PASTORAL INTERNSHIPS: A Driving Force For Missions
STATEMENT
Central to the Great Commission is the training of new leaders who will be able to advance the gospel farther afield. Pastoral internships are one key strategy for equipping future generations of qualified leaders, whether in sending churches at home or in churches already deployed on the field.
Article Written by John FolmarFahim, a Moroccan schoolteacher, was converted by reading the Gospel of John. He joined an underground house church in Casablanca and grew spiritually under the care of a faithful pastor. When that pastor left the country, Fahim was asked to replace him. Fahim was eager but lacked experience and training, so he joined a pastoral internship in an English-language international church in Dubai. The church invested in Fahim for 9 months while pastors taught, trained, and modeled evangelical church ministry.
Two years later, Fahim is back in Morocco, where he has taken three younger men under his wing for pastoral training. They meet regularly for prayer, read books, discuss theology, worship together, and evaluate one another’s ministries. This Moroccan leader is following in the footsteps of Paul: entrusting the gospel to faithful men who will also be able to teach others.
Central to the Great Commission is the task of training new leaders who will be able to advance the gospel farther afield. Pastoral internships are one key strategy for equipping future generations of qualified leaders, whether in sending churches at home or in churches already deployed on the field.
A Biblical Method
Jesus Christ dazzled large crowds with his public ministry, but his focus was on investing in the Twelve and even more intimately in the Three (Peter, James, and John). Jesus taught the disciples by opening up his life to them and living together in close proximity. This was Jesus’ pastoral internship program. He knew he was leaving them, so the Lord was preparing a team to go and spread the news, with the aim of “catching men.” He trained and sent out the Twelve and later 72 such ambassadors, previewing the apostolic mission that would begin after the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. Jesus’ final charge was that these men go and baptize others, “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20).
The apostles imitated Jesus’ pattern, attaching themselves to other men for fellowship and life-on-life training. Paul recruited Timothy (“my true child in the faith”) to serve alongside him in ministry, eventually sending him to pastor the church in Ephesus (1 Timothy 1:2, 3). Men like Titus, Tychicus, Onesimus, and Silas lived in Paul’s orbit. Even when he was under arrest, Paul was never without travel companions like “Aristarchus, a Macedonian from Thessalonica” (Acts 27:2). Paul’s parting instruction to Timothy resembled the Great Commission: “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2).
More Than a Lecture
Practical theology is best absorbed not in a seminary classroom or a missions agency orientation but in the life-on-life fellowship of a healthy church. Ministry candidates learn best how to disciple others, prepare sermons, baptize, administer the Lord’s Supper, lead congregational meetings, and counsel hurting members in a real-life environment of pastoral care and oversight.
The apostle Paul said, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). Discipling involves a “chain of imitation” (e.g., Jesus, Paul, Timothy, others, future generations) where one is taught not only sound doctrine but a way of life. Such imitation is “deeply and inescapably relational,” caught as much as it is taught.[1]
Jonathan Edwards, the theologian of the Great Awakening, was committed to mentoring the rising generation of new church leaders and missionaries. He once told a friend that his mentoring was accomplished “singly, particularly, and closely.”
Singly—not mass-produced on a factory assembly line. Leaders are cultivated one by one through prayer, modeling, feedback, and counsel.
Particularly—no two leaders are the same. All have different strengths and weaknesses, and training must be tailored accordingly.
Closely—the best pastoral internships involve “friendship, meals, camaraderie, disappointment, laughter, trust, and mutual respect.”[2]
In a pastoral internship, a seasoned pastor opens up his life and ministry for a younger man’s observation and imitation, the same way the apostles were with Jesus or Timothy was with the apostle Paul. In this kind of setting, future leaders learn:
How to shepherd the flock of God
How a pastor uses his time during the week
How he treats his wife and children
How to receive critical feedback on one’s public ministry opportunities
Before a young surgeon operates on his first real, live patient, he has observed many more experienced surgeons doing the same work. So it is with the care of souls. Book learning is necessary, but more is needed. Future church leaders and missionaries need to be able to emulate another’s godly character and shepherding care. Pastoral internships provide opportunities for this kind of life-on-life learning to develop, both in sending churches and churches on the field.
1. Sending Churches—Equipping “In a Manner Worthy of God”
A missionary’s ministry DNA is largely established before leaving his home country. Long before the mission agency's "sending celebration," his understanding of the gospel and church ministry is set in concrete. Pastoral and missionary internships can lay a solid foundation. In evaluating their gifts, Paul urged the Romans to “think with sober judgment” (Rom 12:3). Such realistic assessment happens best in a faithful church, where the man or woman is known and discipled before being sent.
