Mark's Blog

My son was part of a short-term mission trip several years ago that was building a church building in a third world country.  After working for about a week, digging the footing for the concrete stone building, pouring the concrete for the foundation, and then building up the wall about 2-3 feet, someone realized that they had not put any doors on the building!

I know, you are thinking that this was a freudian slip, but, in fact, the story becomes worse. So the Americans spent the rest of the mission time, tearing down a major portion of the wall that they had just built and rebuilding the wall, this time with gaps for doors.

The rest of the story I cannot verify firsthand, but my understanding is that another group went to the same area a year or two later, and the church had torn the whole building down because it never met either their needs or their standards.  There is a message in this story for those who would plan short-term missions projects.

Just having manpower and money will not get you to the goal. Mutual design is also imperative. Without reflecting on any real person’s motivations, my best guess is that the Americans showed up with a plan. The locals were asked to validate it, which they did because what else can you do in the face of money and power!  The results speak for themselves.

Mutually planning the mission activity is the only way to hope for an effective outcome. Sure, mutual design does not guarantee a positive outcome, but it certainly increases the prospects.  By mutual design, we are talking again about a partnership between American Christians and hosting nationals with (to borrow from the French!) liberty, equality, and fraternity on both sides.

Here are some reasonable questions for both parties to ask in preparation for any short-term mission trip:

1. What are the common goals of both guests and hosts? Is the primary goal to please the host or to please the American guests? Is there a way to plan the mission so that both sides feel like their expectations will have been met?  Before an LST project ever occurs, an LST representative sits down with the hosting leader/leaders and tries to describe in their context what might occur when an LST team arrives. We talk about how we spend money, how teams are typically housed, what each day looks like, what the teams typically do on Sundays–no part of the project is intentionally left out.  Then we listen to how they believe an LST team could work best in their context. Where there are differences, we make great effort to work them out–or we both agree that perhaps some other form of mission would be better for this particular site.
2. What preparation and follow-up are expected from the hosts/guests? What are the hosts/guests expected to do both before and after the mission project? LST projects expect the host church to advertise prior to the team’s arrival, for instance. How they advertise is left to the expertise of the local Christians? If both of us find this acceptable, we go forward with our planning!  Local Christians are expected to make plans for follow-up to LST projects. LST teams are expected to leave all contact information necessary for follow-up with the local churches. When one of our teams does not do this, we think the mission church has a right to be upset with us!
3. Who pays for what? Unfortunately, fairly simple questions like this create much of the havoc on short-term mission trips. LST promises to pay for all food, local transportation, laundry, and the social events that are part of a typical LST project. Hosts are asked to arrange for housing and advertising.  Some hosts have no housing options that they can afford, in which case we ask them to work out mutually acceptable housing arrangements with us BEFORE our team arrives. Often their solution is a nice American-style hotel–which we most often decline because we can’t afford that either. So we continue to dialogue until either there is a mutually acceptable solution or there is no solution; in the end, we both know that we have made a mutual effort to find a mutually acceptable solution, but have failed–usually with a promise to try again next year.

Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Missions puts great emphasis on the ability of both the American guests and the national hosts to implement what they have accepted as their responsibility.  When there has been full liberty to both negotiate and to decline, when there has been equality assumed by both partners, and when brotherly love (fraternity) is the framework of every conversation and interaction, then nothing short of a REVOLUTION will be the result–a revolution that both we and God will delight in!