Across the country, PCA churches are preparing young men for ministry by augmenting their seminary training with church-based residency programs. In many of these programs, residents attend seminary locally or remotely while working at the church and being mentored by pastors. These programs are longer than a traditional internship — often several years  — and enable future pastors to put their theology training into practice.

The pastors who lead these programs agree that training and preparing godly church leaders — especially within a local context — is increasingly difficult, and they see residency programs as one way to address that challenge.

“We are facing a pretty significant crisis in terms of the leadership pipeline in the next 10 to 15 years,” said Dustin Hunt, lead pastor of Coram Deo Church in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and executive director of the Southwest Church Planting Network.

Hunt said residency programs are a way to train local candidates “who maybe wouldn’t have the flexibility to go to Orlando or St. Louis for seminary.”

Nate Groelsema, assistant pastor at University Reformed Church in Lansing, Michigan, echoed Hunt’s concern. With most traditional PCA seminaries being so far from the Wolverine State, Michigan’s sons who leave for seminary often do not return. 

“One of the things that we know and lament is that guys might go to bigger, sunnier, warmer, and more exciting places for seminary and not return to Michigan. We see a great need in Michigan for more faithful churches and Reformed and Presbyterian churches,” he said.

Not every residency program prioritizes training local leadership, but every program aims to equip men for serving the kingdom. They do so not merely through encouraging the theological and academic questions that seminarians consider, but also by requiring residents to participate in the everyday work of ministry. 

As Bill Fullilove, executive pastor of McLean Presbyterian Church in McLean, Virginia, put it, “As pastors, we’re not just theologians, and our people are not just brains on sticks. We are theologians who are applying that theology to working with people in real life.” 

Out of this intersection between theology and life— and out of a desire to develop pastoral candidates within the church instead of competing with other churches for candidates — McLean Pres’ residency was born around a decade ago. 

Three men participate in McLean Pres’ program at a time, each for three years. Each year, the church takes on a new resident after one graduates from seminary and the program. The church funds the residents’ studies and pays them for their work as they rotate through various church ministries. Most residents attend Reformed Theological Seminary’s Washington, D.C., campus, which is only three miles from the church. Because the residency takes place in the D.C. metro area — what Fullilove calls the “bleeding cultural edge of American society” — residents learn to “minister to the world that’s coming, not the world that was.”

“Because we believe that the Lord has tremendously blessed the PCA, we want to be a part of carrying out the legacy of what has gone before us,” said Joe Palekas, a former resident at McLean Pres and the church’s current pastor of young adults. “And to be able to do that in a place where you’re being culturally exposed to everything that D.C. has to offer with the winsome, warm, confessional rootedness that the PCA brings, that combination is really cool. Our prayer is that this serves the health of the PCA more broadly.”

Former residents are doing just that, some at McLean Pres or her daughter churches; others as far away as California or Wisconsin. As Fullilove noted, “We’re thrilled when we are able to hire them and keep them on our staff, but we are also thrilled when they go bless the church more broadly.” 

A new residency program at Faith Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, has similar aims and practices. Martin Wagner, executive pastor at Faith, first envisioned the program three years ago, and it has been operating for about nine months now with one current resident. 

In the first two years of the four-year program, participants at Faith will be on three-month rotations through different church ministries, getting a full picture of the church’s work. In the final two years of the program, residents pick a specialty related to what they’d like to specifically pursue after ordination. 

As they work at the church and at their studies, Faith pays its residents so that they can “receive a debt-free M.Div., and enough experience to receive a call after seminary,” Wagner said. Faith’s current resident attends a local seminary, but Wagner said that the church is open to different seminary options, including distance learning. 

“We didn’t create this in any way to disparage what seminaries are doing,” Wagner said. “Seminaries are doing their job, but there’s more to being a pastor than just what a seminary is designed to teach. So we hope we are able to prepare men in a more full way for what ministry will look like and allow them more experience than seminary within the context of the church.”

Hunt said that such hands-on work helps Coram Deo’s residents immediately apply what they have learned. 

“Oftentimes when you’re a full-time residential seminary student, your studies are so theoretical. My guys are actually doing hands-on ministry week by week. So for them, they’re able to apply what they’re learning,” he said.

Five years ago, Hunt noticed that many young men in New Mexico who left the state for seminary training never returned. In response Coram Deo developed the church’s residency program that has been running for two years. Residents take seminary classes online, typically at Covenant Theological Seminary, while working at Coram Deo and with the Southwest Church Planting Network. 

