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(And How To Make Sure Yours Isn't)
By Noel Becchetti Former President of CSM. He can be reached via email at noelpb@gmail.com .
"We're going to Ecuador!" The words ring out in a dimly-lit sanctuary. As music pulses, more lights come on and more voices ring out: "We'll be working with our denominational missionaries!" "We're going to repair the roof of their mission house!" "We're going to put on a Bible club for the village children!" The voices? Members of a youth group in a large church in the Pacific Northwest. They were presenting their upcoming mission trip to members of their congregation. Me? I was the guest speaker, brought in to inspire the adults to support their students' summer mission plans. No problem-except that I was in a quandary. What can I honestly say to these people, I thought, when I know that this trip is mostly a waste of everyone's time and money?

Say What?

Those words may read strangely, coming from the keyboard of someone who is dedicated to advancing short-term mission and service opportunities for young people and adults. But I'm concerned that many (if not most) of our well-intentioned mission and service efforts are misguided. And as the world of youth-ministry mission and service continues to grow (and time, energy, and financial costs continue to rise), it's imperative that we make the most of the precious resources that God has given to us to work with. Since the key to solving any dilemma is to first identify the root causes, let's take a look at how we get ourselves off course.

The Root of the Problem (Mirror, Please)

"We have met the enemy," the saying goes, "and it is us." Afraid so-the first place to look when trying to figure out why we're wasting our time is in the mirror (me too, so don't feel too bad). There are three common errors we North-American, Western-Culture types make that can torpedo our best efforts.

We want to control the situation. This is understandable, given the responsibility we carry in taking a group of kids into a strange and potentially dangerous location. The problem is, missions by its very nature is a cross-cultural experience. We're choosing to go into a situation where the values, norms, cultural rules, and methods are radically different from ours. If we continue to insist on control-which means imposing our cultural and methodological framework onto our ministry partners-we create two wasteful byproducts:

Our ministry partners divert us to meaningless (in their framework) tasks that fit our control grid. A friend of mine has coordinated mission and service trips into northern Mexico for years. One of his sites is an orphanage, full of boys and girls dying for love and attention. And The Wall. "I've got this wall," he told me. "When a group comes that can't handle what's required to build relationships with Mexican kids, or insists on completing a task so they can 'accomplish' something, I put them to work on The Wall. They feel like they're a big help, and it keeps them out of everyone's hair so the ministry isn't compromised."

We pull our ministry partners away from more meaningful work. "People need to remember," an inner-city friend from Chicago told me recently, "that a ministry pays a price to accommodate volunteers. It takes a lot of time and energy to set up an environment that can effectively handle volunteer help." While there are a number of legitimate reasons why a ministry partner may choose to allow volunteer groups to come in on a "make-work" basis (expose kids to the mission field, build awareness of the ministry, generate financial support), it's a waste of their distinctive gifts and skills to force them to accommodate our control issues.

Remember the high school group headed for Ecuador? The missionaries really didn't need their roof repaired; they figured that it was what the kids could handle. But for two weeks, it took them away from their core ministry-an outreach to the adult men of their village.

We Want To Define What Is 'Ministry'

The 'ministry' that God calls our mission partners to pursue may be (and often is) the exact opposite of what we would do. The point isn't to decide whose definition of ministry is "right"; the point is that as we insist on defining what ministry is in a context we know little about, we head down the garden path. Ever wonder why so many other cultures don't maintain their homes and buildings up to our standards? Maybe other things are more important to them.

One of the most common cultural collisions occurs between linear cultures (like ours) and nonlinear cultures (like Latin). Our culture is task-oriented; Latin culture is people-oriented. Our culture is time-sensitive; Latin culture is situation-sensitive. Glen Kehrein, co-author (with Raleigh Washington) of a terrific book on racial reconciliation entitled Breaking Down Walls (1993, Moody Press), relates an incident that illustrates how these basic differences can collide:

"While visiting missionary friends in Mexico City, [his wife] Lonni and I decided to go sight-seeing. On the way to the pyramids outside the city, our friends dropped off a package for a friend of theirs. In the U.S. the encounter would have lasted thirty seconds-tops. In Mexico it involved extended conversation and refreshments. Our friends, Rick and Diane, had never met the recipient and would, most likely, never see him again. Two hours later we were back on the road."

