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Head over heels for short-term missions: Think before you go by David Livermore |
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  Let's call our congregations toward being as committed to the social injustice in our own neighborhood as to those in  parts of Africa. David Livermore, author of Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence |
It used to be that the typical church member's missions experience was limited to the once-a-year missions conference – a weeklong event complete with displays bearing snake skins, potluck dinners with international dishes, and hair-raising stories from our visiting heroes, the missionaries!
Today, missions is much closer to home. Our congregations are going themselves. Through short-term missions, the everyday school teacher, the tool and die maker, the physician, and the 14-year-old high schooler can hop on a plane and serve for a couple weeks in a foreign land. North American Christians are jet-setting around the globe in the name of missions like never before. Just last year, more than 1.6 million American Christians traveled overseas on short-term missions trips. Today, the American Church spends more money on short-term missions than on long-term missions.
Most churches have come a long way from missions simply being a once a year event with slide shows and a potluck dinner. What's not to celebrate about missions being given to our everyday, average church members? Clearly, many of us have experienced firsthand some of the amazing opportunities that come with traveling abroad on a short-term mission trip.
However, a growing body of researchers, myself included, are raising some indicting questions about short-term missions.
- When is it mission and when is it mostly about our benefit?
- When is it an adventure-filled vacation with a Christian label?
- Do our building projects help or do they take jobs from locals?
- How might short-term missions be perpetuating the very ethnocentric ideals we're attempting to counter?
These are some of the questions I explore in my recent book, Serving with Eyes Wide Open (Baker Books, 2006). The book is my attempt at persuading us to put down our car-wash placards and passports for a minute and rethink a few key aspects of missions work. Most of all, I'm interested in giving voice to the national churches who have received our short-term teams – their viewpoints are challenging and surprising.
I'll tip my hand. I'm "for" short-term-missions. But let me suggest a few practical steps for what we should think about before planning our next trip:
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1. Ask what's needed. Then ask again. And again.
The first step is to ask the local church leaders on the receiving end what's needed from us. One of the biggest mistakes made in short-term missions is doing things the locals don't really need or even want us to do. This can come about quite innocently. It's not easy to accurately interpret everything being communicated, especially when doing so across cultures and often through e-mail. Furthermore, sometimes national church leaders have learned to tell us what we want to hear in order to involve us beyond merely sending money.
It takes perseverance to assess if and how we might truly serve the mission of a local church in another part of the world. We need to slow down and hear what's really being said. We need to work in partnership with others who understand the context to assess what, if anything, a short-term trip can do to really meet the needs of a local church and its community.
2. Don't do there what you aren't doing here.
Helping babies in Romania is a lot sexier than volunteering year-round to help kids of single parents in our own cities. And teaching English for a couple weeks in China is much more exotic than befriending a local refugee.
As churches and individuals, we need to resist doing overseas what we aren't doing at home. The tendency is to run overseas and "fall in love" with the people we're serving for a couple weeks. We take lots of pictures, promise to write, feel good about our charity, and fly home feeling like we can check off "missions and service" for the year. In reality, this is pretty low-cost "missions."
There are too many stories of white, suburban youth groups loving on Mexicans for a week only to return to their local high schools and ignore, or worse yet, demean their Latino classmates. We need to create opportunities for these students to engage in relationships with minority groups at home. Let's call our congregations toward being as committed to the social injustice in our own neighborhood as to similar problems in parts of Africa.
3. Don't skip the debrief.
A growing number of churches are spending more time preparing their short-term teams with training and orientation before going overseas. I'm a big fan of taking the time to do pre-departure training, but if I had to choose whether to do pre-trip training or post-trip debriefing, I'd go with the latter.
Just as seminary education is most valuable when combined with ministry experience, cross-cultural training for short-term service has its greatest value once it moves beyond theoretical conversation. During and after the trip is when our groups are most ripe for actually translating the lessons learned into their everyday lives. We need to create a discipleship plan for how to assimilate what we've learned into everyday life.
This is one of the reasons why I'm much more hopeful about short-term trips done by churches than those done by agencies who work entirely independently from local churches. As a church, you can continue the discipleship and follow-through in the lives of your members who participate. One of the things we're doing at my church is asking our short-term teams to make a 12-month commitment – six months of training before the trip and six months of debriefing afterward. The picture party is a fun start to debriefing, but let's find ways to keep incorporating what's learned from a cross-cultural experience next week, next month, and next year.
4. Don't overestimate the impact. Don't underestimate the impact.
When done well, short-term missions can be a valuable expression of Christian mission. I have great hope for how short-term missions can serve the worldwide Church. But in our attempts to validate our pursuits, we sometimes overstate what we're doing. Some of the typical comments I've heard from American short-term teams are things like, "We have a chance to bring Spirit-filled worship to Indonesia" or "We're bringing God to Ireland" and "This is the first time this kind of church-planting material has ever been taught in South India."
Given the amazing speed at which churches are being planted in South India, I'd rather bring Indian pastors here to train us. And are we really bringing God to Ireland? Is the worship in Indonesia not Spirit-filled? There are local churches serving faithfully long before we arrive and long after we leave. Consider the words of some African church leaders on the topic: "Please raise our dignity before the Christians and citizens of North America. We are not naive, backward, and ignorant black people. Instead we are your brothers and sisters in the family of God who are seeking to be faithful to his calling on our lives."
The point is not that we have nothing to offer. We just need to resist calling short-term mission the biggest and best, most strategic thing happening in the Christian church. It's one of many things God is using to extend his reign among the nations.
On the other hand, we must not underestimate the power of God to do amazing things through the simplest efforts of service. Short-termers who go to Zambia to hold orphan babies or who visit a leper colony in China and wash the stumps of people who haven't been touched in years – these are the kinds of acts recounted by national pastors as having deep, lasting significance among their people. Eating meals together, praying together, and sharing one another's testimonies – these acts might not wow donors, but they're exactly what national pastors describe again and again as being significant roles for short-term teams. May we never underestimate the power of what God can do through his presence in us.
5. Pursue growth in CQ
Finally, learning how to effectively engage with people from other cultures is a need not only for short-term missions but also for the average American Christian wherever we go. We would be wise to lead our congregations in ways that reflect the same kinds of cross-cultural sensitivity we should use on our short-term mission trips into the way we live and act the remaining 50 weeks of the year.
Several chapters of Serving with Eyes Wide Open are devoted to helping leaders train their groups. I've adapted the fascinating concept of cultural intelligence quotient (CQ) to short-term missions. The sound of CQ shouldn't intimidate us. It's a very useful framework that includes four different emphases (knowledge CQ, interpretive CQ, perseverance CQ, and behavioral CQ) that are proven to enhance our cross-cultural work, even for a couple weeks. It's particularly useful during the trip and upon return. And it's a valuable skill for ministering locally as well.
There's never been as much reason to celebrate what's happening in the worldwide Christian church as there is today. The church of Jesus Christ is growing faster than ever before—in some of the most unlikely places, including Indonesia, Iraq, and Cuba. Short-term mission allows our congregations to join the worldwide revolution of what God is doing. By being more thoughtful about how we engage, there's tremendous potential for our local congregations and for the worldwide church of Jesus Christ.
This article is adapted from Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence (Baker Books, 2006).
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Dave Livermore is the author of