Immerse | A Journal of Faith, Life, and Youth Ministry

We boarded the train just after midnight, sad to leave behind the breathless beauty of Venice (and the Italian ice cream sandwiches, of which I had already consumed a half dozen). We were on our way to Nice in the south of France for another adventure on twenty dollars a day. My wife having won a fellowship during our final year of seminary, we had chosen to stretch the funds to their extreme by traveling the world.

This particular evening, we hauled our backpacks through the thin aisles of a train until we found our way to our sleeper car. We swung the door open to meet another young couple, also backpackers, from Montreal. After sharing a few travel stories, they asked us what we did back home. We explained that we had just finished seminary and that my wife was preparing to be a pastor and I was going to be an academic theologian. “Cool,” they said in their perfect English with overtones of a French accent. It was the kind of “cool” that said, “That’s surprising and a little weird; I have nothing else to say…sooo…cool.”

After a minute of silence the young woman, realizing we had hours remaining together, said, “I was kicked out of confirmation when I was in school. The leader thought I asked too many disturbing questions, so they asked me to leave.” I must admit that often after a conversation, I think of the perfect thing to say, but this was one of those occasions where it came to me in the moment. I responded, “That’s too bad because the best theologians ask the most disturbing questions.” She just smiled, and we were on to another conversation.

When we finally went to bed that night, I lay in my sleeping bag as southern Europe raced past the window and I thought of the last confirmation class I had taught. I remembered the frustration and pressure. I was frustrated by what felt like bipolar meetings with my ninth-grade small group. It always seemed that they wanted to talk about anything but the lesson or faith, preferring instead to rehash school gossip or simply make fun of each other until it was impossible to find our way back to the lesson at hand.

But at least a few times a year (and this is where it gets bipolar), the conversation would turn from gossip and mayhem to the deepest and most difficult of questions. Right in the middle of my trying to steer things back on topic and telling someone to stop throwing popcorn, one of them would drop the biggest of theological questions on me. One minute I would be fighting to get them to talk about anything having to do with what I supposed was our reason for being together, throwing out comments like, “So in reading this Bible passage, what jumps out to you?”

Then the next minute I’d be suddenly cornered with something like, “So if God is so powerful and loving, why are children in poor countries dying every minute? And why did my mom’s friend who just had a baby get leukemia?”
This back and forth made my head spin; what was I doing? I felt like half the time I was taskmaster-teacher, and the other half I was bumbling defender of the faith, not feeling prepared or adequate to address these significant questions (and I was a seminary student at the time). So what was I doing as a confirmation leader? Was I to be a teacher, a defender, a mixture of both?

The truth is, when it comes to preparing adults to be confirmation teachers and mentors for students, we often don’t know what they are doing, which of course means, that if we—the paid youth workers—don’t know, then surely the volunteer has no clue. We know that they’re supposed to help pass on the essentials of the Christian faith and tradition to young people, but they’re also supposed to be in deep relationship with them. These desires seem to conflict. The volunteer is given a packet of lessons and told to get through them as well as help kids write faith statements and memorize Bible verses. And of course, while you’re doing all this essential stuff—stuff that determines whether they can be confirmed at all—don’t forget to build deep relationships with them.

But maybe this conflicted way of being confirmation leader is not the best approach; perhaps there is another way. Often we see the confirmation leader as the one responsible for getting kids to know and appropriate the tradition through deep relationship. But what if the objective of the confirmation teacher was not to work to pass on anything but was rather to be a partner and companion in doubt?

What if, instead of depending on lessons bought from publishing houses, we used our very doubts as the curriculum for passing on the faith? Or to say it another way, what if the best way to actually pass on the faith was not through lessons, certainty, and knowledge but through doubt? What if the confirmation teacher was a convincer and co-doubter with adolescents? What if confirmation wasn’t about appropriating a tradition but exploring doubt, placing it on the table and fiercely seeking understanding through it?

Then the responsibility of the confirmation teacher is not to know the tradition in an airtight way, something few to zero volunteers can sign off on, but only to be open enough with young people to explore one’s own doubts as he or she explores the young peoples’. What energy a small group could have if for three years—or three weeks—they sought to express the depth of their unbelief, working to share it with each other and God! The confirmation teacher then is no longer taskmaster-teacher or skilled apologist with defense for all adolescent questions but is the captain of the company of companion doubters. Confirmation would be the time to ask your most disturbing questions about God, self, and world, to place them on the table as the group’s shared curriculum.

You may be starting to get nervous (I must admit, my own stomach quivers a little as I write this). But our shared nervousness has more to do with misunderstandings than with reality. We wrongly think that doubt is a Trojan horse that, if allowed to penetrate the fortress of our person, will release an army that will undercut our faith and lead us far away from God. We may not admit it, but we fear that if we allow kids to doubt (even more so, if we encourage it!), then they will discover that our faith is only a house of cards that cannot stand up to the winds of their inquisitions. But I think this is because we wrongly assume that faith is only faith if it has been immunized from doubt. Yet doubt is not antithetical to faith; doubt is the call to faith.

Protestant theology, from the early Reformation, sought to do theology by discussing the negative or the opposite (the via negativa). The theologians of the early Reformation believed that it was only by examining the opposite that we could be freed from seeing our common theological language as just that—common; as meaningless phrases plastered on greeting cards that now have no meaning at all. We get back the rich (earth-shaking) meaning by thinking together of these realities in light of their opposite.

