To complete the development of those preparing for pastoral and missionary service, the local church must offer internships. The idea of an internship is for the student to gain practical ministry experience within the context of a local congregation.
If the disciple is about to launch out into full-time ministry, he needs the experience of a full-time internship. Almost all ministry training schools require one or more such internships. While some larger churches can provide specialized ministry internships, such as for Christian education or evangelism, most internships conducted at local churches are just called “pastoral internships”. The intern serves in a local church, supervised by a pastor, doing whatever ministry or ministries he is assigned to do.
Students of both pastoral ministry and missions benefit from a pastoral internship. For, missionaries still serve from the context of a local church even on the mission field. The missionary is either planting a church or working with an established church. Either way, he needs the practical experience of ministering in a local church context.
Neither part-time ministry nor active layman ministry is anything like full-time ministry, where his only “work” is ministry and he is “on call” twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Part of being effective in ministry is learning how to manage time and priorities.
While the intern is getting valuable training, he is also making a valuable contribution to the ministry of the local church. It is a full time job that requires a salary from the church. The salary may not be that of a staff position, but it needs to be enough for the intern to make a living.
If the local church will not do its best for the intern, why should the intern do his best? The self-righteous and self-serving church leader will reply, “He should do his best for the Lord!” So true, Mr. Church Leader. And is what you are paying him your best before the Lord? The best your church budget can do?
Having an intern work part-time and serve part-time is only good if he is preparing for a bi-vocational ministry. If you expect a full-time effort from the intern, he is deserving of a full-time wage. For the laborer, even an intern, is worthy of his wages. (Luke 10:7)
I have overseen internships that lasted anywhere from six weeks to eighteen months. The internship requirements at most schools is only six weeks of full-time service. For a pastoral internship, this short span is practically a waste of time for both the intern and the church. For, it is usually done over the summer, the slowest time of the year on the church calendar. Attendance is at its lowest. Many members are missing while on vacation and mission trips. Many ministries take the summer off. Leaders of ministries are in the planning stages for kicking off a new year after Labor Day. The intern can’t be given much responsibility because he’s only here for six weeks. Because the summer months do not accurately reflect ministry as it is the rest of the year, even a three-month summer internship is the worst time to serve in a church.
I’m sure some pastors will disagree with me. They may feel the summer months are the best time to have an internship. However, typically, summer interns spend their time plugging ministry holes that do not exist the rest of the year. The intern becomes the number one substitute teacher. Because they are only there for the summer, interns are often given ministerial busy work, the things the pastor doesn’t have time for or an interest in. While there are always exceptions to the rule, pastoral internships are usually handled by pastors to just meet the school’s minimal internship requirements, and not to prepare the intern for local church ministry. Running a children’s program all summer, even if it is a raging success, is good ministry experience, but unless the intern’s vocational interest is children’s ministry, it makes for a poor pastoral internship.
Attention pastors! How many times in your first years of ministry did you discover things about ministry that your schooling never prepared you for? How many times did you wish you knew about those things ahead of time? Having an intern gives you the opportunity to build into a disciple those very things you wish someone had taken the time to teach you.
Pastor, if you don’t have the interest or time to mentor and guide an intern through the realities of day to day ministry, don’t offer an internship. Too many ministry students are already returning to school after an internship thinking they didn’t get much out of it, or worse, that it was a waste of their time. It’s a sad commentary when the most positive statement the student makes about the internship is that “at least I got the internship requirement fulfilled.” Pastor, remember hearing that when you were in school? Maybe you had one. And what did you think about those internships?
Pastor, don’t offer your disciples that kind of lame internship.
Internships are a privilege to be used by God to do discipleship with an individual on a level that cannot be done with the laity in the church. It is the closest thing to being involved in discipleship like Jesus did with the twelve by having them around Him during His ministry day in and day out.
Internships have a mix of what the intern wants to do and what he needs to do. Below is the ministry description of a one-year pastoral internship for one preparing for the mission field. The intern grew up in the church. His pastoral role for the year was to basically be the pastor of the college and career group ministry.
Increase Exposure to the Church Family
1) Preach twice
2) Regularly be up front in worship services to lead in announcements and/or prayer
3) Teach S.S. each quarter, a class in different age groups: K-3, 4-6, 7-12, and adult
4) Hospital visits
5) Active and Inactive member home visits
6) College & Career member visits
Enhance Ministry Skills Through:
1) Evangelism
a) contact visitors with intent to share the gospel
b) make contacts on college campuses with the goal of sharing the gospel
2) Discipleship
a) lead a discipleship group
b) teach the College & Career Bible Study
c) be the team leader of a summer missions team
3) Assimilation of believers into the local church ministry by:
a) Challenge and recruit College & Career individuals to serve as teachers or helpers in:
1. Sunday school classes
2. Morning or evening Children’s Church Classes
3. Awana
4. Nursery
5. Five Day Clubs
b) having a College & Career service project
4) Gaining greater understanding of local ministries by:
a) attending monthly elder board meetings
b) attending monthly meetings of the committee most related to your future vocational ministry (ie. youth ministry intern goes to the youth committee, pastoral intern goes to the C.E. committee, missionary intern goes to the missions committee.)
