Why Short Term Missions Matter

By Todd Baucum, D.Min.
First Presbyterian Church, Enterprise, AL PCA

Constructing bars for Tequila sippers in Mexico is not what a group of teenagers from north of the border had in mind when they went with their church on a mission trip. I can still remember my college professor telling us in our missions class how lots of church building projects in Latin America end up not as churches but eventually fall into the hands of unscrupulous businessmen selling their liquor or other contraband. My professor, I believe, was engaging in a bit of dramatic hyperbole, but his sentiment towards youth dominated mission trips was well noted. This thought has stayed on my mind over the years as I have been on short term mission trips. Now decades later, as a pastor and ceaseless promoter of overseas missions in the congregations I’ve served, I have come to believe that short terms missions is worth doing. Of course it is also worth doing well. There is, to be sure, much that is wrong with the thousands of trips that leave U.S. airports to exotic locations around the world. Mission trips done badly are a disgrace to the Church and a disservice to career missionaries who must mop up afterwards. But bad trips and poorly planned STM’s are not reasons to judge them all as hurtful or bad stewardship of limited funds. I believe this so strongly, that it was the basis of my doctoral dissertation. We ought not to be laying concrete blocks for worldly pursuits, nor should we be bringing spoiled teens into the developing world, for a taste of how good they really have it back home. There is much to avoid in this ministry that like anything else in American Christianity where the true focus can be lost. Let us not throw out the baby with the bath water of distasteful examples of the American, brick laying, “get me to Jamaica” adolescent.
Here are few of my reflections that I glean from the work I did in completing my doctorate several years ago. Why are Short term Missions valuable? I can sum it up in four reasons.
Reason One: It Enlarges Your View of the World.
Even a person who is well read and educated can benefit from traveling to another culture to be challenged by someone else’s way of life and view of doing things. Anthropologists define culture as that which filters everything we do, think, and perceive about life. It is a bit like looking at something through a lens, and saying the lens is what one means by culture. We don’t see culture; it is just something we see through without knowing it. In a sense, culture is more like the cornea on the eyeball, rather than spectacles or contacts. We know we put contacts on and at night remove them, even if at times we don’t think about wearing them. So culture is more a part of our non-rational selves, most of us don’t ever assume anything else. Once we are put into a different culture than our own, we either clam up with self-righteous fortitude and judge all failures to live up to our culture’s standards of thinking, doing and living, or we adjust, learn and grow with another’s point of view – of seeing things. In the latter, we begin to appreciate the differences in another culture and how one culture is not superior but only different. This is not to say there is no room for judgment, there are weaknesses and strengths in all cultures. The Christian is one who must see how the Gospel is addressing every culture, even one’s own in light of the Lordship of Christ. Engagement in another culture can give a Christian the tools to do this sort of self-evaluation in a more tacit manner, than merely reading the National Geographic.

Reason Two: It Enlarges Your World-View

Secondly, a short term mission trip can provide a catalyst to rethinking your own faith and life views. In this way, a missions trip can be thought of a “cultural apologetics” at a slant. Building upon the thinking of the missionary theologian, Lesslie Newbigin, short term missions can provide a means of reverse missions, allowing preconceived ideas about what Christianity is all about to be tested in the laboratory of biblical thinking without cultural bias. In a sense it is an impossible task, because culture is like our own skin, but it is possible to critically think about the Gospel apart from our cultural bias. Indeed it is necessary to know where one stands in light of a complex world of cultures, religions and values. The Christian under the call to be obedient to Christ in all of life is to view one’s work, play, politics, and values from the filter of the Bible. Most Christians, if I can judge by my experience as a pastor, live with their grid calibrated along the lines of most unbelievers, reading the same books, watching the same movies and taking in the same viewpoints with little ability to filter these competing views through a biblical grid of truth. Too often we assume the filters of our own culture, even at times baptizing our own as “Christian”. But, it is possible with the help of Christians of another culture to think more “biblically” about our own culture, especially in those contexts where believers are living in a culture that is hostile to the Christian faith. When I talk to a Christian brother who lives in a Muslim part of Africa and faces ongoing threats to his life, I find a fresh understanding and perspective that corrects much of my own shallow discipleship and assumptions. Talk to a Christian in a land where food and good theology is rare and never taken for granted and you will get a sick feeling in your gut the next time you walk into a Christian bookstore in our country. Rub shoulders with poor humble saints in makeshift churches worshiping God and you will see your world and your faith in a different light. One can then begin to read the Bible in a different light as well. One begins to see, as Newbigin suggested, we in the postmodern West need the Gospel again.

