Two months ago, I (Kara) was part of an inner-city Los Angeles weekend mission trip with teenagers from my church.

We had a surprise for the students: It was actually a poverty simulation. We had told their parents ahead of time; but to students’ shock, they showed up on Friday night and were told they had to surrender all of their possessions. They could keep two items, and their sleeping bag counted as one of those items. So most everyone kept their sleeping bag, and then they each chose one toiletry item. One girl kept her toothpaste, another her toothbrush, and then they shared. It made for interesting community.

Next, the kids relinquished the clothes off their backs and chose clothes from Goodwill to wear instead.

The students slept outside that Friday night—until 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, at which point they were awakened because an ordinance in Los Angeles prohibits sleeping outside after sunrise. Their breakfast consisted of one-half of a saltine cracker and a few sips of lemonade. They did manual labor Saturday morning, cleaning bathrooms and kitchens.

By the time lunch rolled around, they were tired, grimy and starving. The only way for them to get lunch was to beg for money from strangers (one of the many reasons I was glad we had obtained parents’ permission), which we did 10 minutes away at Staples Center (home of the L.A. Lakers). After about 45 minutes, our small group of six had $2.25.

We were thrilled to discover that our $2.25 could purchase a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter at a nearby 99 Cent Store. As we sat on the dirty sidewalk, getting peanut butter all over ourselves and our clothing, our kids kept repeating, “These are the best peanut butter sandwiches ever.”

Later that evening, the local leader hosting our group of students said they have groups experience this poverty simulation almost every weekend.
Apparently, our group was the first group of high-school students who didn’t cry when their stuff was confiscated.

I love the kids at our church, but I don’t think of them as particularly tough. Afterward, I asked our youth pastor why he thought the students did so well. His answer was immediate and simple, “We trained them ahead of time.” It was their training about what it’s like to experience poverty that helped them dive in immediately instead of reject or resent the justice challenge facing them.

A Process, Not an Event
During the past few years, we at the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI), in collaboration with Dave Livermore of the Global Learning Center at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and Terry Linhart of Bethel College (Indiana), have helped convene two summits of experts in short-term missions. A major theme in our discussions was that we need to reenvision our service experiences not as events, but as processes that have a before, during and after.

Let’s be honest—our preparation before the usual short-term mission trip usually consists of “MMs”: money and medical releases. Our reflection during the trip boils down to a few minutes of prayer requests before our team tumbles into bed, exhausted. Our debrief after we get home is little more than organizing the media show and the testimonies to share in “big church.” If we want greater transformation, we need a completely different timeframe for our service.

The Before/During/After Model
Several youth ministries have worked with us to design and test a Before/During/After model based on an experiential education framework originally proposed by Laura Joplin and later modified and tested by Terry Linhart on youth trips.

Step 1. Before: Framing
A successful experience starts when we help students frame the sometimes mind-blowing and other times menial experiences that await them. Getting ready for a mission experience involves much more than just helping them raise money, learn a drama or know what to pack. Our job as youth workers is to facilitate a series of gatherings that prepares students emotionally, mentally, spiritually and relationally for what lies ahead. The recent Los Angeles poverty simulation certainly highlights the value of preparing students before we hop into minivans or airplanes.

Step 2. During: Experience and Reflection
The main component in students’ learning during their actual service is the cycle of experience and reflection. As youth workers, our job is to give space for students to catch their breath in the midst of the typical mission project sprint and ask questions that help decipher the deep meaning behind their observations, thoughts and feelings.

To facilitate the experience-andreflection cycle, our students need to be surrounded by walls of support and feedback. While these two expressions of care are vital throughout the process, their importance peaks during the time they’re actually serving.

You might assume support and feedback would flow most naturally from the other adults and students on your team. While that is often true, the best networks stretch far beyond the immediate team and include those who are hosting you, your students’ families and your entire church. We’ve found grandparents to be great sources of support, especially when they actually go on the trip and offer an ultra-safe presence to kids and adults.

Step 3: After: Initial Debrief
At the end of your trip, as your students’ minds and your ministry’s minivans are starting to head home, you’ve now entered the third step, initial debrief. Maybe it’s the last day of your service trip as you take a bit of time for RR. Or perhaps it’s when you hit a coffee shop together right after you’ve visited patients at the local children’s hospital. Either way, the goal is to gather your team together after the “work” is completed and start thinking about the even harder work of long-term transformation.

I (Brad) recently shared a short-term mission trip with 14-year-old Amanda from our church. Amanda stood out because she walked into our trip more obviously broken than most kids and seemed more than a little hesitant about the cross-cultural realities we faced every day. To be honest, I was hesitant about her; and not long into the trip I heard another leader note that Amanda seemed really disengaged.

I didn’t have great confidence in the transformative potential of this experience for Amanda. Yet during our initial debrief the night before we packed up to head home, Amanda shared about a profound faith experience.

The previous evening Amanda had lain awake for several hours praying and wrestling with God’s presence in all she’d seen and experienced—and then offered her life to God. She confessed to us that she was anxious about what that might mean for her back at home. Our team prayed with her, reminding her she was not alone in her faith journey.

Amanda’s stumble into faith had occurred in her own sleeping bag, at night, by herself. If we hadn’t scheduled time for initial debrief, we never would have been able to join with Amanda in her justice journey.

Ongoing Transformation
If most youth groups lack an effective preservice framing time, even more have difficulty facilitating proper ongoing transformation. Two realities fight against effective learning transfer. First, most of the significant growth in a service experience takes place in an environment very different from home. Second, the students themselves don’t know how to apply the learning to their own lives. That’s why we need to help them connect the dots between having lunch with a homeless man in Detroit and having lunch with new kids in their school cafeterias.

A month after a trip to Mexico last summer, a team from Brad’s church gathered to share a meal and watch a DVD of photos and video from the trip. We also spent time in prayer and reflection about ways our trip could impact our lives at home. We each picked out a 5×7 photo that stirred a specific memory or emotion in us and took time to pray and journal about ways that significant memory compelled us to engage our local community. In our sharing and prayer for one another, students offered hopes for engaging in local homeless ministry and reaching out in new ways at school.

Fully engaging this Before/During/After process probably requires cutting other ministry events to create space in your calendar for more time with students. For most youth workers we talk to, that’s welcome news. We’re convinced you’ll be more likely to change the world and your students when you do less, but do it more intentionally.

Photo by Sean Smith. Used with permission from Adventures in Missions.

Going Deeper
One of our primary research objectives during the past three years at the Fuller Youth Institute has been to lead students and adults deeper into their service and justice work. Like you, we believe God has called us to serve the poor, oppressed, sick and anyone in need, and that God invites us to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them in very tangible ways. We also have heard and observed that youth workers struggle to engage students effectively in life-transforming, long-term commitments to live out God’s heart for justice.

We have listened to the needs and concerns of youth workers across the country and around the world and filtered them through a theology of Kingdom justice based in Scripture. As a result, we have created Deep Justice in a Broken World, as well as the Deep Justice Journeys curriculum and the Deep Justice Journeys Student Journal. The subtitle of Deep Justice Journeys captures our deepest prayer: that students would move from mission trips to missional living. Check out more resources at fulleryouthinstitute.org.