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What Responsibilities To Give An Intern

My prayers were answered! We brought an intern onto our staff to help us with our overwhelming load, but also help him get his feet wet in ministry. Now the surprisingly difficult task is releasing responsibilities to him. I thought that would be the easy part. However, I don’t want to overwhelm him or trust him with tasks above his competency level.

Today I’m starting to get a grip on how I can help him best:

– I’m going to help him get set up with his blog and social media so he can build an audience as he learns. This could be one of the most useful assets when he’s in the job market later on

– I’ll spend time explaining the why behind what we do. Once he can capture the why, the “what” (method) will come more naturally

– Yesterday I had him write small group questions for this week. Before reading them, I made an agreement that nothing is personal if something gets used or not. The experience of thinking through the questions and writing – the process – is great training. Truthfully, he wrote great questions and we’re going to use them almost word for word

What I’m discovering is that having an intern is an amazing privilege and responsibiity. Our team wants to equip him to the best of our ability to get our stuff done, but set him up to majorly win. If we use well this amazing gift God has entrusted to our team, I’m sure he’ll be faithful to trust us with more down the road and one day my email and voicemail boxes will be at zero and other churches will be blessed with some well-equipped servants of the gospel.