to initiate young people into the life of faith.John Dewey once made the observation that "Philosophy is a generalized theory of education." 1 By analogy, it could well be said that "Theology is a generalized theory of Christian education."The history of theology readily bears this out as many of the greatest theologians in history developed their profound insights in the process of teaching the faith to others.Far from an add-on or a peripheral matter, teaching Christian belief and practice to others-particularly the young-manifests and clarifies the true character of the church.For those Christian traditions that practice infant baptism, teaching the basics of faith comes to a crucial transition point in confirmation.Usually occurring in early adolescence, confirmation provides space and time for young people to explore what they have received from family and church with an eye toward personal appropriation and reflective commitment.Among Protestants, confirmation plays a key role for Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, members of the African Methodist Episcopal church, and various Reformed bodies like Presbyterians.Problematically, none of these traditions in the American context had studied confirmation work in recent memory and it had never been done ecumenically, until four years ago.This took the form of a multi-year joint project of practical theologians from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church in the USA, and the United Methodist Church."The Confirmation Project" sought to Theology Today
Source: Theology Today
Author: Gordon S. Mikoski
Institution: Princeton Theological Seminary
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2944934997