Leadership Formation Internship

The Leadership formation internship is a 10 month, intensive learning community dedicated to forming leaders who will impact the world. Experiential learning, input, supervised ministry, reflection, timely feedback - all these combine to help create leaders who are equipped to change the world.

Wholistic, integrated leadership formation experiences like this, coming at a crucial time in your life, can make the difference between effective leaders who finish well and those who are limited, frustrated, or even derailed. To ensure effectiveness, health, and longevity, leaders must develop in several key areas:

1. Personal character and spiritual development
2. Relational, communication, and conflict resolution skills
3. Practical ministry and leadership skills
4. Theological and leadership understandings
5. Hands-on experience, coupled with the ability to glean and integrate learnings into ongoing leadership experiences.

When these are integrated and interrelated in a learning community, the development and growth of leaders is maximized. However, most leadership training opportunities focus on just a few of these areas. Seminaries and Bible Schools can be a rich arena for growth in theological understandings and ministry skills, but often underemphasize character issues, relational skills and practical experience. Short term discipleship programs provide valuable skill development, experience and foundational character and spiritual formation, but may be lacking in in-depth leadership formation. And without an integrated approach, many programs become 'mountain top experiences' that are difficult or impossible to translate to real life.


	The fallout created by lack of development in one or more of these crucial areas prevents many leaders from reaching their full potential for God. We see it in the lives and marriages of mid-career leaders with gaps in areas ranging from communication and conflict to spiritual gifts and disciplines, understanding New Testament church life, and personal integrity and identity issues. We see it in the lives of leaders closing out a season of ministry, struggling to make sense out of what they have just experienced and the nature of God's call through it all. We see it in emerging young leaders who with some timely leadership formation and mentoring will lead effectively and impact their world, but without it may become frustrated and marginalized.

	The Leadership Formation Internship is designed to help emerging and transitioning leaders integrate the skills and experience they already have with the core competencies, character and spiritual development, and relational skills that make a well rounded, effective leader. This 10-month program provides a formation experience in the context of real life, rooted in Christian community, in a setting small enough to provide personalized mentoring and equipping but large enough to offer a well-rounded array of resources and opportunities. The emphasis will be on character and spiritual formation. We'll work at clarifying your personal gift set and role preferences; discerning core values, ministry philosophy, and life purpose; healing past hurts and removing hindrances to growth; relational and conflict management skills; spiritual disciplines; developing a lifelong personal development and Bible mastery paradigm; and operating from a New Testament church paradigm. The program will provide a variety of 'tracks' that focus on the work arena, where interns can work in an area of interest and develop their work skills and work ethic. In 2001 we will be offering a hospitality track, geared toward learning what it takes to run a B&B or Country Inn, a Web Development track where interns will build real-world CD-ROM- and web-based training materials, and a 'church leadership' track that will focus on launching a church plant at Three Hills. The goal? Well rounded leaders who can stand the test, produce lasting fruit and finish well... and are actually fun to be around!

	This site describes the Leadership Formation Internship in depth. To learn more, first read through the Vision and Program Overview pages, then follow the links for explore more details. We welcome your feedback and inquiries!