What are our expectations about short-term missions, and what motivates so many people to participate in such trips? That’s what we’ll explore in this chapter. Organizers and mission-trip recruiters play a significant role in shaping our expectations about short-term missions. When asked about the benefits of going or supporting those who go, people give myriad reasons. Most people promote short-term missions based on the way it will change the lives of both those who go and those who receive them. But other reasons that frequently surface in formal and informal discussions about short-term missions are the so-called biblical mandate for doing short-term missions and the adventure of the experience.
It’s Biblical
The other day I had lunch with Debbie, a friend who is working hard to get her mega-church more involved in short-term missions projects. She said, “This Sunday I’m making another announcement. This time I’m going for the jugular. I’m going to say something like, ‘This isn’t just about whether or not you like Mexico or Romania or want to go there. It’s a matter of obedience. God has commanded you to go. Short-term missions is about obeying the Great Commission.’”
“Wait a second, Debbie!” I replied. “Are you saying people who don’t go on short-term missions trips are disobeying God?”
She backed off a little bit, but clearly she sees short-term missions as a matter of biblical obedience.
Debbie is in good company. Advocates of short-term missions often look to Scripture to demonstrate the biblical models of short-term missions. Roger Peterson, CEO and founder of STEM International, a short-term sending agency, says short-term missions is the only worldwide strategy that exists today to comply with the doctrine of the priesthood of believers—God using everyday people to fulfill his mission. Peterson and his fellow authors point to more than thirty “proof-text passages” (their words) for short-term missions. They range from the heavenly visitors who came to Abraham in the heat of the day (Gen. 18) to Nehemiah and the short-term construction mission (Neh. 2–10) to Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). Peterson is confident that short-term missions has a theological foundation that must not be ignored.[45]
Others have linked short-term missions to a strategy regularly employed by Jesus and Paul. For example, one missionary writes, “[The disciples] had watched [Jesus] sacrifice, serve, love, teach, and heal. They watched the Son of Man deal with popularity and opposition. It was time to send them out on their own short-term trip to copy the ministry that they had experienced.”[46]
Does short-term missions violate Scripture? Not at face value, though many of the concerns I’m raising in this book need to be wrestled with in light of what God teaches us about being his physical presence in the world. However, might we need to use caution in too quickly using Scripture to legitimize short-term missions? What was the starting point for the short-term missions movement that has grown to such huge proportions today? Did it come from the conviction of men and women studying God’s Word and discerning that this was a missing element in the church? Or was it a response to the increased accessibility we have to the world and a way to mobilize everyday people to experience missions firsthand? Clearly, we see people doing things itinerantly in many places throughout God’s story, but ramping up short-term missions trips based on the belief that we’re imitating Jesus’s ministry can yield some dangerous practices.
It’s an Adventure
On the other extreme lies the tension I personally feel as I think about my love for going new places. When is my drive to serve cross-culturally more a reflection of my desire for adventure than to truly engage in a noble endeavor? Is short-term missions simply a way of appeasing wanderlust?
The reports given by people before and after mission trips tend to emphasize the virtuous aspects: the number of souls saved, the lessons learned about prayer and materialism, and the impact made on the churches visited. However, sit down for coffee with a friend who has just returned from a trip or eavesdrop on the picture party of a returning group, and the adventure of life in a new place seems to be the emphasis. Such conversations are filled with stories about who got stopped going through customs, what it was like to eat the food, bartering the shopkeeper down to a ridiculous price, and experiencing the driving habits of the locals.
Let’s be honest. Along with the seemingly more noble reasons for going on a short-term missions trip, the adventure of it all appeals to many of us. It’s fun to fill up our passports with international stamps. As participants we try to be subtle about when and how often we ask the group leader about the plans for the “free time” on the trip, but we desperately want to know what new experiences we will have. We’re told to make sure our reports back to the congregation focus on the “spiritual” things that happened—not just stories about getting sick and trying to speak the language. But there’s an adventure that comes with traveling to a new place. Going to Mexico or Africa is much more exciting than going downtown.
Some organizations aren’t subtle about using adventure and fun to motivate people to participate in short-term missions. For example, Teen Mania has been taking young people on mission trips for over twenty years. They report having sent sixty-five thousand short-term missionaries on projects called “Global Expeditions.” They recently ran a full-page advertisement in a magazine for youth workers that featured this headline: “Missions Should Be Fun!” Below it was a picture of a group of North American youth pushing a cool-looking canoe down a tropical-like river with a few “natives” in tow.[47]
Teen Mania sends parents, youth leaders, and teenagers an eight-page, four-color brochure explaining all the details of “Global Expeditions.” The headline of the brochure reads, “Missions Made Easy!” A picture below shows a North American youth group piled into a jeep that’s roaming through high grasses. Turn the page and you see another large photo, this one of six North American teenagers standing below an exotic waterfall looking as if they’re having the time of their lives.