So when Paul says that discipleship is encompassed in faith, hope, and love, these are not just nice, flowery words perfect for church mission statements and Christian college insignias. They are radical assertions in light of their opposites. We are to love others in opposition to the will to dominate them; we are to hope in opposite immediacy; we are to have faith in opposition to certainty. The call to faith is the call to avoid the temptation of certainty; it is certainty, not doubt, that destroys faith.

And right here is where we usually go wrong with confirmation. Christianity has nothing to do with certainty, and confirmation is not the ritual of claiming that you will with all certainty believe the tradition and theology of the church. Rather, Christianity is about living in opposition to certainty; it is about faith in the midst of doubt. Christianity has no room for certainty, for certainty lives by the law of self-protection; its own rightness keeps it from hope, and most importantly (the greatest of these, Paul says), love. Certainty demands its rightness in the now, even if it means hurting or hating others to maintain its integrity.

Doubt then is not our enemy but our great friend. For it keeps us from the most un-Christian of things: assuming that we possess certainty, that we need not think our faith, love our neighbors, and worse—that we need not search for God, for we know this God certainly. Faith that has become certain is no longer (by definition) faith; it has become idolatry. We are no longer seeking out a living, personal God but have made this God into a frozen idol.

The truth is, there can be no relationship at all when it is based on certainty. I cannot really love my friend and embrace the fullness of his being if I assume I know him with certainty, if in being with him I keep saying, “I know you; that’s not what you think. I don’t need to hear you, see you, or learn from you. I know you certainly; you cannot change.” Faith is about trust. And for trust to be trust, it must always live with doubt. So I say, let us doubt! Let us make confirmation the place of shared doubt. For it is only when we welcome doubt that we are really the people who are about faith seeking understanding (which the church father Anselm called us to be).

What the confirmation leader would have to affirm is that the Christian tradition has something to say to our questions. It has something to say to our deep doubt that is worth exploring. She or he would have to commit to affirming that the tradition has something to say, not commit to knowing it perfectly or even accepting it fully. It is not important that he or she have the answers, only the willingness to seek God through doubt. This of course takes some bravery, much more bravery than going through a lesson handout. But it is a bravery that is borne in the person of the leader. When the group is built around shared doubt, it is constructed around the core of shared humanity.

Through doubt, the leader is moved not simply to share knowledge or adult wisdom with an adolescent but to share his or her very person, his or her sufferings and longings. A confirmation small group built on the sharing of doubt embraces the mutual openness of relationship. It is a group of place-sharing.

A good confirmation teacher, then, is not someone who knows every answer. It is someone who can create an environment where people feel safe enough to speak their deepest doubts into the life of the group, to speak those doubts and then seek God in them. The job of the confirmation leader is to invite doubts to be spilled without fear of shock or dehumanizing judgment from others. The goal is to make doubt shared, and therefore, part of a community. When our doubts are shared by others, we not only find ourselves squarely in relationship with others, but we discover that our doubts do not alienate us. They invite us to keep searching, to keep seeking for God with these people. We discover that when we cannot believe, others believe for us. And that faith is not a possession or achievement; it is a gift from God.

Confirmation is not the end of a road or a final exam but the welcome and continued encouragement to keep seeking God. The lifeblood of faith seeking understanding is confronting and sharing our doubts with others. If confirmation teachers are co-doubters, conveners of the community of doubt, then they are able to do the two things we often ask of them, the two things that often thrust them into an uncomfortable conundrum: they are able to be in deep relationship with young people and, in so doing, explore deeply the tradition. If relationships are built on mutual identification while respecting the other’s difference and otherness, then exploring each other’s doubts serves as a road to deep connection through mutual exploration (what more can we want?).

Our doubts are usually deeply woven around our beings; we doubt because we have heard that Jesus brings peace, but we have only known the chaos of a drunken father. We’ve heard that Jesus brings wholeness, but we have only known the emptiness of being out of work. As co-doubters, the small group becomes a deeply woven relational community of shared suffering. But because it has been built around doubt instead of certainty, it is at the same time a group that seeks God, that seeks understanding in the midst of the world’s inconsistency, their own inconsistency, and the tradition’s inconsistency.

In shared doubt, the broken searching of our shared lives leads us into seeking God, into asking, Who is this God who joins us in our suffering, who comes near in our doubts? Who is this living God who calls us into relationship, who loves us so that our very unbelief and our willingness to proclaim our doubt, (like the father in Mark 9: “I believe, help my unbelief!”) becomes the invitation to trust and therefore have faith in the God made known in Jesus Christ?

I wonder what our sleeper car companion would have said had she been in a confirmation class that did not kick her out for asking disturbing questions but made her (and the many other unspoken) doubts the curriculum for their time together? My hunch is that she would have said something like this:

Cool; I went to confirmation. It was one of the most interesting times of my life. I fell in love with those people. We talked about so many crazy, fun, and heartbreaking things. I really saw the depth of the Christian life; I tasted it, and even now I find myself still searching, always asking big questions, always wondering what God is up to, who I am, and what people are dealing with. It was one of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had. I discovered life is worth living and God is worth loving.

Image from le fromage: http://www.flickr.com/photos/catski/1198748740/sizes/z/in/photostream/