Note: This article is adapted from a talk presented at the “Being There: Short-term Mission and Human Need” international conference at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, July 30-August 1, 2009. You can also watch Eric give this talk at the conference.
I hated short-term missions!
As a young, inner-city African-American male from a single parent home, with a working knowledge of the welfare system, I saw short-term missionaries as doing more damage in my community with their “drive-by’s” than the gun-toting gang-bangers ever inflected with their own version of this practice. I felt a sense of powerlessness as I watched yet another group of white kids (at least that’s how I remember it now) burst from their new vans every summer to “save” me, and others who looked like me, again that year.
Now I love short-term missions!
I love the potential short-term missions work has for kingdom restoration when it realizes the power it has to influence church culture. I love when it sees the part it can play building up a generation of people who are aware of their ability to love Christ by selflessly loving others without ever stepping foot inside a bus, plane, van, or car. I love when it realizes its role in engaging the church to be the missional body of Christ, and to be that missional body of Christ the fifty-one other weeks of the year it is not paying money to be on a trip.
At YouthWorks, our missions experiences occur exclusively among economically and socially oppressed people: the materially poor. As an employee of this organization, I pay my mortgage, eat and survive through the facilitation of service in those communities; therefore, it is my responsibility to struggle against the poverty that exists there. It is my responsibility to fight the economic conditions, which we introduce to thousands of Christians every year, so that they may create life-change for their students and then maybe those communities too.
If I am not working to reverse those conditions, I am at risk of becoming comfortable or complacent with poverty and potentially dependent upon its very existence. This puts me dangerously close to becoming seen as someone who is “pimpin’ the poor” in the name of ministry. The message a community receives from me could sound like, “Hey thanks for letting us serve here this summer, hope you’re poor again next year so we can sell another trip.” Because my ministry is exclusively in materially impoverished communities, I have a responsibility to work against that poverty.
Fighting against the oppression which creates poverty will be a lifelong and difficult journey for any church or mission organization. Here are some ideas for moving forward in the struggle against poverty while we serve host communities with integrity:
- Design interactions that reverse false perceptions the teams may have of the host communities, reducing the tendency to ignore the living conditions of the host.
- Design interactions that allow community members to speak into and contribute to the lives of the mission teams that reverse a perception among the host that they are only recipients.
- Create jobs that provide livable wages for host community members.
- Improve the educational systems to help give children more chances for success.
- Help host community members to own their own homes, so that they can create and pass down wealth to their children too.
- Use the mission agency’s influence to engage their participants in an ongoing struggle against poverty and oppression that will continue after they leave your realm of influence.
Because every YouthWorks weeklong trip allows us to influence our participants for 71 waking hours (more than most pastors have in a year), we decided to focus on the latter option for now.
The 1K Challenge and REVERB Magazine
In the summer of 2007 we set out to try a few new things that we thought would help people go home and continue the mission. We wanted to be clear about a value we all held, that the team should go home and “do” something beyond a once-a-year adventure. We began writing into our programming the words, “Go home and do something,” integrated this message into our theme and programming elements, and asked our staff to say it out loud as well.
Follow-up is one of the weakest links of the short-term missions industry, and we knew we needed to try to give our participants something tangible to take home as an attempt at follow-up. We published a post-trip magazine called Reverb, which our staff gave to every participant at the end of his or her service week. The magazine included games for the van, as well as a couple of articles written by YouthWorks staff about reentry and serving at home. It also included two weeks of devotionals, a few ads and an entire page devoted to an idea called the 1K Challenge.
The 1K Challenge asked our participants to create a service opportunity geared toward the people in need in their own communities. We asked them to put a plan together for that opportunity and submit it to YouthWorks as a grant proposal. YouthWorks offered ten $1,000 grants to youth groups who best fit our 1K Challenge criteria.
Reverb went out and by September of year one (fall 2007) we received 45 applications and awarded ten grants for $1000 each. In the second year (fall 2008) we received 36 applications and awarded nine grants for $1000 each. The projects have included community cleaning, home repair, a drop-in center for single parents, and a laundry service for people who can’t make it to the Laundromat.
I realized something good was happening after hearing from a woman I had met at a conference in the spring of 2008. When I mentioned that I worked for YouthWorks, she immediately began telling me about the youth from her congregation who had been on a trip with us the previous summer and how excited they were when they got back. She explained how the group had created three different service crews and how she and her husband were each on a separate crew, and loved it. This group had engaged their entire congregation in their project, not just the youth group, and it was having an impact.
The most interesting part of her report was how nervous the pastor had been about the amount of service they were involved in leading to a reduction in tithes to the church. She told me that their church’s giving had actually gone up in the year since the group had returned from the trip. I handed her a copy of the new Reverb magazine and pointed out her group in its pages, and left feeling amazed at the potential of missions if more congregations made space for groups who wanted to be different.
