I'm proud to announce that this summer we will have several college-age interns assisting us in our work here in Masatepe. This is a new program Jan and I have started with the goal of equipping young people who believe they're called into missions work (or praying and seeking God about this calling) and who want some real-life ministry experience in a foreign missions environment. One intern, Joshua, will be with us from June until December while the others are summer interns.
We'll introduce you to our interns in due time but first we'd like to say a little more about our intentions and purposes behind the internship program. First of all, Jan and I have long had a burden to disciple and equip high school and college-age people. We were in campus ministry at Appalachian State University from 1993 until 1997 and after that have been involved with high school students in my job as teacher. Now that we're older (i.e., closer to their parents' ages than to the students'..argh!) we believe we're able to disciple on an even deeper level and have a greater impact on the lives of these students. It's all in God's timing, of course, but our passion for this was re-ignited last year when Gena and Shawna came and spent three months with us as "unofficial" interns. During their time here, they had lots of adventures, hilarious moments (hee hee!), horrifying moments, and, hey, they even did a little work! Gena is returning this summer to lead a team from N.C. and afterwards to do a 3-week stint with us.
The day-to-day details of our intership program involve the intern helping with the short-term teams, taking an intensive Spanish language course, and working with the school students and youth group at the church. We've arranged for the interns to stay in the homes of people from our church - allowing them a greater immersion in Spanish than if they lived with us. Also, we are going to be using an excellent discipleship resource that I'll be blogging about later.
All in all, we're excited to see what God's going to do in and through these interns!
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