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                                              Pastors' Bytes

By Marshall Allen

I surveyed the wreckage in the Quarry, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where over 50,000 people barely survive in squalor and poverty. Hundreds of mothers, fathers and children scurried through the rubble that had been their tiny dwellings of particleboard and corrugated tin. Their homes, humble as they had been, were no more. Government squads had unexpectedly bulldozed the midnight before.

My wife and I had been coming to Mission Hope, a ministry to street kids in The Quarry, three times a week for about six months to tutor children. We had been in Kenya for almost a year, and frequently saw Kenyans living in inhuman conditions while suffering human-rights abuses.

Julius, one of the Kenyan leaders at Mission Hope, had a typically Kenyan gentleness about him, but his voice cracked as he shared his frustration toward his corrupt government. Because most slum-dwellers technically are squatters -- even though they do pay rent to slumlords -- the government didn’t hesitate to bulldoze the homes. Julius and the other Kenyans suffered their government’s abuse with quiet dignity. But my disgust was near the boiling point.

“How do your people endure this injustice, Julius?” I asked. “Why don’t Kenyans stand up for what’s right, maybe even revolt against the oppressors? This country needs a revolution!”

Julius, fortunately, was familiar with Americans and their know-it-all attitudes. He also considered me a friend. So despite the fact it was very unlike a Kenyan to do so, he explained his perspective on the situation.

“In Kenya, we are proud that we have peace,” Julius said sincerely. “Look at most of the countries of Africa - Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Zaire. They murder each other. The government can do what they want to us, but they won’t take away our peace.”

Humbled, my response was silence. Julius was right, of course. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I had some kind of activist attitude about the situation, while in reality if there ever was a Kenyan revolution, I’d be evacuated immediately. I had made my judgment through a distinctly American cultural lens. I thank God that Julius didn’t listen to me.

We lived in Kenya for a total of three years, during which I realized that the more I learned about Kenyan culture, the less I truly understood it. I had to be humble about my level of cross-cultural understanding.

No one disputes the fact missionaries must strive to be culturally sensitive. But if it’s difficult for a long-term missionary to understand culture, is it at all possible for a short-term missionary to succeed at it?

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Short-term mission trips -- one-week to three-month projects, also called volunteer missions -- are at an all time high. No one knows how many short-term missionaries go out from the United States every year, but the number is in the hundreds of thousands.

“The only word I know to quantify it is exponential,” says former mission executive Bill O’Brien, now director of the Global Center at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “If you were to graph it, it wouldn’t even be a gradual shot upward, it’s almost a straight shot up. … People want to love Christ, serve Christ. They’re sacrificing their vacation time, and this is positive.”

Sherwood Lingenfelter, dean of School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., says the declining number of career missionaries and the increase in short-term volunteers is “the biggest change in missions in America.” He points to the wealth of U.S. churches and technological advances in travel and communications as factors in the increase of volunteers.

No doubt these volunteer trips have great potential for good if well executed. But many are not. They place the priority on the needs of the missionary, not the concerns of the indigenous people. As a result, many are culturally insensitive and missiologically ineffective.

If the shift to short-term missions is significant, it may be the first mission movement in church history that is based largely on the needs of the missionary.

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The goal of biblical missions is to evangelize the world and build disciples of Christ. But frequently short-term mission projects are billed as tools for personal growth.

"It will change both you and your church," says the Web site for Adventures in Missions, which has taken more than 30,000 youth and adults overseas for short-term mission trips in its 12-year history. "It will deeply enrich your faith and drive home the teachings of Christ."

"Strengthen your family bond by serving on the mission field for a week. This is a vacation that will change your lives and help you build relationships and create memories that will last a lifetime, and beyond."

AIM doesn’t say that its only priority on mission trips is the life change of missionaries, but its literature emphasizes maturation of the missionary as a selling point.

Robert Bland, director of Teen Missions International, is much more blunt about it. “We tell our people who are leading our teams that we’re building kids, not buildings,” says Bland. “The purpose isn’t just what we’ll do for these people, but what these people will do for us."

"There is not a single purpose in missionary work…but to us this is the first purpose.”

“That says something about our therapeutic culture,” says Lingenfelter. “Our culture focuses a lot on the healing of ourselves, as opposed to the healing of others. I guess too much self-reflection ultimately takes us in a different direction from the challenge that Jesus gives us - to take up our crosses and follow him.”

It’s obvious that missionaries will be changed through cross-cultural service, but life change should a byproduct of the trip, not the goal of the enterprise, says Bill O'Brien. “If your primary goal is to build your people, then that’s a different agenda than missions.”

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Sean Lambert of Youth With a Mission says he’s seen and heard of plenty of trips that became culturally irrelevant because they were more focused on missionary needs.

“I talked to the director of World Vision in Mexico City and he said, ‘My church gets painted once a year whether it needs it or not.’ … Sometimes a youth leader will say to me, ‘My junior highers want to paint,’ and that’s the fourth time a particular fence has been painted this year. But Mexican culture is very affirming, so they won’t say anything.”