This adventure-filled, fun-packed motif is often used by local church short-term-missions recruiters as well. Glenn Schwartz, executive director of World Missions Associates, shares the following excerpt from a church bulletin announcement about an upcoming trip to Mexico:
[Our congregation] is sponsoring a women’s-only mission trip to beautiful Guadalajara, Mexico! We’ll spend the week of June 11–18 in Guadalajara (also known as the shopping capital of Mexico), where we will have the incredible opportunity to minister to, pray for, and teach women in a vibrant church community. And this trip isn’t a “rough-roach-in-your-bed” kind of experience either. We’ll be housed in nice, clean hotel rooms, eat lots of salsa, and have plenty of time to shop! Our hope is to take at least fifteen women (including teenager daughters) on this Mexican Ministry Outreach. . . . We trust that God will expand our hearts for Him as He expands our ministry to the women of Guadalajara. If you’re remotely interested in this adventure—or if you’re just in the mood for Mexico after all this winter weather—call for more details about this fantastic outreach opportunity.[48]
This fun-filled, adventurous mind-set is quite a contrast to that of the thousands of young, aspiring missionaries in China who are ready and expecting to die for the gospel during their mission sojourns. In their words, “The Muslim and Buddhist nations can torture us, imprison us, and starve us, but they can do no more than we have already experienced in China. . . . We are not only ready to die for the gospel, we are expecting it.”[49]
A spirit of adventure and a desire to explore a new place aren’t all bad. They can be part of how we open our eyes to the world in which we live. However, if the adventure of trekking through a new place is the primary drive behind our short-term missions experiences, we need to exercise caution. If adventure is most what you’re after—go for it. Take a trip there! Explore the culture. Soak it in. Experience it fully. Just don’t put a “mission trip” label on it and ask other people to fund it. Be “missional” when you go sightseeing in Prague or snorkel in
Fiji. Always be looking for ways to call people to follow Jesus. Continually consider how to facilitate peace and justice. But let’s beware of taking what ought to be normal activity for all of us everyday Christians and suddenly calling it a “mission project” and expecting other people to pay for it.
It Will Change Your Life
Obedience to a biblical mandate and pursuing a globe-trotting adventure are part of what motivates many Christians to participate in short-term missions. However, the main reason people participate in short-term missions is the life-changing experience it promises them.[50]
Think about your conversations with people after they return from a mission trip. Or consider your own descriptions of trips you’ve experienced. What’s the most common response to the question, “How was your mission trip?” The response I hear more than any other is, “Life changing!” Spiritual growth is the very thing we’re promised by many of the people who organize these trips: “This trip will change your life. You’ll never view the world or your faith the same way again.”
Most people are convinced short-term missions is one of the most effective ways to expose North American Christians to the needs of the world. An altered prayer life, a commitment to resist materialism, and a newfound orientation toward servanthood are all ways people describe the life change that occurs through short-term missions projects.[51]
Of the millions of North Americans participating in short-term missions projects every year, the majority are teenagers. Twenty-nine percent of US high school students have participated in one of these kinds of trips.[52] Almost any legitimate North American youth ministry is expected to have a mission trip as part of its annual program. In many cases, there’s a six- or seven-year cycle of trips for students to engage in from middle school through high school. Mission trips have replaced the summer camp experience as the standard summer event for most North American youth groups.
Parents and leaders who struggle with why we’re sending our kids overseas to engage in missions when we aren’t doing it right in our own backyards are pacified with the assurance that one leads to the other. Mission trips are said to be the ideal vehicle to help students identify their own culture’s consumerist and ethnocentric values, to respond to the needs of the world in ways that are faithful to their beliefs, and to challenge the status quo of how their culture shapes their lives.[53] Expose kids to the needs of the world, we’re told, and they’ll be much more engaged in serving their own communities when they come home.
Robert Bland, director of Teen Missions International, is reported as saying, “We tell our people who are leading our teams that we’re building kids, not buildings. The purpose isn’t just what we’ll do for these people, but what these people will do for us. . . . There is not a single purpose in [short-term work] . . . but to us [building our kids] is the first purpose.”[54]
Emphasizing how short-term missions trips can change the life of the “missionary” is a drastic change from what was historically emphasized in missions. Clearly, the goers have always experienced life change as a result of engaging in missions; however, investing billions of dollars in mission work that is mostly focused on the transformation of the missionary is a radical shift from the missions movement throughout church history. Most mission paradigms throughout the ages have called for long-term sacrifice for the sake of others.[55]
Many argue that while the focus may initially be on the short-term participant more than the receivers, a long-term vision is required. As short-term participants become engaged in mission, get a view for the world, and personally experience life change, the receivers benefit in the long run. Short-term participants are prime candidates for becoming career missionaries. So while the first purpose of short-term missions for people such as Bland may be changing North American kids, I expect he, as others, would say that in the long term it will result in changing the lives of people elsewhere.
