GOALS AND INTENDED OUTCOMES OF A SUPERVISED INTERNSHIP
Self-awareness: Effective ministers are wise risk takers who vulnerably summon the courage not only to admit to imperfection but also to interrogate the ways their particular experience of embodiment is forming them as well. Learning to know areas of strength and limitations results in authentically exercising ministerial authority with integrity and humility. Field education supervisors and settings help students to recognize talents and gifts for leadership and service as well as to accept and address deficiencies that may impede effective ministry. So also a holistic and multisensory engagement with and in the body can be a bridge to connect field education with personal and professional growth as well as a growing awareness of one's ministerial identity.
Relationship Development: Relationships are crucial sites of learning, formation, and integration. Competent ministry is built on strong, healthy relationships. The rapidly changing global context demands that ministers take embodiment and cultural context with utmost seriousness in order to relate to others with sensitivity, integrity, and understanding, in and beyond the church.
Skill Acquisition: Christian faith leaders in a variety of settings need to develop competency in an ever expanding set of ministry task-skills, relational skills, and ministry knowledge. A learner-centered internship provides opportunities for students to try, hone, improve and learn from mistakes in the process of both acquiring new skills and further refining others.
Testing Vocational Call: Callings do not take care of themselves, and ministry in the 21st century is marked by increasingly diverse and changing contexts. Yet no matter what ministry God calls students to, field education empowers them to discern their unique vocational calling through experiential learning, the support of a mentor-supervisor, and hopefully the encouragement of the community in which their learning-serving takes place. Students are invited to consider their gifts, limitations, and uniqueness and to seek after a clarity of vision about themselves and their place in the world.
Integration: Competent ministers combine theory and practice, concepts and skills, ideas and relationships, critical reflection and action. Field education offers students the opportunity to discover new and possibly transformative knowledge gained through practice and reflection on practice. This is why field education placements are the integrative heart of the PTS curriculum. Through a process of integrative reflection, students integrate their lives, their social locations, their coursework, their vocations, and their spiritual practices. As students work with those experienced in ministry, their capacity for wisdom increases as study and reflection lead to competence and clarity of thought.
Hours: Monday-Friday 8:30am-4:30pm
Summer Hours: Monday-Thursday 8:30am-4:30pm; Friday 8:00am-1:00pm
Phone: (609) 497-7970
Email: [email protected]
Rev. Dr. Shannon Smythe, Director of Field Education and Vocational Placement
Rev. Touré Marshall, M.Div, ThM, Assistant Director of Field Education and Vocational Placement
“Trenton Psych was a fantastic place to work and learn, a seminal part of my Seminary experience and the most important thing I did at Princeton.”