Tag: Rethinking Short-Term Missions Page 1 of 2

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You’ve got plans to hold a VBS this summer in a cross-cultural or overseas context, and you’re feeling the challenges: How do you communicate effectively with kids who don’t speak English? How do you come up with activities that you can fit into a suitcase? Maybe you’ve got a limited budget or time constraints. Yet you have a sincere desire for your team to share Jesus during your trip.

So maybe you are considering the classic go-to activity for sharing the gospel with kids from a different culture or language: the simple wordless bracelet.

You can order 12 kits for $5.99. They’re fun, they’re cute, and kids love them. Plus, the children now have a tangible reminder of the gospel, right there on their wrists, no language skills required. Perfect.

Maybe not so perfect. Sometimes cross-cultural communication is a lot more complicated than just a language barrier. This classic VBS activity might not be communicating what you think.

Before you put wordless bracelets into your cross-cultural VBS curriculum, take a moment to consider the following thoughts.

Many cultures in Asia, Africa, and South America have strong beliefs in the spirit world. In order to protect their children against evil spirits, they will often tie an amulet around their wrists. This will be a cloth, twine, or leather cord and may include a few beads.

So when a group of religious foreigners arrive in their country and put on a children’s program and start tying bracelets around the kids’ wrists that have spiritual meaning…..

Unfortunately, you may have just given those kids a new amulet.

Languages divide up colors differently. For example, in English, we have a word for red and a word for pink (not light red!). But we say light blue and dark blue. Other languages might use the same word for blue/green or red/orange. And when a person doesn’t have a word for different colors, he might not see them as different. This is fascinating stuff – and something we need to be aware of.
Other cultures assign different meanings to colors than we do. We may see green as representing growth. But in Indonesia, it’s associated with exorcism. In China, it can be associated with infidelity, and in South America it’s connected with death. White is correlated with purity in Western cultures, but in some Asian cultures, it’s a symbol of death. The children in your host culture may not understand the gospel story the way you intend to tell it if they are not making the same color associations.
Contemplate for a moment the implications of a missions team with lighter skin visiting a group of people with darker skin and telling them that black means sin and white means holiness.
The gospel presentation that goes along with wordless bracelets is grounded in a guilt/innocence paradigm, which may not be the best way for the message to make sense to the people you are trying to reach. If you are unfamiliar with what I am talking about here, check out this excellent 7 minute video on guilt/innocence, honor/shame, and fear/power worldviews.

I realize that this list might make you feel a little uncertain about not just wordless bracelets but your entire VBS program. Because if something as simple as a colorful craft might be communicating something different than what you intended, then what does that mean about all of your other activities? So if you are feeling that tension, great! That’s a good place to be. That’s where learning and growth start.

So what should you do?

Start with some research. In the time you have available, your team needs to learn all they can about the history, customs, worldviews, and religion of the people you will be visiting. Hofstede Insights is a great resource for this. Remember–don’t assume that what works in your own country will automatically translate to another culture.

Most importantly, before you set any plans in stone, run your entire program–teaching, activities, games, songs–past your missionary or local contact. Make it very clear that you want feedback and are open to change. Even better—if there is any way that a local person can do the teaching instead of someone on your team, make that happen! The best way for you to impact a community is to train others to do the program alongside you and then later—without you.

For more reading about short-term missions, check out these links:

Have you considered how Your Short-Term Trip Should Be About You (And That’s Not a Bad Thing)? Perhaps what God wants to do in you during this trip is more important than the service project you are taking overseas.

This one has a similar idea: 3 Quick Ways to Improve a Short-Term Missions Trip. How can you reframe your trip for maximum impact in your life and the team’s recipients?

Also, Sarita Hartz’s What to Do About Short-Term Missions provides a comprehensive list of ways to prevent your team from causing more harm than help overseas. And Short-Term Missions: Is the Price Tag Worth It? offers some thought-provoking insights on ensuring we are stewarding our resources well.

If you are an overseas worker who is hosting a team this year, then this one is for you: How to Host the Best-Ever Short-Term Team

Also, this excellent video series Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions by the Chalmers Institute is extremely valuable for any church or organization that wants to prioritize short-term missions.

Your Short-Term Trip Should Be About You (and that’s not a bad thing).

By Amy Medina

On June 12, 2023

In A Life Overseas, Thoughts on Short-Term Missions Trips

It’s kind of a short-term mission trip mantra: “This trip shouldn’t be about you. It’s about the people you are serving.”

I’m here to flip that on its head: This trip isn’t mostly about the people you are serving. It actually should be primarily about you.

And that’s not a bad thing. Stick with me here; don’t write me off yet.

