Fri 24 Jun 2005
From a recent article in ChristianityToday.com:
“Short-term mission trips to foreign countries are the biggest trend to hit the evangelical Christian outreach scene since vacation Bible school. Between 1 million and 4 million North American Christians reportedly participated in STMs in 2003, and the number keeps rising.”
“Praises and critiques of the trend tend to be proportionately extreme, touting STMs either as miraculous recruiters of long-term missionaries or insidious sowers of third-world dependency.”
“But a new study, to which I contributed the literature review, suggests both sides are off the mark.”
This article uses dollars as the primary measure of missions effectiveness, although there is some mention of the quality of relationships (or lack thereof) resulting from the missions trips. What are your experiences in the world of missions?
Read more – outside link.
June 24th, 2005 at 9:24 pm
Good question. As a long-term missionary, who started out as a short-term missionary, I’d like to share the thoughts I have formulated over the years.
First, I think the study is limited in that it only analyzes one type of short term missionary, the “house builder.” My instinct tells me there are more effective types of short-term missionary.
I think the most important principle for short-term missionaries is that you want to be involved in a partnership with a long-term missionary you know and trust, and realize that you are a part of their strategy. It’s not reasonable to expect a lasting, positive impact without time commitment. In the world of short-term missions this means sending a team every year to the same long-term missionary until you complete a part of their strategy.
In contrast, some people I know feel like mega-churches make terrible partners because they want to spend a Summer in Mexico, then in India, then Siberia…they want to feel like they’re impacting the world, not just a single city or people group.
In my city, short term teams are a vital part of our strategy. They usually come in the Summer, Fall, and around Christmas and their primary job is to evangelize. As people come to believe, they are passed on to the long-term missionaries who are equipped to disciple them and to help them become a church.
That’s what happened this summer as one of our short-term teams just saw ten people come to the Father in four days! These ten people will be followed up on and it is likely that a church will form as a result of this short term team.