I have been struggling with the effectiveness of the current evangelical practice of short-term mission trips. For one, career missionaries have told me (one personally, one to a group of missionaries-in-training) that short-term teams frequently “leave a mess”, a mess of sloppy cultural behavior that the more adapted missionary has to clean up in their wake. I will add that it is nearly impossible to assimilate into a culture in one week, so short-term teams moving through a village with their backpacks and Chacos and coolers frequently appear to be just a big western spectacle to the locals. The good news is preached, to be sure, but it carries a lot of baggage. 

Neither do I think that short-term missions is particularly cost-effective. Honestly, why do we spend $20,000 in airfare, lodging etc. for a team of 10 college students to go to a foreign country where they need translators to say anything except “hello” or “very good”, so that they can run a VBS and teach the kids Christian sing-a-longs for 5 days? Run a VBS near your city, and give $20,000 to feed and clothe the poor in the foreign country. 

Now, if it’s true that short-term teams are not the most effective way to communicate the gospel directly to locals, what is the purpose of short-term teams? In an extension of some previous thoughts, I am not suggesting that we abolish the practice, but I think the function of short-term missions should be re-envisioned.

My international short-term experience in Romania and the Philippines has shown me two things. First, the most lasting memories and spiritual growth are a result of relationships with fellow team members, such as team leaders, crew members, both Christian and non-Christian translators, and the host missionaries. The main impact does not derive from the village families whose homes you visit once or twice, but from the believing locals with whom you visit them. It was our young, soccer-playing Christian brothers with whom we wept at the end of our week, for we had all been encouraged by the other’s presence. “There are other believers, on the other side of the world, who believe just what I believe, hope in the same cross, and are enduring the same struggles.” This camaraderie produced a heart-penetrating encouragement that is often the most lingering and powerful result of a short-term mission trip.

Second, at the end of every mission trip debrief I have experienced, someone observes, to a room of nodding heads and “amen”s, that everything they did during that trip is exactly what they can and should be doing in their daily lives back home. My brother strongly affirmed this after nine months in Russia. Inevitably, the travelers realize that there is no dichotomy between “there” and “here” in how they should live their lives. It just takes them going overseas to bust the illusion. Great attention is being given these days to “missional living” and the fact that “you are a missionary wherever you are, whatever you do.” (Cf. the new vision shift of major missionary sending organization Crossworld.)

Here’s what I’m getting at: Short-term mission trips are training for missions. The other 51 weeks of the year are the mission field. (Not the other way around.)

Training is where a group of people with the same goal retreat to a place where they can focus and get a fresh perspective, so they can learn how to accomplish that goal. Training involves leaders casting a vision and guiding the practice of action steps needed to make it happen, in a controlled environment. At the end of training, the trainees are disbursed to go accomplish the tasks on their own, with less structured supervision.

That paragraph describes short-term missions. You retreat to another environment. You are surrounded by likeminded, passionate individuals, lead by visionary leaders. You practice skills together. Then you return home with your eyes opened to “what it’s like to live missionally.”

The other 51 weeks are where you are immersed in an environment where you are already enculturated among a people group. You have (unless you are a church worker) a natural network of friends and acquaintances who do not know Jesus. You can speak into people with real sincerity of relationship. Your actions can easily resemble those of career missionaries: establishing study groups and home groups that talk about the Bible, extending hospitality to coworkers and neighborhoods, developing relationships, and keeping your ears open for the hurt and the seeking as you go about in your community. In short, the ideal mission field.

So, in a real sense, what we have long considered the mission field is really a training session, and what we have considered an irrelevant missionless zone, 355 days of the year, is the field “ripe for harvest” that such training prepares us for. Short-term mission trips are good, but they are not the end, they are the means. They are the pre-game, the warm-up, the new job orientation. Until missional living gets deep into the DNA of our lifestyles, we will not see the gospel burgeon in our spheres of influence. 

There is often in the minds of Christians this idea that some people do ministry for a living, and some people do spiritually irrelevant work for a living, and then do ministry on weekends, like teaching Sunday School or going on a service project with church. This dichotomy is unfounded in scripture.

Crossworld’s Dale Losch makes the case that there’s a new wave in missions, a wave powered by lay missionaries, or Christians who carry on families, careers, and lives missionally without being full-time, support-funded, card-carrying professional missionaries. The new missionaries are a wave of Christians who realize that their vocations, their 9-5 jobs, are their sacred calling and mission field. The traditional way of doing missions is on the out, as Crossworld has, to their credit, realized. 

 Frankly, I’m glad. Why? Because I am an aspiring overseas missionary, but a traditional form of mission doesn’t  entirely sit right with me. For one, it’s strange when your buddies come home from work and they ask you what you do and you say, “Well, my 9-5 is…well…I get paid by rich westerners to strategize how to convert you.” For another, as Crossworld also points out, most of the countries in the 10-40 Window, the best target of future missionary efforts, are not friendly toward evangelists. You can’t come there on a missionary visa. But most countries are friendly toward westerners who can bring real societal and economic benefit. So I am unable to be a missionary without being a “tentmaker”. But I don’t think that such an occupation should be a cover, or a front, or a way to sneak in. I think that you have to really want to bring societal and economic improvement, to really care about the people’s culture and commit to becoming a member of it. A missionary should not be duplicitous. 

The globalization and modernization of the world means that we have to do life alongside people in unreached cultures, instead of treating them like projects or savages. It requires a new kind of international integration. And that’s the kind of life that sounds exciting to me – developing genuine, natural, real, deep friendships with people in other cultures. Being a friend to sinners, the only friend who bears Christ in his heart, perhaps. I can be the new kind of missionary. In fact, I plan to.