c) attending three consecutive meetings, if not included immediately above, of:
1. C.E. Committee
2. Youth Committee
3. Missions
4. Deacons
d) meeting with ministry leaders to learn the strategy and challenges of each
of the following ministries:
1. Assimilation
2. Christian Education
3. Discipleship
4. Evangelism
5. Family Ministry
6. Leadership Development
7. Missions
8. Summer Missions
9. Women’s Ministry
10. Worship
11. Youth
5) Learning the church planting strategies used by six current missionaries:
a) Contact the missionaries by email asking if they have a written strategy they could send you. If they have no written strategy, ask if they could explain to you in an email what their strategy is.
b) After receiving and reading a missionary’s strategy, make inquiry as to any adjustments that had to be made in the strategy and results of the church planting effort thus far.
c) Write a report that compares and contrasts the six strategies, noting where cultural norms influence, if not dictate, certain steps in the strategy.
6) Devise a written church planting strategy for your future mission field, including:
a) possible approaches to relationship building and reaching the nationals with the gospel
b) a one-year schedule of weekly discipleship lessons
c) research potential children’s ministry material that would be useful on the field
Sunday morning: teach Sunday school and go to the worship service, where, from time to
time, he will do welcome and announcements, opening prayer, prayer for the offering, or closing prayer.
Sunday night: He can occasionally substitute in evening children’s church. Otherwise,
he repeats his Sunday morning worship role.
Wednesday night: He can lead adult prayer group or serve in the children’s program
Friday night: He leads the College and Career Group Bible study.
The intern that was given this “job description” did all that he was called upon to do, plus he still had time to volunteer for a weekly jail ministry. He also did it all with an average fifty-hour work week. No pastor will burn out himself or his family with a fifty-hour work week. Neither will an intern.
This internship example with summer missions involvement assumes the intern is someone who came up through the church and has been on mission trips before. If not, two trips are in order for the intern. A year-long internship usually has two summers available. The first summer, the intern goes on a mission trip as a team member. The second summer, assuming he is capable, he leads a mission trip from start to finish.
Interns must have an office at the church so that the mentoring pastor can maintain a relationship with the intern. Sometimes the “office” in our church was a table in the photocopy room or in a storage room. It is important that the mentoring relationship includes almost daily time together. I always had weekly meetings with the intern and an open door policy so that we could chat at anytime he needed during the day. We ate a lot of lunches together.
Mentoring an intern is much like parenting. You get “quality time” by having “quantity time.”
If the intern is heading for the mission field, part of the internship needs to also include getting the intern through the steps of being accepted as a missionary candidate at a mission agency. The intern for the above internship already was accepted by an agency. He went to the agency’s candidate school before starting his internship.
If the prospective missionary intern has not done so, I would highly recommend the candidate school be done prior to the internship. The candidate school will make recommendations for further development that can be addressed in the internship. If the missionary intern hasn’t been to candidate school, selecting an agency and going to the candidate school some time during the internship is a necessity. This will help the missionary intern have even greater focus in his ministry preparation during the internship. Plus, he’ll be able to go directly into support raising for the mission field after graduation. Again, this recommendation assumes a one-year internship is being offered.
When the internship draws to a close, there must be a written evaluation of the intern that reviews how well he accomplished his ministry assignments, his personal strengths and weaknesses, and recommendations for further study and development. If the mentoring pastor has had the nearly daily involvement with the intern, there should be no major surprises in the final evaluation. If he has been there for a year, his successes, failures, strengths, and weaknesses have all been in the spotlight a time or two. No doubt they were talked about in the past. Therefore, most of the final evaluation is a review and an opportunity as the mentoring pastor to send the intern off with words of encouragement.
If the internship was a time of uncovering many personal issues that interfere with his effectiveness, hopefully there was some progress made in addressing the short-comings over the course of his time there. An intern may wonder if he should continue to pursue ministry. You, the mentoring pastor may wonder about it too. Unless there are sin issues that disqualify the intern or there is an obvious void of some of the qualities of an elder in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, I would avoid pronouncing a verdict against his pursuing full-time ministry.
Many great servants of the Lord in missions and pastoral ministry have disaster stories. Thankfully, they picked themselves up, learned from their mistakes, trusted God, and kept their hand to the plow. That’s the advice I give to the blundering intern. Get up. Learn from the mistakes. Trust God still wants to use you. Get on with the Great Commission. And, be thankful these mistakes took place in an internship and not the first year of the full-time ministry God has for you in the future.
If the pastor will look at the internship as a discipleship opportunity akin to what Paul had with Timothy, then the internship can be one of the most rewarding times for the pastor as well. Building into an intern takes a lot of time, but it is well worth it. The mentoring, love, and fellowship established during the internship doesn’t end with the internship. Years later, I am still in touch with former interns, keeping up with how God is using them today, praying for them, and rejoicing with them.
I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in truth. – 3 John 4
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