Last summer during our church staff meeting, we were interrupted by a gorilla. This gorilla ran past the glass windows of the conference room, growled at us and got just close enough for us to realize it was not a real gorilla but someone in a gorilla suit. But still, when is the last time someone interrupted your church staff meeting in a gorilla suit?
Once the gorilla had our total attention, he fled through the administrative offices. We all jumped out of our meeting to follow him, but he was gone. We decided to divide ourselves up to catch him, all running in different directions in the building, through classrooms, by the nursery school, and even checking the bell tower, laughing and breathless.
Finally we caught sight of him again, jumping into his car in the parking lot. Thank goodness, he was removing his head before driving away. We saw it was Nick, a high school junior, playing a prank on all of us, but specifically the four members of our summer staff, our high school and college interns.
I tell this story to warn you that what I am proposing here may disrupt your life as usual as a church. Staff meetings are not the same with all that young adult energy. They bring Panini makers to church and set off the smoke alarm. They may forget to say, “Let us pray,” in worship or they may forget to pray all together. They may write sermons that shock the congregation. Their friends may show up in gorilla costumes. Which is part of what we love about this ministry of being “a calling congregation.” Put simply, not only is it important, it’s also a lot of fun.
From teaching to calling
Years ago our congregation made a commitment to being a Teaching Church. We brought in seminarians to work during the academic year, learning to lead worship as well as do the church’s behind-the-scenes work. The program has grown so that in recent years, we have three seminarians at once adding to our life, challenging us with new thinking. We are proud to launch them into ministries around the country, from a church in Seattle to a hospital chaplaincy down the road. The congregation loves this work and considers shaping these leaders our gift to the wider church. But after a while, I began to think, Why couldn’t we do this for our own kids? Our seminarians come to us already knowing they want to do this work. What about the young people who do not yet know, but are wondering? In declaring ourself a Teaching Church, had we skipped the most obvious step? We needed to also be a Calling Church.
I approached our lay leaders about funding a summer internship for the youth of our own church, the ones we thought had the gifts for Christian ministry and leadership. The average lawyer thinks about becoming a lawyer in her teens, but so many people who end up in the ministry don’t start thinking about it until their late twenties or thirties. By then they have already followed other paths. Many second-career pastors tell me that they might have gone to seminary earlier, but no one suggested it, while the pull to other secular careers was more obvious. The church needs to make the claim of ministry equally obvious.
Often we in the church, not wanting to be too pushy, simply allow the culture to make career claims on our youth before we do. Who is asking them to consider serving Jesus by leading a congregation? Mostly, we in the church wait for them to come to us, which is of course, not what Jesus would do. Jesus went out and invited.
How it works
So in our first year trying to be a Calling Church, we asked four high school or college students from our congregation to work a Tuesday and a Sunday for eight weeks during the summer.
We paid them a stipend, and we met for staff brown bag lunch on Tuesdays, so that they could experience the camaraderie we have. Not only do they spend time with clergy, but also with our administrators, our parish nurse, our music director, and our staff who work with children and youth. They learn that there are all sorts of called people working at the church, many of whom are not pastors but do the work of ministry nonetheless.
The interns wanted to do what their ministers did, robes and all. Wasn’t that why they had applied?
My ordained colleague and I developed a curriculum: books we would read with the interns, topics for discussion about the life of a minister, and a full afternoon for sermon preparation. That last one was ridiculous. How do you teach a young person who has never studied theology or Bible to create a sermon that adults will want to listen to? We raced through topics like how to use a Bible commentary, different Bible translations online, and helpful websites. Then one intern asked, “But where did the Bible come from? Who decided what got in and what didn’t?” Two and a half hours later, long after they were supposed to leave, we were still discussing the origins of Scripture, and hadn’t even begun talking about how to write a sermon. One intern had to leave to pick up his sister, but did so with a grimace, explaining he didn’t want to miss any of this.