It could be called benevolent colonialism, Americans entering a foreign culture and imposing unneeded good. Usually the motives of short-term missionaries are pure -- they want to serve and be effective in ministry -- but it’s nearly impossible for outsiders to enter a foreign culture and determine what people need.

Part of the problem, O’Brien says, is that people are full of zeal but lack proper training. Missionaries may have a good experience in their own eyes, he says, but the trip hasn’t been factored into an overall strategy and there’s not ownership on the part of all parties. Such mistakes demonstrate the need for solid leaders in missions, he says.

“Right now we have a lot of pastors and mission leaders who have proof-texted themselves into missions involvement without an adequate understanding of the whole purpose of the mission of God as seen in the whole of Scriptures.”

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John and Amy Derrick, who coordinate mission volunteers for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, have learned that listening to the locals and putting their needs first is crucial to a trip's success.

Once, while serving in Canada, they took a trip to Japan to plan future short-term church-planting initiatives with Japanese Christians. The Derricks' education began in their first meeting, which lasted five hours and seemed to accomplish nothing.

“Our first meetings were all about drinking tea, not talking about partnership,” says John. He said it was hard for him to be relational with the Japanese Christians when his agenda was to talk about partnership. He consciously had to avoid the topic of ministry.

“They were fearful because of bad experiences in the past of Westerners saying, ‘We know what you need,’” explains Amy. “The point of our trip was to drink enough tea to ask, ‘How can we help you?’”

The help Amy expected to give the Japanese wasn’t the help they wanted, she recalls. She had thought the Canadian team would come to Japan and lead Bible studies and ministry-training sessions. But the Japanese had a different plan. When the Derricks' team arrived in the summer of 2000, they didn’t zoom in with a prepackaged evangelism presentation or building project. They did just what the Japanese had asked them to do - they hung out.

“They just wanted us to come be with them,” says Amy. “Come to flower-arranging classes, visit senior citizen homes, play with the children. It was more about living with people, staying in homes. They wanted our presence to be an impact.”

“A big part of the trip was just being there and having a cross-cultural exchange,” says John. “We were the first Westerners that many of them had seen before, so it was a draw to hold something at the church. The big emphasis was to be there to support their indigenous work and enhance their profile within their community.”

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Joel Vestal, founder and director of ServLife, a mission organization committed to building global community among Christians, agrees with the Derricks that the most successful short-term mission trips support ongoing indigenous work.

His group sponsors short-term trips made up of four or five people who try to learn how they best can serve an indigenous church. The missionaries devise a plan, under the leadership of local Christians, to help the indigenous church with its ministry. Then they become advocates for completing the plan after returning home.

Vestal says that contributing to the ongoing ministry of local Christians has advantages. “Those people are there and they’re not going anywhere,” says Vestal. “If a civil war breaks out, they’re not coming back to America."

Cooperating with existing ministries also eliminates some of the issues of paternalism and the exportation of Western culture. But it requires building legitimate partnerships with local Christians. To do that, Americans have to give up control of a mission project and assume the role of humble servant.

“It begins with listening and learning, as opposed to coming in with all the answers,” says Vestal.

“We can learn what faith is, and that the gospel and consumerism are not mixed everywhere in the world. We also can learn that God is more concerned with us being faithful than successful. Our whole North American gauge of success in ministry is in terms of numbers and budget. But God’s concerned that we’re faithful to him.”

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Changing the mission mindset of American Christians will be no easy task.

“We have so long perceived ourselves as the bastion of mission-sending, the great North American force going out,” says Bill O’Brien. “And even where we have established partnership, it’s often just a buzzword. In most cases we still have 51 percent of the money and position.”

Mutual partnership between Western and non-Western Christians would turn the traditional short-term mission paradigm on its head. Considering that Christianity is thriving outside the Western world and shrinking in the West, partnership could mean that Western churches begin receiving mission teams, not just sending them.

For instance, Christians from Africa and Asia could teach American Christians how to live faithfully in a pluralistic society without becoming syncretistic.

Believers from countries that persecute Christians could help American Christians learn how to handle increasing intolerance toward believers here.

Followers of Christ from impoverished countries could help American Christians understand the biblical perspective on money and happiness.

Lingenfelter and O’Brien agree short-term missions are here to stay and may present a fantastic opportunity to reach the world for Christ. O’Brien is encouraged by the zeal behind the movement, even if it might result in some cultural conflict.

“I’d much rather try to guide a missile than resurrect a corpse,” says O’Brien. 

“Just the fact that there are so many people who are willing to do missions is a sign of hope that the church isn’t dead.

“But that reality calls for a much more mature leadership, meaning leaders who understand the implications of missions at home and abroad.”

Christians who are taking and leading short-term trips must prayerfully evaluate their motives and level of expertise. It’s time to demonstrate the humility and patience to strengthen the global church by fulfilling the Great Commission through mutually beneficial long-term relationships.

No longer can short-term missions be relegated to the role of a quick-fix spiritual Cortisone shot - just enough to inspire a missionary to better living but rarely a cure for a world that’s dying for new life in Christ.

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