Internship in Nebraska
by Betsy Hansen/Fremont Tribune correspondent
Editor's Note: Nate Clements is doing his internship at
First Lutheran
Church in Fremont, Nebraska. Recently the Fremont Tribune told
Nate's story in this article. Thanks to the Tribune for granting us
permission to reprint the article and photo.
The journey from college student to ordained ministry varies from
denomination to denomination.
For the past 20 years or so, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America has been asking its third year seminary students to spend a
year working in a parish. Sometimes these students are called vicars
and sometimes they are called interns, but it's a year of
exploration in which the seminarian experiences the day-to-day
demands and joys of full time parish ministry.
Since the middle of July, Intern Nathan Clements has been doing
ministry at First Lutheran Church. After a year, he will return to
seminary to finish his senior year better prepared to understand
what 21st century pastors are doing in their churches.
Clements already has a good idea. His father is a pastor in a
small town in Illinois and he grew up "very active in the church and
very active in Boy Scouts (he is an Eagle Scout)."
He began college at Concordia Lutheran College in Moorhead,
Minn., planning on a degree in biology, then optometry school. Along
the way, at about his junior year and after a couple of religion
courses, he changed his mind.
"The study of religion was really fascinating to me," he said.
"In the summers I was working at a Bible camp and I was able to
combine my passion for outdoor living and my passion for exploring
different dimensions of living out faith. During my junior year, I
felt a definite call for ministry. One day, I felt I should go to
seminary. I ran it past my roommate and he said, 'Well, yeah.' One
day it all came together."
It was at summer camp after his sophomore year that Clements met
Emily, his wife. She was going to school in Michigan so their
courtship became a long-distance one. They were married and she is
working on her master's degree in American history at the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln with emphasis on Plains history. She is
interested in the lives of immigrants of the late 19th and early
20th century.
While in college at Morehead, Clements worked in the Campus
Ministry Office and was active in Concordia Students for Social
Justice. He was part of the Bread of the World ministry on campus.
He was elected to be a voting delegate to the ELCA Churchwide
Assembly.
"It was a powerful experience, to help form the church in which I
hoped to be a leader," he said.
He graduated with a minor in Biology, "because I love biology."
Clements sees a struggle for the church to remain relevant in the
lives of God's people.
"The United Church of Christ recently ran a campaign - 'God is
still speaking,'" he said. "One of the things that the church cannot
afford to forget is that God is still speaking, that God's mission
is taking place in and around us and that we must make sure that we
have leaders who are able to walk with others and share their faith
when there are so many forces that are so distracting.
"We live in a culture where personal success is the main goal in
life - if you work hard enough, success can be achieved. Church
reminds people that our success has already been given to us in the
gift of God's only Son -- that we have been given gifts and passion
and energies for whatever we're called to do in life. It's like our
starting point is grace and in God's life there is no ladder we need
to climb as we continue to receive this grace."
Clements sees church as a place to struggle together with the
issues of the day.
"The church has to remind people that the goal in life is to love
God and to love your neighbor - a distinct way of looking at life
that brings joy into work. If you're serving God and your neighbor,
you give up self focus."
He'll return to seminary in September for his senior year. After
that, he'll graduate with a masters of divinity degree and will be
prepared to take his first call shortly afterwards. Part of the
senior year process is sorting all the details of the candidacy, the
first call and interviewing processes.
There is a checklist of things to be done. He plans to take some
courses online as well as at the seminary so that he and Emily can
be together while she finishes her studies in Lincoln. The location
of her doctoral studies in uncertain.
Clements is open to God's call wherever he is asked to serve.
"I'm called to serve three years in parish ministry in the ELCA,"
he said. "I grew up in a smaller congregation with one pastor, but
I'm open to wherever I am being called to serve."
His
internship at First Lutheran is going well.
"It's a wonderful experience so far," he said. "This transition
from studies to leadership in church has been a joy and a challenge.
It's refreshing to be working in a congregation and exciting to
build relationships and exciting to put into practice what I have
learned in seminary."
The goal of the internship year is to help seminarians get a
taste of ministry in any number of aspects of the church.
"Here, I've been teaching confirmation, working with middle
school youth, making hospital visits, conducting nursing home
worship services, leading bible studies, leading worship and
preaching," he said.