How much damage has resulted on the mission field from churches' unwillingness to say “No” to well-intentioned but unqualified candidates? How many individuals have been demoralized by trying to fill a role for which they were ill-equipped? Evaluating missionary candidates is a weighty responsibility. Feeling “passionate” about missions is not enough—a missionary must be qualified.[3]
One’s view of the church matters for missions. This view is not taught at a missionary finishing school; it was imbibed years earlier in a healthy sending church culture. Conrad Mbewe, pastor of Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, has trained pastoral interns and sent them out to start new churches for three decades. Mbewe observed, “The local church is best placed to do the screening. This is because the church's leaders and members know from experience how credible a person’s testimony of salvation is. They also know whether the person has matured in the things of God and is serious about serving the Lord. They know whether he is a humble team player or is most likely simply wanting to fulfill his personal dreams of greatness.”[4]
Failing to equip and assess can take a toll on the mission field. One national pastor in northern India who had experience with ill-equipped missionaries pled with sending churches: “Please don’t send bad workers. If a person cannot be an elder in your church, don’t send them. . . . We don’t want mavericks. We don’t want entrepreneurs. We don’t want go-getters.”[5] He wanted missionaries with biblical character qualifications: humility, Christlikeness, and the ability to teach sound doctrine.
Like Tyler and Betsy, former members of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Atlanta. Tyler was a retired Air Force officer and university administrator when he and Betsy joined the church and quickly got involved in people’s lives. They attended regularly, served in children’s ministry, and invited people into their home. Tyler began teaching an adult Sunday School class, and his gifts were noticed by more and more of the church. He expressed interest in pursuing full-time pastoral ministry. Over time, the church recognized him as an elder and brought him into their pastoral internship program, where Tyler saw the inner workings of healthy church leadership. Strengthened by the training, Tyler eventually became an assistant pastor, intending to head off to seminary. His senior pastor, Aaron Menikoff, recalled, “Around that time, I heard of a church in the Middle East that needed a pastor. I let Tyler know, thinking he’d have no interest in packing up his family and moving halfway around the world! I was wrong.”[6]
Tyler and Betsy uprooted and moved to the Arabian Peninsula, where he has been pastoring an English-language congregation for years. This church, which rubs shoulders regularly with under-reached Muslims and Hindus, is now growing spiritually under the faithful ministry of the word. They have an opportunity to be salt and light in a dying world.
Ecclesiology matters for missions. Our doctrine of the church will determine how we carry out the task on the mission field. And biblical ecclesiology is best absorbed in a healthy church internship.
2. Overseas Churches—Staging Areas for Gospel Training
The obstacles were enormous when William Carey took the gospel to India in 1793. How could a small handful of Western missionaries address so much need? Carey and his colleagues concluded, “It is only by means of native preachers that we can hope for the universal spread of the gospel throughout this immense continent. Europeans are too few, and their subsistence costs too much, for us ever to hope that they can possibly be the instruments” for the cause of the gospel in India.[7]
The difficulty of language acquisition alone made it essential for the missionaries to “cherish native gifts” and prioritize training locals. Qualified indigenous leaders were deemed superior to foreign missionaries, since the locals were “inured to the climate, acquainted with the customs, language, modes of speech and reasoning of the inhabitants; able to become perfectly familiar with them, to enter their houses, to live upon their food, to sleep with them, or under a tree; and who may travel from one end of the country to the other almost without any expense.”[8] So, Carey and his colleagues committed themselves to training indigenous leaders for the long-term advance of the gospel.
This same principle applies today. Local, indigenous leadership is key for gospel penetration in under-reached areas of the world. By virtue of their geographic location, churches on the missions field, including English-language international churches, have a unique opportunity to reach and train promising leaders from those gospel-needy cultures. Local leaders can be trained and sent from remote staging areas for a fraction of the cost of training and supporting a Western missionary. Thus, pastoral internships overseas are strategic opportunities for mission multiplication.
In 2008, a Syrian Muslim named Mahmoud contacted a pastor in Dubai. He wanted to learn more about Jesus. Mahmoud was connected with other church members, began studying Scripture, and, in time, embraced Jesus as Lord. He got baptized and started growing spiritually. When his family learned of Mahmoud’s conversion, they threatened his life and tried to trick him into returning to Syria. But Mahmoud kept growing and, over time, developed a love for the church and a desire to serve God’s people pastorally.
Around that time, Anand, an Indian believer who was converted in Saudi Arabia, joined that same church in Dubai. He had heard of their biblical and theological emphases and longed to be better equipped for ministry. Then a pastor in Delhi recommended another young minister in his church for theological and pastoral training. These three men became the initial class of a new pastoral internship program.
Since the Dubai church was located at the crossroads between the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, they had a unique opportunity to serve strategic churches and ministries. With the congregation’s support, they began annually equipping aspiring pastors, evangelists, and church leaders from that region with education, training, and ministry opportunities so that they might serve more fruitfully in local churches in their home countries.
The goal was to provide a biblical model for ministry as these men became exposed to the inner workings of the church—observing biblical ministry, studying systematic and pastoral theology, receiving practical training in preaching and teaching, and attending elders’ meetings and observing church leadership in action. An internship would be a laboratory for the development of spiritual gifts. Too few pastors welcome constructive feedback on their sermons, for example. Internships provide opportunities for pastoral candidates to be sharpened through critical evaluation of their preaching and teaching.