"As whites we often see such encounters as a 'waste of time', rushing to judgment rather than attempting to understand the culture. The Mexican value of relationships is often viewed as laziness."

When we give in to our task orientation and define "doing" as ministry (one of our most common mistakes), we create more wasteful repercussions:

We spend an inordinate amount of time, energy and money to do 'ministry' that is a low priority to those we're attempting to serve. A few years ago, a friend of mine went with a group of other adult men from his church to a jungle village in Brazil. They were there to build a new meeting room for the mission compound. "The only problem was," he told me, "the weather was horrible the whole time-driving rain 24 hours a day. It was the worst possible time to build a building; but we'd come to accomplish a task, and by George, we were going to do it!" He went on: "It got to be ludicrous. The villagers were laughing their heads off. They couldn't figure out why the gringos were so loco that they'd slop around in the rain and mud when anyone with half a brain was inside."

We tempt our ministry partners to tell us only what we want to hear. I've got another friend who also works in northern Mexico. He's built a network of relationships with Mexican pastors all over the region. There's just one problem, he says: "Some of the pastors have learned how to make a good living telling Americans what they want to hear. They'll tug their heartstrings with some cute children, then tell them how, if they could only build a new wing on their church, they could do so much more for the kids. It's not that these pastors have such bad intentions; they've been overwhelmed by the amount of money and material resources that Americans can pour into a situation."

Buildings are not automatically bad. But these Mexican pastors have become sidetracked from the ministry that is most effective in their culture (relationships) because of the overwhelming influence (and its attending temptations) of well-meaning but ignorant groups.

We Want to See Certain Kinds of Results

After all, we're investing a lot of time, energy and money into this mission trip. Surely God (not to mention the church board) wants to see some results from our efforts! True enough-but in rural Ecuador or inner-city Cleveland, "results" can be tough to pin down.

This pitfall can be especially treacherous when we're ministering in difficult, complicated situations. It would be great if homeless crack addicts could meet Jesus, get clean, and land a job in a week; unfortunately, it rarely happens that way. Results like "We got to know some homeless men and women and told them that God loves them", or "We helped the missionaries hand out information for an upcoming service to the village men as they came out of the cantina" can be tough to quantify. But insisting on attaining results that fit our criterion for effective use of resources creates still more wasteful ripple effects:

We run the risk of seeing 'results' that aren't really there. "What a great day!" one group leader told me after his group spent the afternoon at a Washington, DC homeless shelter. "We handed out tracts and witnessed to dozens of guys. At least ten men accepted Christ!" Well, maybe...but homeless shelter residents are (unfortunately) familiar with evangelistic blitzkriegs and know how to go through the motions so they can get some peace and quiet.

We could do real damage to our ministry partners' long-term work. When the Iron Curtain fell, there was an explosion of evangelistic outreach from the West into the countries of the former Soviet bloc. Huge stadium rallies brought together thousands of people, virtually all whom, it seemed, raised their hands to accept Jesus. Unfortunately, the organizers of most of these events forgot to consider how they were going to follow up these respondents. Guess who absorbed the blow created by this phenomenon? The men and women who had patiently worked over the years to smuggle in Bibles and Christian literature, connect with believers behind the Iron Curtain, and support clandestine youth camps and other outreaches.

One friend of mine who has worked in the Eastern Bloc for more than a quarter-century recounted how he was approached by an American group that had held a crusade in Romania. "We've got over 2,000 decision cards that were filled out by people who attended our crusade," they told him. "Can you follow them up?" His ministry was staggering under the weight of trying to meet such needs while continuing the work he'd been called to for decades. (In 1993, the head of a respected mission agency reaching a former Iron Curtain country concluded that the results achieved from all the evangelistic efforts made into his country were essentially zilch.)