Let’s start with the second part: this trip is not about the people you are serving.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to come right out with it: if this trip were really about the people on the other side, then you would just take the $20,000 your team raised and send it to the missionaries or local pastors instead.

They could support the local economy by buying the supplies you are bringing. They could hire locals to build the house or paint the church – people who are likely desperate for work. They could pay for an expert to train the church members to run the VBS themselves (in the local language) and supplement the income of those church members who need to take time off of work to serve. And with the extra, they could support a local pastor. Or top up the deficit in their ministry account.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that your service is a waste of time. Certainly, God can use you to touch lives. But my point is this: it is unlikely that a team who doesn’t know the language or culture will be able to make a measurable impact in a foreign country in seven to ten days. Often, there are already people living in the country who could do the exact same ministry themselves if necessary. (I know there are exceptions, but that’s not what I’m talking about today.)

In spite of all this, I’m still a fan of short-term missions. This is not an anti-missions-trip article. Those are out there. This is not one of them.

So why do I still encourage these trips? Because I believe God can use them to transform lives. Not necessarily the lives of the people you are serving. But your life? Yes!

Because your short-term trip is actually about you.

Your Short-Term Trips Have Not Prepared You For Long-Term Missions

By Amy Medina

On June 14, 2017

In Thoughts on Short-Term Missions Trips

My monthly post from A Life Overseas……

I can still remember the random thoughts that shot through my head during my first couple of weeks as an adult long-term missionary. Wait, what? There’s nothing planned for us today? So what are we supposed to do? Hey, when is someone going to take us souvenir shopping? I was really looking forward to that! Why is no one telling me what to do with the trash? What am I supposed to do with it? Why is no one telling me what to do about anything?

I caught myself many times. No, Amy, you live here now. This is not a short-term trip. I knew that, of course, especially since I had been an MK. But it was weird how my short-term trips had programmed my brain with certain expectations.

This is not a post about the good or the bad of short-term missions (STM), or how to do them well. This is a post about the limits of STM trips as preparation for long-term missions.

These days, just about every long-term missionary has been on at least one STM. Of course, many long-term missionaries choose that life because of a short-term trip—which is a wonderful thing indeed. But what is often not discussed is how different long-term missions is compared to short-term trips. And sometimes, those misplaced expectations can actually make a long-term missionary’s transition even harder.

So if you are headed for long-term missions after a series of short trips, what differences should you expect? Here are four things to consider.

1. No one is going to hold your hand. STM trips, when done well, are carefully controlled. Your entire schedule, down to when and what you will eat, when and where you will sleep, and how you will spend all of your time, have been decided for you. You might not even get to handle local money yourself.

So when you arrive on the ground as a long-term missionary, it might come as a shock that you will be more or less on your own. If you’re lucky, there might be a few missionaries who will show you around and get you oriented. But they will be busy, and you will find yourself thrown in the deep end a lot sooner than you wanted. It might be scary and overwhelming and not nearly as fun as your short-term trip.

2. Daily life is not all ministry; in fact, most of it isn’t. My husband remembers his first STM trip when he was in college, and the shock he experienced when he realized that his host missionaries not only watched television regularly, but they had cable. What? Missionaries need rest? On STM trips, you might joyfully work 12-hour days and fall into your sleeping bag at night feeling smugly satisfied with all you accomplished.

But as a long-term missionary, you might waste 5 hours driving all over town, looking for the right-sized lightbulb. Or you might spend all day in the immigration line. You can go whole days where all your time is consumed by figuring out how to just live, and you think, Ministry? What’s that? On top of that, you’ll soon discover that burn out comes really quickly if you don’t allow some downtime into your life. Even if that means getting cable.

3. True results take a long, long, long (long!) time. When you went on that STM trip, you may have been ecstatic to see the kids who raised their hand at the VBS. One of the best moments of your life might have been when the poor family stepped into the new home you built for them. And you will never forget the party that broke out in the village when they witnessed the well you paid for. But a few days later, you got on a plane and left. You weren’t there to notice that the VBS kids never showed up at church again. You didn’t see the poor family get pushed out of their brand new home by an older relative. Six months after the well was built, you weren’t there to see it broken and rusting.

But when you sign up for long-term service, those disappointments become your reality. And if you’re expecting quick, easy, fabulous success stories, you’re not going to last very long in your new country. You’ve got to start your new life with your teeth clenched in determination, with lots of grit, and humble, long-term perseverance.

There’s more….click hereto read the rest.

Trying Not to be Predictable: Our Plan for a Missions Internship Team

By Amy Medina

On February 24, 2015

In Thoughts on Short-Term Missions Trips

Last year, I did a series on re-thinking short-term missions. I ended it with the challenge to not be so predictable. The world is changing, missions is changing, and we’ve seen a lot of the negative side effects of short-term trips. One idea I presented is to re-think the idea of a service trip, which can often hurt more than help, and to consider the idea of a vision trip, which would do a much better job of exposing and teaching young people about missions without hurting overseas ministries.

