One of the greatest lines you could ever hear from one of your leaders is the following:

"I want you to dream up something big. Not something dinky or small. Something big. Something you could never pull off but you would find to be necessary to The Factory. I want you to dream it up and then I want you to give it to me and I'll make it happen."

These are the exact words of Jon Cron, one of our leaders within The Factory. At this point, I didn't have anything. I wasn't dreaming a big dream. I was trying to make it through that week! But as we had a chance to dialogue more and as we worked through needs in The Factory, one of the things that kept coming back was the success of the Summer Internship. We had students who were coming after school each and every day looking for ways to help because they enjoyed it so much. Which again led us to the same place as the beginning of the Summer Internship, why not make this available for everyone. We put in some work, crafted a schedule and came up with the following, which we implemented in January:

SUNDAY
8:30-1:00 - Church Services

TUESDAY
4:30-4:50 Start-Up / Prayer
4:50-5:20 Leadership Course
5:20-5:40 Team Building
5:40-6:10 Follow-up / Invitation
6:10-6:30 Debrief

WEDNESDAY
4:00-4:20 Start-Up/ Prayer
4:20-5:30 Service Prep / Service Time
5:30-6:00 Dinner
6:00-6:30 Student Led Prayer Meeting
6:30-8:30 The Factory
8:30-9:00 Post Service

THURSDAY
4:30-4:50 Start-Up / Prayer
4:50-5:15 Leadership Profiles
5:15-5:25 Student Recap of the Reading
5:25-5:40 Student Led Team Building
5:40-6:15 Student Led Accountability and Prayer
6:15-6:30 Student Led Debrief

Our mission for the Spring Internship is Leadership. For the Summer it was Doctrine, but for the Spring, we wanted to be developing leaders within our Student Ministry. Not just leaders who would lead services, but leaders to impact society. In fact, I shared with their parents:

"Our mission with this internship is to create a program that rivals that of anything else your student could be involved in. We will develop Christian leaders better than anyone else in town. And the level of commitment involved is going to look really good on a college application."

So we did. We have the students reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. This is apart of the Leadership Course taught at Evangel University as part of one of their degrees, a course in which Jon took. As he is passionate about proactive leadership and The 7 Habits, that passion gets turned over to the students and translates into really effective leaders. I can say that within two months, they have completely redefined our Student Ministry. And they're just getting started.

Again, one of the biggest joys is what Jon said to me in the beginning. Little did we know when we talked about this, that the birth of my son would have me decide to become less involved in a lot more and to not take on any additional leadership responsibilities that were not absolutely necessary. The Internship falls into this category. Yet Jon, with the help of Jaime, Student Ministry Administrative Assistant, run the internship. I am able to occasionally say hello, but it's all them. One of my greatest joy to be able to say is that I could not do it better myself. In fact, if I was in charge, it would be worse.

This is why I love the Body of Christ and everyone getting to use their gift.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you about where we're heading and what's next for the Internship.