Many of the congregations who have received the 1K Challenge grant are still serving in one way or another in their community. One of my top three favorite stories from the past five years at YouthWorks is the story about a group that didn’t come back for another trip with us. After applying and being denied for a 1K grant, the youth of this congregation asked the most beautiful question a youth group could ask: “Do we need to do a missions trip next summer? Can’t we just carry out the project we designed here at home?” The wise youth ministry leader answered, “Sure.” This group truly got it. They had work do in their own backyard and didn’t have to pay someone to do it elsewhere. I hope more churches catch on to this realization.
What if more of the people who serve with us each year discovered they had missions taking place right outside their church every day? What if we were excited about people not coming back for another mission trip in 12 months, but rather followed the Holy Spirit’s leading in their own community and in their own congregations to bind the broken hearted, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and were continuing the restoration work we all desperately need? What if we took the role of the Good Samaritan to the next level, and truly banded together to love our neighbors?
On the one hand, we are called to play the “Good Samaritan” on life’s roadside; but this will only be an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. 1
What if short-term missions could inspire the church to look at and transform their own Jericho road, so that women, men, and children would no longer suffer the beatings that happen along that road? I believe that those of us who influence the church could be a part of building a road suitable for all to walk on during our journey toward him.
Read more stories from churches who responded to the 1k Challenge on our Deep Justice Stories page.
Listen to an interview with Eric by Kara Powell.
- An excerpt from “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Concerned Clergy and Laity at Riverside Church in New York City [↩]
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12 Responses to “Short-Term Missions and Missional Youth Ministry”
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February 1st, 2010 at 11:48 am
[...] Baptist Church of Keene February 1, 2010Eric IversonNote: As described in the article “Short-Term Missions and Missional Youth Ministry,” here is the story of one church who applied to the 1k Challenge grant:A group of two adults [...]
February 1st, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Iverson. Love it. You are writing what I am thinking. Now granted I’m the white kid getting out of the van but I also believe that we have a ton to teach us white kids about service and looking at the world through a different lens. I don’t have all the answers or even a few of them so I’m relying on you to teach it. Thanks for writing this.
February 1st, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Thank You Dr. Rood,
I am confident in your continuing to find and dig for answers; I know that prefix ain’t easy to come by. You might be a white kid getting out of the van (and by the way there are globally way more non-white people serving in missions than white folks now) but race is less of a factor than class, and you are getting out of the van for a whole other set of reasons than what I have seen in my ‘hood in the past.
I think that if you go to serve those on the margins, which by the way is where Jesus chose to reside, you will learn and grow, and see Jesus there among those you chose to serve. Which, because you have power- as indicated by your mobility- and ability to pay to go- your going will lead to action that will hopefully reduce the need for going in the first place.
So, lets say that you would spend $2,000 to go and serve on a hypothetical missions trip to Haiti. I don’t know what you are going to do on this trip to Haiti, and I don’t know if your going is going to make a very substantial dent in reducing the problems faced by Haitians, I would venture to guess that the $2,000 you might spend to go, would go a long way to folks in Haiti who are building wells so that people can get water. When you compare you serving to people having water for a long time, it seems that you just sending the cash is a better idea.
BUT, lets say you would go, and if you did I do know that you are going to get wrecked by what you see, and the suffering you have seen on tv will become your problem in a big way. It might influence how you do youth ministry, how you talk to your kids, how you make decisions on how you spend your money, how you confront folks in Dallas on how they spend their money, that all might have an impact on systemic problems faced by Haitians, not the symptoms we see now brought to the surface by an earthquake. Or say you are so messed up that you encourage your congregation to send $100,000 to people doing work there so that they can build wells for water or what ever else that money can go for. Then your $2,000 you spent on a trip to serve for a few days would have a great ROI for the people you went to serve. Your trip would have assisted in getting a message trough to you, who like me are in the center of society, which by the way is the place Jesus did not reside, but was the exact segment of society he delivered his message of change to.
I am excited to learn from you the message you get from the Jesus who is residing in Haiti as he ministers to you as you serve Him there.
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:54 am
Eric,
Thanks! Great article and comments above!! I am one of the students from David Wesley’s STM class at Nazarene Seminary that skyped with you a few weeks back.
What you said that night as well as what’s in the article I think speaks to the tension that I feel in regards to the whole STM movement. I love the example you give in the dialogue about Haiti….what is really crucial is allowing the STM experience to really get ahold of us, not just viewing it as another passport stamp.
While I was one of the white kids getting out of the van in the 90′s, it was more like a beat-up 1978 Ford Econoline with 373,000 miles on it! What I am saying is that the stewardship issue in STM is a key for me. I don’t know if we will ever be able to truly justify the way our $ is used as Christian in this way, but if we let what we experience have a piece of us amazing things can still happen.
Thanks for sharing with us!
