The Church in Mission

Here is another reflection on short-term mission trips by local churches from the perspective of who goes. Hope this is helpful…

Are Short-Term Mission Trips Worth It?

by Dale Meador

Are short-term mission trips worth it? That question has again been much on my mind, inasmuch as I have just returned from one. Along with six other friends from our church, my brother Gil and son Stephen and I went for two weeks to Santarem, Brazil. In the heart of the Amazon River basin, Santarem is home to Project Amazon (PAZ), an effective church-planting ministry to which Bear Creek Church has enjoyed warm ties for five or six years. In support of PAZ’s diverse ministries (medical/dental boats, water filters, health education, Bible teaching, leadership development, and the planting of more than 300 churches, to name a few) we built 31 heavy wooden seats to be used in a leadership training facility (built by another, earlier team from BCC) in the small river village of Prainha, to which we sailed and where we assembled the seats.

Are short-term mission trips worth it? The question is reasonable and one I struggled with myself, before I had ever been on such a trip. After all, this trip was grueling and not inexpensive. Figured one way, it was 8 people x 64 hours of air travel (round-trip) each, including 18 take-offs or landings + 17 hours of boat travel (again, round-trip) to cover just 110 miles of ocean-like river. The total cost of the trip itself was about $16,000, a figure that includes the material used in the manufacture of the 31 benches (really, more like pews than benches).

I don’t think it wise to frame the worth of such a trip in monetary terms only, since the economics of the kingdom of God operate on a scale not recognized by the best secular economists. But this trip was a bargain any way you look at it, economically and for all the reasons cited below, listed in no particular order. It took me only one hour or so to come up with this list of reasons why I believe that such trips are well worth it. With reflection, more reasons might become clear. I’m not speaking here for all short-term mission trips, since some may not be well-conceived or may be little more than holidays for adults or teens. But of the trips with which I have had the privilege of being involved – I can say that they:

1. Stretch us relationally, helping us to experience the bond known only to brothers and sisters in Christ, even among people from vastly different backgrounds.
2. Help us to arrest our selfishness, as we go and meet and serve and bless others.
3. Retard our nearly insatiable appetite for material wealth, meeting people whose only possessions are the roof over their head and the pots in which they cook.
4. Underscore the worth of language study for the communication of the gospel, and for communication of any kind. Many people spend two or three years learning a language in school, and for what?
5. Dramatize the challenge of the Great Commission of Jesus, called “great” not for its quality but for its scope.
6. Improve the sending congregation’s sense of purpose.
7. Graphically compare the result of dollars spent on things that yield eternal results to dollars spent on things that don’t last.
8. Make possible long-term, intimate relationships with believers from other cultures, relationships unlikely without face-to-face interaction.
9. Plant the seeds of lifelong concern for world missions among participants.
10. Insure that monies given and projects undertaken are well spent or conceived.
11. Protect against small-mindedness; give us reason to recognize, challenge, and abandon prejudices and stereotypes.
12. Shrink our own challenges and problems down to size and putting our lives in global or kingdom perspective.
13. Build an appreciation for the work and calling of long-term missionaries.
14. Hard work and grueling travel allow us to experience a tiny bit of what it means to assume inconveniences for the sake of Christ.
15. Demonstrate our commitment to, and partnership with, the missionaries and their mission in a manner that is encouraging to them.
16. Give us an opportunity to put our lives and livelihood on the line in faith in God, in a way not possible at home, what with the risks inherent in international travel.
17. Lend perspective on what is most important for a disciple of Jesus as we learn and practice the conventions of other cultures, softening us and making us more flexible.
18. Provide sweet opportunity to worship alongside new friends, in an unknown tongue, but with renewed affection for God and zeal for His glorification.
19. Help us to pray for the missionaries and their mission with intelligence and enthusiasm.
20. Use God’s money wisely: in this case, those 31 benches were built and delivered to a remote village at a cost of just $500 each, a price unheard of in the US. The cost of the trip amounted to approximately $135 a day, per person. Many people spend that on their vacation, accomplish nothing eternal and come home only with sunburn.
21. Trips like this challenge us with hard work in difficult conditions.
22. Allow us the privilege of living out that scripture that challenges those of us with much to share with those who have little (II Cor. 8:13-15).
23. Show us how much can be accomplished in a short period of time when our effort is intentional and our aims holy.
24. Remind us of the universality of human need and reveal the sufficiency of Christ’s remedy.
25. Show our lives to be unnecessarily complicated and artificially encumbered, keeping us from service and hindering our obedience in going and serving.
26. Build our appreciation for creature comforts we otherwise take for granted.
27. Encourage our church’s development as an outreach-oriented congregation that sends more teams, involves more people and marshals greater resources.
28. Make a team of unlikely groups of people.
29. Press us to examine our theological boundaries, evaluate critical differences with brothers and sisters of different persuasions, and then demonstrate our unity in essential matters.
30. Encourage our sacrificial giving, reminding us that God blesses us to “raise our standard of giving, not our standard of living”.
31. Challenge people, especially younger ones, to consider the possibility of answering a high call and returning to the field, perhaps as full-time missionaries.
32. Provide an invaluable opportunity for purposeful travel and work by parents and their teens.
33. Allow for the accumulation of photos, video, and artifacts that help to make real the circumstances on the field to the sending congregation.
34. Multiply the joy of the church givers and supporters who enable those sent to go, both in their sending and in their reports upon return.
35. Encourage other believers and congregations to get involved globally, seeing what one congregation is doing.

It is possible to accomplish some of these results right here at home, where there are undeniably many needs and opportunities to serve, and it is important that we stay open to meeting those needs and filling those opportunities. As the Lord leads us to make wise decisions about where to serve, we want to work on both fronts: locally and internationally.

For best global results, we simply have to go. We can say, “We should just send the money to the field and not waste it sending a bunch of north Americans over” but experience shows that people who say that both do not go and do not send the money. The best results come when we give, we send, and when we go ourselves.

Years ago, my friend Tony Sargent, a pastor from the UK whose heart beats for the third-world pastor, told me that I just had to go to the field. Bruce Wilkinson, at last year’s Promise Keeper’s Pastor’s Conference, pled with those of us in the audience to go, especially to Africa, site of the AIDS epidemic. As he put it, there is no substitute for going. And for these 35 reasons and more, he was right.

From: www.evangelizing.us and Pastor Dale

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