Running head: CHI ALPHA INTERNSHIP 1

Chi Alpha Internship

Chi Alpha

Dan Oren

Winona State University

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My internship over this summer was with Chi Alpha. I wanted to intern with Chi Alpha

because it was a club and campus ministry that I have been largely involved in since I came to

college as a freshman. Since Chi Alpha played such an integral part in my life and because I

planned to go into ministry after college, it made sense to do my internship there where I was

already involved and committed. It gave me an opportunity to be at an internship site that

combined my knowledge as a communication studies major with my faith and allowed me to

pursue areas I was passionate in more than other internships I could have chosen. The Chi Alpha

internship also gave me a way to delve into what ministry really is and to be given a deeper

understanding of how ministry functions and the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes.

It was a great opportunity for me to work on some of my strengths while gaining a lot of

experience in areas that I didnt particularly excel at.

Chi Alpha is a college campus ministry and club that is on college campuses all around

the country. Chi Alpha is an Assemblies of God denomination and is based on 2 Corinthians

5:20: We are therefore Christs ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through

us. We implore you on Christs behalf, be reconciled to God. Chi Alpha (or XA) literally means

Christs ambassadors, and the goal of the ministries across the country is to reach the students

and communities of college campuses so that they can be introduced to and develop a faith in

Christ. Chi Alpha has leadership that is on the national level as well as in smaller sections across

the country (ie. Mike Amiot is the director of the Great Plains Chi Alphas), and each college

campus has a head pastor who is in charge of leading that particular Chi Alpha. For my

internship Steph Peterson, the pastor over Winona Chi Alpha, was the main supervisor. After

Steph there are staff members who also hold leadership roles, and finally there are student

leaders involved in leading small groups, ministry teams, and general outreach across campus.
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Chi Alpha has a service every Thursday where students come to socialize, hear a sermon, and

worship. We also often do outreach events like game nights, bonfires, and men/women tailored

events once per semester. All of these aspects are purposed to ultimately get people to know who

we follow and believe in, Jesus Christ, and to recognize the Bible as Gods word.

The purpose of my internship was to use my communication skills and knowledge to

accomplish five main goals:

1. Create compelling, effective arguments;

2. Analyze, create and adapt public messages;

3. Identify and apply theories of leadership and persuasion;

4. Be able to resolve conflict in a variety of settings through the use of conflict resolution

strategies, mediation, assertion, arbitration, advocacy and third party negotiation; and

5. Use computer mediated communication to effectively communicate and network in a

variety of settings.

Each goal not only applies to the communication side of the internship, but also to the spiritual

aspect of my internship. Both the communication and spiritual sides overlap generally speaking,

because the communication terms and theories were viewed in the paradigm based on ministry.

In addition to the goals of my internship I had a specific job description that was outlined. This

was as follows:

Help do administrative work such as support letters

Lead a small group and mentor the guys in the group

Develop mens ministry by planning and implementing ideas

Prepare sermons to give for summer Chi Alpha

Plan and schedule events

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Schedule speakers for services

Help with worship ministry: setup, singing, planning.

Oversee and manage social media communication

These goals and job description are what set the framework for my internship and helped to

identify the areas that I would be able to improve on and develop as an intern with Chi Alpha.

In the first week of the internship I was trained in on how to use the Church

Communication Builder or CCB. CCB is the church database that we use to plan things, store

our information, and send out updates. I was then tasked to send out a mail merge, which

basically sends out emails to a bunch of people at one time. I had to then write the email in a way

that was professional and concise to send to all of the students of Chi Alpha that told them where

people are if they wanted to meet up over the summer. Below is an email I sent with the mail

merge.

Hey Taylor,

I hope you are enjoying your summer break so far! Are you getting bored already? Did you go

home for the summer and have no friends to hang out with? Well bummer. There might be some

people close by that you can hang out with. Click here to see a list of people and where they will

be this summer so you can meet up and spend hours playing Super Smash Bros, or even better

yet have some quality heart to heart conversation. Making sure you stay in touch is a great way

to stay accountable and sharpen each other in your faith.

If you are a female and will be in the cities over the summer, there will be a Bible study led by

Kate Fitzer. If you are interested you can reach her at 651-399-4768.

Enjoy your break, and make sure to develop and share your faith with the people around you.

