Getting the short term mission selfies for our Facebook profiles!

I have led short term mission trips.

I have coordinated the Wycliffe Bible Translators UK & Ireland short term mission programme.

I have seen short termers become long term with Wycliffe and other organisations.

I know the value of short term mission.

I also know that short term mission trips can be failures and even harmful to the people being visited.

I have organised a debate in my church with the title…

I like to make people think!

So here’s a video entitled The Honest Mission Trip Leader which is

a. very funny

and

b. too close to the truth!

I would love some reactions to the video…

… and if you want to explore good short term opportunities with Wycliffe UK & Ireland, take a look here!

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South of France, two weeks in July: what’s not to like?

It’s almost that time of year. Well, we’ll need to celebrate Christmas first of course, but many Christians, young and older, students or GAPpers, early retired or really retired… will soon be thinking about a short term mission trip.

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Looking for a Short-Term Mission trip this coming summer?

It’s almost that time of year. Well, we’ll need to celebrate Christmas first of course, but many Christians, young and older, students or GAPpers, early retired or really retired… will soon be thinking about a short term mission trip.

“I have a sort of love / hate relationship with short term mission trips,” I wrote a few months ago in one of many posts on short term mission.

I look out for blogs on this topic and Eddie Arthur is a regular writer who makes one think.

Eddie’s latest is published in Christian Today website entitled 7 Tips For Making The Most Of A Short Term Mission Trip.

• Talk to your church leadership: Definitely do that!
• Go with an organisation that you’ve heard of: Yep, there are some dodgy ones out there… so I’m told.
• A word of warning: Read this one for yourself
• Make sure they will look after you: “Going to Burkina Faso for a month is different from spending a week in Ibiza and it’s much more of a challenge,” says Eddie. He’s right.
• Do no harm: You could you know – “It can be really exciting to go out to the developing world and help to build a new village school. That is unless you are the village builder, who has lost his income because he’s been replaced by a bunch of young Brits who are working for free…”
• Have a break: Maybe a wee holiday before coming home…
• Look for the seal of approval: A very important one – read all about it!

Before we joined Wycliffe Bible Translators UK & Ireland in 1988, I had never been on a short term mission trip. Could I count taking a school SU group away to Co Tyrone for the weekend or several years as a section leader of Newtownbreda CSSM or hosting a home Bible study group? Do they qualify as “short term mission”? What do you think?

For a number of years I was responsible for summer mission teams for Wycliffe UK & Ireland and I think we got it right in that these were definitely not “mission tourism” but experiencing and contributing to the long term task of ongoing Bible translation projects. An encouraging number of participants later joined Wycliffe long term.

I am retiring at the end of December, so I am unlikely to ever go on a short term mission trip, but well you never know… should I read Eddie’s article again?

Oh,nearly forgot! Check out Wycliffe’s options here

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There Is No Such Thing As Short-Term Mission

I have a sort of love / hate relationship with short term mission trips.

Before we joined Wycliffe Bible Translators UK & Ireland in 1988, I had never been on a short term mission trip overseas. But should I count taking a school SU group away for the weekend or several years as a section leader of Newtownbreda CSSM or hosting a home Bible study group? Do they qualify as “short term mission”?

For a number of years I was responsible for summer mission teams for Wycliffe and I think we got it right in that these were definitely not mission tourism but experiencing and contributing to the long term task of ongoing Bible translation projects. An encouraging number of participants later joined Wycliffe long term.

I have blogged on this topic before, but what sparked this one was first my church mission coordination group discussing the possibilities for a group from my church to visit a couple that we support in Kenya and, in the future, another couple en route to Japan. And we’re thinking hard about how we do it. It will not be mission tourism!

And secondly there was Eddie Arthur’s recent blog which has the same title as this post. read on…

Yes, you read that title right. There is no such thing as short-term mission.

We could spend ages arguing about what exactly we mean by mission, but that’s not the point of this piece. Let’s simply look at the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20.

‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’

So mission is first and foremost to make disciples. It isn’t about making converts; getting people to raise their hands at the end of an emotional evangelistic talk. It’s about helping people to develop into maturing Christ followers who are living disciplined (the clue is in the word) lives. That is not a short term project, it can’t be done in just a few weeks or even a few months.

