The value of short-term missions
Are short-term mission trips effective and worth doing? We’ve discussed that question here before, and learned that there is considerable diversity in opinion about whether they’re a useful activity for churches to pursue.
Well, here’s something else to add to that debate: an interview with missions coordinator Paul Borthwick about the future of short-term missions. As somebody with a lot of experience in both long- and short-term mission trips, Borthwick has some worthwhile insights. He’s straightforward about both the potential drawbacks and opportunities that confront short-term mission trips. Here’s a brief exchange that illuminates his perspective on mission trips in general:
What’s the most common mistake that churches make in short-term missions?
Definitely a lack of long-term planning. If short-term missions guaranteed long-term results, then Mexico would be the most Christian nation on earth, and Tijuana would be the Holy Land. I heard a statistic recently that 30% of all teams from the United States go to Mexico. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t needs in Mexico. But from a long-term, strategic point of view, that’s not the place that needs the most new evangelical ministry.
I’ll give you an example from my own church experience. Our long-term strategy was to invest in the 10/ 40 Window. Yet all of our short-term missions trips were going to the Caribbean and Central America. So we had these people coming back with a heart for Haiti, and we couldn’t support them long-term because our strategy was for North Africa.
In other words, we were not thinking about the big picture. Many times, short-term thinking goes along with short-term missions. When you ask churches and missions agencies what their long-term kingdom goals are, you usually find them coming up short.
The rest of the interview is well worth reading, particularly if your church is planning short-term mission trips in 2010. If you’re planning, or participating in, a mission trip, have you thought through the issues that Borthwick raises? In retrospect, have your church’s mission trips been positive events, or have they suffered from the problems mentioned in the interview? How will this year’s mission trips be different than past ones?
Anytime I would visualize myself in the mission field I was in Africa, surrounded by some of the world’s most hungry children. As a young girl I had lived in Ethiopia and had dreams of returning. Yet the Lord surrounded me with English speaking orphans instead. He placed me in a ‘Christian’ country. God took me to a nation where Christian churches are on every corner. He prepared the way for me to serve those forgotten by their own people. It is so far away from the 10/40 Window.
Because the poor, the prisoners and the orphans of this country are only a 45 minute plane ride from the shores of America it is feasible for churches to send regular short term missions. Because of that we have been able to begin rebuilding homes and sharing the gospel with the All Saints AIDS Camp. Men are accepting Christ in the prisons. Orphans have shoes and are learning to read. From children to the retired, those on short term mission now go back educated, excited and encouraged.
Because of short term missions the islands of the Bahamas hears the love of Christ in ways that has not happened in any other way. Short terms missions brings awareness that these islands are not even close to being what the tourist see. Short term missionaries share the word of the needs that blanket the hundreds of islands that are all but forgotten by mission boards.