This summer, hundreds of thousands of people will embark on short-term mission trips. Teams will crisscross the world in a matter of hours—an unimaginable opportunity even seventy years ago.

The rise of short-term missions (STMs) has left church leaders, missionaries, and organizations asking important questions about trips to low-income communities:

How well are we stewarding the billions of dollars invested in STMs each year? What are the potential positive and negative effects of STMs?

To address these questions, Chalmers’ Community Development specialist, Steve Corbett, and Chalmers’ Founder and President, Brian Fikkert, wrote Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions. They designed the project to equip teams to bless the communities they visit, avoid doing unintended harm, and translate participants’ experiences into lasting change.

Moving toward effective STMs involves reframing the purpose of our trips, shifting away from an emphasis on directly engaging in poverty alleviation. Poverty alleviation is typically a long-term process, not something that can be broken down into ten-day pieces and projects. Poverty is rooted in systems, choices, and relationships that reach much deeper than a shortage of things like food, housing, or clothing. As a result, in the vast majority of cases, short-term trips are not appropriate or effective vehicles for engaging in poverty alleviation.

We need a different definition of what “success” looks like for short-term trips to materially poor communities.

In fact, rather than focusing on the trip itself as the primary element of success, we need to deliberately situate short-term visits as one piece of a larger undertaking. When properly designed, short-term trips are an opportunity to learn from, encourage, and fellowship with believers in the context of long-term engagement with God’s work, focusing on understanding His body and our role in it more fully.

What would this type of trip look like? Consider the following clip from the Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions video sessions:

 

 

As you reflect on what reforming short-term trips might mean in your context, consider the following principles:

Be Intentional with Training: The Holy Spirit is the ultimate author of change, and He has used short-term trips to change many participants’ lives. That is a beautiful thing. But we should be intentional about supporting the change process through our approaches. Quality pre- and post-trip training can guide participants as they craft healthy expectations for their visit, as they learn how to effectively bless the people they meet, and as they consider their role in God’s work in the world.

Prioritize Time for Learning, Fellowship, and Encouragement: We should live life alongside our brothers and sisters while on trips, learning from their experiences, worshipping with them, and spending time with local leaders. Instead of focusing on projects or tasks, we should explore how God is working and how the Church is already engaged in loving its neighbors.

Engage for the Long Haul: What happens after participants return home is typically the biggest factor in whether a trip was “worth it.” We need to communicate to participants that they have a responsibility to steward the visit well, particularly in light of the financial resources invested in the trip. Debrief meetings provide time to reflect on the trip and set concrete, realistic goals for how participants can convert the experience into lasting engagement in their own communities and around the world.

When done well, a short-term trip itself is just one piece of a broader, long-term journey of learning and action. Through this type of transformation, the local body of Christ—on both sides of the short-term trip equation—can share the hope of Jesus Christ’s work more effectively.

 

The above article is adapted from Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert (Moody Publishers.)