When I was younger I had a voracious appetite for learning. In fact, I still do. And I had a few web and IT skills to boot.
What I needed was an opportunity to use them. Why not Church?
What I needed at that time was good guidance, some good investment from older folk, and an opportunity to safely use my skills in an encouraging environment. I think was I was looking for was an IT and/or Web internship at my local church.
I can’t even imagine the impact that would have had! And even though God’s been incredible despite it I still think it could have been formative.
I think there are probably more than a few challenges that exist to justify why this doesn’t happen enough:
- Time – They’ve run out of time for everything. Need to create margin for this.
- Awareness – They aren’t aware of the general interest of people within their congregation.
- Trust – Don’t trust anyone to do it.
- Lack of Value – They don’t see the value (or recognize) the value of mentorship that an internship might offer.
What do you think? Do you offer internship opportunities in IT at your ministry and/or church? Would you consider starting one?
Ryan says
At my church we have something called the Future Leaders Program (www.mbcfutureleaders.com) which is a year-long ministry development program (a bit more than an internship…it’s a paid job that lasts for a year). While it’s not specifically an IT internship, if someone was interested in that or Web design and they were accepted, they would probably be placed in one of those areas. I went through it as part of the Communications team and I’m working here full time now 🙂
John Saddington says
wow, that is awesome!
jason cooper says
Our church has a strong internship program in all areas. We have done summer, year-long, and some part-time internships in youth, children, worship, family life, etc.
Last year we hired our first “media/communications” intern. While primary duties are dealing with graphics and video (primarily for communications), we have also tasked the intern with basic “IT” type of jobs. When we get new computers, he gets them setup and loaded for our network/software packages. He has experiencing fixing both hardware/software issues on PC/Mac. It has been wonderful having the ability to give some of those time consuming tasks to an intern!
Tom says
That’s awesome. Time consuming, sure, but I’d bet he was totally digging getting his hands in all of that.
John Saddington says
that is awesome.
Brian says
I wish my church had a computer “anything”, e.g: leader, class, workshop, whatever. Every once in a while I’ll get a call to come and fix one of the computers in my church, and it’s awful. The computers are a mess, the network is a mess, but worst of all is they don’t really care. Almost nobody uses the computers in the library because they’re so slow and old. The church doesn’t want to buy new computers because when they do they usually spend about $1200 – $1500 per computer due to the fact that they’re tied into to some Christian computer company who’s getting them a “deal”. We have a fairly decent website, but no one seems to know about it. I think it would be great if all churches had some kind of computer or tech person that could not only guide the church in computer related decisions and help with tech problems but members of the congregation too.
John Saddington says
ah. yes. you’re not alone in this situation.
Travis Fish says
I would love to see more technology related church internships show up! They seem to be rare
John Saddington says
rethinking this myself.
Aaron Melton says
How about NPCC?
(I actually had another member see my UpStreet T-shirt last Sunday and asked if NPCC had any type of media-internship. I had no idea, so I directed her to Brad.) 🙂
John Saddington says
there are definitely some at npcc.
Matthew Irvine says
We have 16 interns at our church, and I’m proud to say that I supervise an awesome IT intern. We have a hard time keeping the position filled as there are several higher paying opportunities for young people interested in a job in technology.
Tom says
That’s awesome that you’ve got that many interns (how big is the congregation, anyway?)!
You’re right, though – the money can be a tough thing..
John Saddington says
sweeeeeeeeeet!
Duncan Robinson says
Love the thoughts John, I am kinda thankful though I didn’t do my church internship at a Church for IT. Before I did my MDiv, I had a Bachelors in Computing Science. I spent a few years working in IT. Certainly within Australia I was a little bit of an anomaly, I was a Youth Pastor with an IT degree. Even since moving to the states, having IT knowledge in my skill set has been really attractive to Church planters.
The problem is when you find yourself as the expert, you abilities aren’t often challenged, and I find myself getting less Capable in IT.
Although doing IT in a church does teach you to be creative with little or no budgets a lot of the time.
John Saddington says
The problem is when you find yourself as the expert, you abilities aren’t often challenged, and I find myself getting less Capable in IT. <~~~~~~~~~~~~ yes.
Chris Johns says
A big problem is the fact that most churches (including ours) won’t pay IT interns. I live in the Dallas area and because of the number of companies that pay IT interns it’s much more appealing to learn from the big dogs that shell out the dough, even for interns. IT guys, especially, need some side cash for the latest processor they’ve been drooling over… haha
John Saddington says
doh!
Nick Shoemaker says
I think the biggest is Trust… at least from what I’ve seen. It’s an important part of day-to-day happenings and the trust thing seems to trump a lot of would-be Ninjas.
There should be more opportunities- as a matter of fact, from what I’ve seen there should be more IT/Production/Media internships than pastoral- or at least as many. This stuff is important today more than ever!
jasonmcc68 says
This has been an interest of mine for many years. When I was in Art school I interned at a company after school and got class credit. I was hired at that company after school and my career launched from there.
Our church has an active internship in our youth and childrens ministries. In the past our IT need did not require an intern, nor did we desire to discuss the trust of someone else in the network. However in my 6 years of being the IT/Communications/Web Director on staff, I know of several tasks that we could have an intern do in all 3 of those realms.
I don’t think we could afford to pay an intern at this point for those positions, but I am very interested in starting a couple of intern positions at our church for students to earn credit. I will make another attempt to put this together. Thanks for the thought provoking topic.
Nick Shoemaker says
This kinda proves my point- that interns should be used for the menial tasks, the ones that aren’t AS important. (If you’re not going here, awesome.)
I really think an internship should be real exposure, not busy work. Too often I’ve heard crap tasks get assigned to interns, because they need to “learn to serve”. And I’ve seen interns in ministry leave ministry because of the lack of growth that occurs during their “tour of duty.”
Internship-
Yeah. That’ll do. 🙂
John Saddington says
sure thing!
John Saddington says
trust. i have struggles there…..