A Developmental View of Internship

1st through 3rd months

• What is this new place like?
• Feelings of dependence, aloneness, marginality, discomfort, stage fright, and illy-defined role.
• How long will I feel as though I were a guest?
• Trying to keep eyes and ears open.  Experiencing much fatigue along with starry-eyed romance.
• Pastor/Supervisor seen as interpreter, source of support, power, and authority.

• Tendency to focus on those things I have not done or areas in which I know I am weak.  Harder to hear what the congregation needs and what the church-at-large expects.

• Troublesome musings:  Shall I leave?  Can I handle this?  Do I wish to handle this?  Should I be here? Am I doing any good? Am I worth what they’re paying me?

4th through 6th months

• Self-perception: learner, receiver, contributor.  Sufficiently at ease really to learn.  Forming own opinions, circle of friends.
• Making suggestions, but still looking for direction.
• Risking occasional challenge of the “local tradition” and/or the supervisor’s views or methods of ministry.  May even begin to see the supervisor as a co-learner.
• Post-Christmas: Do I have the Winter blahs?  Seasonal depression?  Cumulative fatigue?
• Questions: Does Internship really need to be a full 12 months?  What needs to change to make another half year here valuable, defensible, bearable?  Should I actually be paid for something I so much enjoy doing?  Who might my successor be?

7th through 10th months

• Critical months: some settle for a stalemate or allow for deterioration in working relationships; some settle for “no change” and simply do “more of the same”; some move to a restructured, self-motivated stage.
• Signs of the latter: feel you have a purpose here; do more on your own; integrating values and methodologies; focusing on strengths and how you use them; transition from solo skills to community-building skills; have worked through savior-complex; better able to handle “lows”; reinforced by positive feedback; better balance of professional and personal life; appreciate strengths of supervisor; able to identify limitations of supervisor

11th and 12th months

• Often quite tumultuous
• Covering for Pastor’s vacation and experiencing an attendant ego-lift
• Aware that time is running out
• Fielding requests for “still want to have you over”
• Anticipatory grief over leaving
• Temptation to protect self from the greater hurt by no longer investing self fully in the ministry and related relationships
• Doing final evaluations
• Suffering through the joys and sorrows of leave-taking
• A strange mix of feelings