Darin Goodwin
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Three cheers to Eric and the Youthworks staff for help to extend peoples vision for what is called “short term” missions. Indeed the history of short termers has not always been the spreading of “Good News” in under resourced neighborhoods as Eric described his experience as a kid in a tergeted community, in fact we may win a battle and lose the war on poverty if we fail to engage everyone as coproducers in building the kingdom of God.
Thanks Eric for your honesty and the vision you and Youthworks hold out, and I think it is important to remember if it is more blessed to give than to recieve the greatest gift we can give anyone is the chance for them to give rather than maintaining their roles as recipients.
How can a locate a copy of reverb?
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Hey Darin,
Thanks for the feedback. I remember spending a lot of energy and time complaining about my perception of STM and it’s issues. I truly believe the Church and it leaders have the ability to improve how we do this type of Mission each year. I also believe that when the Church sees Mission as something they are engaged in all the time it will begin to eliminate the need for organizations who provide the type of service to the Church that we do.
My hope is that young leaders like you will continue to bring your congregation into it’s mission on a daily basis, and help organizations like YouthWorks to continue to create reciprocal benefits within the STM field.
I don’t know the answers to the stewardship question either, but do know there are great ways to prepare for and maximize the impact on your students. I think FYI’s “Deep Justice Journeys” curriculum and Christianity Today’s “Round Trip” curriculum are some of the best prep tools that I have seen out there. Prep and planning is one great step to becoming better stewards of the resources required for us to serve.
February 2nd, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Hey Ruston,
Thanks for the undeserved complements, but I must say that I have been on a journey with some amazing people over the past five years, and have been privileged to work with an amazing group of people who are willing to get their hands dirty in the process of providing impact mission experiences for our participants. Kara Powell, Dave Livermore, Rick Richardson, Kurt VerBeek, Noel Becchetti, Robert Priest, and Terry Linehart, have been among some of my heroes/shero and Daryl Nuss at NNYM has done a great job of bringing people involved in STM together to improve what we do. I love the linking of arms to improve i have seen within STM community, and how there has been a serious trend toward improvement of the way we all create Missional experiences.
Point is YouthWorks has been one among many that are improving our serve over the years. Friends at Group Workcamps, Pittsburgh Project, Mission Year, CSM, Amor, Leader Treks, along with the academic community are all working hard to make these experiences the best possible for all involved.
Point is Ruston; there are a lot of amazing believers working to shine glory back to God as we humble ourselves in the service of his beautiful bride.
February 4th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Eric,
Great article and great insight. Again, I’m appreciative of your perspective, your creativity and your humor. You raise some necessary questions for STM, questions that can only be raised by someone from your vantage point as a resident, as a STM leader, etc.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how, on the worst days, things like STM actually serves to dehumanize everyone. Those ‘being served’ are viewed through a lens, not as people or as image bearers of God, but only as containers meant to catch my charity. On the other side, I do not get viewed as a person, as one made by the Almighty, but rather only as living wallet meant to be opened and to distribute money. All of this taking place with the best of intentions in mind.
Eric, thanks for pushing through good intentions into something far richer.
See you in Chicago.
-watson
February 6th, 2010 at 11:58 am
I really like this article, Eric, and all the questions that you raise.
So if we are able to channel that STM service into ongoing local mission (or a $100,000 donation later on) does that answer your critiques? Or do youth mission teams still inflict as much damage as the other drive-bys you experienced as a youth?
Mission trips have always been great experiences for my students, and they’ve always been partnered with ongoing local service, and those experiences have lead many of them toward a life of service and compassion. But I still have this gut feeling that some of what i’m doing is exploiting poor people for the sake of building my ministry. And if it really is all about building a commitment to local mission, isn’t there a way to do that without exploiting someone who lives 1000 miles away?
You couldn’t have said it better “I hope you are still poor next year so we can sell another trip next year.”
February 8th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Thanks for the input Jeremy Watson,
For me the going home part is just a start. But it is a good start. I there are tons of thing I wish we were doing better, but I got sick of complaining about STM and deiced to try to help to change it for the better. The church is going to do mission, and sometimes with an agency, regardless of the quality of the service provided.
I have been encouraged by some community folks that I have talked to who have said that they really enjoy having the help each summer. When more host community folks have a voice in what we do, what we do gets better. I want to reverse stereotypes, help teach about systems that maintain poverty, not just count converts especially when there is no follow up or discipleship.
I have always felt that a those of us in the middle class are a big part of problem and so for me the act of short term missions has become a way of addressing the roots of some of the oppression I see. I really think the Church can prevent and elevate a bunch of these problems. I just want to help the Church to see that we have a role to play. We forget the Gospel that we often proclaim to share.
As a kid from the city, I don’t feel used by mission teams. I feel like my community has the week long window to help the rest of the Church to give a rip about “us” so that when “they” are a boss, consumer, law maker, cop, teacher, parent or decision maker “they” will consider “us” in their lives. Then, hopefully that consideration will allow some of “us” to get out of the cycle, even if the “us” live in another community.
Bro. thanks for dialoging.
March 11th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
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March 19th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
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