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Developing an effective debrief for your short-term missions teams by Dave Livermore |
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  We don't want to be guilty of loving on Mexicans one week and then resorting to discriminatory relationships with immigrants in our  own town. David Livermore, author of Serving With Your Eyes Wide Open |
"How was your missions trip?!" It's the dreaded question for most experienced missions travelers. What can you possibly say in 45 seconds or less that does justice to the trip and doesn't result in your listener glazing over with boredom? How do you express the dissonance you're feeling over picking up a $4 coffee this morning when that's twice what many of the locals earn daily where you just spent last week? And how do you talk with a potential donor today about the church's multi-million dollar building campaign in light of the church where you worshiped last Sunday? And even if you find that rare friend who is really interested in hearing all about it, your pictures just don't convey the sights, smells, and sounds that accompanied your experience. We've all been there!
Helping short-termers with this kind of frustration is one of the many powerful reasons for making a "debrief" plan an essential part of your short-term missions ministry. I'm part of a small but growing research community that has been asking some tough questions about short-term missions (See Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence; Baker Publishing). The motivation behind why many trips happen, the paternalistic interactions that often occur, and the growing amounts of money spent are reason for concern. However, research has shown that an effective "debrief" period is one of the most significant ways to improve the effectiveness of short-term missions. In fact, although pre-trip orientation and training are important to effective short-term missions, the post-trip debrief is even more important.
I'm part of the Global Outreach team at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich. We've recently begun requiring a 12-month commitment from those participating in many of our two-week missions trips. Six months prior to the trip, the group moves through a series of encounters together. We include things like team dynamics, studying the Word, preparing for the particular tasks of the trip, cultural intelligence training, etc. During the trip itself, regular times for processing what's going on are incorporated. Then the following six months are used to debrief the experience. Rather than simply doing a one-time picture party or random reunions of the team, groups continue to meet twice a month for another six months. We talk about how to continue investing in the place we visited, and we consider ways to mobilize others in our congregation to join us in that investment. We explore things we learned from the locals and we seek to be honest about what we did well and where we fell short. And we spend a great amount of energy trying to transfer the learning and experience from where we've been to our missional journey at home. We don't want to be guilty of loving on Mexicans one week and then resorting to discriminatory relationships with immigrants in our own town. So we look at specific ways for us to apply what we learned to our lives and ministries.
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A true debrief is actually identifying what learning happened in the experience, discussing it with others, and evaluating it. David Livermore |
A few of us recently convened a "Short-Term Missions Effectiveness" think tank (coordinated by Kara Powell and Brad Griffin from the Center for Youth and Family Ministry of Fuller Seminary, Terry Linhart of Bethel College in Indiana, and me from the Global Learning Center at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary). We gathered a group of youth workers and organizations that are doing some exemplary things in short-term missions. The topic of debrief was a central part of our conversation. Several of our exemplars suggested developing a debrief framework that includes strategies for daily debriefing during the trip (i.e., "What was going on inside of you today when feeding people at the dump?"), end-of-trip debriefing (i.e., "What assumption did you begin with that's been changed?"), re-entry debriefing (i.e., on the airport layover half-way home), and post-trip debriefing over several weeks. These kinds of debriefing conversations maximize the potential for transformation and encourage the ongoing interpretation of the short-term missions experience in students' expanding worldviews.
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- As you read over your journals, what five to seven themes or subjects do you see most often?
- What three to five encounters or experiences were the most significant for you during this trip and why?
- What did you feel like God was trying to say to you during this experience?
- What thoughts about "back home" did you have during the trip?
- What did you observe about what God was already doing before you arrived there?
- If you were to spend a whole year there, what three to five new things might you learn that you weren't able to fully understand during this trip?
(Adapted from an article reporting on the above think tank, "If We Send Them, They Will Grow ... Maybe" by Kara Powell, Terry Linhart, Dave Livermore, and Brad Griffin in the Journal of Student Ministries, March/April 2007).
Another simple debrief strategy you might employ is using three rounds of "Why?" questions. When you hear a STM ("short-term missions") participant make a reflective statement, push them to get behind the statement by asking "Why?" at least three times. For example:
STM participant: "I loved Mexico City but I could never live there."
Facilitator: "Why?"
STM participant: "Because I just wouldn't feel safe."
Facilitator: "Why?"
STM participant: "Because so much crime happens there."
Facilitator: "Why?"
STM participant: "Because people are so poor."
Maybe this is the point for you to ask whether others agree or disagree. Or it might be a good way to jump in and ask what systemically causes some places to be higher in crime than others. How should the Gospel respond to these realities? The point isn't to annoy your participant with a preschooler kind of questioning. But it is to help the participant keep going deeper in his or her own journey of being transformed to Christ's likeness.
Traveling to another part of the world, encountering Christ's work there, and seeing a very different way of life is a powerful way of being transformed. But transformation doesn't just happen automatically. Intentional discipleship through debriefing provides an ideal framework to help move missions trips from being spiritualized vacations to true transformative experiences – both for those who go and for the locals who receive them.
The frustration of responding to "How was your trip?" won't entirely go away. But a debriefing plan creates space for a short-termer to have a place for the deeper conversations to occur and to move missions trips from our short-term memories to long-term transformations.
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Dave Livermore, Ph.D., is the author of