Focusing On What's Best (aka Is Short-Term Missions a Good Thing?)

I finished a book this evening called "Simple Church". It's premise is (appropriately enough) pretty simple: the most vibrant churches tend to be those that have a straight-forward disciple-making process and all aspects of the church's programming are aligned in such a way as to move people through this process. Many churches that are struggling are, by comparison, very complex and not unified around common goals. The authors make a point to say that a complex church that wishes to become more simple may have to ax popular programs that don't fit into a simplified disciple-making process.

This sort of change is hard to make but necessary because the reality is that people have limited time and churches have limited budgets and you want both commodities to be devoted to the most important things. Programs that are not contributing to the overall vision of the church, however good they may be, must make way for those that do.

This principle has application in all sorts of ways of course. There are many cases where we are forced to make choices not between what is good and bad but between what is good and what is best.

I've been thinking about that this week as it applies to missions -- particularly short-term missions. On Monday I met with the guy who started Cafe 1040 (check them out at www.cafe1040.com), who shared with me some research he'd come across recently. The research indicated that short-term mission trips have no discernible impact on a person's decision to enter long-term missionary service. This was shocking to hear. For many people, the primary reason for having short-term trips is that they mobilize people for long-term service. Indeed, a huge percentage of long-term missionaries took a short-term trip prior to committing to a longer term. But this is, apparently, not a causal relationship. It's no different to say that a huge percentage of long-term missionaries have received Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. Apparently most long-termers were moving in that direction before their first short-term trip.

So what does this mean for the church? Well, if short-term missions isn't mobilizing long-termers and can't effectively plant a church among a distinctly foreign culture (this is patently obvious to me, but may be a new thought to you), then what is its purpose? Well, my friend argued, it is for the maturation and spiritual growth of the person going. (I've long acknowledged this to be a result of short-term missions, but not the primary one). He then added that, if this is true, then short-term missions is a discipleship tool -- not a cross-cultural evangelism one. Therefore, it ought to be included in churches' discipleship or spiritual growth budget -- not the missions budget.

To me, this is a profound application of this thought -- and one that makes some sense to me. More and more of our churches' missions budgets are being devoted to sending short-termers from the church. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except when you realize that they are not raising more money to do this or adding more hours to their work weeks. They are shifting money from long-term missions into these programs and spending more of their time organizing and runnning these trips (leaving less time to care for the long-termers). The fact is, every dollar spent on short-term missions and every hour spent coordinating such trips is a dollar and an hour not spent on long-term efforts which bear FAR more fruit in terms of lost lives coming to faith. Whether this research is true or not (I have yet to see it in person), this is still something we ought to be thinking about.

Short-term missions is a good thing, don't get me wrong about that. Many people are positively impacted by them. But is the primary benefit to us or to those we mean to serve? And once we've answered that question, we must next ask, "Is it the best thing we can be doing with our time and money -- in light of our clear command to reach the nations in His Name?"

It's high time we take a good, hard look at the short-term missions movement and evaluate what it is, who it serves and what we're neglecting so that we can do it as much as we presently do.