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MTS: Where to train

Sunday, 14 January, 2007

We did MTS on a university campus but of course you can do MTS at all sorts of other places well: churches, TAFE, ECOM and so on. Some (like Haoran) split their time between several places (in Haoran's case, UWS Blacktown, TAFE and a high school). Most of the MTS workers I've met have undertaken their traineeship on university campuses or in a church—probably because MTS started on a university campus and the first lot of trainees went on to work mostly in churches where they decided to implement the program (pure speculation on my part though!).

Obviously where you do MTS will affect what sort of ministry you're doing. At Uni, you're working primarily with tertiary students—local, overseas, residential and commuter. In a church, you're working with people of all different ages and education levels who tend to live in the local area. Uni ministry is mainly concentrated during the times when semester is in full swing because that's when the students are there. During the holidays, they all tend to go home, though they tend to make exceptions for things like Mid Year Conference and National Training Event (which is the Australian national conference for Christian tertiary students held in Canberra usually at the beginning of December). In a church, stuff is happening all year 'round (particularly at Easter and Christmas!) and your congregation doesn't tend to fluctuate as much as with Uni students (who graduate after three, four, five, six years—unless they go on to become postgraduates but then everything changes again ...)

When thinking about where to train, it's a good idea to find somewhere that will give you a taste of what you want to do in the future. If you're thinking of going overseas to south-east asia to do mission work, it would be better not to do your training with a congregation full of Europeans; you're better off working with an ethnic ministry or an campus group for overseas students (e.g. Fellowship of Overses Christian University Students [FOCUS] Wollongong). If you're thinking of eventually pastoring a church, don't do university ministry. If you're wanting to eventually work with children, don't sign up with a ministry to office workers in the CBD. You get the picture. But if you're not sure what you want to do, choose something that you're interested in. After all, MTS is about having a go and seeing whether or not this is what you want to be doing with your life.

That said, there are certain things that you should be looking for when choosing a place to train. Firstly, it's a good idea to go somewhere that has completely embraced the training ethos behind MTS (and preferably somewhere that has had trainees before so you know that the trainers have some idea of what they're doing). You don't want to end up somewhere where you aren't going to be trained, and where you're treated like an extra pair of hands to put out the chairs or babysit the children in crèche. MTS is primarily about training. What's the point of doing it if you don't get trained?

Which leads me to the next point: your trainer. In MTS, you work fairly closely with your trainer—the one responsible for your training. At Wollongong, we met up with our trainers once a week. They would read the Bible with us, check how we were going, set goals for the semester, pray with us, do ministry alongside us, and so on. We also had weekly staff meetings as a team (where one of the senior staff would take us through a training topic) and women's staff meetings for the female trainees (although now that there aren't as many female trainees, I don't think that's happening there any more). Your trainer doesn't just get alongside you to teach you practical stuff; your trainer also pushes you theologically so you grow in your understanding of the Scriptures and so you take the bold move of stepping outside your comfort zone every now and then. I remember being extremely reluctant to do walk-up evangelism (that's when you walk up to strangers and ask them if they would like to talk about Christianity. Some people also call it “cold turkey evangelism”). In my second year of MTS, my trainer, Amanda, encouraged me to do it by planning three or four dates with me where we would go out together and give it a try. (In the end, on the very first day that we did it, the very first person we approached was so keen to hear the gospel message and meet up with us, we ended up meeting up with her for the rest of the semester to read the Bible together so we never actually did it together again.) She also encouraged me to do stuff like organise a sleepover night with the girls in my faculty so that we could study the Bible together and get to know one another better, and give an evangelistic talk.

But I'm getting off the topic. My point is it's a good idea to suss out your trainer. How do they work? What are their methods? Do you two get along? Do you respect this person to lead you on this journey? Is this someone you can learn from? What kind of ministry are they currently engaged in and is that the sort of thing that you'd like to try as well? Do you get along well with him/her? Train with someone you know and trust. Train with someone whose ministry you've seen. Train with someone who will train you not just in skills and knowledge but in godliness. Train with someone who exhibits the characteristics of elders and deacons in 1 Timothy 3. Train with someone who will actually train you in the areas where you need to be trained.

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