Residents receive a small stipend from Coram Deo; students who need more support can fundraise on their own. Coram Deo also participates in Covenant’s Church Match scholarship program so residents can graduate from seminary debt-free. 

During their studies, Coram Deo’s residents work part-time at the church. They attend staff and session meetings, accompany Hunt on hospital visits, receive opportunities to teach, and are personally mentored by Hunt.

Hunt believes that if more churches in the Southwest Planting Network developed residency programs, it could change the region’s church ecosystem.

“The issue that we’re actually going to face in the next 25 years is not a lack of money but it’s going to be a lack of candidates,” he said. “Having 12 to 20 churches in our network raising up pastors in the next 10 years could really change the landscape of the Southwest.”

Other PCA church networks have similar concerns. Will Witherington is associate pastor at Tates Creek Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, part of the Bluegrass Network. The Bluegrass Network is a collaboration of PCA churches in Kentucky working together to plant churches and develop leaders within the local church. Tates Creek and the Bluegrass Network together oversee a residency program with a specific focus towards church planting in Kentucky. 

Twelve years ago, Tates Creek began envisioning the residency program, and their first group of four residents — all of whom came from Tates Creek and its local campus ministries — began working at Tates Creek in 2017. From the first group, one resident became Tates Creek’s assistant pastor, one is a local RUF campus minister, and two others planted churches. The inaugural class finished the residency in 2021, and, after a break due to the COVID-19 pandemic, another group of residents began work with Tates Creek and the Bluegrass Network. 

Residents either participate in hybrid or remote seminary programs or come to the residency with seminary already completed, and they spend two or three years working on staff with churches in the network, gaining ministry training and receiving discipleship from pastors.

As residents work and study, the Bluegrass Network funds one third of their pay, the church where they work covers one third, and residents themselves fundraise one third. The residency is designed in this way to prepare residents for the work of church planting and to reflect the responsibility shared among network, church, and individual.

 “Everybody has skin in the game,” said Witherington of this design.

At University Reformed’s residency program in Michigan, residents especially have skin in the game, as they fundraise all of their support, though Puritan Reformed Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan — where each of University Reformed’s six current residents is enrolled — has substantially funded residents’ tuition through Puritan’s Church Embedded Master of Divinity program. 

At University Reformed, residents focus not on ministerial productivity as much as personal and spiritual growth, according to Groelsema. Each resident is assigned to one of University Reformed’s pastors for discipleship. While residents do contribute substantially to the life of the church — Groelsema particularly mentioned that residents counsel individuals and facilitate evangelistic conversations at nearby Michigan State University — University Reformed is primarily “interested in their long-term growth and benefits to the kingdom,” he said. 

University Reformed’s robust ministry training program began around 20 years ago when former pastor Kevin DeYoung noticed that many young men in the church community were interested in serving the Lord in ministry. He began a pastoral internship simply as a way for those college students to witness the life of a pastor and the operations of a church. 

Around 2013, the internship became a post-college, full-time, year-long experience to help young men discern whether or not to pursue seminary and full-time ministry. In the following years, University Reformed also developed a residency program for seminary students and a fellowship program for those who had completed seminary. The residency program is particularly designed to help those who are in seminary “with the hopes that they might populate our presbytery,” Groelsema said. 

Although in the past University Reformed has had remote seminary students on staff at the church and has for 20 years facilitated some variety of ministry training, the current iteration of University Reformed’s formal residency program is only two years old. However, ten former program participants are currently working in the Great Lakes Presbytery, and two men who participated in some variety of University Reformed’s ministry training program in the past have planted churches in Michigan. Groelsema himself is a former participant in University Reformed’s pastoral internship program. 

As residents across the country receive training, local churches are, in turn, strengthened. Witherington noted that a Tates Creek’s assistant pastor who was trained through their residency program began developing the church’s mercy ministry as a resident and now continues that work as a pastor. Palekas shared that through teaching McLean Pres’ sixth-grade communicant member class during his years as a resident, he was able not only to connect systematic theology to real life but also to connect with and minister to the children taking the class. Hunt shared that bringing in residents from different church backgrounds has helped his church appreciate the work of God’s kingdom more broadly. 

“For my church, it really does give them a bigger vision of the big-c Church,” Hunt said. “We want to be known as people who send. Jesus is the great missionary, and we want to follow in his footsteps. My church knows that these guys are going to be here for four years, and they’re going to be sent out to do kingdom works.”