So….we are practicing what we preach! We’re hoping this summer to host our very first internship team! It’s still in its formative stages, but we are very excited about this!

I am posting here the information that we sent our supporting churches. I am not expecting my average reader to sit down and read through this, but I am posting it because I want it to be a resource for missions committees and overseas workers who might be interested in doing the same thing.

Feel free to ask me questions! Let’s get this idea going!

2015
Tanzania Missions Internship Team

Hosted by: Gil and Amy Medina, ReachGlobal

Summary: We are inviting each of our supporting
churches to send one person or one couple (with no kids) to Dar
es Salaam, Tanzania for three weeks in June/July. These team members must already have a significant interest in missions. The
purpose of this trip will be to teach this team about different types of
overseas ministries and missions philosophy. Team members will be active learners and participators, but will not be serving in any specific capacity. In
response, team members will be expected to make a major presentation to their respective missions committees on what they learned, and a smaller presentation to the entire congregation about our ministry in Tanzania.

Philosophy behind this trip:

We are big fans of short-term missions. We ourselves participated in many such trips in our younger days, and they were hugely influential in our lives and our decision to become career missionaries. We also have hosted a number of short-term teams in our 11 years in Tanzania and all have been a big encouragement and help to our ministry.

This year, and possibly in future years, we would like to try something different. We have found that for those young people who are really interested in missions, short-term trips often don’t really give them a picture of what missions really looks like. Team members engage in activities
that aren’t the kind of things “real” missionaries do, and sometimes their
activities actually cause harm to local ministry by taking jobs away from
nationals or causing unnecessary dependence on the West. Churches in the West often justify these types of trips by pointing to the benefits they bring to the team members themselves. They look to “missions exposure” as the main reason they want to send their young people overseas.

We absolutely believe in the benefits of missions exposure. So we decided to construct a new type of team that will give more than the typical kind of exposure team members get from short-term teams. Instead of a service trip, we want this to look more like an internship. We are designing a trip that will expose interns to a variety of different kinds of ministries, in different
venues and reaching different people groups in our diverse city and
country. We want interns to get “up close and personal” with these ministries, not only observing but actively engaging—asking questions, taking notes, and discussing their implications throughout the entire trip.

Why are we doing this?

1. Because we love the opportunity to help raise up the next generation of missionaries

2. Because we want to serve the churches who serve us by helping to mentor and nurture their upcoming missionaries

3. Because we get something out of it too! In hosting this trip, we hope to continue to make better and stronger connections with our supporting churches. We will ask each intern, when they return, to do a (five-minute) presentation to their congregation about us and our ministry in Tanzania. We hope that interns will also gain a passion for our ministry and will help to advocate prayer for us as well.

Now…onto the details!

Approximate dates of Tanzania Missions Internship
program: June 15 to July 5, 2015

Each of our supporting churches are invited to send either one person or one couple (no kids) to join this team. The number of people sent from each church can be possibly negotiable depending on how many other churches want to send interns.

What missions committees should require of interns:

· At least 18 years old and have graduated from high school by the time of the trip

· Demonstrating a growing, thriving relationship with Jesus Christ

· Already showing a significant interest in missions as a career

· Mature and responsible

· Involved in church ministry

· Able and willing to travel alone internationally (This may not be necessary as we will try to bring team members together for travel, but traveling alone might be the most practical choice.)

What we will require of interns before the trip:

· Read two books between March and June: Cross-Cultural Servanthood by Duane Elmer and Discipling Nations by Darrow Miller. We will
keep interns accountable through a Facebook discussion group.

· Procure a passport

· Receive travel vaccinations

What we will require of interns during the trip:

· Be active learners and participators

· Take a notebook with them wherever they go, asking questions and taking notes

· Have a good attitude about new situations that might be uncomfortable

· Conform to cultural modesty standards

Examples of ministries interns will be exposed to:

· Our ministry to local pastors, Reach Tanzania

· Haven of Peace Academy, MK international school

· Community Development Ministry to impoverished neighborhoods

· Ministry to train disabled individuals in marketable skills

· Young Life in Africa

· Bible translation efforts in Tanzania

· Orphanage Ministry [and a number of other ministries that cannot be shared publically]

Interns will also interview many missionaries and nationals, travel to a few sites that teach about the history of Tanzania, and learn about missions philosophy and strategy.