But a growing number of researchers question the long-term impact of short-term trips on participants. Some studies demonstrate that while participants come home with lofty aspirations of buying less, praying more, and sharing Christ more, within six to eight weeks most resort back to the same assumptions and behaviors they had prior to the trip.[56] And the number of North American Christians pursuing long-term careers as missionaries is getting smaller while the number of people participating in short-term missions is getting bigger. Something doesn’t add up.
Others are even more critical about the impact of short-term missions on many who go. David Maclure contends that not only do these trips fail to bring about lasting life change for the participants, but, worse yet, they also actually perpetuate the very things they’re intended to counter. Participants come home assuming that poor people are doing just fine and are happy that way and that developing countries are backward, given their chaotic road systems and archaic ways of doing construction. “Instead of advancing the cause of mission, the exercise simply reinforces worn stereotypes and old power relations.”[57]
So which is it? Do short-term missions trips change our lives when we go or not? Before you jump to your own experiences to defend your answer, let’s hold off on trying to answer the question right now. Instead, let’s pay attention to these dissenting perspectives to open our eyes.
It Will Change Their Lives
The other leading motivation for short-term missions is the chance to make an impact on the lives and communities of people around the world. Participants are excited about the chance to leave the mundane world of life at home to travel to a different place to share the gospel, build a building, or teach a workshop. The kinds of activities in which short-term missions groups engage are diverse. Individuals and teams do everything from conducting medical clinics and evangelistic meetings to performing drama and music to building homes and painting churches.
When short-term participants seek financial and prayer support, they most strongly emphasize the benefit to the recipients. A few of the support letters I’ve received recently included statements such as the following:
“Many of the people devastated by the tsunami are not getting the help they need. We have a chance to rebuild the homes of the homeless in Japan.”
“Most of the Brazilian churches don’t have [church] buildings like we do. Our team is excited to build this [Brazilian] congregation a new building where they can meet.”
“We’ll be running a vacation Bible school for the children.”
“Ireland is a place without God. Pray for us as we bring the gospel there.”
“This will be the first church ever built in this city.”
These are the kinds of sentiments that permeate the pleas of short-term participants seeking support. Such expectations are at the core of students leaving the comforts of suburban North America to mix cement for a week in Mexico. These assumptions are part of why giving to short-term missions now exceeds giving to long-term missions.
The assumption that a short-term trip can make a significant impact on those on the receiving end is held not only by high school students and laypeople. More and more North American pastors travel overseas regularly to conduct training workshops. The following comments are typical of what I’ve heard from North American leaders who participate in these kinds of experiences:
“I’m excited to equip these leaders [in Columbia] so they can be more effective in their youth ministries. I know how these principles have benefited us, so think about the benefit to them!”
“I’m so excited . . . to take what God’s done in our ministry here and multiply it to other places.”
“I would imagine these youth workers have lots of great ideas, but do they have a philosophy of ministry? I would guess they don’t. I want them to walk away with a good structure for ministry.”
“We have a chance to bring Spirit-filled worship to Indonesia. The tiny Christian church there needs the power of prayer released.”
“This is the first time this kind of church-planting training has ever b
een offered in south India.”
These participants wanted to see their own lives changed, but most of all they wanted to change the lives of others. Their mentality is, “We don’t do short-term missions for the fun and excitement, or because everyone else is doing it, or because we’re told we have to go. We go to serve and share.”[58]
While the life-changing impact of these trips on the locals is used as a way to motivate people to support the trips, little research has explored whether short-term trips really help the cause of the global church as much as we think. Most of the reports about the positive impact on local communities come from North American participants and sponsoring organizations, not from those who received the participants.
Those who have researched the impact of short-term missions on the receivers aren’t convinced that these trips are changing the recipients. One missionary says, “Everyone knows that short-term missions benefit the people who come, not the people here.”[59] In fact, many missionaries are concerned that the very nature of a short-term trip creates a temporary approach to things that require more long-term solutions.
Kurt VerBeek, a sociologist living in Honduras, is one of the few researchers studying the impact of short-term missions on local communities. VerBeek studied a North American relief organization’s role in helping Hondurans rebuild their homes after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. The organization raised over 2 million dollars for reconstruction of 1.5 million homes lost and channeled it through Honduran partners. In turn, these partners hired Honduran builders to work with people to rebuild their homes. In addition, the organization mobilized thirty-one short-term teams from the United States and Canada to assist in rebuilding homes. VerBeek was interested in whether there was a greater impact made on the Honduran communities that received short-term groups compared to those who received homes built by Honduran builders with North American money.
Serving with Eyes Wide Open Page 5
