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This page contains suggestions and guidance for using The St Ninian Confirmation Course. They are mostly based on the way the course is run at St Martin's, Ruislip, but the course has also been used in other parishes. In particular, the course material has been used successfully at St Anselm’s, Hatch End with a mixed age group of adults and young people which in fact included some whole families, with sessions following the regular Sunday mass. We also provide more information about adapting the course for your particular circumstances.
If you come up with a new way to use these, or have suggestions of your own, please be in touch and we can share them on this page for all to use.
The sessions are provided on the website in an appropriate order. However, we shuffle the order as appropriate for any given liturgical year – for example, we suggest that the Holy Week session is run shortly before Holy Week, and so on. What we have suggested, then, is by no means the only order in which the sessions can be used – and there is no requirement to deliver every session either, of course, though use of all the sessions is designed to form a complete course.
You will notice that some short Biblical texts (such as John 3:16) and themes are repeated several, or perhaps many, times through the course. This is deliberate and the hope is that some of these will become very familiar to the participants over time.
Each of the Leader’s sheets for the sessions finishes with a time of preparation for mass as this is how the course is run in the context of St Martin’s, Ruislip, that is, with each session followed each week with a Catechumenal Mass. If you are running the course differently, then this last part of each Leader’s sheet will not be relevant to you, of course.
These are a vital resource for the participants on the course.
It is recommended that on one Sunday at the start of the course the candidates are presented with the texts of the Beatitudes (a pattern for how to live as a Christian), the Lords’ Prayer (a pattern for how to pray as a Christian) and the Nicene Creed (the declaration of what Christians believe).
These could be printed out on good quality A5 card, perhaps as presentation texts in colour, using your usual Biblical translation for the Beatitudes and the form of the Lord’s Prayer you are used to in your own context.
The three texts are referred to a number of times in the course material and providing these on good quality card encourages the participants to look after them and perhaps display them at home so they can be referred to again and again.
Towards the end of the course, it is useful to suggest that parents/carers could, if they wished, reaffirm their baptismal faith at the Confirmation of their children.