An Argument for Short Term Missions: Part 2

We can't underestimate the power of presence. This is true both for those who are visited and for those who visit. I have seen it time and again when a short term mission team shows up the people we visit are excited and encouraged. In many cultures it is an incredible honor to welcome visitors into their homes. On a visit to Uganda I was introduced to a woman who cared for three teens orphaned by AIDS. She was over 100 years old and living in a dirt floored brick home that had recently replaced the mud hut she had lived in most of her life. She could not even stand but lifted her hands to me and wept with joy. I asked my Ugandan partner what she was saying and he told me she was thanking me for the honor and blessing of visiting her home. It was my turn to weep.

No amount of YouTube video clips or late night commercials will replace being physically present in the lives of people. If I go to someone and ask them to contribute $2500 to advance a worthy project in Kenya I guarantee that, in most cases, the answer will be 'no'. If I ask that same person to go with me to Kenya, they will find the $2500. Once they have spent time in Kenya, worked in a medical clinic for orphans, stood alongside Kenyan workers building a kitchen or cleaned up a building to create a community health care facility their lives are changed. Their sense of place in the world shifts in good ways. And the people they serve with are also changed in some fundamental ways. In short, relationships form that cannot be defined by money or even the work that's accomplished.

Short term missions cannot and must not be about one group of people going to rescue another group of people. That is demeaning, wrong and too often a big part of our motivation. If we go we must go as servants, partners and members of the same family. We must go intending to build relationships not buildings. Anyone can build a building. It doesn't take a team of strangers to do that. When we go just to build what we end up doing is offending. I'm reminded of a team that went to Puerto Rico and was assigned to paint and clean a nursery. Instead of doing what they were asked to do they decided all the toys in the nursery were unsuitable so they threw them all away and bought all new, clean, fresh toys. If you get what I'm talking about then you know how horribly offensive and hurtful that act of 'charity' was to the people there. They wanted to visit and build a friendship which they didn't get and they got a nursery full of new toys which they didn't want!

Short term missions must be undertaken with much preparation. But most of that preparation is training Americans how to behave in other cultures. Most of the preparation is reminding ourselves that we go to build relationships with capable and competent partners who will continue to advance their ministry even if we never show up. If we go with our minds and hearts in the right place short term missions can be very effective. If we can't then we shouldn't go at all.