A Case for Cross-Cultural Short Term Missions: Introduction

(We just had a short-term missions team leave, and so it seems a good time to delve into this subject, one I had previously promised to discuss. Obviously it's a complicated topic, so this will be our introduction and we'll look at different aspects of short term missions in coming posts)

Short-term Missions - Good or Bad?

Of course, this is a ridiculous question.

("Putting things in your mouth and swallowing them, good or bad?" "Well, that all depends on what-" "Nope, don't try to dodge the question, you have to say whether it's good or bad.")

Nothing is gained from using a binary mentality to approach a complicated issue.

The question we should be asking, I submit, is what kind of short-term mission trips help accomplish the Great Commission, spreading the Kingdom, and do so in a way that is not obviously a foolish waste of the resources God has given us: time, money, energy, etc.? Then the question is whether those kinds of trips are feasible enough for churches to continue to do short-term missions as they currently do.

That is the question I will try to answer over the course of this discussion, and note that we're mainly focusing on cross-cultural short-term trips, though much of what we'll discuss applies to trips within a particular culture as well.

Claim #1: It is possible to have a short-term missions trip which does more harm than good.

This is something which in the past few years has been clearly acknowledged.

From the youth trip that ends up being more about keeping the high school guys and girls from flirting too much in their swimsuits on the beach than about running the kids' camp which was supposedly the purpose of the trip, to the big impressive voyage to a sensitive area in China or the Muslim world that ends up putting the local believers in danger while the visiting foreigners are obliviously enthusiastic about how "cool" it is to be on a "secret, risky" trip, one can stack enough bad examples together to convince some that short-term trips are generally more harm than good and should be abandoned as a paradigm for churches.

There's also the "bang for the buck" argument, which suggests that at some point a trip is not going to accomplish enough to justify its expense. Obviously it's impossible to put a dollar value on a human soul (an expression I may have heard a few too many times), but it's also quite easy to spend a lot of other peoples' money yet not really accomplish anything, so this is something we want to keep in mind. We must avoid both the sin of Judas, whose argument about money being wasted was based on a love of that money and not of Christ, and the sin of Ananias and Sapphira, who claimed to be giving their money to the Kingdom but intended some of it for their own selfish purposes.

Claim #2: It is not good enough that the people going on the trip are edified. The trip should have a specific goal that benefits those that receive the short-termers.

I have heard, many many times, the statement (and it is typically true) that "you will get more out of a short-term trip personally than you help the people you're going to serve."

Now so long as you do actually help the people you're going to serve as well, that's not a bad thing at all, it's what we call a "win-win." (arguably a "win-win-win" for you fans of The Office out there) If the team is helpful to the local missions effort, and the team grows in their own faith as well, that's a great outcome for a trip, regardless of which one is "more," which is not really something you can measure anyway.

And, honestly, the average short-term team is composed of relatively inexperienced travelers, who are going to need to spend a lot of time and energy just getting used to the new location. It's unreasonable to expect them to move mountains on stomachs full of unusual food, ears full of an unintelligible language, and brains full of jetlag. (Sometimes they do anyway; to God be the glory.)

But while as an observation the statement is accurate, as a motivation it's quite self-centered. The goal is hopefully to help the people you are going to, with personal growth as a welcome outcome, not to help yourselves with the trip as merely a means to that end.

This is especially true if a team's capabilities or preparation are not adequate to accomplish the goals of their trip, something which has been dangerously close to true on one or two trips I led in the past. We had a good trip, and felt like we'd learned quite a lot, but were not able to serve as effectively as we'd like, and some complaints from local volunteers even made their way back to me later through friends.

Claim #3: It is possible to have a short-term missions trip which is more helpful to the local believers and missionaries than it exhausts them.

On a positive note, many of us have participated in trips that seemed to be at least somewhat successful, in a measurable sense. People did hear the gospel. Something did get built. There were English teachers for an outreach event that needed them.

It's always tiring for those who receive the teams, that's simply a fact of short-term trips. But if the team can help accomplish something the local believers and/or missionaries would not have been able to do on their own, then some exhaustion is worth it. Speaking as a long-term missionary, we didn't come here to relax, we're just happy when our tiredness is accompanied by seeing God moving and people serving, and sometimes that happens through these trips in ways we couldn't do by ourselves.

(Convenient example that just occurred):
We just said goodbye to a team from California, who worked in our community for 3 weeks. Everything was new to them, most of them had never traveled internationally before, only one of them knew any Mandarin, and the weather was chaotic, but by the time they left two local high schools we didn't have any contact with previously had called asking about our English program, we had met the principal of a school we'd been working in for months, and they had shared their testimonies and the gospel with quite a number of students, planting seeds in some cases and watering in others. (And all this in a pretty dry field, more so than they knew)
After working with them for three weeks we all need a rest now, but we're quite pleased with what they accomplished, how their hearts were prepared to serve, and we thank God for bringing them.

This is an example of how things can go right. The team had been through a ton of training, didn't have any obvious personality conflicts, and had a missions organization helping to manage the logistics of their trip, so it was a better than usual case. Obviously trips can go very wrong as well, but that just means it's a question of how they're prepared for and conducted, not of intrinsic value.

We'll stop there for now, and take a more detailed look at what often goes wrong with short-term trips themselves in the next installment. But in the mean time I'd love to hear your stories, about short-term trips that went very right, or very wrong.
(Do remember to leave the identifying names out either way...)