Announcement Page

This curriculum is currently in development.
This site will be updated in Spring 2025 with the full release of the program.

Let's Strengthen Faith!

The goal of Strengthening Faith Program is to prepare youth, primarily those in 6th grade to 8th grade, to live out their baptismal covenant. This program will prepare youth:

  1. To trust God and to reject sin,
  2. To live in unity with others through the love of Christ manifest in their lives,
  3. To worship God through lives of prayer, praise, thanksgiving, witness, and service,
  4. To exercise their Christian calling in their daily lives,
  5. To use the gifts of the Spirit for their calling in the world,
  6. To proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed,
  7. To serve and care for others and the world God made, responding to God’s love to meet human needs and following the example of Jesus, and
  8. To strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

How's it Work?

SFP is focused primarily on focused on hands-on activities that will engage youth in the practices of faith and prepare adults to support them in those practices. The units will open by teaching a core concept using Scripture, then help the youth engage that content while the adults learn ways to help the youth dig deeper, and close with practicing what was learned as a community.

Each unit of the Strengthening Faith Program is broken into 3 sessions lasting 40 minutes each:

Bible
Introduction activities
Ground the unit’s topic in stories of faith
Youth
Dig deeper into a topic
Receive tools for their faith		 Adults
Receive tools to support their youth
Learn to lead group activities

Community
Group activities, usually building on what was learned in Youth and Adult sessions
Take home resources to continue building on what was learned

The Strengthening Faith Program design was modeled on the Strengthening Families Program. If you've never encountered the original SFP, this program is a skills training program for families that has been proven to protect youth from high-risk activities by training not only them but also their parents, creating families that can support one another. My hope is that the Strengthening Faith Program will be for the Church what the Strengthening Families Program has been for the families I led through that program.

Wait, Adults?

Everyone researching faith development, from Frogs Without Legs Can't Hear in 2003 to Cultivating Teen Faith: Insights from the Confirmation Project in 2018, has recognized that the key to raising youth of faith is surrounding them with adults of faith. The Strengthening Faith Program requires an adult - parent, grandparent, godparent, mentor, or another person who will invest in this youth's life - to participate in the program with the youth. Every unit is created for youth and adults to learn together, and each unit has a section that focuses exclusively on teaching adults the tools they need to help their youth live out their faith.

In addition to the main outcome goals, by the end of this program adults will have fulfilled their baptismal promises to their youth:

  1. To live with them among God’s faithful people,
  2. Bring them to the word of God and the holy supper,
  3. Teach them the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments,
  4. Place in their hands the holy scriptures, and
  5. Nurture them in faith and prayer.

What's Topics are Covered?

Introduction

  1. What is Faith?

Image of God

  1. Who is God?
  2. Who am I?
  3. Jesus and the Christians

Prayer

  1. Prayer 101
  2. The Lord's Prayer
  3. Spiritual Practices

Commandments

  1. Sin and Sabbath
  2. Human Relationships
  3. Love Commands
  4. Repentance

Gospel

  1. Law and Gospel
  2. Cross and Resurrection
  3. Forgiveness

Living Faith

  1. Spiritual Gifts
  2. I Believe
  3. Pick Up Your Cross
  4. Stories of Faith

Is there a Sample?

"Unit 3: Who am I?" is available as a sample of what the program looks like. Unit 3 includes the following activities:

Bible Youth Adult Community
An Image of Me
Made in God's Image		 Humans as God's Image
Encountering Jesus
God Sightings		 Jesus: The Image of God
Baptism: Reforming Us		 God Sighting Stories
Mission to Find God
Where We Always See God

Download Unit 3 here:

Frequently Asked Questions

What faith tradition is this?
This curriculum should work with nearly any Christian tradition, but its content is built on the Lutheran tradition. The outcome goals were designed around the liturgy of the ELCA, and Luther's Small Catechism is used when relevant.

How is this different from traditional confirmation?
Traditional confirmation explores the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments. This program cover that, but will also teach youth how to forgive and repent, prepare adults to talk about sexuality with their youth, teach a method of family prayer and family bible study, and so much more.

Is there anything else special about this program?
Every unit is designed for the youth to create some type of output, whether it's picture of how they imagine God or it's a list of all the the gifts others see in them. Each of these creations will be put in a binder so that at the end of the program they have a portfolio of their faith to share with the community and hold onto as a keepsake.

Do adults really need to participate?
Yes. If a parent isn't available, find another adult. Nearly every congregation has numerous more adults than children. Find someone to step up and support these youth. Many activities are designed with the assumption that an adult is present for every youth in the program.

Can this be done as an indepedent study?
Though this program was imagined for groups of about 5 to 12 youth-adult pairs, most of the content could be engaged in a single youth-adult pair.

I only have an hour with the youth; will this work in that timeframe?
Because each unit is divided into three 40 minute sessions, each unit could be broken up into multiple weeks.

This is a lot of units; do I need to use them all?
Every unit is completely indepedent of any other unit. True, some units follow a theme, and some topics are skipped in certain units because they are covered in other units (for example, the Lord's Prayer unit mostly skips the line about forgiveness because it's covered in another unit). But if you did not have the time to cover all the units, it should be possible to pick and choose.

Can I mix and match content from different units?
This would be difficult. The content for each session builds on the content from previous sessions. For example, in one adult session, they write their own faith statements; then during the community session they read those statements to their youth and youth come prepared to ask questions about their adult's faith.

How much will this cost?
The price is subject to change, but I'm currently planning on charging $50 for an annual site license. After a few years of feedback, giving me the resources to revise, I may move to a permanent license model.