At the end of the school year awards ceremony of my senior year in high school I received the award as my graduating class’s outstanding Social Studies student. The prize was a gift certificate to a local book store, and with that certificate I bought “Baby Let Me Follow you Down… the Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Music Years”. I was the top Social Studies student and a folk music fan: perhaps I was a bigger nerd in high school than I like to remember. While the rest of the class of ’79 was boogie oogie oogying ‘til they just couldn’t boogie no more, I was waiting for Peter, Paul and Mary to return to the top 40. It’s amazing I ever got a date.
Well, I just rediscovered “Baby Let Me Follow you Down” on my bookshelf. I’ve been thumbing through it again, and I came across this quote by the African- American folk and blues singer Taj Mahal: “I got involved with the civil rights movement. I did one show with the “Freedom Caravan” or whatever it was called… Phil Ochs got up and started singing about how he wasn’t marching anymore and he wasn’t this and he wasn’t that. All these black kids were sitting in the heat bored… listening to this guy who had nothing to do with them. They were being used. .. Those people were being used to make the singers look good.”
While this made me sad, it also got me thinking about this quote in relation to short term mission trips. Evangelist Tony Compolo, Pastor of Bill and Hillary Clinton and very prolific author, has stated that many times short term mission trips are merely “Christian tourism”. Like Taj Mahal’s assessment of the freedom riders of the 1960’s, short term missions can often be a way for believers to make themselves feel better about themselves by spending a week or two with ‘the poor’ then returning to suburban comfort. It is hard for me to even write this, as short term mission trips have been a big part of our family’s experience over the years, and we are preparing to go on another such trip to Paraguay this summer. I must acknowledge, though, that short term foreign mission trips are often not very cost efficient and can feed into an ‘us / them’ mentality and perhaps even exaggerated nationalism. As Shaine Claibourne said, “People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.”
Yet our short term experiences in the third world have been of value, and even the Apostle Paul went on some missions that today would be classified as short term. When can these types of trips be something more than condescending feel-good experiences? Here are some thoughts:
1) Stay with the people, not in a hotel. This could be in a camp, missions house, church basement or school dormitory and this will allow relationships to develop, and will be much more cost effective.
2) Take every opportunity to spent time in the homes, churches and workplaces of the nationals.
3) Avoid the temptation for a day of sightseeing and touring during the trip. For example, if a trip is for one week and only one day is spent touring, that’s 14% of the trip not spent serving.
4) Return home with projects that friends and family can get involved in. For example, we returned from Quito after one trip and, by selling handmade greeting cards, we raised over $1000 for the Bible study group in the Quito women’s prison. The cards were made by the incarcerated women themselves.
5) Ask the people what Americans need to know about them, their culture and government. Similarly, ask them how we can pray for them, then pass this information on when you get home. Also, tell them how they can pray for us.
While we as a family prepare to go to South America again, we are also involved in a project right here in Bridgton with our church. Organized like a mission trip, for nine days in May, we will be reaching out to our own community where the needs may not be as dramatic as in the third world, but they are every bit as real. We will have a team doing basic carpentry repairs for seniors and single moms, a medical team running a free medical clinic, a backyard Bible club for kids, two community meals, performances at the local nursing home and in a local park, a cleanup project along route 117, and a variety of other outreaches. This will allow people who can’t afford the time or cost of a mission trip to experience one right here. It will also allow our congregation to impact the lives of a lot more people for a lot less expense.
As for foreign missionary work, our dream is that, after Paraguay, the next time we go on the mission field it will be to stay. Just a dream? Perhaps. Time will well.