Seminary interns?

Yesterday I had a delightful conversation with Leah Bradley, who is the Director of Alum and Church Relations for Louisville Seminary. Among other things, she was the primary person responsible for putting on the Festival of Theology and Reunion this week at the Seminary, a truly herculean undertaking!

But the conversation Leah and I had was on a different subject. I had a crazy idea, and I wanted to talk with her about it. What about if we formed what might be called a Learning Community in our Presbytery? This is what I envision at present... A few congregations, a few experienced pastors, and a few seminary students who are willing to spend a year's internship, covenant to be an intentional Learning Community together. The students come to gain hands-on experience in pastoral ministry. The seasoned pastors have opportunities to share their experiences and also to learn from the students. The congregations begin to see themselves as teachers as well, offering their faith community as a learning lab for someone who soon will be ordained as a Presbyterian minister.

Leah reminded me that there is a similar program for students who are finishing seminary and looking for a first call - a program called "For Such a Time as This." (http://www.pcusa.org/vocation/residency.htm) However, the program that I envision would intentionally be for people still in seminary. I did an intern year between my middler and senior years in seminary, and, I discovered in our conversation, so did Leah. What we both found was that that experience made our senior years inestimably richer; we knew questions to ask that we otherwise wouldn't have known, we knew things to concentrate on in our studies, and on and on.

I'm excited about the kinds of things this kind of program could offer the Church. It could do amazing things within the life of our Presbytery. It could even be expanded and done within our Quad-Presbytery Consortium (Missouri River Valley, Prospect Hill, Central Nebraska, and Homestead). There is, of course, this minor practical consideration of funding... but I think this could be addressed in some realistic ways without having to get too "creative."

In any case, I certainly want to pursue this when I get back home, and to continue the dialogue about this with Leah. She also mentioned that she gets together with other Field Education folks at the other Presbyterian seminaries, and that some of them might be open to considering this as well. Who knows? The idea just gets more and more intriguing to me!