Waste Not, Want Not

Take heart - your mission and service trip can be a wise and effective investment of your time, energy, and resources. All you've got to do is keep three principles in mind as you prepare yourself and your students:

Let Go and Let God. Several years ago, a friend of mine and I were able to gain an invitation from the Romanian government to bring a group of baseball coaches to their country to conduct instructional clinics for their youth baseball program. (We were also given complete freedom to share with the kids about our faith.) I was in charge of the previsit; so, in the dead of winter, I headed over to Bucharest for my first meeting with Cristian Costescu, the Secretary-General of the Romanian Baseball Federation.Romania is a Latin culture. It's people-centered, situation-sensitive, and they don't sweat the details. As Cristian, my taxi-driver/translator friend, and I sat in a Bucharest restaurant for the first of what were many hours-long meals together, sweat began to pour down my forehead as I realized that there was no way that we could nail down the logistics of our trip ahead of time. Where we would stay, what the schedule would be, who we'd interface with-every query was met with the reply, "You will be our guests. It is not a problem." I had two options: I could pull the plug on the trip, or I could place our group in Cristian and his associates' hands and trust them to do right by us. I decided on the latter. The orientation meeting with my guys when I returned home was, let's say, brief. "How's it look?" they asked. "It's going to be great," I replied. "How are things going to work?" they asked. "I have no idea," I replied. "But we can trust them-they'll work it all out."Which they did-in Romanian, roundabout, by-our-standards-last-minute fashion. It was a fantastic trip. The clinics went great; the kids were responsive; God put us in touch with local Romanian Christians who were willing to follow up with interested players after we departed. Most importantly, my wife and I established friendships that we've maintained over the years, friends we've gone back to see several times since then. And interestingly (and appropriately) enough, we've 'done' more ministry just sitting around visiting with our Romanian friends than we ever accomplished during our mission trip.Most of the control issues that hover around a mission and service trip concern method rather than goal. We're all after the same things; it's in considering how to get there that our differences emerge. As we allow our methods to be adjusted to fit the situation we're entering, we communicate a powerful message of trust and respect to our ministry partners that will ensure our time will be well spent.

A ministry by any other name would smell as sweet. In 1992, my wife Kyle and I started the Chicago branch of CSM. As we began to learn our way around, we made friends with a number of African-American Christians who attended a church on Chicago's South Side.One Saturday, I headed down to their church to get my car hand-washed at the facility they'd set up in a warehouse next door to their sanctuary. Kirk Bell, one of my new friends, came by. As we chatted, I looked across the street to the new sanctuary they were building out of what had been a burned-out grocery store. "Kirk, we could bring all kinds of work groups to help you with your church building," I said (in a dazzling display of Anglo task-oriented linear brilliance). "That would be great," Kirk (diplomatically) replied, "but what we'd really like to do is to train teams of Christians to go back with us into the projects where we grew up and share Jesus with the folks who live there."Their ministry goals looked nothing like mine - and, as I was to discover, it took some real selling to convince our groups that traipsing into housing projects (where 100% of the residents were African-American) with a team of black evangelists was a good idea. But sharing Jesus with people in the Stateway Gardens housing project with Kirk and his friends has become one of the most powerful ministries our groups experience during their times in Chicago. By deep-sixing our focus on task and redefining our understanding of ministry, we were able to see God work in ways we couldn't have otherwise imagined.

Leave the driving to Him. Have you read Matthew 25:31-40 lately? It's one of Jesus' most significant discourses. After all, he's articulating the actions by which God decides who's going to heaven and who's headed You Know Where. What's fascinates me in this passage is what he doesn't say. Do you notice what he leaves out in his charge to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and minister to the sick? He says nothing about what results are supposed to be achieved through these actions. There's no talk about ending hunger, defeating poverty, or seeing the prisoner go straight. He says simply to Do It, because when we do, we're somehow ministering directly to Our Lord.Jesus gives us the freedom to go into our mission and service trips with the goal of just plain ministering. We don't have to achieve certain "results" to justify our investment. Frankly, we might not recognize some of God's divine results when we see them! But as we can remove our cultural blinders, discard the limitations we place on God's definition of ministry, and "leave the driving" to Him, we can begin to understand what it means to be Jesus' hands and feet to a hurting world.

