As our internship developed, we find some things to be really crucial and vital to what we were doing, and other things we found could be accomplished in a matter of moments and didn't take nearly as long which left us scrambling. Here's a bit of a play by play:

God Time. One of the key parts of The Factory is our desire to see every student be apart of a weekly prayer meeting (we host one at 6pm on Wednesday Nights). As they are apart of that, they can then begin to lead a prayer meeting on their campus.

As such, we gave students 30 minutes of personal devotion time each day. We'd play some light worship music and allow them to spend time in the Scriptures, prayer and worship. For the final 30 minutes, we would pray on one of 6 topics (Campus, City, Nations, Passion, Intercession, Healing). We would pray passages of the Bible and then get after it.

Accountability Groups. We wanted to create space for students to get to know each other a little bit more as well as hold to each other to encountering God at their house. Our Accountability time was built around: How are you doing at home? How are you doing with your family? How are you doing with God? Were are you struggling? How are you doing well?

Staff Meeting. This was a was a way to give Alan a chance to run a Staff Meeting as well as a chance for our students to know that they were accomplishing something. It was a time for us to see what God was doing and where we were going.

Skill Building / Team Building. Initially our hope was that we would be able to develop skills and harness abilities of our students. If they could play guitar, we wanted to help them play guitar better. If they had media skills, we wanted to help them do it better. Unfortunately, for how much time we had and for the fact that we were lacking experts in every field we wanted to develop, instead we decided to use it as Team Building exclusively. Games. Activities. Events. Competitions. Anything to get students connected with one another (a key part of our mission in The Factory) and to keep it light. As you'll see with our Ministry Training, we came at it really strong and heavy. In order to do so, we needed to have something that wasn't so heavy. Our Team Building was the perfect out.

Ministry Training. One of the great parts about our Summer Internship is that we have a lot more time. Seeing as that's true, we wanted to use it as a way to strengthen doctrine, right belief and help students think through things they may not have before. Here's how it worked:

We used the book Doctrine by Mark Driscoll as the backbone for our discussion. The reason I liked it was two fold:

1. He brings all major doctrines.
2. The book is a result of a teaching he did at his church which is available to watch.
   

What that allowed us to do was to watch the video on Monday to finish out our day, have the students read during the week (which was easier since someone walked them through what all the words meant) and then on Friday we would discuss questions that the students has as well as the ones that were included in the book. It made it a perfect fit for what we were looking to do.

Service Prep / Follow-Up / Service Invitations. I haven't been one to do "a lot" when it comes to themes for series. I just haven't feel the effort ever paid off. But with the interns, I begin to see how much joy came for being able to have a part in making a service happen. From the smallest details: snack shop stocking, Guest Card making, handout cutting, chair stacking / sorting, painting, reorganizing, fine tuning. All of these became a way for them to have a part and to be a viable part of The Factory.

Not only that, but they helped in one of our biggest gaps. Follow-Up / Service Invitations. If you have seen in previous posts, this has been one of biggest areas of improvement for quite some time. It started with our interns. We were able to give student-to-student follow-up, have students calling students for invites and it paid off in dividends. Let's just say that we went from a student ministry of 40-80 at the beginning of the summer. To one of our last nights of the summer we had 100+. All credit goes to our interns. (Hence, why we started up Spring and Fall, but that's coming later).

Service Projects. When we dreamed the dream of internship we thought it would be fun to get students serving in the community and helping out local projects. There were two problems:

1. We had a lot more interns than we had transportation for.
2. 1:00-5:00 MWF is not an ideal time to serve anywhere.

So we improvised. Instead of serving outside the church, we had them serve inside of it. Our interns took what they were doing for service prep within The Factory and made that happen for the rest of Hope. Interns were stocking guest cards for the Sanctuary, cleaning toys for the nursery, prepping meals for dinner, organizing closets, helping with events, sending out letters for missions. It was phenomenal to see. One of the things we kept hearing from staff members at our church was:

"The interns have been such a blessing to me and this church. They have done things for me that I've been wanting to do for years but have never had the time going from week to week. Tell them how thankful I am for them."

This happened again and again and again. I call that a win.

Tomorrow, I'll let you know how this developed this into both a Spring and Fall internship.