If this wasn’t enough, Jesus then tells us that we have to teach the new disciples everything he commanded us. That might take a little time, too.

So mission, by it’s nature, is a long term activity. There are no short cuts.

I particularly like this next paragraph.

However, just because mission itself is long term, this doesn’t mean that there is no place for short term mission workers. What it does mean is that short-term mission work must take place within a long-term framework. Short-term missionaries can bring valuable skills and manpower to bear at critical points in a long project. The key is designing short-term mission projects that support ongoing mission work.                  [Italics mine]

Eddie added a footnote. Well, he would; he works for Global Connections! But I thoroughly agree with his final sentence.

If you are interested in short-term mission, you should take a look at the Global Connections “Short-Term Mission; Code of Best Practice“. I would strongly discourage anyone from going on a short-term trip which does not adhere to these basic principles.

Wycliffe Bible Translators UK & Ireland is looking into new initiatives in this area but in the meantime see what might get you involved.

 

 

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Two Week Stint: “an amazing opportunity”

Caitlin Hamilton was one of four students from N. Ireland who attended Wycliffe’s Two Week Stint programme in the south of France this past summer. We invited Caitlin to write a blog for us and here it is. She starts by tracing her journey with Wycliffe…     

   

I will never forget the moment I walked into a boulangerie in the south of France to ask for 18 baguettes! The boulangerie was in Charmes-sur-Rhône, a little village in the Ardèche area of France. The reason I was there was because I was taking part in the Two Week Stint.

It started on Sunday the 17 July 2016, when I arrived at the gîte to find this group of then strangers, now friends, all standing around outside and talking. Well, you could say it started that morning when I left the house at 6.30 to get the bus for Dublin. After a lift, a bus, a plane, a tram, a train, another bus and a lift from the bus stop, I was finally there, ready for the two weeks to begin.

Or then again, maybe it started even before that. I first heard of Wycliffe through church. I love languages, so when it came time to do work experience in lower sixth, my first thought was Wycliffe. I spent a fascinating week in the Belfast office, where I learnt translation wasn’t as simple as you would think. I was so taken with the work of Wycliffe, that I brought a friend along to the First Steps a few weeks later. Ever since I had been considering coming on the Two Week Stint, but the timing had never been right – until this year. I’m very thankful that I was able to get a travel scholarship at Queens: God is good.

Each morning began with worship, prayer and Bible teaching

Over the two weeks, we spent time together each morning in worship and Bible teaching. Our focus was on Acts, that God is on a mission. I really enjoyed the chance to worship together with this group of people from so many places, singing in both English and French as we praised our Lord. Then, each morning, we spent time learning more about the work of Wycliffe, and what is involved in Bible translation. We spent three days on each of linguistics, literacy and Scripture Engagement.

Linguistics covers a wide range of areas including: sounds, how language is written down, grammar, and meaning, and all of this is vital in producing a translation that can be read, can be understood, and makes sense. I found it fascinating, especially since we were using a real African language, Mankanya, as an example. Literacy focused on the importance teaching people to read their own mother tongue, and various methods which can be used to do this. The last topic we studied was Scripture engagement. This encourages and equips people to use the Scripture and to understand it, for example, by encouraging churches to read the Bible in the local language.

Teaching

I really enjoyed the fact that all of the camp was bilingual, in French and English. It was a great chance to practice my French and I’m feeling a lot more confident about speaking French now. Throughout the two weeks there were a number of French classes, which I found really useful as they focussed on practical things like giving your testimony and praying in French. This will certainly be useful next year as I spend my year abroad in France.

Learning

It wasn’t all classes though! Every afternoon, and at the weekend, we had free time to spend as we wished. A couple of afternoons were spent having fun by the river. We also went into the local city to explore, went to a Reformation museum, visited an impressive castle overlooking the area, went on a guided tour around some caves, and went around a maize maze. We had a lot of fun in the evenings too, chatting, playing games, and one night we even had a ceilidh!

Reformation museum visit

The Two Week Stint was an amazing opportunity, and I enjoyed it so much. It was great getting to spend time in such an idyllic place with some lovely people while learning about the work of Wycliffe.

This article also appears in the September edition of Wycliffe News which can be ordered by e-mail or post here

My thanks to Caitlin for this guest blog about her Two Week Stint experience .

