This Week at Confirmation: What Do You Believe?

This week the Confirmation class began to examine both what we believe personally as well as what the Church believes.

The purpose of this class is:

1. To invite the canddiates to begin serious reflection on their attitudes and understandings of Jesus.
2. To provide the candidates opporutnity to identify and reflect on their own beliefs.
3. To introduce the candidates to the Nicene Creed and encourage them to understand how it applies to their daily lives.

The candidates participated in a 'Playing Percentages' activity that asked them to identify where on a scale they felt most teenagers would fall in terms of religious beliefs. Then the candidates answered a series of questions about their own beliefs by placing themselves on the scale as well.

After examining their own beliefs, the teens broke open the beliefs of the Catholic Church by first identifying some of the common misconceptions about the Church. Then they broke down the Nicene Creed into sections and re-worded it into their own words and discussed what each section of the creed means to the lives of teenagers today.

Finally, they closed class with a prayer based on Matthew 16:13-16 where Jesus asks Peter, "Who do you say that I am?" The teens reflected on who they would say that Jesus is and prayed for the Holy Spirit to better reveal the truths of the Church to them.