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Designing Church Intern Programs

A ministry intern’s effectiveness is usually correlated to the effectiveness of the internship plan and supervisor.

There’s been a lot written about how to properly use an intern to be both helpful to the intern and to your church. Without going into those pros and cons, let’s start at the foundation: designing an internship plan that will attract the best interns for your church’s situation.

Not only for what an intern will provide for your church, but also what your church can provide them. If the program is not designed well, those don’t always line up.

Being a good steward of an intern requires you to know what you’re looking for on the front end. If you need someone to clean out the camp lost and found closet, design the internship that way. If you want someone to delegate ministry tasks to, great. If you want to develop someone called into ministry, design the internship for that.

Our church has long used interns, and used them effectively. But this last year we decided to streamline our approach with all of our ministry departments. We documented core philosophies, expectations, and compensation for our internships. Then we allowed space for each ministry area to contextualize their internships for their ministry area.

As a resource for you to review, I’ve provided our church’s internship application and ministry plan. Choose from a PDF form or an abridged web version.

Our plan won’t match all of your needs, but perhaps parts will spur you on to be thoughtful and proactive at designing an internship program which has Kingdom impact for all those involved.

A Critical Step in Hiring A Minister

The pause.

The pause is relevant no matter how many ministers you hire.

The pause is critical no matter your church’s governance model.

The pause is a ‘must have’ no matter how long you’ve been hiring ministers.

The pause is, in fact, a pause.

After each step in your selection process with a minister candidate, you as a church leader need to ensure the decision maker or makers (hiring manager, elders, personnel team, whomever) pause.

Once we as church leaders get excited about a candidate and can see how they fit into our church’s future, we sometimes move things forward quickly and don’t stop.

We perpetuate urgency.

When you’re working urgently, you miss things.

A pause in the hiring process accomplishes several things:

It makes sure we’re in an Acts 15 moment “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”
It slows it down for things below the surface to literally rise to the top (some things are only uncovered in time)
It allows people to catch up. This is really important for search processes that include multiple people. Most “multiple people” have lives that aren’t solely focused on hiring ministers. So pauses give literal time for people to catch up on the process
A pause at each step tells the candidate that this is a process, it includes due diligence, and they too, should be pausing
And related to an Acts 15 mindset, pauses allow us to be still enough to hear from God. We want to always be a part of God’s “good, pleasing, and perfect will,” and that may not always match our desired candidate

There are some negatives to pauses. But the positives far outweigh the negatives.

One pause is not enough, I suggest a pause at every significant step (see link at bottom for examples of steps). I’m not suggesting how long a “pause” should be, that’s circumstantial and usually clear to the leader who’s involving others, wants the best, and seeking divine wisdom.

Completing a step doesn’t have to beget another step. In hiring a minster, the paradigm should be: complete a step, pause, and then make decision about whether to take next step.

Pausing could mean you delay having a minister on site by a week or a month. Pausing could also mean you never hire the minister. And in that case, the pause did its job…allowing time for the process to disqualify candidates, or changed the desires of a candidate or the search team, or for the Spirit to provide clarity that only comes from God.

As a practical takeaway, here is an Abridged Version of BBC Selection With Pauses that shows pauses throughout.

p.s. Lifeway President Thom Rainer has written some excellent blog posts recently about what ministers want search teams to know and what search teams want minister candidates to know.

When A Leader Should Confront

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto®

One of the most important decisions a leader makes is when to confront someone they lead.

Confrontation is not a bad word. From its Latin origin, it means to turn your face towards. (What is bad is to say confrontational things, in the form of an email or to a third person when you’re not “facing them.) Confronting is an inevitable part of leadership. It’s part of keeping your church on mission. It’s part of developing others.

I’ve written previously on “saying the last 2%” once you’re in a confrontational or developmental conversation. But regardless of whether you’re saying 98% or the last 2%, you first need to determine if you should say anything at all. In other words, is the issue even confront-worthy?

So before you send that email to schedule a meeting, or catch someone in the hallway and ask them to step in your office…

Count the Cost

Ken Sande, author of The Peace Maker reminds us…

“We need to make a conscious effort to count the costs of a conflict at the outset of a dispute and compare them to the benefits of quickly settling the matter (via over-looking).”

Proverbs 19:11 tells us that “it’s to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”

You need to perform a cost/benefit analysis. Here are some questions you can ask yourself, to determine if an issue is worth confronting:

Does this issue, unchecked, have the ability to cause harm to others or the church?
Will this issue get really annoying to you or others if repeated or perpetuated?
Is it sinful or anti-staff values?
Do you have a specific issue to address, or do you have a general dislike of this person or their attitude?
Was this a one-time offense, or is it likely to happen again?

These questions will help uncover your motives and ensure that your issue is in fact, an issue, and not simply a temporary annoyance.

Another way to ensure better confrontation is to think gray. That is, give the issue some space before setting up the confrontation. While I loathe the leadership methodology that waits for the annual review to unload all of someone’s short comings, waiting one to three days will help focus the confrontation.

One other thing that Ken Sande suggests:

“Ask the humanizing question. The humanizing question looks at an infraction and uses not only a situational view of the person who committed infraction, but also a dispositional view. When we feel we are wronged, we often ask, ‘What’s the matter with that person?’ instead of, ‘Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do that?’

Practical takeaways for everyday church leadership:

Before rushing to confront, count the cost
Perform a cost/benefit analysis
Pray for wisdom
Ask the humanizing question

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