Who Can Go On Short Term Missions

For years Mission Discovery has offered a Pre-Field Orientation to prepare group leaders for the best possible "team experience" on the mission field. The PFO breaks down to a model of 6 ideas. To have a team arrive on the field as learners, servants, and story tellers. Focus is given to considering three more areas of preparedness: before the project, during the project and after. Most of the deep thinkers would agree that the above mentioned six elements are the gist of preparing a team.

I am beginning to be bothered though by the tremendous weight placed on STMs to produce "long term missionaries," and students who return to serve their community back home. Another study laid monetary giving as a proper measure of the productive short term mission experience. Great goals, but a one or two week short term mission project is, after all, one component in the youth leader's discipleship of his students. I have long believed that the short term mission experience has no similarities to the long term work of a missionary on the field. Short term missions, more than likely produces...more short term missionaries. The work of a missionary is hard, methodical, sometimes filled with long gaps of apparent lack of progress, study, etc. I have always believed that the goal of a short term mission experience is to produce "World Christians", not vocational Christian workers.

34 years ago I was a youth pastor. One night after youth group a parent walked in my office just to chat. "You must have a long term view of these young people you work with?" he said. "You have to imagine them walking into your office at age 34 and saying 'thank you for where you led me.'

That was one of those moments that helped shape my view of what I was doing. I began to develop memories around teaching. I looked for anything I could do to break the routine of "youth group" on the youth floor.

I got really excited about our mission project preparation because the material we used prepared a student for life, not just "mission trip". These were life skills. Being able to tell the story of what God is doing and has done in you life or Story Telling is a daily part of my life, and can also be for the middle schooler who learned how to tell his story before his mission project to Mexico.

I thought differently about the results of our mission project experience. What if a short term mission project was the start of someone working in his local government to effect change for the Kingdom's sake there? What if a short term mission project led a student to break up with his girl friend? What if a short term mission project helped a student choose how he looked at future purchases? It seemed to me that these were actually the very things that "missionaries" where hoping for from those they worked with in foreign lands. At our churches mission conferences missionaries talked about their disciples becoming high ranking officials, or mail men who could spread the gospel delivering letters, or customs officials.

Acts 1:8 offers the reader the opportunity to be a "witness." A witness is someone who sees an event and reports it. The scripture indicates that the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. This is an open invitation to everyone. I can't believe I am saying this, but it is an open invitation to the prepared and the unprepared. Either who see Him will have accomplished Jesus simple call, "You WILL be my witnesses."

Remember it is not short term mission project that lead participants to radical change, it is an encounter with God that takes the willing heart to the next most difficult journey.