Dan Oren.
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Learning more about CCB gave me a better idea of the behind the scenes parts of

ministry. I had been on the receiving side of many mail merges through my time in Chi Alpha

but hadnt been tasked with sending one or seeing how it is done through CCB. It was a valuable

experience to learn to send mail merges because it would remain useful throughout my internship

and is a good communication skill to develop. Communicating well electronically and through

email is extremely important for interns and students who will be going into full time jobs

because so much of communication occurs through that medium in differing workplaces. Just

like face-to-face communication is important, CMC or computer mediated communication is

also important for us to be effective and professionally skilled with.

Writing mail merges and keeping in touch with the leaders and students of Chi Alpha is a

way to create a social support system. This is where people feel valued, know that they are

important, and can get assistance and support from others in the group. The first mail merge I

sent out was encouraging the students to take advantage of that social support system and to have

the information needed to find other people around them to count on and fellowship with over

the summer while we all werent in Winona. This is important for ministrys to develop a sense

of social support where everyone feels valued and wants to contribute to the ministry. This was a

large part of my responsibilities over the internship in helping to create social support through

planning Chi Alpha events, sermons, and other ways for student to keep in contact with each

other.

Very early on in the internship the staff and I had a meeting to discuss what we were

going to do throughout the rest of the summer for Chi Alpha, and talked about our vision and

ideas for the coming months. There was a lot of things to cover considering Steph would be gone

for a month of the summer and we were also going through a big transition where our main
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administration staff member (who seriously did everything) was leaving and new staff members

were going to take over. Considering I was the intern that meant I also would need to be aware of

the changes because I had to learn how to do and use things that the past administrative assistant

had done. We discussed how we were to go about doing Chi Alpha in the summer. Since I was

the one who was primarily taking charge of planning the events and services, this was the time

for me to talk about what I envisioned for the summer. I had a list of possible events planned and

had the setup of event every other week and service on the weeks in between. This would

provide a good amount of relationship development with those involved, while also not

neglecting the spiritual side that is also extremely important. Some events I planned were

bowling, bonfires, a movie night, and a game night. I was also in charge of finding speakers on

the service weeks, so I talked about possible people who could speak and topics we may go over

during services. In this meeting we were using the functional approach to communication

which When we were in our meeting about the future of Chi Alpha over the summer, the group

was using the functional approach to group decision making. The functional approach is based

around effective communication between the members. Communication is required for groups to

achieve the best possible outcomes by being able to use critical thinking, being rational, and

being able to balance each other out by not allowing other group members to use poor decision

making or problem solving. There are several aspects of a group communication that need to be

present for a group to be effectively solving problems. A few of these aspects are: Groups need

to be able to choose the best decision, recognize the things that are required to reach that

decision, and review the process to make changes if necessary. In our meeting, we were able to

sue communication and these pieces to be able to effectively plan for the summer in a way that

was the best possible and where we were all on the same page. To have this effective group
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decision making we needed to be promotive, which is the role of bringing attention to the

required functions of group decision making. Steph is really effective at being promotive and

leading the group in the right direction for discussion and decisions. Making sure that in the

group there arent members who are disruptive is also important, as the disruptive people cause

the group to get off track and makes it difficult to keep to the four functions of effective group

decision making. Lastly, groups also need those that are being counteractive, or trying to

provide a way to get group members back on task after a disruption.

In our meeting I learned that ministry has a lot more administrative and boring things

that go on behind the scenes. In any ministry for any service there are many things that had to be

planned out beforehand. This isnt something that is often recognized or realized. This week I

got to experience the side of Chi Alpha that plans and meets about things and does administrative

work. Though obviously not every intern going into a full time position will do ministry related

work now or in the future, this idea applies to any work place. There are parts that are not as

fun and parts that require a lot of communication to function properly. It is an important skill

for everyone to develop to be successful in their workplace.

One of the biggest projects I was in charge of over the internship was the alumni project.