Photos © Knut Burmeister, ALLTAG  http://foto.alltagmedia.de/

For information on Two Week Stint 2017, keep an eye here

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Should short term mission be encouraged, re-defined or even, perhaps, abolished?

Ok, I’m being deliberately provocative in the title, but please read on.

“Dear Sir, I’d like to come and be a dentist for two weeks. I’ve been meeting once a month with a small group of others who also want to be short-term dentists. We have our t-shirts printed and we’re ready to come.

P.S. Can you drive us around, translate for us and help take cool photos for our Facebook pages?”

I’d like to be a fly on the wall when the dentist received that letter. We don’t have short-term social workers, or short-term bio-scientists. We don’t have short-term gastro-enterologists or short-term politicians. So why do we have short-term missionaries in ever-increasing numbers?

So writes Craig Greenfield at Relevant Magazine.

This appeared in the past few days (or perhaps it has re-appeared because I seem to remember reading it or something very similar before). It’s in your face; it’s radical; it’s though-provoking – or is it? Because Craig goes on to make several key statements which should not be unfamiliar with Christians who understand the Bible and what Jesus has called us to in the New Testament. Take a look at John 20:21  for example.

Let’s just agree right up front that there is no such thing as a part-time Christian. There is no such thing as a follower of Jesus who is not in full-time service to God. As followers of Jesus, we are all called to a vocation.

When we see that each of us has a unique and important vocation, we’ll develop a theology of work that works.

And later he suggests some re-defining or rather, re-naming of what have come to be known as short term mission trips. You can read his suggestions in the article.

When correctly framed, these trips can be important and even life-changing seasons of engagement with the poor.

At first reading I wondered why he emphasises “the poor”. Do all short term mission teams go to visit / help poor people? Short term mission in my experience can be life-changing in many ways, not least an awareness that so many people in the world don’t have the Bible in their heart language. But then I suppose that is a form of poverty too, isn’t it? Bible poverty!

So what do you think? Does short term mission need re-thinking in your church or in the mission organisation that you are involved with? I f so, let’s do it! So that we can obey Jesus better.

PS With reference to the dentist idea above… I tried Googling “short term dentist” and I found opportunities for dentistry overseas at GapMedics UK. So dentists, there’s an option.

Or dentists and anybody elsewhere, get in touch with Wycliffe Bible Translators about opportunities to explore the Bible poverty that I referred to above.

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Ultimate short term mission trip?

Just to satirise a little bit more…

Following my discovery of Daniela Papi’s BBC magazine article, I remembered Jamie’s blog which has appeared in a recent Global Connections Sphere magazine. I’m including it in its wonderful entirety…

You know what I really want to do?

I want to fill a rental van marked “Tourist” with unbelievably rich people and then I want to bring them to your middle-class neighborhood to take pictures of you and your kids and your house and your cars.

I’ll act as the unofficial tour guide to their trip, walking them slowly down the street, pointing out the shocking differences between their lifestyle and yours. “This man,” I will say with a gesture of my upturned palm, “cuts his own lawn.”

“These kids share a bedroom.”

“Many of these families require two incomes… just to survive.”

I’ll tell them bluntly, “Most of these people will never ride in a helicopter, meet the president, or own a show horse.” And they will glance at each other with looks of angst and sadness, they’ll shake their heads at the injustice of it all.

And then I’ll let the details of your simple life sink in as they snap pictures of your no-thrills mid size SUV and your quarter acre lot. I’ll stand aside so they can get pictures of each other, smiling, with their arms around your kids in hand-me-downs. Ooh, and maybe they can take turns helping you cut your hedge or clean your bathroom, and then you could show some of them how to make a sandwich – That would be so great for the video they’re gonna take back to show at the Super Elite Rich People Church.

But don’t worry. There will totally be something in it for you. The rich people are going to paint all of the houses on your block. For real. They’re going to pay for it and do all the work and everything. Also? They’re gonna do a puppet show for your kids, and give them candy and crap.

It’s a win-win.

Even if you’re extremely uncomfortable while all of this is going on, in the end, you will look at your freshly painted house and it will make you feel good about what just happened. And when the rich people go home, they’ll get to tell their people about how they painted your house and learned to make a sandwich, which, of course, will make them feel good, too.

