Steven's Missions Confession

Below Steve, Community Church's Youth Intern, confesses his reservations about the usefulness of missions trips and why he's excited to head to LFCH anyway.

Steven, looking a little less cantankerous than he claims to be

Hello! Thanks for reading. I hope that these blogs are both useful milestones for us to look back on after the trip, but also places where we can connect and bring those who are not going on the trip physically with us. I want to talk about short term missions trips and my journey with them.

When I was in high school back in the States, every summer the incoming senior class would go on a trip to the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean through a missions organization called “Meeting God in Missions” (MGM). At this time, believe it or not, I was much more cantankerous than I currently am, and thought that such a trip was a horrible idea! To send 100 seniors down there on a missions trip was an absolute waste of resources in my opinion. Think of how much you could do with all that money that was being spent on the planes, the food, the passports, the visas, the bags, etc, and how much good you could do if you either just sent the money directly to MGM to create sustainable solutions, or if you used the same time and money locally where you could save on all the travel costs and also continue serving in the long term. I viewed all short term, non-local missions trips in this light, as a wasteful attempt at a type of spiritualism. To make matters even worse, MGM claimed specifically that their organization was not for the people who we were going to serve, but rather for the people going on the trip.

Now you may be saying, well… I guess you are right. Your accusations are well grounded and make sense. And that is because that is true. The money could be better spent, the time could be more wisely used, the local needs are still there, but all of these are facts which make sense in our human perspective. The resources of the Kingdom of God are much, much different than the resources of a country or a company. Now, that doesn’t mean that we throw caution to the wind and neglect the reality around us, but that also means that spiritual realities must also be taken into account.

The blessing brought to the kingdom by the relationship between MGM and my high school, the students that went on the trip and the Christians they met and served, has had long range impact on both the physical and spiritual world. Many of those students that went to MGM have since gone back and are working and giving their resources for the long term to that mission and those people. The “short term” missions trip was just the experience that God used in their life to open their eyes to the real needs that we are not exposed to us as openly in the first world, the real Christianity that exists in a world in need of it, and the interconnected nature of the Church across national and linguistic borders.

And now, still a cantankerous fellow, I have put down my self-righteous stance on these trips in the absolute. There are still places where such a trip can be detrimental, and we should be wary of that, but the long term effect that a short term missions trip can have on the lives of individuals, the relationships it can bring to God’s people across the globe, and the fact that Jesus also commanded his disciples to do similar things has disarmed me. And so, humbly, for the first time, I step forward to go on a short term missions trip, and ask that God fill me, fill us, and send us out to do this weird thing called short term mission, not because it makes sense, not because it is the best use of the physical resources he has given us, but because it is where he has called us to go in the here and now. So let’s go- expecting great things from a great God.