Can You Go on a Short Term Mission Trip without Doing Harm?
The popularity of short term missions continues to increase year after year, and for many it has become a regular part of our Christian practice. And yet, there are so many ways in which our efforts can cause harm, not only to those with whom we visit, but even to the team that is making the effort. In this episode we focus on the reasons why short term mission trips can be harmful and question whether the practice should continue. We discuss examples of the ways this harm comes about and the American values and attitudes we inadvertently bring into short term missions. We end the episode with helpful tips for those who wish to continue to engage with short term missions, referencing the book When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, whose work we suggest should be a prerequisite for any short term team traveling domestically or internationally.
Discussion Questions:
Have you been on one or more short term mission trips? If so, what do you believe were the positive outcomes of the effort on those whom you were visiting, and what were the positive outcomes on you and your team?
Have you previously considered that short term mission trips might actually cause harm, both to those whom we visit, and even to those who are part of the team? As you listen to the episode, which potential harms stood out to you as either surprising or particularly concerning?
Do North American Christians tend to see poverty primarily through the lens of a lack of material goods? Is that because of our American tendency to define success by an abundance of material goods? What other lenses can we consider to better understand poverty, such as relational, spiritual, emotional or physical?
Do you agree that Americans place a high value on efforts to save or fix others? If so, where do these values come from? Can you identify movies, books, or other media that reinforce these tendencies? Is there something about our history that makes us particularly prone to export our way of life and our values to the rest of the world? Are there points where we conflate the way of Jesus with these particular American values?
Why do so many of our testimonies about our short term mission trips focus on what the trip did for us? Is this an indication of the primary beneficiary of the mission effort? Could it be false humility after we have spent so much and traveled so far in our effort to help others? Is it simply the template that we’ve heard people use, so we end up parroting it based on the examples we’ve heard?
As you think about the difference between long term missionaries and short term missionaries, what advantages do long term missions have that we cannot do through the short term model. What do we lose when we take our focus off long term missions in favor of short term missions? Does one fuel the other, or can one take away from the other? Can short term missions become a substitute that allows us to avoid the more difficult questions of whether we should commit to missions long term?
