The Spirit's Tether by Warford Malcolm L.;Huggins Kenneth;

Author:Warford, Malcolm L.;Huggins, Kenneth; [Malcolm L. Warford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SUBJECT
ISBN: 4717741
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated
Published: 2011-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chris

Returning to Union after a year’s internship in his hometown, Chris begins the interview following his fifth semester on several positive notes, evincing less of the weariness that seemed to dominate his outlook at the end of his fourth semester. As he has hoped it might be, his internship “was a renewal of roots after all. After some rough years up here, it was a very healthy year. It was a good year. … About 75 percent of the time was in campus ministry. … That was the main assignment, and that was basically what I was paid to do. But in addition to that I did about three afternoons a week of hospital visitation … , visiting Presbyterians who were from out of town in area hospitals. It was not CPE [clinical pastoral education]; it was not anything sophisticated. It was simply a one-time short visit. And then I would go back and visit people again if they were in the hospital for longer than a week. I would just make a Wednesday afternoon round of this specific hospital.

“Kind of an addition to this work for the … presbytery, was work that I did at a Presbyterian church on the weekends. I would go down there about every other weekend. I had no specific responsibilities other than to be an apprentice and get an exposure to the parish work and preaching and polity and program and all the things like that. …

“So it was an intern year that had kind of two poles. One was doing an urban campus ministry in a graduate setting of health, and the other was being an all around ministerial apprentice in a traditional, small-town, Southern congregation.”

Chris then goes into a good bit of detail describing his internship, particularly his work at the ecumenical campus center, which had been completed in 1970. According to Chris, the center had languished during the intervening years, and he now takes great pride in his role in bringing the center back to life.

“It was successful partially because I was so young. I was the age of these students. Three or four of them I had gone to high school with, and I think just having somebody young there in ministry. … We offered them programs that were general in nature and that I think related to some kind of humanistic, sometimes even religious level, to their tense technological scientific orientation that they have at medical school. … I think we just created an hour break for them in the midst of their demanding and dehumanizing education.”

Certainly Chris’s commitment to ministry was reaffirmed by the experience: “I have always had the feeling that if you go in and do a good job, a competent job of developing programs that meet the concerns that people have, … the people will respond. And they did. You know, it was just phenomenal the amount of response we got. … The fact that I went down there and just had that kind of

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