MONT BELVIEU, Texas (ABP) — Twenty-five years ago, Frank Phillips felt God burdened his heart with desire to make it a little easier for people who feel a call to ministry to see it become reality.
About five years ago, Phillips believed the nest egg he had saved all those years finally had grown to sufficient size, and he told Pastor Jake Porter about his dream. God already had prepared Porter for just such an eventuality.
“It truly was a God thing the way this came together,” he said.
Porter, pastor of First Baptist Church in Mont Belvieu, Texas, had attended a weekend conference at a Washington, D.C., church and was impressed with the internship program there.
Kellen Reid (left) was the first intern at First Baptist Church in Mont Belvieu, a program funded thanks to the vision and foresight of Frank Phillips (seated). Pastor Jake Porter (right) supervises the interns, tailoring the program to meet the interests of each individual.
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“I started praying that one day, the Lord would maybe allow us to do something like that. It wasn’t very long at all after that that Mr. Phillips approached me and said that for all these years he’d been putting aside these funds to help young people who feel called to ministry. It was just an answer to prayer,” Porter said.
The funds have now been invested and the interest from those funds has been used to pay for an internship each summer.
Porter tailors each year’s program to meet the interests of that year’s intern.
“I talk to whoever the intern is going to be and hone the program to whatever they think their calling is,” he said. So far, interns have shown interest in missions, worship and pastoral leadership.
The program has kept his intellectual fires hot as well, he said.
“It’s good for me, in that it does keep me active in reading and learning,” Porter said.
Kellen Reid was the first intern in 2008. During her 10 weeks as an intern, she and Porter read and discussed 10 books. “Way too many,” Porter said with a laugh.
But Reid said the intellectual rigor of the program was beneficial for her.
“I’d never thought about an academic and intellectual pursuit of God until my internship, but from there, I know that I want to go to seminary after I finish my undergraduate work,” she said.
The growth was more than intellectual, however, Reid said.
“It took me from a place where I was a churchgoer and felt like I wanted to follow God to knowing how I could do that day by day and to push myself harder and closer to God through all the things I do,” she said.
Reid is a preschool Sunday school teacher, the keyboardist for the worship team and soon will lead an adult discipleship class.
“I think a lot of what was begun in her internship is being paid back to the church in her ministry,” Porter said.
Another of the former interns already has moved on, and that’s as it should be, Porter said.
“Part of what we recognize is that people who go through this are going to go off and minister in other churches, and that is part of the plan,” he said.
The genesis of Phillips’ desire came more than two decades ago when his church was helping a young man through seminary.
“We were always looking for funds for him. You can’t go to seminary on nothing. You’ve got to have money, and we were always taking up money for him. I said, ‘It would be great if we had a scholarship fund for this,’” he recalled.
“That’s really where it was born in my brain. I guess God put it there. He’s in charge of everything we do.”
Once he started to put the money aside, he never wavered in his vision, he said.
“It’s God’s to start with. He owns everything. We don’t own anything. He just puts us in charge of it. Sometimes we do all right, sometimes we don’t,” he said.
“If one person is saved over it, how much is that worth? I have no regrets.”
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George Henson is staff writer for the Baptist Standard.
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