"Another part of the internship year is developing, designing and
instituting some kind of project. This keeps your internship years
as a part of your education."
When he returns to seminary in September, he will have had a year
of hands-on work in the heart of the church, a fresh look at the
people who make up the church and strong relationships with the
people of First Lutheran and the community.
"Pastor Charlie (Axness) is a really good mentor with a strong
sense of collegiality," he said. "One of the internship learning
tasks is to learn how to form relationships, and then how to leave
when the call is finished."
That's ahead of him. It is one of the tools, fine-tuned during
the year, which will serve him well wherever he is called to be of
service.
January in the church. The crush of Christmas activity has left
pastors, lay leaders and interns (!) exhausted. Time for a breather.
But wait. The new year is here. The new budget, with its feared
shortfalls. The annual meeting, where who knows what unexpected
controversy will arise. It's time to exert control, and navigate the
whitewater by force of faithfulness and will. So much for a
breather.
I hope this isn't the case where you are. I hope you have reveled
in the Advent/Christmas time, taken a bit of a break, and are
happily planning for annual congregational meetings and the Lenten
season. But you may have experienced a bit of the stressful
temptation to "take control" in the face of uncertainties and
pressures.
Control is overrated. As a husband of one wonderful wife and a
father of five, I learned that long ago. As a pastor who lived
deeply into the lives of the people, I learned that early on. But
why am I tempted to try to control situations (for the most noble of
reasons, of course)?
Margaret
Wheatley helped me understand that, when I read her magnificent
book, Leadership and the New Science. I commend it to
you for your winter reading, even if you don't like the sciences.
She writes:
"...we have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by
confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that
management has often been defined in terms of its control
functions. Lenin spoke for many managers when he said: 'Freedom is
good, but control is better.' But our quest for control has been
as destructive as was his.
If organizations are machines, control makes sense. But for
[living organisms] it is suicide. But what if we stopped looking
for control and began, in earnest, the search for order? Order we
will find in many places we never thought to look before - all
around us in nature's living, dynamic systems that are open to
their environment. 'In life, the issue is not control, but dynamic
connectedness,' writes Erich Jantsch. I want to act from that
knowledge. I want to move into a universe I trust so much that I
give up playing God. I want to stop holding things together. "
Margaret Wheatley has it right. The only one who "holds it all
together" is our Lord. We get to participate in an amazing,
incomprehensible, ordered life, but we aren't in control. Thank God
the words of Colossians are true: "In Christ Jesus, all things hold
together..." (Col. 1:17)
Have a blessed January. Let go a little. And maybe pick up
Wheatley's fascinating book.
Giving Thanks for Lay Committees
by Donna Duensing
Thank you, Lay Committees! Keep up the good work!
There is a particular perspective that neither we at the seminary
nor the pastoral supervisor can give to our students. Offering that
unique perspective to the seminarian is a task of the lay committee
members. Each of you offers the eyes and ears of the parishioner.
You know the gifts, skills and resources of the intern that are most
effective in his or her ministry in your context.
In this first half of the internship you have grown to know your
intern. Trust has been established. This makes you a valuable
resource to the intern in these remaining months. At this stage, the
intern is fine-tuning the basic skills for ministry. Your help is
vital in that task.
Of course you will continue to offer support and encouragement.
But in addition to support, your committee meetings will serve your
student well by giving the feedback that enables the candidate for
ministry become even more effective in his or her ministry.
Ask yourself the questions, "Knowing what we know about this
candidate, what will be the biggest challenge in their ministry? How
might we help prepare them to meet that challenge? What are their
greatest strengths? How might we encourage them to build on these
strengths?
Thank you for serving as a member of the Lay Committee. We value
your partnership with us. We look forward to hearing what you are
discovering about our students. The larger church will benefit
through your work!
Got a great idea? You probably do! Willing to share it? We hope so!
We know that supervisors, interns and lay committees come up with
their own resources for carrying out their responsibilities. Maybe
it is a form for evaluating sermons, or a way of keeping track of
time use, or a plan for the orientation of the new intern, or a
structure for introducing the intern to all of the components of
congregational ministry. We would like to be able to post some of
those resources for common use. They will be posted at a common site
on the internet, and links will appear in Mission In Context.
