Foreword - Fr Simon Evans
This Confirmation Course has been developed in a parish trying to grapple with the issues we face in catechising and nurturing the faith of children in the changing culture of contemporary society. As our practice and thinking has evolved during recent years, two main factors stand out in the approach we’re now adopting:
- We need to be nurturing Eucharistic Christians. The programme for preparing both adults and children therefore takes place with a Catechumenal Mass at its heart. The children’s group leads into the mass which takes place on a weekday evening, and the adults group flows from it. Each week a different part of the liturgy is explained as we come to it and the scripture readings relate to the subject that the children have just been focussing on.
- In today’s society Christianity has all but disappeared from the life of most schools, so what children learn of their faith at home is vitally important. It’s been our experience however that most parents are simply not sufficiently articulate in the Christian faith to support their children’s faith development. We’ve therefore devised a Confirmation Course that involves at least one parent accompanying their child at church and taking material home to discuss and think about between the sessions. As soon as we’d decided to try out this approach, we were encouraged by an article that appeared in The Tablet describing the success of family catechesis in the Archdiocese of Liverpool using precisely the model that we’d started to envisage. After the first year of adopting this approach we experienced the same response described in Liverpool: parents discovering their own faith being renewed and having significant conversations with their children that would otherwise never have taken place.
No doubt we still have much to learn and more to develop but The St Ninian Confirmation Course is offered to the catholic parishes of the Church of England in the hope that it will be a useful and fruitful resource. I am grateful to my colleague, Fr David Green, and his wife Alison who have worked so hard devising and putting the material together.
Additionally, Fr Simon authored an article for New Directions providing further insight into the development of the course at St Martin's. The article can be found in the September 2016 edition, available from the New Directions website.