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Over the years I’ve been able to watch seminary students excitedly depart for summer internships and then hear from their supervising pastors how well or poorly they did. Many interns do fine, but there are some who have trouble. One of the most common problems is that interns do not take criticism well. A vital part of an internship is preaching or teaching and then sitting down with your supervisor and having him critique your work. Did you make good eye contact? Was your sermon well organized? Did you faithfully exegete the text? Did you use appropriate and useful illustrations? Sitting down with your supervisor and dissecting your sermon can be a very painful process.
Good interns will listen to the criticisms, take good notes, meditate upon the feedback, and then make necessary adjustments. Bad interns ignore the counsel they’ve received or even worse, argue with their supervisor about how erroneous his assessment is. Bad interns negatively respond for a number of reasons. Sometimes they know that their own theology does not line up with their supervisor’s, hence they dismiss his criticism as ill informed. Other times the intern thinks too much of his own abilities to preach and too little of his supervisor’s pulpit skills. Still yet, some interns believe they’re ready for primetime and bemoan the fact that they have to waste their time in an internship. I have colleagues who recruit interns for our denominationally funded program and they regularly recount horror stories about bad interns.
My advice to any intern is simple: shut your pie hole. One of the biggest obstacles to accepting criticism is the man in the mirror. Rather than listening to the criticism, we’re too intent on explaining why our critic is incorrect. Sometimes we may be right—our critic has missed an important point. But most of the time, I suspect, we’re too busy trying to make excuses or defend ourselves and not listening to the valid points of criticism. Common sense should tell you that if you’re only ever preached a dozen sermons in your life (or perhaps less), you should sit quietly and listen to the man who has preached more than one thousand. Surely there is something to learn from his critique of your sermon. Yes, your supervisor’s critique may contain erroneous points, but such errors really don’t matter. If you feel the need to correct every single criticism, then you’re in the wrong vocation. You have to get used to listening to all of the criticism, weighing it, ignoring the erroneous, and embracing the accurate.
I did not personally agree with everything my supervisor said about my preaching, but I smiled, nodded, thanked him for his candor, and walked away and gave it a lot of thought. I’m not saying that I did all of this with a happy heart, but I think it was a first step in exercising some humility—a crucial virtue for a future pastor. You may be right when you object and argue with your supervisor, but right or wrong, you might not get called as a pastor if you get the reputation for being arrogant or above criticism. Once your internship is over and you get a call, you can preach in the manner that you believe is best. You just might find that your supervisor was right after all and you end up preaching as he suggested. In the end, humility calls for silence—grin and bear the criticism you receive.
