The-Faith-Journey.com is a partnership between Rev. Dr. Steve Thomason, PhD (Pastor Steve) and Easter Lutheran Church. Pastor Steve has been innovating in the intersection of faith formation and digital media since 2002. He currently serves as the Pastor of Family Faith at Easter and is responsible for leading the Confirmation program. The-Faith-Journey.com is an experiment to create an online, gamified social learning environment that will empower families to own their journey to confirmation and customize it to fit their family’s needs.
Here’s the brief story of how it came to be.
Easter has 700 active families and 300 students in the Confirmation program, running in different tracks. Pastor Steve started serving Easter in May, 2017. Easter has a long and rich tradition of a dynamic confirmation program. The church is situated in a Midwest Suburb that was booming in expansion during the 1980s and 1990s. Young Lutheran families flooded into the neighborhood and into the church. It was busting at the seems. At the turn of the millennium all of those young children were coming into Confirmation. The church enjoyed as season where each year a new crop of 200+ high school sophomores would be confirmed.
Things have changed. The suburb is aging out. The demographics are shifting. It is.