What we will require of interns after the trip:

· To their missions committee: A formal presentation of some kind, such as a Power-point presentation or a video, highlighting what they learned on this trip. The missions committee could also give interns the option of writing a formal paper instead (though future missionaries need to get used to making presentations!).

· To their congregation: A five-minute presentation highlighting our ministry

Accommodations:

Interns will either stay with us or in the dorm rooms at our ministry training center (two miles from our house). Everyone will have a mattress, though not necessarily a bed!

Cost per person:

· Air ticket: approximately $1800-$2000

· Passport

· Tanzanian visa: $100

· Living/travel expenses: approximately $500

· Travel vaccinations: Cost varies. Only yellow fever is required, and we do not anticipate interns needing additional vaccinations. Recommended that interns bring malaria prophylaxis.

· Safari trip: approximately $150

· Interns need to have medical insurance that will cover them internationally

If a church decides to send an intern, we ask that the missions committee of that church officially interview, support, send, and follow-up with this person. The missions committee does not need to fully financially support this person, but should give them their official backing and encouragement to raise the rest of the money from the congregation. All support
money should go through the church and not directly to the individual.

We recommend that each intern pay for their safari trip out of their own funds. They will also want to bring some spending money, though all meals and activities will be covered through living expenses.

We hope you will prayerfully consider this opportunity!
We would love to serve one of your young people in this way. Please be in contact with us regarding any comments or questions.

Together for the gospel,

Gil and Amy Medina

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Don’t Be So Predictable (Rethinking Short-Term Missions, Part 4)

By Amy Medina

On March 5, 2014

In Thoughts on Short-Term Missions Trips

Think outside the box! In our changing world, missions doesn’t look the same as it used to. There is so much room for creativity here.

If it really is exposure that you want for your young people, then just be honest about it. Don’t feel like you have to justify the expense of a trip by insisting that “ministry” must be involved. There is much to be valued in simply exposure.

Consider this idea:

Each year, your missions committee sponsors 2-4 mature young people to send to one of your church’s missionaries for a couple weeks. For the duration of their time, they will shadow the missionaries in their ministry. This team will look for ways to help and serve, but that is not the primary purpose of the trip. They will always have a notebook with them and they will always be asking questions.

When they return to the States, they will be required to turn in a 10 page paper on what they learned. They will also be required to put together some sort of presentation that they will give to the entire congregation. They will share what they learned, as well as an update on the missionary’s ministry. For a year afterwards, they will be the communication liaison between the church and the missionaries.

This type of trip accomplishes many of the same things that a short-term “missions” trip accomplishes–exposure, learning, impacted lives. Yet it is far less stressful for the missionary to host this type of trip than a large team who are expecting to do ministry. And in many ways, this kind of trip actually gives a more realistic picture of missions to a young person.

Or another idea:

If you are able to take overseas vacations with your family, why not combine it with a visit to a missionary family or two? Most missionaries absolutely love this! (We do!) Don’t expect the missionary to be your tour guide, but spending a few days with a missionary family on the field is a fantastic way to expose your family to missions in a healthy way. Visiting friends from home are incredibly encouraging and refreshing. YES, We want you to visit, and it’s one of the very best ways you can bless us!

(By the way, Tanzania has Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti Game Reserve, and Zanzibar Island….in case you are looking for an exotic vacation….!)

And one final note:

Sending your pastor and/or church leadership to visit missionaries is always, always, always a great idea–an incredible encouragement to us, and wonderful for future connections between our ministry and yours.

Last but not least, I would consider all five of the teams we have personally hosted (remember–we didn’t host the No-Shower Team!) to have been a great success. Here is why:

1. We asked for these teams.

2. We genuinely needed these teams–they provided the necessary man-power, creativity, and energy to make our (English-speaking) youth camps effective.

3. We kept them under 10 people (a couple times there were more because we split the team with another missionary).

4. They were carefully selected by the team leaders and very well-prepared.

5. We told them exactly what we wanted them to do and they were purposeful in doing it.

All of the pictures in the posts from this series are from the times we hosted teams. They hold very fond memories in our hearts!

Thanks to all of you for sharing these posts, and for such an encouraging response! I am so thankful that there are so many like-minded people out there who resonate with these ideas.

Here is a link to all four posts bundled together, if you want to share all at once: Rethinking Short-Term Missions. (Just remember to start reading from the bottom up!)

Tag: Rethinking Short-Term Missions Page 1 of 2

Those Wordless Bracelets Might Not Be Saying What You Think They’re Saying

Your Short-Term Trip Should Be About You (and that’s not a bad thing).

Your Short-Term Trips Have Not Prepared You For Long-Term Missions

Trying Not to be Predictable: Our Plan for a Missions Internship Team

Don’t Be So Predictable (Rethinking Short-Term Missions, Part 4)