Moving Students from Faith to Lives of Service to Social Action

One of my favorite things to do when training a group of students for a mission trip is to share embarrassing moments from past trips. It loosens up the group and teaches subtle lessons at the same time. Here are three of my favorites:

• During a work trip to Tijuana, which included a couple of native speakers serving as interpreters, a girl once asked me, “How do you say taco in Spanish?”
• After explicitly, repeatedly, adamantly explaining to our group in Guatemala that no one could eat from street vendors during a visit into town, one of our boys did just that, purchasing and eating three pieces of cotton candy. I spent the entire next day assisting him to the baño.
• While on a mission trip in a village, I sat on a homemade ladder to avoid sitting in mud. The ladder broke and a nail punctured my backside. I asked one of the students to see how badly I was injured. Thankfully, she still speaks to me.

I share this to make the point that it is easy to focus on the foibles of missions efforts and highlight various cultural no-no’s. Yet, in the midst of pressures to plan lock-ins, winter camps and Sunday School lessons, we often throw together a service project at the last minute. While we actually may pull it off, we often are left imagining how much more the youth could have gained from those experiences—or whether they really learned anything.

It is so important to spend strategic time to prepare well. Here I will share how I systematically trained teenagers over several years to serve in order to shape their understanding of ministry, compassion and crossing cultures. I also will share testimonies of how those formative experiences helped shape students’ studies in college and their vocations afterward.

Invest
During 15 years of service at one church, I was responsible for three groups: fifth and sixth graders, junior high (seventh and eighth graders) and high school. Because I knew I would have a chance to invest several years, I decided to follow a piece of Stephen Covey’s advice in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Begin with the end in mind. What did I want our students to learn by the time they graduated? I focused on three goals:

• Stewardship: Building on Luke 12:48, I wanted them to understand that “to whom much has been given, much more will be required.” Because they live in America, have access to education and sleep in their own beds each night, they are those “to whom much has been given.”
• Lifestyle: Ideally, we do not “do” ministry; it should be a way of life. We learn this most effectively when ministry occurs in the midst of our daily lives. Thus, I did not want to focus our service projects solely on out-of-town experiences.
• Mercy: Henri Nouwen said it best: “Showing mercy is different from having pity. Pity connotes distance, even looking down upon. When a beggar asks for money and you give him something out of pity, you are not showing mercy. Mercy comes from a compassionate heart; it comes from a desire to be an equal.”

My goal was to keep our process simple, consistent and age-appropriate. For the fifth and sixth graders, I started globally. I made a point of bringing in our church’s missionaries when they were home on furlough. They would give a presentation of their work and often have their children briefly share. We would commit to praying for them and look for ways to support their children, such as sending birthday cards and making videos.

Once a year, our leaders would organize some sort of tangible project such as Operation Christmas Child so they could start becoming more familiar with simple ways to care for the world. These two approaches planted seeds that we watered for years.

We moved from global to local in junior high. For years I took our high schoolers to lead a monthly chapel service at the local rescue mission. Eventually, junior highers asked to go; it was surprisingly successful! Sarah, a former student who is now 21, told me, “I didn’t know it at the time, but these experiences exposed me to the issues of justice and evangelism in my faith. It made me uncomfortable at times and pushed me out of my white, upper-middle-class comfort zone; but meeting with the people there, occasionally giving a five to seven minute talk, planted seeds in me that I wouldn’t [notice] until years later.”

Starting in ninth grade, my goal was to bring everything together. I wanted global and local awareness to affect students’ lives habitually. We continued with the rescue mission and developed a student team to coordinate the ministry. We also got involved with Invisible Children, a powerful ministry service in Uganda. We ate together weekly as a youth group. As each student contributed $1 for his or her meal, he or she also was invited to give to Invisible Children. Through the years, we raised hundreds of dollars this way.

We also served at a VBS for at-risk minority children in our own community each summer. Finally, juniors and seniors were invited to apply to go on a 10-day trip abroad to serve in Guatemala. They would go to monthly training meetings for six months and raise their support entirely through letter-writing in order to experience fundraising the way missionaries do.

I interviewed another former student, Mark, now 27 and married, who is preparing to go into vocational missions to Muslims. I asked him if he learned anything for service and missions from this long-term training: “I was afraid at first about doing ministry. I felt like it was an all-or-nothing deal because of what I’d seen from my aunt and uncle, who are life-long missionaries in South America. I know that for me I just needed a little encouragement about what I could offer. I needed to gain confidence that I could minister in my own unique way.”

The Payoff
While my approach certainly isn’t fail-safe, it has been gratifying to see the direction many students have taken: teaching public health in Afghanistan; working as a social worker to immigrant children in Denver; intentionally living in blighted communities in Philadelphia; pastoring struggling single-parent families. They all tell me the consistent experience and exposure they received were a big part of their own discovery process.

Going back to Sarah, she said, “In Guatemala, I volunteered at a girls’ school in a rural village. God solidified my hopes to become an elementary school teacher. I saw how God can be glorified through being a caring adult to children. Now in my fourth year of college and beginning my teaching credentials, I look back on that experience and remember the feelings I had. Now I feel called to go to the least desirable schools here and teach the students no one wants to teach.”

We must have vision for the young people we know, “being confident of this, that He who began a good work in [them] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”