In This Issue Thank You for Listening Debriefing/Reflection Sessions for Returning Interns Mark Yackel-Juleen Joins CLI Staff When is Internship Over? Fall Cluster Meetings Editor's Column: A School that Looks Right Helpful Links Internship Handbook Lay Committee Handbook Internship Forms Contact Us The Contextual Leadership Initiative staff is here to support you! Contact us with your concerns or suggestions. Previous Newsletters Want to re-read an article from a previous issue? Review previous newsletters.

Internship Newsletter: August 2007

Thank You for Listening
by Laure Schwartz, CLI Associate

The Spiritual Discipline of Service can be defined as, "loving, thoughtful, active promotion of the good of others and the causes of God in our world, through which we experience the many little deaths of going beyond ourselves." (The Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible) This Spiritual Discipline has been practiced and acted upon by so many participants in each internship setting. As a representative of the Contextual Leadership Initiative staff, I would like to thank you all for the ways in which you provided service in ministry.

Interns, thank you for your willingness to do some Holy Listening this year as your heart was stirred by God and others in your surroundings. Listening to how God was forming you and how you were then affecting others. Listening to yourselves as you remembered to find time and space for yourselves, family, recreation and healthy habits. Listening in the moments when attachment to the "small ego" was getting in the way of God's drawing you back to God and God's plan.

Supervisors, thank you for your willingness to do some Holy Listening as well. Listening to what God was saying to you in the midst of guiding and affecting the formation of a future pastor. Listening to your intern who may have needed a safe place to talk about what God was up to and the struggles of parish life. Listening to your parishioners as they shared honestly with you about the benefits and challenges to hosting an intern. Listening to your own sense of healthy boundaries for self and modeling those for your intern.

Committee members, thank you for your willingness to do some Holy Listening too. Listening to your intern in the telling of his/her faith story and supporting the work God was doing in him/her. Listening to each other for clarity as this journey unfolded and you maybe weren't quite sure of your role. Listening to what God was saying through you to help form a free child of God, unique in everyway, free to be who God made him/her to be.

Your Service to the church and to each other truly is a loving, active promotion of God's work in our world, going beyond yourselves, remembering that this work ultimately is to draw us closer to God. May you continue to find freedom and joy in the work God has given you to do.

Debriefing/Reflection Sessions for Returning Interns   

PLTS Sessions

For interns returning to PLTS, reflection sessions will take place during the Public Ministry II class in September.

Luther Sessions

Students returning from internship are requested to sign up for a reflection session with a small group of their peers and a staff member from the Contextual Leadership Initiative Office. This will be an important time for reflection and conversation regarding your internship experience. There are numerous time slots available on September 12 and 13 and the sessions will last approximately 1 1/2 hours. Please call the CLI office (651-641-3266) to reserve a spot. The times available are as follows:

Mark Yackel-Juleen Joins CLI Staff   

Mark Yackel-Juleen has joined the CLI staff on a part-time basis, sharing the title of Deployed Associate for Region III with Steve McKinley. Mark will be responsible for internship teams in North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota and a few other teams around the country.

Mark is the executive director of Shalom Hill Farm near Windom, Minn. and senior pastor of Prairie Star Ministries, a multi-point parish in southwestern Minnesota. We will feature a profile of Mark in the September issue.

When is Internship Over?  

You in the back row...when is internship over?

When you give your last sermon in the internship congregation.

Wrong. Over by the windows, what do you think?

When the congregation has its farewell party.

Sorry. You in the front, sticking your hand up and jumping up and down.

When you move back to campus.

Wrong. Anybody else want to try?

I didn't think so. Here is the correct answer: Internship is over when all of your evaluation forms have been returned to the CLI office with the appropriate signature pages. Until that happens, your internship is not considered complete. That means that the CLI office cannot tell the faculty that you have successfully completed internship, and therefore the faculty cannot take action to recommend you for ordination and that you cannot receive your diploma.

You don't want that to happen, do you?

Fall Cluster Meetings   

Some of the Fall Cluster Meetings have been scheduled, with more to come. Continuing supervisors might want to mark their calendars!

• Northern California: November 7-8 at San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville (Sherwood Glover)
• Southern Minnesota: October 16-17 at Shalom Hill Farm, Windom (Steve McKinley)
• East Metro: October 18 (Laure Schwartz)
• Arizona/New Mexico/Nevada: October 18-19 at the Franciscan Retreat Center, Phoenix (Sherwood Glover)
• North Metro: October 25-26 (Laure Schwartz)
• Southern California: November 5-6 at the Mary and Joseph Center, Palos Verdes. (Sherwood Glover)

A School that Looks Right  
by Steve McKinley

One of the side-road routes I take when driving from my home to the Luther Seminary campus takes me past an aging elementary school in St. Paul. It is neither the shortest route nor the quickest, but I drive that route because I like to look at that school.

I like the view because to me it looks like a school is supposed to look, meaning it looks like the schools I went to back in the mists of the ancient past. When my gaze falls on that school I know what the rooms look like and smell like and feel like. I can see the desks and the chalkboards and imagine the students there with a mini-me in the midst of them. Driving past that school stirs up good feelings in me.

But here's the reality: it isn't a school any more. It really isn't anything. It was a parochial school, but that closed down some time ago, and now the sign on the outside of the building that used to announce concerts and plays and scout meetings usually just says "For Rent." That is appropriate for me. I haven't been back to the town where I grew up for over 20 years, but I keep up with the local newspaper there on line, and I know that none of the schools I attended through high school are now in use as a school, and most of the buildings don't even exist any more. Sanderson School and Horace Mann Junior High are only memories. Perkins School and Prospect Hill School and Burlington High School sit vacant.

There is that little virus called nostalgia that creeps in now and then even for the heartiest and most forward-looking of us. My aging mind slips gears with some regularity, but stuck in there is a portion of a poem, albeit without the author's name attached. This is what I remember:

This is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain.
The happy places where I went
And cannot come again.

That old school for me is the land of lost content, a place I cannot go again, any more than I can go back to that old home town and find things the way they were when I left 45 years ago.

Supervisors live and serve among people who carry around their own little lands of lost content and now and then those noble saints persevere in the sad and destructive notion that they can go there again, that St. Susan's By The Gas Station can be just like it was in 1955 or 1975 or maybe 1925. It can't. Interns, most of whom are now finishing up their internship year, had the chance to see this up close and personal, perhaps for the first time. If a congregation is more than, say, 18 months old, there will be people in it yearning for the good old days. Every now and then they will drive pastors and interns crazy.

The truth is that there is a little bit of that in all of us. As interns transition back into the student role and return to their campuses, they find that "things aren't the same," that some of the people who were always there aren't there any more, that the walls have been painted in some of the classrooms and even, miracle of miracles, different people are teaching the old classes in new ways. This is followed by a wistful yearning for the way things used to be and now and then, even among forward looking and spiritual grounded seminarians, by a hushed level of grumbling.

Verily, even supervisors, when they return to visit the congregations where they grew up or congregations they previously served, may find that things have changed there, and wish they could find them the way they used to be.

There is a tinge of the nostalgist in all of us, that little cluster of atoms that yearns for the old, for the way things used to be, for the good old days. It is that portion of my being that enjoys driving past the old school. But on our good days we have the wisdom and the discipline to acknowledge the nostalgist, and then whomp him upside the head and send him to his room as we embrace the present and look forward to the future. Yesterday is over, it isn't coming back, so let's enjoy today and tomorrow without that foolhardy quest to bring back the good old days. We work with congregations that way; may we do the same thing with ourselves.

And I didn't say a word about the Pope in there, did I.