Just Call Me Chicken

So what did I say to the congregation that was sending their students to Ecuador? To be honest, I wasn't very bold. I played it safe and affirmed what was praiseworthy about their trip-their willingness to move out of their comfort zone, their desire to serve God, their heart for the children they were looking forward to meeting. But I took comfort in the knowledge that they were under the guidance of a solid youth leader whom I knew would learn from the experience (he did) and approach future mission and service trips with more flexibility and sensitivity (he has). The "result" has been healthy relationships with ministry partners all over the world, and students whose lives have been changed forever.

That's what we want our kids to experience. And that's mission and service that's worth anyone's time.

Click here to register a trip that isn't a waste of time.

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Why Most Mission Trips Are A Waste Of Time - CSM

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By Noel Becchetti Former President of CSM. He can be reached via email at noelpb@gmail.com . "We're going to Ecuador!" The words ring out in a dimly-lit sanctuary. As music pulses, more lights come on and more voices ring out: "We'll be working with our denominational missionaries!"

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A proposed solution to the problem short-term mission trips cause is to force short-term mission workers to understand that their way of living is not better than other ways of living, it is just different, and that converting these people-groups to evangelism is not the answer to fixing poverty, hunger, disease, and death.

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By the millions, Americans are jumping at the chance to become missionaries - with one key stipulation of the 21st century: They expect to get their comfortable lives back a few days later.

Evangelicals often build homes or visit orphanages, then explain the roots of their faith to new friends. Mainline Christians tend to focus on providing relief from poverty. This year, tens of thousands of short-term missionaries plan to storm the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in visible witness to their savior's love for humankind.

They'll do so with the help of dozens of trip coordinators, promising such perks as adventure, fun, and vacations infused with meaning. High season for short-term missions begins this weekend.

As these missions flourish, however, the faithful are debating the wisdom of tailoring outreach programs to suit the needs and wants of missionaries in search of a peak, transformational experience.

Critics say impoverished people, especially overseas, often end up pandering to cash-wielding, untrained missionaries who leave a bad impression and don't make meaningful lifestyle changes upon return.

"We justify our efforts by saying [youth] will come back and make a difference in their own communities, but the research has demonstrated it's not happening," says David Livermore, an evangelical scholar at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and author of a new book, "Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence." "Kids are going down and 'loving on' Mexican kids for a week and then coming home and being the same racist white kids they were toward their Latino classmates before they went on the trip."

Others are more hopeful. "We don't really know yet whether it's simply do-good tourism or a profound, life-changing experience for people who do these trips," says Dana Robert, codirector of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University. "The jury is still out."

She sees potential for many a reformed worldview in the fact that nearly 1 in 3 American youth now take part in a cross-cultural service projects before finishing high school.

Short-term trips, lasting two weeks or less, drew about 1.6 million Americans to foreign mission fields last year, according to a survey by Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist of religion at Princeton University. Others who study Christian missions, such as Todd Johnson of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, say brief domestic mission trips draw even more participants than international ones.

For hundreds of thousands of students and others on summer vacation, the trip marks the culmination of months of learning to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Agencies make no apologies for designing trips with missionary-as-beneficiary in mind.

"That's how Jesus intended it to be when he sent people out to minister in his name," says Seth Barnes, who heads Adventures in Missions in Gainesville, Ga. "We view these mission trips as discipling experiences [for paying participants]. We're looking for whatever will optimize their spiritual growth.... It would probably be paternalistic to say we could do that for [indigenous] people in the field."

Short-term mission trips date back to the 1960s when air travel first became accessible to religiously passionate pockets of the middle class, according to Dr. Johnson. But only since the mid-1990s, with the rise of Internet-savvy megachurches, have local congregations attained the tools necessary to bypass denominations and forge their own ties on the ground as far away as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

"This area of short-term missions has been absolutely transformed over the last 10 years by the rise of independent churches," Johnson says. He finds adventure-seeking, untrained missionaries now run a heightened risk: "The danger is that they make [foreigners] into Americans without even realizing it" by failing to let Christianity take root in indigenous forms.

