03 Jun Kairos Impact | From Immaturity to Equipped

Our Kairos Summer Internship program is one of the key tools Grace Church uses to equip the next generation to live life on mission. As a new set of interns arrive for the summer, we’ve taken some time to catch up with previous interns to find out what they’re up to and uncover how their season at Grace Church has prepared them to live missionally.

Clay Westbrook, a 2011 Kairos Worship Intern, just graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a Masters of Accounting. He and his fiance Paige will be moving to Greenville in September.  Read on to find out how Kairos impacted his life and has shaped his view of ministry and mission.

1. What was the most impactful aspect of your internship?

During my time at Grace, I was really impacted by Men’s Roundtable.  Those teachings really woke me up to reality of my own passivity and showed me areas of sin in my life that I was not even aware existed and gave me a framework to identify those areas and begin to root them out.  As much as I thought I was taking responsibility for myself and my actions, it really showed me that I was just a lazy college student that put financial and academic success first, fun second, and God third.

2. How do you feel Kairos has equipped you for your future?

Kairos did a great job preparing me for the future.  I entered Kairos as a relatively immature college student with a fairly complacent attitude to spirituality.  I was a Christian, I loved Jesus, but I was just content with being where I was and had no real purpose or goals that put Jesus at the center. Everything was centered around me and my own selfish desires. I left Kairos as an enlightened yet still relatively immature college student, but I had a vision for what it meant to serve Jesus as Lord.  Being surrounded by Grace’s leadership exposed some deeply rooted sin patterns that had affected relationships with my friends and parents, especially my father.  Having these sin patterns exposed helped me grow and restore relationships and prepared me for the relationship I was about to enter into with Paige.  But I think one of the biggest things was reading “Just Do Something” by Kevin DeYoung.  Instead of being passive and waiting for God to reveal his plans to me – I have been able to step out in faith, make a decision, and watch God work through that decision and use me and that decision to orchestrate His plan.

3. How did Kairos change your perspective toward ministry? 

Growing up, I always viewed ministry as something that hyper-spiritual, religious, Jesus-freaks did and that a life of ministry was not for me.  Kairos was the first time that I realized ministry is a lifestyle and not just a profession reserved for the religious or spiritual elite. Kairos taught me how ministry doesn’t stop after leaving on Sunday morning or on Wednesday night, but that ministry is a full time job that all Christians are called to do. Ministry doesn’t always look like the traditional view of a pastor in the pulpit or a soup kitchen for the homeless.  Ministry can be found in loving our coworkers, creating new businesses that allow a community to flourish, or even in doing the everyday grunt work as long as we are centering our heart on Jesus and preaching the Gospel to ourselves daily.  Kairos taught me that ministry is exhausting and that if you don’t take a break every now and then you’ll burn out you will be less effective.  Carrying weight and providing shade takes work.

4. What does it mean to you to live missionally? 

Living missionally is about living for Christ is the everyday things of life. It is living humbly in reverence and submission to Christ.  It means living in a way that shows your identification with Him in all aspects of your life and not just on Sunday morning or when you’re on a mission trip or when you finally work up the courage to tell that friend about Jesus.  It means serving those around you and putting God’s desires and plans ahead of your own.  It means praying and allowing space for God to move and expecting Him to do so.

5. How did Kairos equip you to live missionally? 

Kairos put me under the leadership of those who submit themselves to the Lord on a daily basis.  Grace was an environment where reverence and submission to Christ was the norm and not the exception. It was a community that engaged each other beyond the surface and sought to uproot sin in the lives of those within the community. Kairos equipped me to live missionally by showing me what it actually looked like to live missionally.  Grace was filled with average, everyday, people who knew they were sinners and were in desperate need of God’s mercy and grace and lived their lives in submission to God, and to me that was worth more than any lesson I learned during class.