It's
hard to believe a new year is here! A year ago, as prospective
interns, you were waiting to see which internship sites would be
available, where they were and which ones you might be interested
in. Today, as interns,
mid-year
evaluation forms will be due soon.
Mid-year forms differ from the evaluations done at the
three-month mark. The mid-year forms are detailed and the intern's
competency in various areas is described. Another difference is the
involvement of the committee. The mid-year evaluations are submitted
online by the supervisor, intern and the committee.
These forms are used to assess the progress and growth of an
intern as well as note areas in need of more experience or training.
The evaluations at the end of the year should note any progress in
the areas needing improvement.
By previewing the mid-year form, you will get a sense of the
types of information necessary to fill it in and be better prepared
when the form needs to be completed and submitted.
The mid-year form is due six months into the internship, which,
for most interns, is at the end of February.
After the evaluations have been submitted please remember to send
hard copies of the signature page from each evaluation to the CLI
office at your school.
On Blooming Where You're Planted
by Steve McKinley
There are Christmas traditions and Christmas traditions:
religious traditions, family traditions, social traditions; holy
traditions and not-so-holy traditions.
I have a personal not-so-holy Christmas tradition. On the last
weekday night before Christmas Eve, I watch David Letterman and get
my juices flowing at the end of the show when Darleen Love comes out
to sing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)". Darleen performed for
seventeen straight Decembers before missing last year because of the
writers' strike (the network played a video recording to the 2006
show), but this year she was back and singing. Dave's longtime
musical partner Paul Shaffer augments his band with additional
instruments and there are back up singers and, well, it grooves.
I always enjoy Darleen, but it is some of the other musicians who
really fascinate me. I have a thing for the violins. There they are,
three or four of them every year. This year they wore Santa hats.
Darleen is rocking, Paul and the band are rolling, the audience is
going wild, artificial snow is dropping from the ceiling, and there
they are, bowing away.
Back in the high school orchestra, the college orchestra, back
when they were the first chair violinists, is this what they
pictured themselves doing in the future? When, encouraged by that
college orchestra director and the success they enjoyed in their
recitals and the privilege of soloing with the local symphony
orchestra, they decided to move to the big city and pursue the
violin as a career, did they imagine themselves sitting on that
stage as back-up musicians for Darleen Love, being overwhelmed by a
saxophone player in a full Santa suit? They could see themselves
wearing tuxedos and black gowns, not sweaters and Santa hats. But
there they are, playing the violin, and I hope it is good for them.
I would like to thank them for being there.
Back when I was a pup, wall posters were a big thing, and one of
the reigning poster artists was
Sister Mary Corita. College and seminary dorm rooms and pastors'
studies featured her poster that showed a flower and bore the words
"Bloom Where You Are Planted." A noble sentiment, that. Darleen's
violinists are blooming where they are planted; it might not be what
they dreamed of, but they are blooming nonetheless.
There are God-only-knows how many pastors out there who had a
vision of themselves being in one kind of place back in their
seminary days, and find themselves in a very different place today.
There are interns who spent their middler years imagining themselves
being glorious and heroic on internship in some dynamic and exciting
congregation, but now find themselves in a place that seems
depressingly ordinary. As a matter of fact, I would be willing to
bet that there are some supervisor-intern teams in which neither
partner is exactly where he or she dreamed of being not that long
ago.
But there you are, where you are. Maybe you are like Darleen
Love's violinists, but you are there nonetheless, and you have a
song to play. I've never been able to shake this old fashioned piety
(and don't want to) that says to me that you are where you are for a
reason; that you have a mission to carry out there. So as we begin
this new year, my wish for you is that you might spend more time
glorying in where you are than you do dreaming about where you
aren't and cursing your fate (or your bishop or the CLI staff)
because you aren't. Bloom where you are planted, even if it is on
the side of the stage playing the violin for soft rock music.
Luther Seminary educates leaders for Christian communities
called and sent by the Holy Spirit
to witness to salvation through Jesus Christ
and to serve in God's world.
His
internship at First Lutheran is going well.
Margaret
Wheatley helped me understand that, when I read her magnificent
book, Leadership and the New Science. I commend it to
you for your winter reading, even if you don't like the sciences.