It was a huge undertaking as I had to find all of the alumni of Chi Alpha and get in touch with

them so we would be able to contact them to update their information in CCB, our church

database, so that we could make sure they are up to date with the things going on with Chi

Alpha, and ask for their support financially and through prayer. We had decided early on in the

summer that we wanted to move Chi Alpha to be on campus, so the alumni project was

extremely important since we needed money for the transition, and to have all of our past Chi

Alpha students/leaders to pray over the transition. The alumni project required a lot of
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communicating through different methods to reach the alumni. I used Facebook a lot to be able

to look up people, while sending messages to those people over Facebook as well, asking for

their information. Below is the message I sent to the alumni:

Hey, I am an intern for the summer at Winona State University Chi Alpha. God has been moving

on our campus and we want to include you in helping us continuously impact students lives for

Christ. There is an opportunity for our ministry to grow and reach the students more effectively,

and we could use your help! If you could respond with your current address, we would love to

send you more details on what God is doing! Thank you so much in advance!

Though a small amount of people responded to the message compared to the number of alumni

there was on my list, it was a good first step to gain some more information on alumni.

The message sent to alumni was a form of foot-in-the-door technique. The foot-in-the-

door technique attempts to get someone to agree to a small request, and then later they will be

more open to agreeing to a larger more substantial request based on their first choice to comply

with the small request. Since a large amount of the alumni started to get back to me later in the

week, they had agreed to the smaller request of giving us their updated phone number, address,

and email address. This would set the alumni up to later respond with the same compliance when

asked to support Chi Alpha through prayer and financially. The foot-in-the-door is a form of

compliance gaining strategies, or ways to try and get people to comply with what you want and

to do what is asked. Another compliance gaining technique is door-in-the-face, in contrast to

foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face starts with a large request and then shrinks that request to be

smaller and thus creates a situation where the person is more likely to comply. An example of

this would be if I sent out a letter asking Alumni for money first, but then asked for something
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simpler like updated information. In this instance it was more effective to start with the small

request and move on to the bigger request of asking for support.

The use of social media as a foot-in-the-door technique was using a medium of

asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication is when the sender and receiver

of a message, dont respond and communicate with each other at the same time. There is time in

between the communication where no messages are being relayed to the other. This form of

communication gives both communicators the ability to really think about and create the best

response possible to send. In this instance the ability to communicate with the alumni all at once

and asynchronously made it much easier to reach that many where synchronous communication

that occurs all at once, would have made a much more difficult task.

The lesson I learned through doing the alumni project is that it can be very difficult to get

people to respond over Facebook when it comes to requests like this, that are of the more

professional type. Facebook and other social media can be an excellent tool for businesses and

professionals, but also can have some difficulties reaching people as they dont always want un-

solicited messages about non-profits. I learned more about using Facebook as a professional tool

and that there are very real limits to Facebook just as there are strengths. In this day and age,

interns who will be going into any work environment will likely be exposed to some form of

social media in the work place. It is an important lesson to learn how to effectively use social

media and to recognize the things that can be done well with Facebook and not as well.

Social media can be a great tool to use while setting up events, and during my internship I

took full advantage of Facebook events to invite people to our summer Chi Alphas. When using

social media to create events and to try to get people to come to those events, the frequency and

reach of the event/message is important. The reach of the message is the amount of people who
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see the specific content. If my Facebook event has 100 people look at the page, the reach of that

event would be 100 people. In this instance it was important to have the highest reach as

possible, to be able to get as many students and future students to come to summer Chi Alpha.

The frequency of a message is how many times that people see the message. Facebook provides

a unique opportunity of inherently improving its frequency with having more of a reach. If more

people are reached on a Facebook post than other people are more likely to see the content again.

Especially in terms of Facebook events, when someone says they are interested in the event or

they are going it provides a new opportunity to persuade people to come. This frequency increase

through increased reach also can further solidify the positive feelings that people have towards

going to the event. In the best possible circumstance for our summer Chi Alpha events, we

wanted the highest frequency and reach possible, so we would post reminders about the event

over the week to reach more people, and to provide multiple opportunities for students to

respond and to choose to go to the event.

Through event planning during my internship, I learned a great deal about administration.

Administration was an area I knew I was not particularly adept at and through the internship I

was able to develop into a much more efficient planner and scheduler. I was able to learn where

my weaknesses were and to be able to improve on those areas by doing things I had not before.

