Est. 2009
142 churches and ministries
over 500 interns and counting
93 coaches training interns
73% of grads in ministry
97% of grads in a leadership role
You Have the Heart for This. You're Missing the Blueprint.
A working plan for coaches ready to stop winging their internship and start building a pipeline of leaders that outlasts them.
WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW:
You said yes to this because you believe in the next generation. But right now?
You're improvising.
You've got a job description you wrote in twenty minutes, a desk nobody prepped, and a host home you found three weeks before move-in because you ran out of time to ask around properly.
You're the "we need help" coach, and you know it.
Somewhere in the back of your mind, the real reason you brought someone on was so you could finally breathe. You'd never say that out loud. But it's driving every decision you're making with this intern, and it's about to cost you.
You've had the awkward host-home conversation.
The one about the messy room, or the missed dinners, or the family that stopped communicating. Nobody warned you this would be your job to coach.
Your intern keeps asking "what should I be doing?"
And every time they ask, it feels like a small failure. Because it is one, just not theirs.
You're worried you'll do this once and never again.
Not because it didn't matter. Because it wore you out, and you have no idea how to make it repeatable.
You didn't sign up to run a summer of chaos with a nice mission statement bolted on top. You signed up to build leaders. Right now, the gap between those two things is everything you're feeling.
FAST FORWARD ONE INTERNSHIP FROM NOW
Your intern walks into a real office, a real desk, a notebook with their name on it, not because you got lucky, but because you built it that way three months out.
The host home calls you on week four, not because something's on fire, but because you told them you'd check in, and they've come to expect that from you. It's a two-minute call. It's easy. It's working.
Your intern stops asking what they should be doing, because they never have to. They know Tuesday. They know the mission. They know what's expected of them because you named it before they arrived.
Somewhere around week eight, you watch them lead something on their own, not perfectly, but theirs. And you realize: this is the moment you built the whole thing for.
At the end of the summer, you're not relieved it's over. You're already thinking about next year's intern, and this time, you're not starting from scratch. You have a blueprint. You have a system. You have host homes lining up because word got around that your church does this well.
And five, ten years from now? That intern is leading their own ministry, telling their own interns about the coach who took the time to build it right.
That's not a better internship. That's a pipeline. And it starts with the plan you build before day one.
WHY THIS IS DIFFERENT
Most internship resources hand you a philosophy and call it a day. Have a great "why." Trust the process. Love on your intern.
That's not nothing. But it's not a blueprint.
The Internship Blueprint isn't a theoretical overview of what internships could look like. It's a working plan, built from decades in the trenches, cohort calls, and field experience with coaches who've actually done this, not just written about it.
A blueprint doesn't build the house for you. It means you never have to guess where something goes, or when. This course gives you that: the actual notebook, the actual covenant, the actual weekly structure, so that by the time your intern shows up, you're not improvising. You're executing a plan that's already yours.
This isn't about doing internships "the right way" according to somebody else's church. It's about building the version that fits your culture, your ministry, and your timeline, with a proven structure underneath it so you're never starting from a blank page.
WHAT'S INSIDE
Prework: Your Why
Before anything else, we get honest. Journal and audio homework that forces the real question: are you doing this for them, or for you? (If the answer's wrong right now, that's not disqualifying, but building on it without fixing it will quietly break the whole experience. This is the one step almost everyone wants to skip. Don't.)
Intro: Reframing Responsibility
The shift from "I need help" to "I'm investing in the next generation of leaders." Short. Direct. Everything after this only works if this lands first.
Module 1: Build the Foundation
Boss, board, budget, role, structure, buy-in: the six things that have to be locked in before you post a single job listing. Compensation, housing, host homes (your biggest win or your biggest regret), and the friction points that quietly blow up internships before they start.
Module 2: Design the Experience
Vision becomes a weekly, lived reality. You'll walk out with the actual notebook, the weekly structure, and the host home covenant, so your intern always knows what Tuesday looks like, and you never have to be the coach fielding "what should I be doing?" at 2pm.
Module 3: Lead the Transformation
This is the module that turns tasks into formation. The three phases every internship moves through, how to give feedback that develops instead of just corrects, and how to know the difference between pressure that grows someone and pressure that breaks them.
Conclusion: Finishing Well & Multiplying
How you end it is part of what they carry with them. This is where a good summer becomes a pipeline, where this year's intern becomes next year's recruiter, and eventually, someone else's coach.
WHAT'S INSIDE
Prework: Your Why
Before anything else, we get honest. Journal and audio homework that forces the real question: are you doing this for them, or for you? (If the answer's wrong right now, that's not disqualifying, but building on it without fixing it will quietly break the whole experience. This is the one step almost everyone wants to skip. Don't.)
Intro: Reframing Responsibility
The shift from "I need help" to "I'm investing in the next generation of leaders." Short. Direct. Everything after this only works if this lands first.
Module 1: Build the Foundation
Boss, board, budget, role, structure, buy-in: the six things that have to be locked in before you post a single job listing. Compensation, housing, host homes (your biggest win or your biggest regret), and the friction points that quietly blow up internships before they start.
Module 2: Design the Experience
Vision becomes a weekly, lived reality. You'll walk out with the actual notebook, the weekly structure, and the host home covenant, so your intern always knows what Tuesday looks like, and you never have to be the coach fielding "what should I be doing?" at 2pm.
Module 3: Lead the Transformation
This is the module that turns tasks into formation. The three phases every internship moves through, how to give feedback that develops instead of just corrects, and how to know the difference between pressure that grows someone and pressure that breaks them.
Conclusion: Finishing Well & Multiplying
How you end it is part of what they carry with them. This is where a good summer becomes a pipeline, where this year's intern becomes next year's recruiter, and eventually, someone else's coach.
RIGHT NOW, YOU HAVE TWO CHOICES
You can keep doing what most well-meaning coaches do: wing it, hope it works out, and find out what breaks in real time, with a real person's summer on the line.
Or you can build it once, build it right, and have a plan you can hand to the next coach, the next intern, the next ten generations after you're gone.
THE INTERNSHIP BLUEPRINT
Prework + Intro + 3 Modules + Conclusion. Self-paced.
Delivered straight to your podcast app, start today, revisit any lesson whenever you need it mid-internship.