Nothing feels better than a cold drink after a long day of painting and roofing. I’m talking to my new friend, Bapit, one of the older kids in the orphanage we are visiting in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Bapit and I enjoy our cold mandarin orange drinks as we talk about life in the United States.
He thanks me for coming to help and says, “It must be nice in America where there are no poor people.” I look at him, surprised by his comments and say to him, “That’s not true at all. There are plenty of people who need help back home.” It’s after I say this to him that Bapit looks at me, confused and trying to process this information. After thinking on this for a second, he responds, “Oh. I thought everyone from America was rich. That’s why Americans come here to help.”
Short-term mission trips are a huge phenomenon in today’s churches. The latest statistics show that more than three million people go on a short-term mission trip during the course of a year, but this fad has not grown without its detractors. It’s easy to get critical when you hear about the exotic and foreign locations that end up being the destinations of so many short-term trips.
This brings us back to Bapit and his perception of Americans. Why is it so easy to ignore the need at home and go gallivanting across the world?
Building Structures or Relationships?
When we think of short-term mission trips, we think of going to a specific location for a week to pour our all into a community. All of our time and energy is focused on how we can build relationships and help people. After giving everything we’ve got for a week, we go back home and talk about how those experiences changed us; then, we brainstorm about which cool places we could go to following year.
This model of short-term missions pushes missionaries to lend aid to an area for a week and then vanish from that area’s radar for the rest of time. There must be a way to fix this, a way to achieve long-term impact with short-term missions.
Imagine a new paradigm for the short-term mission trip. What if instead of a short-term mission trip being an opportunity to see a new part of the world, we thought about short-term missions as a way to maintain growing relationships? What if instead of viewing short-term missions as a one-week commitment, we viewed them as ongoing, lifetime commitments?
It all harkens back to this question: Why do we need to go somewhere new every time for a short-term mission trip?
The way that we shift this paradigm is by making a commitment to one specific community. Just because a short-term trip lasts for a small, finite time does not mean that our commitment to those people needs to be short and finite, as well. Become invested in a community. The impact that could be created by this shift in short-term mission trips is enormous.
This kind of commitment is hard and is the main reason we do not see ministries and churches gravitating toward this model. When you do a short-term mission trip, many of the details and plans are handled by the organization putting it together. If you were to be responsible for putting it together yourself, that suddenly means a lot more work.
Like anything that provides an opportunity for greater impact, there comes a greater amount of responsibility for those doing the ministry; but this is the life of a missionary. Ministry never was meant to be easy. It was meant to be impactful.
Pick and Stick
This paradigm shift to short-term missions is not a new thought at all. There are people across the world who have clued into this idea. One example is Bruce Bentley, founder of the Lakota Journey. The Lakota Journey is a non-profit organization that seeks to plug churches into a native community on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. What separates the Lakota Journey from other organizations is that it seeks out churches and youth groups that will commit to years of service.
“I tell interested churches to come with an open mind and consider the possibility of coming again in the future. What we want to see is the best possible ministry experience to the people to whom we are ministering,” says Bentley. The Lakota Journey was created out of a weariness of the serve-them-and-leave-them mentality of so many short-term mission organizations. “I felt like it was too limiting in a ministry prospective. You did your thing and left, and it didn’t seem adequate. The problem with the serve-them-and-leave-them mentality is that so many churches today are looking for this experience in their short-term mission trips without knowing it.”
You don’t have to start your own non-profit to take part in this paradigm shift. Here are some ways you can start building your short-term mission trips to have long-term impact.
• Look for a community to which you can make a commitment. Just because we are talking about a long-term commitment doesn’t mean that it needs to be five minutes from where you live. Maybe it means that your group takes a 10-hour road trip every year to get to the community you’re serving. The important thing is to pick a place and stick with it.
• Find locals who can help you plug in. Having a heart to help is great; but if you don’t know how to help, you are just going to get in the way. Ask around the community for people who are already invested. These can be local pastors, non-profit organizations and/or schools.
• Plan long-term. When you plan your trips, don’t just think about the itinerary for your current short-term trip. What goals within the bigger picture do you want to achieve? Maybe your plan involves developing strong leaders with whom you can partner in ministry, so it becomes less about you coming in and more about you becoming a part of the community.
• Find ways to establish your long-term connection apart from short-term trips. What’s the point of a continuing relationship if you only commit to it once a year? You need to find ways to maintain the relationships you are building outside of the short-term trips. An easy solution is to get people to adopt a pen pal in the community. Do not let yourself slip into a once-a-year friendship.
These are just a few ways you can start to build your short-term mission trips to have a long-term impact. It’s important to remember that it always starts with passion. If you are doing short-term trips because you need to put a mission trip on the calendar, than maybe you need to rethink why you are doing them in the first place. Take some time to stop and pray. Ask God if there’s a community He wants you to minister to, with which you can build a long-term relationship. You might be surprised about whom God directs you to serve.