Risks aside, some veterans of short-term mission trips say the experiences have shaped their outlooks for the better. At age 18, Zoe Sandvig's Indianapolis church sent her to St. Louis on a trip that she says, "inspired me [to see] there are beacons of hope in the inner city," such as a woman whose faith didn't flinch even amid flood damage and persistent poverty. Three mission trips later, including one to Peru, she took up a career last year of writing for a prison ministry newsletter.

Sam Massie of Somerville, Mass., raised $2,000 two years ago for a mission trip to Honduras with 35 other youth from the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Each day, Honduran tradesmen directed the group in dirt-hauling and bricklaying as an armed guard kept watch. After a week of accommodations with neither electricity nor hot water, the group moved to one of Tegucigalpa's finest hotels and did three days of sightseeing.

In hindsight, the whole trip "sort of felt like tourism," says Mr. Massie, who this month finished his freshman year at Yale University. "There was a sort of novelty to [working alongside poor people]. The focus of the trip was not enough on bringing benefits to the local place."

Despite some reconsideration, short-term missions show no signs of slowing down. Adventures in Missions has about 60 trips planned for June, a fourfold increase from its May lineup.

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Rise of sunshine Samaritans: on a mission or holiday?

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By the millions, Americans are jumping at the chance to become missionaries - with one key stipulation of the 21st century: They expect to get their comfortable lives back a few days later. Evangelicals often build homes or visit orphanages, then explain the roots of their faith to new friends.

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A century ago, missionaries had to commit to years of service. With the comparative ease and affordability of travel, church and non-profit leaders now encourage a different form of congregational engagement: short-term mission trips. These journeys, typically lasting from a few days to several weeks, allow people to put their religious beliefs in action by taking people to other countries or areas of great need to serve the poor or disadvantaged.

A new study from The Barna Group shows that most of the people who embark on service adventures describe the trips as life-changing. In fact, three-quarters of trip-goers report that the experience changed their life in some way. Yet the research also shows that few adults - including a small percentage of Christians - have ever gone on a short-term service trip.
Heart Change
The label "life-changing" is pasted on many things, but the description fits most short-term service trips. Only one-quarter of those who have participated on such a trip said it was "just an experience," while a majority said it changed their life in some way. The most common areas of personal growth that people recall - even years later - include becoming more aware of other people's struggles (25%), learning more about poverty, justice, or the world (16%), increasing compassion (11%), deepening or enriching their faith (9%), broadening their spiritual understanding (9%), and boosting their financial generosity (5%). Others mentioned the experience helped them feel more fulfilled, become more grateful, develop new friends, and pray more.
Missing in Action
However, despite the accessibility and personal benefits, most Americans have never experienced such a short-term service project. Just 9% of Americans have ever been on one of these brief service trips, including only 11% of churchgoers. What's more, most of the people who have ever gone on such a journey did so more than five years ago. To put that in perspective, only 8 million of the 228 million adult residents of the U.S. have been on a short-term mission trip in the last five years.

Some population subgroups were more likely than average to participate in short mission trips: adults under age 25, residents of the South and the West, college graduates, political conservatives, and people who are associated with a faith other than Christianity. The most active group of people in terms of short-term trips was evangelical Christians (23% of whom had taken such a trip).

In contrast to evangelicals, residents of the Northeast, Catholics, and political liberals were among the least likely to go on service trips. One surprise from the study was that upscale adults were no more likely than downscale adults to have participated on a short-term service project.
Trip Advisor

The research provided additional snapshots of service trips:

1. Most people take service trips outside the country; however, 33% of the mission trips were to locations in the U.S.

2. A person does not have to go far in order to grow personally through serving others. People who took domestic service trips reported the same degree of life-changing experiences as did those traveling abroad.

3. The typical person who has been on a mission trip has taken two such journeys. Two percent of Americans are service trip enthusiasts, having been on five or more such adventures.

4. People frequently go on short-term trips with immediate family members, most often with siblings. Only 14% of these trips were parents facilitating a family learning experience. This means that just 1% of Americans have ever taken a mission trip as a family.

