Churches Revamp Short-Term Mission Programs
Short-term overseas mission trips are expensive and not effective, some churches and critics say.
Some have even dubbed short-term overseas mission trips "vacations with a purpose" or "religious tourism."
In response, a growing number of churches and agencies that arrange short-term trips have taken the criticisms to heart and are changing their mission trip programs to deliver the results at a fraction of the cost and man-power.
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Youths at Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Va., no longer fly to far-off places to see and touch poverty-stricken communities. Instead, they lend a helping hand in the name of Jesus Christ to needy people in the United States.
The Fairfax Presbyterian youths go on mission trips to Welch, W.Va.; Lansing, Mich.; Philadelphia; and St. Petersburg, Fla., to renovate low-income homes, work with the homeless and volunteer at a free health clinic.
"It became too hard to justify the expense of flying the kids overseas," said Senior Pastor Henry G. Brinton, according to The Washington Post. "If you're going to paint a church, you can do that in Florida as easily as you can in Mexico."
Likewise Alan MacDonald, the pastor of global engagement at Fairfax Community Church, said his church is changing its mission trips "to get away from the vacation-with-a-purpose, large groups going somewhere to build something" mentality.
Instead, the church is sending smaller teams of experts to work with local partner churches. Information technology professionals fluent in Spanish, for example, are sent to the Dominican Republic to train church members in computer skills so they can get better jobs, MacDonald said.
It is estimated that millions of American Christians participate in short-term mission trips each year, with some 1.6 million believers contributing labor worth about $6 billion, according to Wycliffe Associates, a mission group that organizes short-term volunteers to support the work of Bible translators.
Dr. Ralph D. Winter, a preeminent missiologist who founded the U.S. Center for World Mission, is one of many critical of short-term mission trips but is hesitant to say that it is completely a bad idea.
Winter says although short-termers do not have much impact on missions, participants' personal faith can benefit from the experience.
However, he specifically criticizes churches that send every family in the congregation overseas for a two-week project. During his presentation last year at the Asian Society of Missiology conference in Bangkok, Winter said educating people about foreign lands was "marvelous idea" but "incredibly expensive" and "very questionable" in its contribution to the cause of missions.
It costs at least five times more overall to send a short-termer than a long-term missionary – financial support that Winter suggested would be better invested in a long-term missionary.
Furthermore, while it costs tens of thousands of dollars to fly a group of teens to foreign locations to spend a few days building homes or painting walls, the same tasks could be done for a few thousands by local groups.
Research has shown how ineffective and even absurd some short-term mission trips can be. A church in Mexico was painted six times by six different mission groups during one summer, according to The Washington Post. In Ecuador, a church was never used after it was built because locals said it was not needed.
More saddening is what happened in Monrovia, Liberia, where a school was built using the volunteers own standards instead of Liberian standards. During the monsoon season, the building collapsed and killed two children.
"If [the trips] are only about ourselves, then we're doing nothing more than using another culture ... to get some benefit at their expense," said the Rev. Roger Peterson, chairman of the Alliance for Excellence in Short-Term Mission. "I don't care what verse of the Bible you read, it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong."
Nearly 2 million short-termers leave the United States each year compared to 35,000 long-term missionaries.
Roger Peterson, president of STEM International, estimates that 50,000 churches in the United States are sending members out on mission trips each year.
