Category Archives: Missions

Help that harms

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Tony Campolo wrote an excellent article last week that ties together several things that I’ve written about on this blog. He points out the harm that Christian relief has done in Haiti, not only now, but over the last few decades. He also reminds us that the hot trends in mission trips (building houses, etc.) aren’t helping the people we intend to help.

Really dealing with poverty takes long-term planning and carefully thought-out strategies. It’s not simple.

Maybe I’m just playing the role of Chicken Little, crying that the sky is falling when everyone knows that it’s not. Or maybe I’m able to see that the emperor has no clothes. Whichever it is, at least Tony Campolo agrees with me. Misery loves company.

Edit: (3/8/10, 9:45 a.m. CST) — Jay Guin’s blog reminded me that I could well include a couple of resources here:

  • When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Dr. Brian Fikkert of the Chalmers Center for Economic Development and the Department of Economics and Community Development at Covenant College
  • Tending to Eden by Scott Sabin

Putting the mission back into our trips

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flagsAs I’ve written before, I’m disturbed by the trend in our churches to take our members on service trips and call them mission trips. They aren’t. If we lose the meaning of the word “mission,” we will have lost something of value within our church.

At least one congregation here in town is doing something about it. They’ve decided that every one of their members that goes on a mission trip sponsored by their church must go through a course in evangelism. If you are going on a mission trip, you need to know how to teach someone about Jesus. Not just build houses. Tell people about Jesus while you are building houses.

I think that’s a good way to begin to counteract this trend. For a trip to be a mission trip, it needs to have an evangelistic purpose. Or call it a service trip. But if it’s a mission trip, let the participants be prepared to do mission work.

Elders: How long must we wait?

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2886243391_de8448f30fIn many mission areas, there is a severe lack of congregations with elders. I’ve spent most of my time in Latin America, so I can speak most knowledgeably about that area. What I’ve observed are churches that have existed for decades, yet aren’t even close to having elders leading their congregation. Besides some doctrinal issues, like the one I discussed yesterday, there are some practical causes to this:

  • Churches from the States have given financial support to preachers overseas. That’s a situation full of potential for problems, from the difficulties in determining the level of support to the impracticality of overseeing a worker long distance. But one of the biggest problems is the creation of preacher-dominated churches. With no sense of accountability to the local church, no motivation to surrender control of congregational affairs, and a model of preachers doing elders’ jobs, the preacher can continue to say, “This congregation just isn’t ready.”  
  • We’ve established preacher training schools around the world. Where are the elder training schools? What are we communicating to our brethren by emphasizing ministers rather than shepherds?
  • When teaching about elders, we’ve focused on the qualifications of elders and taught little about what elders actually do. Steve Ridgell, my supervisor at Herald of Truth, did eldership training in Africa last summer. The leaders commented, “We’ve never been taught any of this. All we ever heard was who could be an elder, not what they were supposed to do.”

We’ve historically taught that our churches were lead by the pastors, the elders of the church. In practice, we’ve too often followed a preacher-led model. Especially in our mission efforts. In the New Testament, elders were named very soon after the establishment of each congregation; we’ll know that we have a healthy model when we see the same thing today.

Missions: In it for the long haul

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20 years ago I started hearing: “We only support mission efforts that we can take our kids to easily on mission trips.” Now I’m hearing: “We only support efforts by our members.”
The preacher at the congregation I attend recently moved after being here for 28 years. One of our elders will serve as “interim minister” for a year, when a new man will be hired. If we did things the way many churches now do their mission work, here’s what the elders would have announced:
“While we fully support the idea of full-time ministers, our eldership feels that we would get more for our money by letting our high school students do the preaching from now on. They get to do all the things the preacher does: counseling, hospital visits, weddings, funerals. This will be an excellent experience for them, building their faith in a way that merely sitting in the pew can’t. Plus, we feel that they will be more supportive of preaching in the future after having this experience and some of them may even decide to become full-time preachers.”
It won’t happen, of course. We feel the need for having trained men who have dedicated their life to this work. Do we consider foreign missions to be so much simpler that we need less? We’ve traditional sent our youngest, least experienced ministers to the mission field, while sending our most experienced men where they are surrounded with lifelong Christians. Now we’re going beyond that, sending more short-term workers and fewer long-term ones.
I’ve never been accused of hesitating to drive a subject into the ground, and I’ve probably said too much on this one. But it’s something I feel strongly about. Let’s put the emphasis back on long-range mission projects and career missionaries. Let’s use short-term missions as support for those efforts, not a replacement of them.

Missions: Getting short-changed

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We have a nasty habit in the churches of Christ. As I like to say it, we tend to jump on the bandwagon about the time that everyone else is unhitching the horses. We run 10-20 years behind evangelical churches in most things that we do; sometimes we imitate them consciously, other times it just happens.
One good example is short term missions. It’s all the rage now. Why get involved in a long-term relationship with a missionary when you can send out your own people on once-a-year trips? Less complicated, no commitments down the road, and more of your members are directly involved. What’s not to like?
In 2005, Christianity Today ran a series of articles on short-term missions. Here are the links, for those who want to read further:
Study Questions Whether Short-Term Missions Make a Difference
Are Short-Term Missions Good Stewardship?
Do Short-term Missions Change Anyone?
Mission Trips or Exotic Youth Outings?
Who Gets ‘Socially Rich’ from Short-Term Missions?
Basically, studies have destroyed most of the myths about short-term missions. No, they don’t increase future missions giving. No, they don’t increase the likelihood of participants being involved in missions as a career.
Well-coordinated short-term mission trips can play a part in an overall mission plan. Let’s be honest… how many of our congregations have an overall mission plan? If we can’t see how our efforts fit into the bigger picture of a church-planting strategy in a certain area, then it’s quite possible that they don’t.
Short-term missions trips should be a part of a long-range effort. Local missionaries or local church leaders (depending on the stage the work is in) should have the final say as to what will be done by those that go. There are many good things that can be done, some more effective than others. But those of us on this side of things aren’t the ones to decide what’s best.
[In Honduras, in May, I was talking with a church leader from Panama. He told the horror story of a group from the States that was building a building in Panama City. They hired an architect from the U.S. to design the plans. After spending weeks of work and thousands of dollars, they came to realize that nothing was up to Panamanian code, failure to use local materials and workers had made the project cost twice what it should, etc. Just because someone is an “expert” at home, doesn’t mean they have the same expertise overseas.]
Let’s not end short-term missions. But let’s use them judiciously and be realistic about the results we expect.
(Some of my thinking was inspired by this post by Jay Guin)