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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.
