short-term missions: part 3

Copyright Josh Cooper 2008.
This is the third of five posts in which I have been focusing on the beneficialness and legitimacy of STM trips from various perspectives. This post focuses on STM trips from the congregational leadership perspective. To read part 1, the introduction, and part 2, which focuses on STM trips from the individual perspective, please click below:

1. Introduction

2. Individual Level

Section Three – Congregational Leadership Level
At the congregational leadership level we discovered – naturally – that the responses to the survey questions were varied but valuable for our research to uncover what makes STM trips legitimate and beneficial. All six pastors / lay leaders had at some point in their ministry career participated in a STM trip. Their destinations included – Zambia, Azerbaijan, Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Canada, Turkey, as well as multiple domestic trips (especially after a hurricane disaster). When asked “Was your specific STM trip legitimate and beneficial?” the overwhelming answer was “yes” in every case! Further when asked “What makes STM trips legitimate and beneficial?” answers varied but shared three common themes. For example:
1. STM trips have the capacity to establish positive cross-cultural connections and build relationships.
2. STM trips create opportunities to become aware of the challenges of the world. One pastor said that STM trips help participants gain a personal understanding of the issues being faced by people in other parts of the world.
3. And finally, STM trips foster life-change. Many respondents mentioned life-change as a result of going on a STM trip.

When asked to define the word missions, responses varied greatly from “participating in the Great Commission” to “advancing the kingdom revolution of Jesus worldwide” to “the varied dynamics that need to occur in order that the message of Jesus Christ as the Son of God is communicated in a cross-cultural setting in a real and relevant way.” And as a follow-up, we asked participants, “Do you think that STM trips fit into this idea of missions? Why?” Respondents were unanimously in agreement that STM trips do fit into their frameworks of missions. However, a couple of pastors cautioned that STM trips are not the only way of doing missions.

When we asked respondents to identify the pitfalls associated with STM trips, the participants identified many. Pitfalls associated with STM trips, according to our survey of pastors / leaders, include:
1. Wasteful spending.
2. Emotional entanglements. Interestingly one pastor had two separate instances where female participants were engaged in moral breakdowns whereby one filed for a divorce, and the other had some mental impairment and had to be brought back to “sanity.”
3. Desiring to live differently as a result of a STM trip, but not having the resources to actually do it.
4. Wrongful attitudes. One key leader mentioned that the mentality that “we have it all together and we are going to fix the world” is culturally insensitive and lacks humility.
5. Lack of direction / openness. One pastor talked about how certain people in a congregation can have strong feelings about working in a particular mission field without ever discerning the Spirit’s direction on where the church as a body is being called to serve.

Finally, when we asked respondents, “How did you avoid pitfalls in the past, and/or how do you avoid pitfalls in the future?” we received a lot of good feedback. The two most frequently cited tips to avoid pitfalls were:
1. Maintaining an attitude of humility; and
2. Providing pre- and post-trip training / debriefing, such as requiring participants to read certain material to better prepare them for departure as well as providing opportunities to share their experiences upon return.

Summary
Overall, there seemed to be no reservation about the legitimacy and beneficialness of STM trips. All agreed that STM trips are legitimate and beneficial. The three most frequently cited reasons in support of STM trips are: 1) STM trips build relationships; 2) STM trips generate global awareness; and 3) STM trips foster life-change. As far as pitfalls are concerned, there are many. Yet, despite the many obstacles which can wreck missions, all the respondents felt that the benefits far outweighed the obstacles. The findings from our informal survey are consistent with the literature concerning the benefits and pitfalls of STM trips.

The Benefits and Pitfalls in the Literature
For every article which emphasized the benefits of STM trips, we can find an article which criticized them. The value of STM trips according to the Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions is that short-term missions play an integral role in the mobilization of global missions by bringing in fresh enthusiasm from the outside, accomplishing practical projects, and serves as an advocate for long-term mission service. Additionally, upon return from STM trips, participants are able to impact their local congregations via increasing awareness and encouraging others to be more active in what God is doing in the world. From a youth pastor’s perspective, Pastor Scott Meier believes that the primary goal of STM trips should be to help teens see Jesus Christ and his kingdom in a new way. Mission experiences, he says, give us a “broader view of the world in which we live” and in order for us to understand other people and their cultures, he continues, we need to immerse ourselves in their culture and live the way they live (Scott, 2001). According to Zehner, even critics of STM trips are cautiously optimistic about short-term missions potential, especially if they support the national leaders and develop healthy relationships (Zehner, 2006).

The pitfalls of STM trips are many such as – overburdening local missionaries; cross-cultural insensitivity; creating unhealthy co-dependent relationships; too goal-focused; unrealistically positive about effectiveness; and last but certainly not least, “Americans seemed unaware of the cultural influences on their own readings and perceptions of the Bible, the result being that they often taught ‘a different Jesus than the one we know.’” (Ibid.). Ouch, this is a painful thing to read.

So What?
At some point, we have to ask, so what? What does all this mean? Well, at a leadership level there is movement toward not only proclaiming the Good News but also demonstrating the Good News vis-à-vis acts of healing, acts of restoration, and acts of love, compassion, justice, and so on. Not only that, “there is good reason to believe that many seminarians, when they become pastors, will support, participate in, and supervise STM trips abroad and that this will be a core center of their engagement with cultural ‘others.’” (Priest, 2006). So there is this sense at the pastoral / leadership level that STM trips are beneficial for those who participate in them and they are a legitimate expression of mission and that STM trips will be a primary outlet for such an expression. However, even though STM trips are regarded as beneficial and legitimate, our informal survey shows that pastors / leaders feel that some guiding principles are in order to frame STM trip participation, such as including pre- and post-trip education and debriefing; cross-cultural training; as well as promoting and maintaining an attitude of humility (or what one pastor called a servant’s heart). These guiding principles can in effect help alleviate (if not eliminate) many problems which pose as pitfalls to living in mission.

On a more personal note, this author (JC) believes that while all the pastors / leaders we surveyed had some difficulty articulating what mission is, they all believed their congregations should be participating in STM trips as a way to create cross-cultural relationships, increase world issue awareness, and foster life-change. These claims, in my opinion, do fall under the broader missional umbrella whereby the church is called and sent by God to be God’s instrument in the in breaking of the reign of God.

Lastly, a word of patient endurance – perhaps the greatest challenge for today’s pastors lies in the differences between a pastor’s understanding of the gospel and church’s mission and the congregation’s view of the gospel and mission (Lee, 2008). Pastors should tread carefully through these missional waters while at the same time be patient with their parishioners as the come to internalize, understand and live out the reign of God in their own lives.