Third Reason: It Makes Good Financial Sense

Perhaps this is the most controversial reason. Just look at the price tag of a mission trip, with airfares, lodging and food versus the vast need of resources in other countries, and it seems this is a no brainer. Let’s redirect this money for something far more necessary. But, if you look at this or any other ministry from this type of cost analysis then we could justify anything and dismiss most. It would seem that those who promote the view that this is bad stewardship need to take stock on how this sort of argument can be applied to any superfluous spending in their lives. Do any of them take a vacation? What is the amount of their monthly budget spent on entertainment or other selfish indulgences? No Christian should buy beer, cigars or play golf, if one wants to be consistent with this line of argument. I concede that many short term trips done badly should not be spending the moolah to underwrite their sophomoric adventures. There is waste that cannot be justified by any standard. But, we are not austere desert monks, nor are most Presbyterians I know ready to give up their vacations, or what they spend going to see their favorite sports team. The funds we use for our recreational reprieves can give us rest and respite from our daily grind, but money spent on a mission trip adds value to others and impact on the soul. I’ve heard John Piper indicate it was his desire that every member of his church go on at least one mission trip. That may be unrealistic in a practical sense, but it conveys the importance of connecting the Body of Christ here in North America with the world wide witness of the “catholic” Church and personal obedience to the Great Commission. It is proven that congregations that are involved in short term missions are also more giving to missions and have a passion for the world. The value of experiencing true Christian community in another culture with the language barrier, social barrier and racial barrier dissolved by the mystery of Christ’s Body and the presence of the Holy Spirit binding us into one is absolutely priceless.

Fourth Reason: Short Term Missions is Biblical
It may seem I have saved the high caliber fire for the last. The big gun is now drawn and there is little defense once the Bible is mentioned. How can one ever imagine given the time and place the early church lived as the outcast of the Roman Empire, that elders at Jerusalem would be sending hordes of teens on weeklong excursions to Cyprus or beyond? Forget the bad examples, and consider the missionary efforts of early Church. The third letter of the Apostle John can be called the forgotten epistle, as we are apt to slip over it so easily. The core of the message is really a biblical call to support the “adelphia” or brothers and sisters involved in itinerate ministries across the known world. Gauis was a man who knew the value of supporting this Gospel cause with hospitality and with monetary support so as “to send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God” (3 John 6). Consider even the missionary travels of the apostles and their companions. Paul stayed three years at Ephesus, which was the longest he spent anywhere, for his multiple long journeys across the Roman Empire, can be deemed in a sense “short term” mission projects. Missiologists are still puzzled at Paul’s method of church planting, but what is known is that this pattern of high mobility and cross fertilization of Christian witness, from soldiers, slaves to ordinary saints in the dispersia, the early church was constantly “going into the world” as a natural consequence of Roman life and multicultural exchange. Roman roads, a common tongue, and a common currency made it all possible. The world of the New Testament was like our world highly mobile. True their world was smaller geographically, but with our wide global expanse and the easy and affordable travel of today, our world is much smaller. We, more than any other generation have less excuse to know and to share in this global expansion of the Kingdom of Christ our Savior. Moreover, we have a biblical mandate and a biblical example to follow as we give our support to short term missions.

ResourcesPeterson, Roger and Timothy Peterson. Is Short-Term Mission Really Worth the Time and Money? Results of STEM Short-Term Mission Research. Minneapolis: STEM Press. 2nd Ed. 1991.
Newbigin, Lesslie. Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1986.
Allen, Roland. Missionary Methods: St. Paul or Ours? Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1962.