During the internship the best experience for me was being able to speak and preach at a

summer Chi Alpha. It was extra exciting for me because it was my first sermon ever. Part of my

goal of my internship with communication and development was to preach a sermon. It was a

really cool experience to accomplish, even if it was a difficult one as well. I spent a decent

amount of time over the week prior to preaching writing my sermon and practicing the spoken

word I would also perform. My sermon was on cultivating Gods gifts, and spoken word is my
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passion area that I have developed and cultivated over the years. I talked about how we need to

work on and cultivate the things God places on our heart in the times we dont have an outlet for

our passion. It was really cool to be able to share about my gift while also encouraging everyone

else in their own gifting, and to push them to using it consistently. The experience was both

extremely challenging and also extremely rewarding. Below is part of the spoken word lyrics

that I shared during my sermon.

When my words surge in

Youll need a word surgeon
To analyze the wordplay ties
Like its black Friday
Im always getting lines
My word game is big in this flow
Like Im a sturgeon
Lyrical sermons like Im rhyming Spurgeon
I have surplus gift so this is splurging
You cant stop my currents
Since I give glory to God
In all occurrence
King has me shining like Im luminous
You wont ever see satan loom in this
Im weaving this poem like I put a loom in this
Since I was saved I illoominate
I dont fabric-ate when I state Im free from dooms kiss
Like a sonogram Im the picture of a new kid
When that living water dropped
I was reborn to the renewed kin
The trumpets blowing will be the ultrasound
Joy abounds as the lost are found

Preaching my sermon and my spoken word specifically are forms of using

Transformational Leadership. Transformational Leadership seeks to satisfy peoples needs

above what are just the basic needs. Maslovs Hierarchy of Needs starts with physiological

needs, then safety, belonging and love, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization.

Transformational Leadership tries to satisfy the higher needs, as those are the places where you

begin to grow towards self-actualization: which is achieving ones full potential. When I preach
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and perform spoken word, the content is aimed at seeing people move towards those higher

needs in regards to faith. In my writing and speaking, I point to faith as the place to find safety,

belonging and love, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. It is in this way, I am being a

Transformational Leader, who is helping to fulfill those needs and encourage the people I speak

to.

A lesson I learned by preaching my first sermon was that I need to be confident in what I

do even if there are things that dont go extremely well. Any speaker or person studying

communication knows that a speech will never be perfect. There is so much that goes into

communication that can potentially go wrong, but part of being a good speaker is moving past a

fumble or an unfavorable situation and continuing to be confident and proceed with speaking. It

is a hard skill to develop, and I have a long way to go, but trying a new thing and having failures

is how I can learn and improve. It was a great experience speaking and seeing the successes and

failures, because I know I can learn so much from both aspects. It is an important for me and

other interns to know that there will be hardships and failures, but we can pick ourselves back up

from them and press on. No communicator got to where they are now by giving up, so interns

need to recognize the power of continuing to pursue goals even when it is hard.

The alumni project that I worked on over the internship required me to find more than

one way to try and reach the alumni. Since I had to use different methods to reach out to the

alumni of Chi Alpha, I was using communication accommodation theory. Accommodation

theory is the notion that when we communicate we change our speech and aspects of our

communication to accommodate others. When I changed the method of communication, I was

tailoring my communication to what might have been a more effective way of contacting alumni.
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In doing the mail merge I was doing the process of convergence, or adapting to the alumnis

communication style to reduce our differences. The reduction in differences would help to

eliminate any apprehension in responding to my messages/emails and help the alumni feel more

compliant to respond.

Often times in professional settings communication accommodation is required so that

workplace communication can be successful and effective. Interns need to become good

communicators because in every job there is communication required and it helps to be able to

approach the different situations with flexibility, as great communicators know how to speak to

their specific audience. Through the alumni project I got a better understanding of how to speak

to my audience effectively, and to try more than just one angle. This helped me reach as many

Chi Alpha alumni as possible.

The next bit part of my internship was being a part of the summer club fair. The club fair

is a very important time for Chi Alpha to be able to outreach and tell people about what we do as

a club and campus ministry. It was a time during my internship that was definitely harder for me

because Im not comfortable standing in front of a table and talking with people I dont know.

