Short-Term Missions

Via kendallball.net, another article questioning the value of short-term missions, this one titled "Rise of sunshine Samaritans: on a mission or holiday?" by G. Jeffrey MacDonald in The Christian Science Monitor:

By the millions, Americans are jumping at the chance to become missionaries - with one key stipulation of the 21st century: They expect to get their comfortable lives back a few days later. Evangelicals often build homes or visit orphanages, then explain the roots of their faith to new friends. Mainline Christians tend to focus on providing relief from poverty. This year, tens of thousands of short-term missionaries plan to storm the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in visible witness to their savior's love for humankind... As these missions flourish, however, the faithful are debating the wisdom of tailoring outreach programs to suit the needs and wants of missionaries in search of a peak, transformational experience. Critics say impoverished people, especially overseas, often end up pandering to cash-wielding, untrained missionaries who leave a bad impression and don't make meaningful lifestyle changes upon return... Short-term trips, lasting two weeks or less, drew about 1.6 million Americans to foreign mission fields last year, according to a survey by Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist of religion at Princeton University. Others who study Christian missions, such as Todd Johnson of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, say brief domestic mission trips draw even more participants than international ones... Short-term mission trips date back to the 1960s when air travel first became accessible to religiously passionate pockets of the middle class, according to Dr. Johnson. But only since the mid-1990s, with the rise of Internet-savvy megachurches, have local congregations attained the tools necessary to bypass denominations and forge their own ties on the ground as far away as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

From my old blog that I haven't yet merged into this one:

Something on the order of 1 to 4 million North Americans participate in a short term mission trips, at a cost of a few billion dollars a year. Conventional wisdom says these activities make a long-lasting positive impact on both the missionaries and the people they visit. Recent research by Kurt Ver Beek (his website is here and some discussion is here) argues that neither group is significantly affected in the long run.

Some comments from my friend Chris are here.