In subsequent years, interns were trained from Afghanistan, Algeria, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Nepal, Palestine, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, Zanzibar, and beyond. Most of them today are pastors or supporting other ministries back in their home countries. One became the pastor of an Arabic church in the U.A.E.
Several church members were “re-routed” over the years into missions and church planting work from secular employment, including:
A former physiotherapist who now pastors an English-language church in the UAE
A former school tutor who now pastors a Russian-language church in Almaty, Kazakhstan
A former engineer who now pastors a German-language church in Munich
A former sales associate who now pastors a Nepali congregation in Kathmandu
A former security guard who now pastors a new Hindi church plant in Bihar, India
A former honey sales entrepreneur who aspires to pastor an Arabic-language church in the region.
These were all fruitful members of the church who had moved to Dubai for work. Over time, they began to give evidence of ministerial gifting—a hunger for divine truth, a love for God’s people, an ability to teach, and a positive spiritual impact on church members and non-Christians. So they joined the pastoral internship program and were later redeployed elsewhere.[9]
Although the internship was costly (both financially and in terms of pastoral time commitment), the whole church enthusiastically embraced this opportunity to build up future leaders. Every year, ordinary members got to know the interns, invited them into their homes and prayed for them faithfully. Long-standing friendships formed. The internship expanded the church’s horizons and stretched their faith.
Conclusion
The crying need in missions today is for more qualified laborers in the harvest. Too many missionaries on the field have not been adequately trained. And yet, relatively few churches devote themselves to training the next generation of leaders. Churches expect mission agencies or other institutions to fill this role. As Conrad Mbewe observed, “Very few churches actually participate in the work of training the next generation of pastors. Our general attitude is that this is the work of the Bible colleges.”[10]
As a result, unqualified candidates slip undetected through impersonal, churchless credentialing programs. The responsibility lies at the feet of the pastors, as Albert Mohler, the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has charged: “Established pastors should be ashamed if they are not pouring themselves into the lives of young men whom God has called into the teaching and leadership ministry of the church.”[11] Pastors and missionaries are not made in seminaries but in churches.
So, consider supporting a faithful pastoral internship overseas. Or consider starting your own. Such programs aren’t only possible for large churches in the West. Healthy churches across the world are sponsoring internships and training the next generation of leaders. Like Fahim in Morocco, pastors are following in the footsteps of Paul: entrusting the gospel to faithful men who will also be able to teach others.
Recommended Resources
Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus, by Mark Dever
Passing the Baton: A Handbook for Ministry Apprenticeship, by Colin Marshall
“Should Your Church Be Involved in Training Pastors?” ch. 12 God’s Design for the Church: A Guide for African Pastors and Ministry Leaders, by Conrad Mbewe
Prepare Them to Shepherd: Test, Train, Affirm and Send the Next Generation of Pastors, by Brian Croft
Sample Curriculum for a 9-Month Pastoral Internship
The best internships include equal parts (1) Observation (watching pastors and church leaders minister), (2) Engagement (involvement in the life of a healthy church) (3) Study (reading and interacting with scripture, theology, and history related to the pastorate.) The following is an outline of the Study component of an internship.
Trimester 1—Ecclesiology Emphasis
Path to Being a Pastor
Principles for Healthy Churches
Understanding Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
Counseling Methodology
Trimester 2—Biblical Theology Emphasis
Protestant Reformation
Conversion
Evangelism & the Sovereignty of God
Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church
Trimester 3—Pastoral Ministry
Church Elders & Deacons
Congregational Authority
Preaching
Worship
Character Matters
*Systematic Theology throughout the year
footnotes
[1] Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mindshift that Changes Everything, 71.
[2] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/5-ways-edwards-mentor-future-pastors/ Missions internships are also valuable for women aspiring to such ministry, although their ministry will look different from men’s.
[3] The most important criteria for assessing missionary and pastoral candidates include conviction, character and competence. Other factors include physical health, singleness and contentment, strength of marriage, capacity to learn a new language and operate in a cross-cultural environment, ability to hold down a job. See Rhodes, No Shortcut to Success, p. 217 and the forthcoming Prioritizing the Church in Missions.
[4] Conrad Mbewe, God’s Design for the Church: A Guide for African Pastors and Ministry Leaders, 168.
[5] Quoted in Rhodes, No Shortcut to Success, 205.
[6] Menikoff and Singh, Prioritizing Missions in the Church (forthcoming).
[7] Serampore “Form of Agreement,” para. 8 (1805).
[8] Ibid.
[9] https://www.9marks.org/article/raise-up-leaders/?lang=ht.
[10] Conrad Mbewe, God’s Design for the Church: A Guide for African Pastors and Ministry Leaders, 167.
[11] Quoted in Brian Croft, Prepare Them to Shepherd: Test, Train, Affirm and Send the Next Generation of Pastors, 14.
