SPM desires to facilitate the work of the church to train ministers for the future. Mentoring within a vocational context that bests fits your stated career goals provides the most natural setting for professional identity formation and skill development in ministry. The philosophy of a field education program is based on several assumptions. Supervised ministry is an integral component of a total curriculum designed to equip students for quality performance in service within a church or agency. The primary focus of such a program was to encourage students to provide their services to churches while enrolled in school.
Students are first and foremost learners.
Students may earn supervised ministry credit while engaged in remunerative employment. It should be understood, however, that the situation in which students are employed must meet certain educational criteria and have a certified supervisor, if the field experience gained there is to be counted toward SPM credit. Unsupervised field experience often contributes little toward the development of professional competencies. Good supervision greatly increases the quality of the student's preparation for the ministry. Supervised ministry should prepare the student to function in a particular vocational role.