Researcher David Kinnaman clarified that "this research does not measure the benefit to the people being helped, since we only interviewed Americans for this project. But short-term missions clearly benefit the people providing the assistance. Many pastors, parents and teachers are searching for ways to transform hearts and minds. One promising way to go about changing people's perspectives is to go on a service adventure together."
Generational Appetite
The Barna study gives evidence that the emerging generation wants to serve the needs of others in short-term missions. For instance, young adults are more likely than the Boomer generation to have ever been on a service trip in the past (12% versus 7%, respectively). Moreover, young adults (defined as those under the age of 25) express strong interest in participating in future short-term service trips. Overall, 10% of young adults said they would definitely go on such a trip in the next three years, compared to just 3% among older adults.

Barna researchers refer to the under-25 segment as the Mosaic generation because of their eclectic lifestyles and diversity. Kinnaman, who is president of The Barna Group, pointed out that "Mosaics are globally aware and cause-oriented. They relish risk, stimulation, and diverse experiences. And they are more sensitive to issues related to justice and poverty. Their craving to take journeys of service could fuel a resurgence of global engagement. Yet, the danger would be if leaders and organizations waste the Mosaic generation's readiness by simply allowing young adults to be mere 'consumers of cause' - selling them a t-shirt or a wristband, instead of challenging them to life-shaping service projects."
About the Research
This report is based upon telephone interviews conducted by The Barna Group with a random sample of 1005 adults selected from across the continental United States, age 18 and older, in August 2008. The maximum margin of sampling error associated with the aggregate sample is ±3.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Minimal statistical weighting was used to calibrate the aggregate sample to known population percentages in relation to several key demographic variables.

"Evangelicals" are born again Christians. In the survey, people qualified as evangelicals if they met the born again criteria (i.e., said they had have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior) plus seven other conditions. Those include saying their religious faith is very important in their life today; believing they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; believing that Satan exists; believing that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; asserting that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today. Being classified as an evangelical is not dependent upon church attendance or the denominational affiliation of the church attended. Respondents were not asked to describe themselves as "evangelical."

The Barna Group, Ltd. (which includes its research division, The Barna Research Group) conducts primary research, produces media resources pertaining to spiritual development, and facilitates the healthy spiritual growth of leaders, children, families and Christian ministries. Located in Ventura, California, Barna has been conducting and analyzing primary research to understand cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors since 1984. If you would like to receive free e-mail notification of the release of each new, bi-monthly update on the latest research findings from The Barna Group, you may subscribe to this free service at the Barna website www.barna.org.

© The Barna Group, Ltd, 2009.
Copyright Disclaimer: All the information contained on the barna.org website is copyrighted by The Barna Group, Ltd., 2368 Eastman Ave. Unit 12, Ventura, California 93003. No portion of this website (articles, graphs, charts, reviews, pictures, video clips, quotes, statistics, etc.) may be reproduced, retransmitted, disseminated, sold, distributed, published, edited, altered, changed, broadcast, circulated, or commercially exploited without the prior written permission from The Barna Group, Ltd. Click here to obtain reprint permission
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Despite Benefits, Few Americans Have Experienced Short-Term Mission Trips - Barna Group

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With the comparative ease and affordability of travel, church and non-profit leaders now encourage a different form of congregational engagement: short-term mission trips. A new study from The Barna Group shows that most of the people who embark on service adventures describe the trips as life-changing.

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-U.S. and or Evangelical Culture

-Economic: rich countries(the U.S.) are going into less developed, poverty-stricken countries (Haiti, Nepal, Africa); causes inferiority

-Religion (Biblically, we are called to serve people and that is why people want to help impoverished countries)

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https://www.adn.com/culture/religion/2016/05/20/why-short-term-mission-trips-may-do-more-harm-than-good/

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On a mission - a short term mission trip

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On a mission - a short term mission trip

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Why were short-term mission trips conducted in the first place?

Were short-term mission trips once taken by more experienced people?

When did short-term mission trips become popular?

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-Impacts of short-term mission trips
-Negatives of short-term mission trips
-Harms of short-term mission trips
-Long-term vs. short-term mission trips
-History of short-term mission trips