Response to “Increasing the Effectiveness of Short-Term Missions”

My friend Drew Gentile, Chief of Staff for Campus Crusade’s Leader Led Movements, sent this response…which I thought deepened the discussion:

Interesting article. I think you can press farther into the dimension of the benefit to recipients.

One of my observations from my post here at CCC is that “sending” has often been viewed in very individualistic, western ways. By that I mean that sending is seen too often from the viewpoint of the sender, not the benefit to the receiver. There are a number of results:

· As you mentioned in the youth pastor example, outcomes are measured primarily in what the visitors gain (read between the lines, because measuring the benefit to the receiver is difficult at best, sometimes because there simply is none in the concept of the visit).

· There is often an extreme emphasis on sender ownership – everyone wants to own some piece of the missions pie themselves, as a result we spread resources thinly over multiple small projects with no coherent sense of what could be accomplished with focused resources. In a word, we diffuse rather than focus resources with this approach because we all want to own our own thing more than contribute to a single effect in coordinated locations.

· As a result, few people actually ask what the contribution to local needs really is. Even when they do, short term missions have a tendency to overlook some essential realities of local works (same is true of long-term people as well at times). Sociologically, not just in missions, there are three categories of items that define the characteristics of any locality: 1) relational / sociological patterns 2) underlying worldview / cognitive patterns, and 3) regulatory / legal issues. Even long term missions, if not careful, can tend to focus only on 1) and that, unfortunately at times, only from an instrumental viewpoint (i.e. I need to know how these people relate so that I can communicate my message to them better). Missionaries are at times surprisingly poor at understanding world view issues – and even worse at appreciating regulatory issues.

So, my point is that in order to have a maximum effect on location, short term missions need to connect with some kind of local group, church, or agency that really understands and works in knowledgeable alignment with the local situation and knows how to connect the visitors when they are defining their expectations for any short term trip.

Do I think that short-term missions that have a primary benefit to the visitors as a category is wrong? No, I think it is appropriate to take people for visits for their development.

What I don’t think is appropriate is to sell that kind of trip as being primarily for the benefit of the recipients. That is a conflict of expectations with reality. There are short-term  missions where beneficial outcomes for the hosts are clear. Short term medical missions would be one good example.  But there are also trips that completely miss the expectations of the short-term visitors. Examples: I have observed all kinds of trips to campus ministries, and frankly expectations are often wildly out of sync with reality, and that is to me the main issue.

For example, several groups visited us while I was working on campuses in Germany. All of them prepared for the trip with the purpose of providing us a boatload of new contacts. I tried in all cases to say, you’re welcome to come, but this trip is for you, it will not provide me with new contacts; when you meet people, they are your new friends, not mine. They came, they met lots of people, they usually had a great party at the end, they gave us lists of names, and they wanted to know what happened to the people. In almost all cases, those people either remained in contact with our visitors after they returned home or wondered why they hadn’t heard from our visitors. In one or two cases people who also knew other German students already, increased their connection to the ministry – that was a measurable contribution – but the connection had already existed, they simply strengthened it. Point being that when our visitors met new people, the new people wanted to stay in touch with our visitors. Our visitors came with the false expectation that their new friends could be handed off to a local organization – a completely false assumption in our context which the short term missionaries simply wouldn’t accept in advance nor did many of them understand after they returned, and were disappointed that their efforts had so little impact. The trip was sold as a help to the local campus ministry as a justification for the expense. Why couldn’t it have been sold simply as a vision or growth trip?

This is a clash of expectations. I mean really, if I go to a unique place out my normal context for x number of weeks, it is a huge learning experience for me – but if I’m visited in my context by someone from outside and only interact with them occasionally in my normal daily routine – the proportionate impact is clear – the visitor is experiencing something far more challenging than the host. If the visitor wishes to have impact on the host – then there needs to be a very well-coordinated effort to impact a deep need of the host, or else it is simply a flash. That flash the host is not in itself wrong – the wrong is in creating the impression that the major impact is in the reverse direction. And I think that comes too often from leading missions in a multi-cultural world from a mono-cultural position.

Additionally, there is a taboo topic associated with such short term missions – the traumatic effect on an unprepared or unqualified worker. Though not the case in many situations, I have seen from the management viewpoint many cases of situations where the Christian worker was not prepared and experienced trauma like a soldier in the battlefield only to return home and find nobody who understood, rather only people expecting an upbeat story of victory. There is a dark side to short term missions if one is not careful that is often completely overlooked.