So, like I said, win-win…

And Jamie’s conclusion…

Are short-term missions teams sent to impoverished communities helpful…? or harmful…? or maybe neither…? Whadayathink?

Check out Jamie the Very Worst Missionary and her wonderfully thought provoking blog here

 

And, oh yes, in the meantime, here’s a Wycliffe UK suggestion for a trip that probably won’t do anyone any harm, but might help you think about your future. Two Week Stint in France this coming summer

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GAP Year… not all it’s cracked up to be

Volunteering abroad to build schools or dig wells might make people feel good about themselves – but it can be detrimental to those who are supposed to be helped.

I can’t remember how, but I came across this article by Daniela Papi on the BBC News Magazine 1 May 2013 entitled Is gap year a bad thing? It has prompted me to blog on short term mission again, but first…

Here are some of the things she writes…

I feel that the growing practice of sending young people abroad to volunteer is often not only failing the communities they are meant to be serving, but also setting these travellers, and by extension our whole society, up for failure in the long run.

We must stop volunteering abroad from becoming about us fulfilling our dreams of being heroes. The travellers are not just missing out on learning the lessons that lead to more sustainable changes in themselves and in the world, but they are also often negatively impacting the people they are meant to be “serving”.

Volunteering to take care of orphans might not sound too bad at first – at least I didn’t think so on my initial orphanage visits. Imagine if an orphanage near your home had a rotating door of volunteers coming to play with these children who have already been deemed vulnerable.

People often say, “doing something is better than doing nothing”. But it isn’t. Not when that something is often wasteful at best, and at worst causing a lot of harm.

Daniela is highlighting the same issues that Christian mission short termism continues to debate. It’s not that it is bad or wrong or always a disaster… but it is a continuous challenge to assess the needs of the people we claim to serve, not the self-satisfaction of Gappers, short termers with misinformed intentions and unrealistic expectations.

In short, the short term trip that you are planning to advertise or to go on… what will it achieve in the context of God’s mission to the people he created?

In the meantime, here’s a Wycliffe UK suggestion for a trip that probably won’t do anyone any harm, but might help you think about your future. Two Week Stint in France this coming summer

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Did Anything Good come out of Iceland’s Volcanic Dust?

dust cloud from Iceland volcano

This blog is less about volcanic dust than about positive outcomes of short term mission. Perhaps there has been more than enough said on the blogosphere about  short term mission – so why write another blog?

Because I love a good news story!

Wycliffe Engage Indonesia 2010

Having had a number of short term mission experiences, including the Wycliffe Engage team to Indonesia in 2010, X contacted us last week, came to visit and told us that it was time to apply to Wycliffe for linguistic training.

So what has this to do with Icelandic volcanic dust clouds? Our Engage orientation weekend was just days after the Thursday when dust clouds totally disrupted air traffic around the UK and Europe. X was one of the brave few who actually got to the weekend.

For me, this is definitely a short term mission good news story. Now all we have to do is pray X through the application process while completing final year at university.

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Ten Commandments for Short Term Mission

These ten commandments are not new, but as the season begins in the northern hemisphere when many Christians, young and older, begin to think about which mission trip to go on in summer 2011 – they are very timely and worth reading.

For quite a few years I was responsible for Wycliffe UK’s summer teams. Along with my colleagues, we worked hard to get across these commandments – or something very like them – though in a more modern version as befits a Bible translation organisation 🙂

1. Thou shalt always remember that the primary function of a short-term team is to learn, and not to help.

2. Thou shalt always defer to the long-term missionaries, even when thou dost not agree with them.

3. Thou shalt surely leave all thy agendas at home before thou arrivest on the mission field.

4. Thou shalt be prepared to spend large amounts of time doing nothing, for thus verily is the way of the mission field.

5. Thou shalt be careful to obey in all details, the security rules and advice of the project which thou visitest.

6. Thou shalt be both attentive and accurate in the communication with the mission base before thy visit.

7. Thou shalt be careful to pay for all the expenses of thy visit.

8. Thou shalt take great care in thy giving and spending, lest thou appearest to be filthy rich.

9. Thou shalt be careful to respect the doctrinal and theological views of the project which thou visitest.

10. Thou shalt surely keep thy word in regards to follow-up activities.

(from Paul Cull, leader of Projeto Casa Esperanza in Brazil)

Read the whole post here

Originally posted November 21, 2006

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