While you are trying to get that Sesame Street Song out of your head, let me continue with my series. In a recent set of articles, Kurt Ver Beek of Calvin College and Robert J. Priest of Trinity Divinity School engage an email conversation based on Ver Beek’s findings that in general Short Term Missions projects (in the words of the first article) “don’t do much at all".
In short, while those who go on mission trips say that their lives are demonstrably changed by the experience, people surveyed after they return home from a trip, are by and large no more spiritually mature, financially supportive of missions, prayerful for missions or more likely to become career missionaries from the experience than if they hadn’t gone. Ver Beek’s study of 127 North Americans and 78 Honduran for whom the Americans built homes after the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 found “that neither group had experienced notable changes.”
Now that is not to say that the experiences weren’t significant to the people involved. Universally, people who take on these kinds of mission trips consider them extremely meaningful and even life-transforming. But the data bears out the reality that for most people a trip in and of itself doesn’t change them much at all. (Not even in terms of attitudes toward other cultures.)
So, then what does Ver Beek suggest? That STMs are harmful and that we should abandon them all together? No. (Indeed, he tested for that very concept and found that STMs are by and large benign and even appreciated by the people receiving ministry)
Well, then shouldn’t we change the way trips are run? Yes, but that’s not as important as we think. How about better orientation preparing people before they go? Everyone says that.
No, Ver Beek centers his suggestions on what churches do after people return from mission trips.
“STMs by themselves do not produce lasting change in North Americans, Hondurans, or Kenyans. I think they need to be part of a larger framework—especially after the experience—that can translate a one-week high into lasting changes for all involved.”
Ver Beek writes in another of the email exchanges:
“I'm beginning to see that short-term missions is like the rest of life. We go to a conference or a summer camp and leave excited to pray every day, exercise four times a week, and reorganize our closets. But then we get home to find we are behind at work, the kids have soccer practice, and we have to pay off the credit card. Our new-found motivation tapers off. Participants in short-term missions have a similar experience. Immediately after returning from a trip, participants intend to make changes in their life, but usually fall back into old routines.”
I have to say that while I am sobered by Ver Beek and Priest’s conversation but not surprised. For every person who tells me stories of how a mission trip changed their lives, I know of dozens where people have “lost the fire” so, so quickly. Even those of us from our Africa trip less than 12 weeks ago have already bemoaned that our day to day experience influences us more than even the power of the experience of our trip. As on one of my teammates said, “I really want to go back again, soon. I feel like I am losing all I gained.”
Ver Beek suggests that the key is structures that integrate the STM experience into a person’s and a community’s ongoing discipleship. But what kind of structures would that be?
That is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.
By the way…if you haven’t chimed in on my “Big Bird Goes on a Mission Trip” post, take a crack at it.
Recent Comments