The week got long because I was doing something I found very difficult. I felt strained and pretty

stressed at times because I am such an introvert. It was a challenging week being the one

overseeing the club fair table and also trying to get other students from Chi Alpha to volunteer

their time as well. Since there arent many students who stay in the summer, and of those that

stay most were working at that time, it was hard to find others to help with the club fair. I did get

some people to come and help out and it ended up being a manageable experience. I was

uncomfortable in it but at the same time was able to talk with people and there were rare times

when the parent/student were really interested from the start and that made it all feel worth it to
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have those types of encounters. I also got to know some of the people who work at Mugby,

which was cool to talk to them about ministry and one girl in particular about her job at Mugby

as far as administrative work and being a barista. As hard as it can be for me to talk to new

people, the club fair did have good experiences and helped to grow me through challenging my

comfort zone.

While working at the club fair a huge aspect to talking with people is the social

penetration theory. The Social Penetration theory explains how people get to know each other

and gain increasingly more knowledge as layers of the person are peeled away. The Social

Penetration theory uses an onion as a metaphor for getting past certain points in getting to know

someone to reach the deeper information that is more private or more secret, or peeling layers of

the onions. Talking to future students at the club fair often means that the communication is at

the orientation stage, or where small talk is. This can have clichd statements and doesnt offer

much intimacy. Because I hate small talk, this is part of the reason club fair was hard for me. The

goal in being at club fair is to eventually get to deeper layers because the student will decide to

come to Chi Alpha and will get more layers peeled back as they get to know others.

I learned through doing the club fair the importance of attitudes shaping experiences. I

did not keep a consistent positive outlook on my week at the club fair and through my time there

I was reminded that to be effective at communicating I needed to have an attitude to foster a

confident persona. It is extremely important for outreach to show that you really care, and that

requires a mindset that was better than my own during the week. In the future I want to be better

at the way I present myself at outreach places like a club fair.

The last extremely beneficial experience for me during my internship was going on a

mini mission trip with some other people from Chi Alpha. We went to Tree Top Kids which is a
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ministry that was created specifically to reach kids who live in trailer parks around Minnesota. In

a lot of these parks there are broken families, and hard situations, and a desperate need for hope

and love. Tonys vision was to provide a place where the kids could experience the love and

attention that they may have been without in their home lives. Our group helped with an event

where we picked up the kids in and around a few of the trailer park communities in buses and

brought them to the home church of Tony and his family. We helped in planning all of the

events, games, lessons, and schedule while also each being in charge of a group of kids (very

similar to being a camp counselor for them the few days). The experience was hard at times

dealing with kids not listening and the craziness, but this mission trip more than anything else in

the internship changed me. I was so heartbroken for these kids and didnt realize how much love

I would feel towards them. I was surprised that when we dropped off the last kid at the end of

our last day to find myself tearing up over the idea that I likely wouldnt see these kids again that

I had played with, spoken too, and loved on. It was hard to leave them and the experience

behind, but I was reminded that through what we had done we were not just changing the lives of

individuals and single kids, but by extension their families and the whole community.

Being a part of the Tree Top mission trip was a form of leadership for all of us involved.

Not just my group, or Tony, but also the kids. An aspect of leadership is that it is multi-

directional. Leadership can be up and down, side to side, and any other direction. Simply stated

this means that everyone leads in certain areas and that the leader can learn from the people

underneath them and the people underneath in the leadership hierarchy can lead each other. At

Tree Top we were able to lead the kids but they also were able to lead each other and go home to

families they could influence and lead as well. This is how we hoped we could affect the whole

communities, extending leadership from us to and through these kids to their families and
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community. Through our influence they could then influence others with the love and hope that

we instilled in them for the short few days we were with them. This was an amazing experience

for me where I stepped out of my comfort zone to be with kids. I learned so much from being

with the kids and my Chi Alpha group over the few short days at Tree Top, a simple action of

stepping out of my comfort zone provided me with invaluable experiences and opportunities to

grow and see others around me positively impacted. This is the main takeaway I have from my

internship. A reminder of how I can be used when I am willing, to impact people around me.

Courage is required to be able to see change in the world, and my internship provided a plethora

of opportunities to grow in my communication, servanthood, and to grow out of my own comfort

zone. I will always hold on to the experiences of my internship and be able to take them into my

job after college, and throughout the rest of my life. I want to be able to be used to positively

impact people with my words, my actions, my poetry, and by showing genuine love. This

internship helped me to be able to do every one of those things, while teaching me more about

communication and leadership, while advocating for those who need help and encouragement.
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