You Can Be Arrested for This

We’d been told to confess.

To write it all down.

Own up to it all.

List our crimes.

Name names.

Tell why.

We were.

Nobody made eye contact.

It was a weirdly quiet room, given the others in there with me, sitting far apart, like one person to a table.

I’d get a good start, then slow down. If there’d been a soundtrack, mine would have included a line from a old Bob Seger song: “What to leave in, what to leave out?”

This happened last night, after sitting in the church basement hallway for half an hour during the Tornado Warning. It was Confirmation Class, and Pastor Jessica had given us the next activity in our Leader’s Guide —

In many parts of the world right now, it’s illegal to be a Christian.

You can be arrested for doing what we’re doing.

If that happened to you, and they made you

write down your Confession as a Christian,

forced you to write out the details,

what would you write?

Okay, if right now you’re going, “Come on already! We’ve done this exercise for years,” allow me to correct you. In the past maybe you’ve written like An Affirmation of Faith. If we’d be trying to sound high-falutin’ we’d talk about it as A Creedal Statement or something. This was different.

When we were all back at the same table and asked if we’d like to read our Confession out loud, I was floored. They were reading statements of real life, solid theology, experiences beyond the ages of the group. and an astonishing depth.

As an artist friend likes to say, “Presentation counts.” How things are framed changes how we see them. Faced with something more than rewriting ancient words and phrases, our Confirmation Class hit grand slam home runs.

I tell you all of that to get to this.

Before you go to sleep tonight, I invite you— no, let me challenge you — to try this same thing yourself. Physically get out pen and paper, or open up a fresh screen on here, and then address this:

In many parts of the world right now, it’s illegal to be a Christian.

You can be arrested for doing what we’re doing.

If that happened to you, and they made you

write down your Confession as a Christian,

forced you to write out the details,

what would you write?

Seriously.