Typically, a pastoral internship is a program within a local church that aims to equip prospective candidates or current pastors for pastoral ministry. Unlike a seminary, an internship mostly focuses not on the study of biblical languages and theology, but on the practical aspects of the ministry like church membership, preaching, and discipleship.
Any pastoral internship will include both learning and doing. Each church will need to decide which will be the priority. Is the internship primarily about reading, learning, reflecting, observing, and discussing? Or is it about filling various gaps in ministry for the church?
God Used a Pastoral Internship to Train Pastors in Central Asia
In 2016, I experienced some of the most formative months as a pastor when I participated in the pastoral internship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. By that time, I had already served as an elder of a house church in Kazakhstan for 6 years, yet I had never considered the nature of a local church in such depth before. My class had pastors and aspiring leaders from the Middle East, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, China, and the United States. We all recognized that we weren’t just learning an American church model, but rather biblical principles for a local church that needed to be applied to every cultural context.
Today, 7 years later, by God’s grace, our church in Almaty, Kazakhstan has been running a pastoral internship program for the second consecutive year. Our interns come from various parts of Central Asia, and that’s the main way we consistently labor toward fostering gospel work in other nations. I know of several churches in the United Arab Emirates that have similar internships, and they’ve had a great impact on the churches in South Asia and Africa.
Pastoral Internships as Investment
Missions demonstrate that a local church is not building its own kingdom but views itself as a small embassy of God’s kingdom. Instead of a new sound system or an additional counselor on staff, a church decides to invest its funds into furthering the work of gospel ministry in a less reached place. It’s an investment with no return.
The church and its elders must decide to pour into men, most of whom will not stay at their church. Such investment involves not only money––like providing an intern with housing and a stipend––but also a significant investment of time from the pastoral staff, especially the senior pastor.
As a pastoral intern, I had the privilege of daily debriefs with the lead pastor and a weekly 3-hour-long intern discussion with all pastoral staff present. At our church in Kazakhstan, we set aside 9 weeks a year where we pour into our interns. Both of our church’s pastors take on additional hours and members of our church volunteer to help with the logistics and admin tasks. This provides ongoing opportunities to teach our members that we have the privilege of investing in kingdom work in other regions, which should be a normal desire for all Christians.
Studying with Aspiring Pastors from Around the World
A pastoral internship that aims to have a missions component should strive to have a mix of local and international interns. When this happens, it creates multiple ways for cross-pollination.
First, the interns interact with one another as they read the assigned material and observe church life. They help one another distinguish between biblical principles and cultural elements that they see. They also learn about God’s work in their regions and develop life-long partnerships.
A pastoral internship doesn’t substitute seminary education, but it can provide unique opportunities for training leaders who will train other leaders among the nations.
Second, international interns help the host church to grow in its love for missions. It’s one thing to pray for the church in China and another to receive an update from a pastor who spent several months with you, read it to the church, and then pray for him and his church. It also makes missionary trips radically different. Our small church now regularly sends missionary teams to Uzbekistan with clear purposes to address some of the needs that our former or current interns asked us to help with.
Lastly, there is a high chance that such an internship will lead to multiplication in other nations. Out of my intern class, I know that at least three pastors started internships at their churches in Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and Kazakhstan.
God Will Accomplish His Work Among the Nations
A pastoral internship doesn’t substitute seminary education, but it can provide unique opportunities for training leaders who will train other leaders among the nations. Not every church will choose to invest in a pastoral internship. It’s important to recognize that a solid internship will require a high level of commitment and hard work from pastors––and it could put a financial burden on a church. Yet, it might become a source of unending blessings to the host church and contribute to the spread of the gospel in ways we can’t foresee or plan ourselves.
Arman Aubakirov is the Executive Director of Good News Publishing in Kazakhstan. He formerly interned with Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. He now serves as a pastor of a local church in Kazakhstan.
