The Virginia Theological Seminary campus was really beautiful. Image taken from the Virginia Theological Seminary website.

From Friday February 20th to Sunday February 22nd, there was a conference for interns in the Episcopal Church Service Corps at Virginia Theological Seminary, in the DC suburbs.  The conference was an opportunity for interns and their directors to meet together.  As part of my internship, I went to this conference, and so did my director, Bryan.  I do not know what the program for the directors involved, except for when they were with us.  The program for the interns involved chapel Friday night, extensive Bible study on Saturday, with a focus on call stories, a driving tour of DC, and church Sunday morning, which was at Trinity Episcopal Church in Northwest DC, the church with which the DC internship program is associated.

Bryan and I arrived a bit late on Friday, because it took longer to get from the airport to the seminary than anticipated, so we missed chapel on Friday night, but we were there for the rest of the program.  Also, I had the chance to see my mother some, which was nice.  I grew up in the DC area and my parents still live there, though my father was away that weekend.  My mother, in fact, drove Bryan and I to the airport Sunday afternoon, which was very convenient for us.

The conference provided an opportunity to meet other interns in the Episcopal Church, which I thought was pretty exciting because there aren’t any others here in Spokane.  It was good both to meet people in different programs, in order to see how ours here in Spokane is similar to and different from the others, and also just to meet other young people that are excited about serving in an Episcopalian context.

The program we interns experienced provided many subjects for further thought.  Our Bible study of various call stories provided a lot of material for my own thoughts about my sense of call and vocation.  Towards the end of the Bible study we talked some about the challenges of being an intern, particularly those posed by family members and friends who do not understand what interning with the church is about and why it is something in which we are engaged.

It would have been even better if the conference had provided more structured ways to process the issues it brought up, perhaps in small-group discussions or something.  It would have been particularly helpful to have had some sort of structured way to discuss how the call stories we studied related to our own senses of call.  It would also have been helpful to discuss in small groups the challenges of interning, especially if the emphasis were not just on what the challenges are, but also on how to deal with them.

One of the aims of this conference was to build connections between the interns, and having small-group discussions would have helped with that aim, too, because it would have built in program time geared toward interacting with other interns.  As it was, the program relied mostly on large-group time, alternating with completely unstructured time, neither of which provides much structural support for getting to know the interns from other programs that one does not already know.