But we are always amazed what these young people produce for their sermons at the end of the summer. Some of the best preparation is the long van ride to visit a seminary and a divinity school. There the admissions folks give generously of their time, for they too realize the importance of reaching these people when they are young. While exploring classrooms and libraries, our church staff remembers our own training. During those four hours in Chicago traffic, we tell each other our call stories. The interns realize their clergy are human, and they begin to see what it takes to write a sermon, to pray at a hospital bedside, to study ancient Greek.
At first I worried the congregation would complain about the amount of face time the youth were getting on Sundays. Obviously, more time for interns means less time for clergy. And it means we clergy are essentially running our own mini-seminary for the interns. Would the congregation resent this new time drain?
It takes a generous congregation to be a Calling Church, but our congregation was ready, emotionally and spiritually.
What surprised us
I have also been shaped by the program. As senior minister, I don’t get to spend a lot of time with youth, so I had certain stereotypes. The interns have set me straight on more than one occasion.
For instance, I decided, in my wisdom and hipness, that the interns would prefer not to wear robes but rather their comfortable clothes to lead worship. (If I am honest, what was really going on was that I did not want to robe for the summer. I just assumed the interns would feel the same way.)
Then, the second summer, I caught them standing around the place we hang our robes and stoles, holding the robes in front of themselves and looking in the mirror.
“You guys wouldn’t want to wear robes, would you?” I asked incredulously, as the Chicago summer was producing highs in the 90s.
“Are you kidding?” they said. “Your robes are the coolest!” The first to try them on were the two boys, not at all self-conscious to put on my colleague Seth’s robe. They already admired him and so his minister’s robes were cool, too. We laughed together as we tried to find the right fit for tall college seniors and a petite high school junior among our collection.
They really wanted to wear those robes, and on Sunday they did. I think it was that Sunday, seeing the young people in the robes, that the congregation really adopted them and the program into their hearts.
I had assumed they’d want to dress like they always dressed, but it turns out these kids wanted a physical way to try on the role. I had my assumptions turned upside down. They wanted to do what their ministers did each week. After all, wasn’t that why they had applied?
Since starting the program three summers ago, two members of that first class have just graduated from college and will attend seminary, one in Pennsylvania and one in New York.
Other alumni have changed their majors based upon that summer experience. One has switched to social work, as a result of visiting the sick that summer and learning how much she loved that intense one-on-one contact. Should she become a social worker, I am certain that her summer internship will help her to view that work as a calling.
We tell the interns that we are shaping Christian leaders. Some of them will be ordained and lead churches. Others will follow other callings, from engineering to banking to parenting to art. But whatever they do, we expect them to be Christian leaders in their field. And we also expect them as adults to be lay leaders within a congregation. The church needs to be grooming both kinds of leaders from a young age.
If there is a downside to the summer intern program, it is selecting the interns. This past summer, we had 14 applicants who wrote essays to apply for only four positions. They all had profound reasons for wanting to do this, and some were truly disappointed, shaken even, by not being chosen. A brave team of lay people makes the selection each spring, so that the pastors’ relationships to all the young people can remain intact, but it still pains me to turn anyone down. We encourage them to apply again, and this year we chose someone who had been turned down three years before. As painful as the selection process is, rejection, perseverance, and thwarted desire are all part of the ministry. So we may be training more than we know.
In fact, the summer interns are only the most visible part of the influence the program has. Seeing those interns up front, composing their own prayers, preaching, and leading Sunday school stretches the mind of every young person in the church. “If he can do it, why not me?” they wonder, and so I trust that God is working far beyond what we can see.
God is working on all the young people in the pews, and even on the young man who ran through staff meeting that day. That mischievous gorilla must have liked what he saw that day. The very next summer, there he was in the new class of summer interns.
Lillian Daniel is senior minister of First Congregational Church of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and the co-author of This Odd and Wondrous Calling (Eerdmans, 2009).
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