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| Carl Gladstone, a former mission intern. |
A quick look at some of the top young leaders in the Michigan Area reveals many of them share a common thread.
It’s not just the crazy hours they are willing to work or the ingenious ministry ideas they come up with — for a lot of them there is a mutual agreement of where they learned to serve.
For the past 12 years the Mission Intern Program of the Detroit Annual Conference has utilized enthusiastic college-age adults to reach the poor and develop leadership qualities that apply to all facets of life. The only trouble, according to Conference Director of Discipleship Rev. Terry Gladstone — who helped construct the program — is that not enough people understand the vitality and importance of it.
As of 2009 four full-time conference missionaries were Mission Intern alumni, two were deacons and plenty more were leading lives focused on serving.
Detroit Conference Director of Youth and Young Adults Ang Hart said the program changed her life, social justice advocate and Newburg UMC Deacon Paul Perez was once an intern, and Gladstone’s son Carl was an intern for three summers before becoming the head of the Young Leaders Initiative, the Motown Mission Project and countless other causes.
The only problem was Carl had to relocate to Dallas, Tex. during the summers to be a mission intern of the General Board of Global Ministries.
That’s when mom stepped in.
“When he got back from (Project Transformation) and was telling me all about it things just clicked,” Terry Gladstone said. “At that point we had a program called the Vocational Intern Program, VIP, but nobody was using it anymore. It was largely because the places that wanted an intern couldn’t afford to pay for half of it, which you had to.”
She saw some money sitting in a fund allocated for VIP and had ideas from her son’s Project Transformation experience — thus the Detroit Conference program was born.
The first year a handful of interns participated in the eight-week long summer internship, earning a stipend for using their summer to engage in ministry with those in need.
That number has ballooned to as many as 20 interns, but has been around 12-15 in recent years.
Each intern is paid $2,000 and they are placed in urban and rural areas around the state, stretching from Detroit to the Upper Peninsula. The Leadership Development Committee selects interns from the group of applicants and solicits funding from a variety of avenues.
As Terry Gladstone joked, “We just beg, borrow and steal until we have enough.”
The intern’s home churches are asked to provide $1,000, but they don’t always have the money, and some interns come from campus ministry programs or occasionally even outside of the denomination.
The Methodist Union of Greater Detroit, the Board of Christian Education, the Detroit Conference CCOM, the Urban Alliance and the church’s Council of Ministries have all pitched in funds in the past.
The Council of Ministries actually supported two year-long interns who helped create and direct new programs at a pair of churches several years ago. Gladstone said doing that annually would be ideal, but probably a pipe dream unless funding changes drastically.
As of Jan. 1 Hart will take a more prominent role in searching for grants, making connections, and telling intern’s stories as part of the Leadership Development Committee.
Hart was an intern in 2005, splitting her summer between Detroit and the Upper Peninsula. She said she made lifelong friends and she distinctly remembers a story a fellow intern shared with her.
“She was working in the city and there was this young girl who couldn’t read and she was working a lot with her,” she said. “And one day they were at a sister church at a sort of Bible School and the kids were doing crafts. The girl came up to (the intern) and asked, ‘Why are we making necklaces with the letter ‘T’ on them?’ It gave my friend the chance to explain to the girl that it was a cross and the girl was very interested in what it was all about, and it is teaching moments like those that make the program so special.”
Terry Gladstone said the program is really an investment in the church’s future, considering the skills the interns attain and the callings they often pursue.
Interns go through all kinds of training courses, including an introductory program at Lake Louise.
She said a past intern recalled the benefits of the training when she was hired on as music teacher in Washington D.C., as part of a program where people with college degrees, but without teaching certificates, could teach.
“They didn’t give her any training and she told me, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without the Sanctuary Training we got, because it made me aware of all these issues and what to do.’”
Gladstone said she’d like to see more light shed on the program because it fulfills plenty of denominational goals and provides a lot of bang for conference’s bucks.
Donations can be made to the Mission Intern Program through Ministry Jubilee. The program’s number is MJ 1214.
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