Truth in Advertising?

Or Business goals vs spiritual goals

(2021 Update: This post is one of ~80 hidden in the drafts folder and was not archived by the Wayback Machine. The OG RA did not write much, just the unchanged text preceding the line break below. However, it did inspire me to expound on it.)

We interns (something I didn’t realize until I got here) literally run Teen Mania Ministries! Talk about exciting! I personally call youth pastors, leaders, and adults that want to become Team Leaders on our mission trips. It can be challenging at times, but I love being stretched as I pour into adults and battle objections that come my way (ha, I’m learning).

—An intern named Amanda

Parent Guide – how is HA marketed – as growing as a leader/business/college

---

The timing of coming across this post is funny to me. I just started a new semester and a classmate and I shared a lunch. We were discussing how we had a bumpy start in our beginning semesters. I mentioned that I had joined a cult, which always piques people’s interest. Over some delicious Vietnamese cuisine, she eventually asked,

“So what was your cult marketed as? Like, was it accredited?”

An excellent question since it was rebranded when I attended. We went from a blue crest to the orange HA logo. We became Elite Warriors and Dave Hasz told us to explain the internship as a leadership internship.

I explained to her that we were learning to be leaders and that we spent a year to learn what God wanted from us. I then talked about the binder we used in the MOB to rebut common objections (including why one should put college off for a year and why we aren’t a cult).

RE: accreditation, right before I left, the HA tried to partner with a university so that alumni could transfer credits (at $55/credit hour, if I recall correctly). Ironically, this partnership was with a university that my friend and I are familiar with because it’s in a small town between our respective hometowns.

So, truth in advertising? Did TM have business goals or spiritual goals?

I think that the HA tried to be a lot of things. The internship proper, i.e. the classes, chapel, and quiet times, could probably be considered as spiritual growth. However, the bulk of an intern’s day is in their ministry placement. There were extracurriculars for training like IET. Then there are the GI programs like MA (for would-be business students), MT (for would be rock stars?), CCM, and SOW. But looking back, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of focus.

Now that I have graduated from college (and getting my second degree now) I can look back with a more critical lens. I remember going to only one or two classes a day at the HA, each about an hour long. As opposed to a university where a student goes to three or four classes a day, or two 90-minute classes. I was a science major, so I had a couple of semesters where I spent 8+ hours in labs.

With 31-hour work weeks, interns were spending six hours a day working. This means that interns spent six times more time working for the cult than they were learning from leadership. Granted, there were other opportunities for growth. For me, I spent a lunch with a staff mentor with two other interns. There was IET as well, if you could cut it (I couldn’t).

Since interns were most likely to be placed in a call center, we have interns calling youth pastors and teens trying to sign them up for ATF, GE, or the HA aka, dropping several thousands of dollars. To make things worse, we were paying $6,000 – $8,000 essentially to work jobs that had little resume-building opportunities. With little actual training and constant confrontation with everything we’re doing wrong, it seems evident what values TM really had.

What are your thoughts?