Rebooting Short-Term Mission Trips
“Can you please tell American churches that we are weary of helping them raise their children, even though we love them and appreciate their concern for us? What we really need is conversations with wise adult leaders.”
The above quote is a compilation of a common sentiment I have heard from diverse global leaders repeatedly over the last decade. It is what many church leaders around the world would like to say to American church leaders, but don’t know how to say without hurting people they love and putting important relationships at risk.
One of the side-effects of the Coronavirus pandemic has been the quashing of short-term mission (STM) trips. In a flash, a $5 billion-dollar-a-year industry came to a screeching halt. This has been devastating to organizations focusing on STMs and has interrupted a lot of important work. That said, STMs were in need of a thorough evaluation and re-visioning.
I have been involved in STMs for over 30 years and have personally made most of the common mistakes that go with this kind of ministry. So, I have no right to criticize others. But I’ve also seen the benefits that can come from STMs. I would not be involved in missions today if it wasn’t for STMs. Many people can say the same thing. I am a fan of STMs when done well while being concerned about STMs done poorly.
During the pandemic lockdown, our staff at MRN conducted global listening groups to get advice from kingdom leaders around the world about the future of missions. STMs came up often. We are working on developing some comprehensive recommendations that we will offer to churches later this year, but we want to do that in collaboration with other missions’ organizations, so it will take a while to get this out.
However, while we are in a rethinking mode, I want to go ahead and suggest one important area where we can improve. This is by creating clearer purposes for STMs and differentiating among different types of trips with clearer processes for excellence in each. Here are four types of trips which are all valid but require different approaches.
Formation Trips: These should be designed to give people a cross-cultural experience that shocks them out of their narrow American sensibilities and creates an opportunity to develop a broader world view, a deeper sense of life purpose, more empathy and compassion, and a kingdom mentality. These trips should be made with global (or regional) partners who feel called to participate in this process. There are numerous mission points around the world that are set up to do this well and even have facilities for it. However, they typically expect these kinds of trips to help them with fundraising after the trip. In order to produce the intended effect, there will need to be some relationship development and service, but the purpose is primarily for those who go, at least in the short run.
Prayer and Vision Trips: These are for American church leaders who are either considering a new missions partnership/project or who are seeking to discern what should come next for an existing mission effort. The goal is to understand what God is doing in a certain region, pray for guidance on-site, talk to people in the region who are in a position to help the leaders discern what God is doing, and help the sending church understand what they can or should be a part of doing to expand the kingdom.
Missionary Care Trips: This would involve any trips from representatives of American churches to check on, support, volunteer with, or provide care for workers in other countries. These are not “evaluations” but rather should be focused on encouragement and care. This could involve sharing some hard truths on rare occasions, but the primary purpose should be to empower global workers and help the church understand their context, and tell their story better back at home.
Service Trips: These trips should be about advancing the mission alongside long-term workers (expats or nationals) who would like help from people capable of providing this help. This could include engineering projects, medical missions, educational ministries, evangelism or preparation for evangelism (e.g., ESL projects), or similar hands-on utilization of special skills that advance a mission in some way.
Guidelines
While each type of trip should have specific guidelines, here is the beginning of a list of guidelines that would apply to all of them.
1. Identify the primary purpose of the trip and plan accordingly. Don’t try to accomplish more goals than can realistically be conducted in the same short time frame. Make sure that you have the right people and activities set to accomplish your purpose.
2. Do no harm. We need a Hippocratic oath for all cross-cultural travel. Someone with significant mission experience should review the plan to check for unintended harmful consequences.
3. Create no burden. Ensure you do not place financial, emotional, logistical, or time burdens on global partners. Go only where invited and where your hosts are set up to receive you.
4. Only do things your travelers have the skills to do. Do not spend tens of thousands of dollars to take teenagers to do labor that local people could do for a fraction of the cost. It makes Americans look foolish and insults unemployed people in that location who badly need opportunities to do that work.
STMs have great value if done well, but the explosion of the popularity of STMs in recent decades resulted in many poorly planned and executed trips that wasted a lot of time and money for little or no benefit - and some harm. The COVID-19 pandemic has given us the opportunity to push pause, rethink, listen to our global brothers and sisters, and relaunch STMs in healthier and more helpful ways. Let’s not squander this opportunity by failing to listen, learn, and adapt while we can.