Blessings on your ministry and opportunities to begin pastoral leadership among a congregation new to you.

Several thoughts about your proposal. Primarily, it seems to me that puberty is a cultural construct at least as much as it is a biological one, particularly in Western (and Global North) cultures. So it’s not clear to me that the connection to the age of Jesus in this text implies addressing the same cultural issues, at the very least, as the teenagers you are likely addressing. On the issue of puberty, perhaps this text helps you make that very point– that a good bit of what they will experience in the coming years isn’t about them, per se, but rather about how they interact with and learn to negotiate in a world where they are gaining increasing responsibility but have still relatively little authority to act. In the world of Jesus, that disjunction between responsibility and authority at this point developmentally simply either did not exist or would have lasted a relatively short amount of time.

So it seems to me, especially for a confirmation class, that the better focus from this text might be on developing the competency to do what Jesus did here– to engage in passionate debate with the brightest and best of the religious minds of his time and, remarkably, hold his own in the process. That, I think, speaks to the context of confirmation far better, because, after all, isn’t that, rather than merely a sort of rite of passage into adulthood generically, what such intensive catechetical processes are all about?

Thanks