The Eternal Intern

Student ministry and internships have gone hand in hand for decades, but how do you get an internship right? In some contexts, an internship can be more rigorous than a college degree and, in other places, as casual as a couple of helpful students picking up pizzas every week. Leading an intern will inevitably come with occasional challenges and require extra correction and guidance along the way.

Sometimes, the ministry benefits more from wringing every ounce of work out of an intern over a few Summer months, and sometimes, an intern is having the Summer of their life while the student pastor quietly brings their hand to their forehead and wonders why they ever brought on an intern in the first place. Does it have to be this way, or can an internship be eternally valuable for everyone involved? With a little intentionality, an internship can be the exact dose of encouragement that you, your church, and the Kingdom have been waiting for. 

I will never forget the day that my summer intern literally saved my career as a student pastor. We were at our middle school camping trip, an annual rite of passage event that rising sixth graders anticipate all Summer. It was about 11:45 PM, and our entire campsite was completely underwater. The river that we drove the bus through just a few hours earlier had overwhelmed the banks, and I had just made the decision to load up the seventy middle schoolers and get them to safety. Through the roar of the downpour, I used my megaphone to gather everyone under the leaking tarp and told them to go back to their tents to grab only their essential items and get on the bus. Once everyone took their seat on the bus, I went to call the roll, but when I pulled out my clipboard with the roster on it, I found that all of my copies were soaked through, and the printed ink had become completely unreadable. The panic inside me was picking up. I looked at our faithful intern, who was days away from completing his Summer Internship, and told him we would have to rely on a head count. We counted three times and were three kids short every time. With lightning striking right outside the bus, he sprinted through the field, checking each tent for our missing students. Finally, he returned with three soaking-wet sixth-grade guys. My intern told me he found them all in their sleeping bags, trying to go to sleep while the storm pounded their tent. When I asked them why they were trying to sleep while everyone else was on the bus, they informed me that all they heard me say was, “Go back to your tents.” I thanked my intern for leaving the ninety-seven to find the three, and we bulldozed the bus through the raging water and got the kids home to their parents. A true miracle.

Three months earlier, I had met with that young intern at the beginning of his Summer Internship, and I told him why this internship was going to be significant in God’s great plan. What I shared with him about how to make his upcoming Summer meaningful also applies to how you can make your upcoming internships eternally valuable.

OUTLINE THE OBJECTIVES 

A valuable internship should have, at the very least, a two-fold goal: (1) to broaden the capacity of the ministry and (2) to equip and develop the person completing the internship. An intern broadens the capacity of the ministry by simply doing work that can’t be done if the intern isn’t there. There should be some real projects that are only possible while the intern is inspired, activated, and set loose to accomplish tasks that the ministry doesn’t have the bandwidth to accomplish without an intern’s added effort. Too often, interns gain experience and new ministry insights at the cost of the ministry, leaving a lot of potential unrealized. The season will come and go, and the student ministry will have produced a well-rounded intern but not taken any new ground for the Kingdom. 

When an intern is in the office or on the team, extra work should be done. Examples of this might be:

• A new weekly Bible Study that a handful of students can engage with for 5 weeks in a row. Let the intern choose the dates and times, make them give reasons for why they are going with their strategic day of the week, and commission them to write or choose the study, name the series, promote the gatherings, and lead the Bible Study.
• Another example might be using their flexible schedule to start late-night high school pick-up basketball sessions through the Summer. You can give them a corner of the equipment room to reorganize or entrust them with a portion of the weekly service to lead.

What is the crazy idea that has been floating around the back of your head, but you haven’t had time or focus to knock it out recently? Give that away to a young person wrestling with a call to ministry and see what the Lord does with it! While getting extra work done for the Kingdom is vital, an equally high priority should be equipping your intern in their call with practical, real ministry insight and wisdom for their future ministry. This means giving the intern a good long glimpse into the purposes behind the ministry projects, showing them the strategy that shapes the ministry’s schedule. Take time to explain to them why you preach the way you do, inspire the volunteers the way you do, and check students into the weekly service the way you do. Give them insight into the mistakes and adjustments you made that brought you to do the things you do the way you do them. A development goal while leading an intern isn’t telling them what to think but teaching them how to think.

CLARIFY THE CALL 

Sometimes, we take it for granted that someone wants to work in student ministry. We should never gloss over the fact that, at some level, this intern is responding to a very unique desire that God has put in their heart. Take every opportunity to stir up what God has placed in them and ignite a forest fire in the wilderness of their calling. Just like Paul reminded Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God which is in you” (2 Timothy 1:6 ESV), we should recognize what they are naturally gifted with, not withhold encouragement about the talents we see in them, and push them to examine the types of ministries they are passionate about.

Are they effortlessly creating gravity that draws students into their influence? Are they strategically minded in a way that allows them to foresee what needs to be done before the need arises? Are they good at running games? Whatever it is, point this out to them and remind them that this is how God has gifted them, and it should affirm their calling that they may be wrestling with. A pattern of consistent feedback can help clarify a blurry nudge that they have felt in their heart into a clear calling over the course of just a few months. Never let an intern go through the whole program or internship without calling out the work that you see God doing in them. 

CONNECT IT TO THE KINGDOM 

The work interns do can be pretty unremarkable. Untangling volleyball nets, stocking snack shelves, icing down coolers, blinking sugary powder into their eyeballs while mixing gallons of yellow Gatorade. It can even be easy to completely miss the eternal value of the tasks they are accomplishing, but we should strive to attach the closet they cleaned, the message they preached, the student they prayed with, the spilled soda they mopped directly to the Kingdom work that God has been doing for over two thousand years of the church age. (This can be a challenge because maybe we, ourselves, need to re-attach our own work to the heart of the Kingdom.) We have a responsibility to remind those we lead that every hole that they have to patch in the drywall was potentially put there by a kid who had nothing to smile about all day until they won that game of tug of war and fell into the wall with a small group leader who showed them love, or that every four square ball they inflate is probably going to be slapped, slammed and bounced by a bunch of students minutes before they hear the gospel of Jesus for the first time in their 15 years of life. These seemingly silly things are the precursors and postscripts of students meeting Jesus and choosing true life over eternal death. Don’t let your intern lose sight of the big-picture work that God is up to! 

That intern who found those lost boys and saved my career in the early years of my time as a student pastor has gone on to become a great student pastor, currently serving at the same church for many years and has even contributed to the YM360 blog a few times! Whenever I think about that Summer or any of the other incredible interns that I have had the opportunity to lead, it is an encouragement and reminder to me that I have a responsibility to make the value of every internship eternal. Make your next internship eternally valuable by outlining their objectives, clarifying their calling, and connecting their seemingly mundane tasks to the Kingdom work of God. 

Share your thoughts with others in our YM360 community:

1. Have the internships you have led been more valuable for the intern or for the ministry? How can you make your internships most valuable for the Kingdom? 

2. What is a new project or undertaking that you can entrust to the next intern who joins your team?

Ready for more articles and training? Check out these top posts!