Mike Warfel, intern and vicar at Cross and Crown Lutheran in Matthews, N.C., walks in front of the church with Jennifer Ginn, his supervising pastor.
Interns learn
oshua Serrano, Mike Warfel and Sandra Barnes served internships on the West, East and Gulf coasts, respectively, and couldn’t be more satisfied with the seminary requirement—especially their growth into pastoral roles, discovering hidden talents and enjoying a trusted mentor and adviser in their supervising pastor. But each seminarian’s circumstance raises questions about larger num- bers of older and second-career ELCA seminarians who can’t move for the internship because of family obligations, and the need for sponsoring churches to come up with creative ways to pay for interns. Serrano, 31, and his wife, Enrique, wanted to stay in San Diego for as long as they could after she found a job as youth director at an Episcopal church and to avoid uprooting their sons, Sebastian, 4, and Isaac, 1. They found their answer at St. Peter’s by the Sea Lutheran Church in the Ocean Beach neighborhood, where Serrano served while its pastor, Karen LaFollette Marohn, went on a three-month sabbatical. Serrano found himself helping a congregation through five members’ deaths in that short period—a higher number than the church had experienced in the previous full year. “It was very hard on the congregation and on me to constantly be at funer- als, but we got through it,” said Serrano, who recently was called to serve Holy Shepherd Lutheran Church, Orinda, Calif. Warfel, 42, sought an internship in the Charlotte, N.C., area because his
J Guy is an ELCA member and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. 30 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
wife, Elizabeth, a high-school math teacher, is near retirement and would have lost her status and accrued ben- efits if she had left the state. “We had agreed from day one
ropes, congregations witness growth
NANINE HARTZENBUSCH
Location-bound seminarians, costs pose challenges By Sandra Guy
that we would be in this together; it would not be a long-distance rela- tionship,” he said. Warfel found his answer at both Cross and Crown Lutheran Church and its preschool, which hosts a chil- dren’s chapel each Friday morning. “The biggest thing I’ve taken away is seeing the reaffirming gifts I knew I had and the pleasant surprise of new gifts, especially working with young children,” said Warfel, who had worked as a paralegal for three years and in accounting and financial analysis for 12 years before he acted on his call to ministry. The internships also had the intended effect of enabling both Warfel and Serrano to serve in a variety of capacities, rather than being pigeonholed as a youth direc- tor or pastoral aide.
Jennifer Ginn, pastor of Cross and Crown, said interns who learn about pastoral techniques in the classroom get “a taste of how people respond to those strategies” in the real world. The congregation ben- efits, too, because members get to see the intern grow and sharpen his or her skills, she added. “All interns are nervous at first,” she said. “It’s a gift that the congre- gation receives, to feel the change in the intern’s presence and the way the person grows in preaching sermons, the warmth of his or her personality, and the genuineness they feel from him or her giving communion.” For the supervising pastor, hav- ing an intern takes work and time, requiring meetings with seminary representatives, overseeing the stu- dent’s required project, and taking on the mentoring role to debrief, evaluate and discuss issues and con-
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