Beginning of Internship

Eight churches, six pastors, sermons every other Sunday, presiding whenever I'm not preaching, and getting to each of these churches every five Sundays (Being at two churches 3 Sundays out of 5), and it all began yesterday. I suspect that sentence would be enough to make your head spin trying to get your head around it, and I'm kind of doing that myself as I settle into my new position. I really loved meeting the people at the first church yesterday, and they seemed delighted to have me there - I even clicked decently with the teenagers there! And... I'm not going to be at their services again until the first Sunday in October. In the meantime, I'm going to go through the same experience at the other churches.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying this site already. My supervisor and I are on the same page theologically, ecclesiologically, in our view of the ministry, and we're both pretty easy going. He's someone I'm confident I'll be able to get along with famously for the next year. The other pastors I work with regularly are pretty fun too, and I can see myself learning boatloads being side by side with them all rather than being with just one pastor. Besides, with so many pastor-intern relationships going sour due to any number of reasons, having multiple pastors to work with can only be a good thing!

I'm going to need to be growing into wearing my clerical collar shirts. They feel alien on me, and the kinds of glances I get from people on sidewalks makes me uncomfortable - what're they thinking? Maybe... "I didn't know I lived next to a PASTOR!" I'm pretty unpretensious as a pastor and am not interested in lording my status over others. If I'm pretensious about anything, it'd probably be a matter of intelligence rather than office (much as I'd rather not be pretensious about anything). I wear the collar mostly because I want to be taken seriously as a pastor from day 1, and the symbol of that collar goes a long distance to accomplishing this. However, it'll be coming off as soon as I'm done with the formal pastoral functions. I'm trying not to think about how weird it'll be to wear it around friends and family for now...

Anyways, today is Labor Day, so I'm now off to being done with all things work!