A few years ago I was in a church service where a team of energetic college students and young adults was reporting back on their short-term international mission trip. Like most such groups, they had plenty of daunting cross-cultural experiences to report. “The food was so spicy,” one wide-eyed young woman said, drawing laughter from the congregation. “It was terribly hot and humid—we had such a hard time getting to sleep,” another team member said. Amid much hilarity, the team leader described their consternation when they arrived at a remote village only to discover that the Christians from the surrounding area were expecting them to lead a worship service, preach, and teach—on the spot.
They had been stretched, they said, way beyond their “comfort zones.” They had also returned full of praise for God and love for one another and the new brothers and sisters they had met. “We received so much more than we gave,” one team member said.
All wonderful, true sentiments that I had heard dozens of times before from returning short-term missionaries. The only difference was that I was in Nairobi, Kenya, and every member of the team had been born and raised in Africa.
That morning I had to unlearn several of my ideas about global mission. Though I was visiting Nairobi on a short trip of my own, the testimonies of the short-term travelers reminded me that North Americans are not the only ones making pilgrimages of mission around the world. In many ways crossing borders was as unfamiliar and difficult for them as it was, and is, for me.
Traveling round trip
If you define mission as crossing cultural boundaries for the sake of the gospel, the global church is engaged in mission at a scale that would have been unimaginable to any previous Christian generation.
Travel and telecommunications have become less expensive and more efficient. Globalized economies reward and demand travel. Millions buy a one-way ticket to a new land in hope of a better life, but an increasingly affluent slice of the world’s population—not just in North America, but in Asia, Africa, and the rest of the Americas as well—can afford to travel round trip.
Likewise, the center of gravity of Christian mission is shifting from the few who set off for a far country with no plans to return, to the many whose return tickets are tucked safely in their knapsacks. Between 1.5 million and 2 million American Christians leave the country on a short mission trip every year. And that’s just Americans!
Is this round-trip mobility a good thing for the advance of the gospel? It may well be. The African team came back with stories of new converts and strengthened believers in India, as well as the increased confidence that comes to those who take real risks for their faith. Many American short-term teams can tell similar stories.
On the other hand, you don’t have to look very hard or listen too long before you hear embarrassing tales of cultural insensitivity and mismatched expectations. Americans, in particular, tend to be activists, wanting to see concrete outcomes—which can lead to make-work projects, sometimes with comic results. As Nairobi pastor Oscar Muriu told me in an interview, “After you leave, we repaint many of the walls that you painted!”
Return tickets can lead to attenuated relationships. A friend’s church recently sent a second short-term team to serve alongside Christians in a small, materially poor town in Central America they had visited the previous summer. They were overwhelmed, and taken aback, when their hosts tearfully told them on the last night of their visit, “We have had American Christians visit us before. But none of them ever returned. We thought that God had forgotten us.”
Even the shortest cross-cultural mission trip is fraught with opportunities for God to make himself known, and with the real potential that we will unwittingly misrepresent him. The shorter the journey, in some ways, the greater the stakes—since we will all too easily ignore both the blessings and the blunders.
From short-term trips to long-term transformation
That’s why we decided to produce Round Trip—to provide a training resource for a new kind of short-term missions. The new round-trip missions are as much about receiving as giving. They are as much about learning as teaching. They are as much about what happens after we get home as what happens during the time we are there, and as much about lasting friendships as snapshots of brief meetings.
The good news is that more and more churches want exactly this kind of short-term missions. The trips themselves may be short, but we want their effects to be lasting: producing lasting friendships, lasting transformation in our own lives, and lasting benefits to the people we visit.
So we went looking for some pioneers—churches, like the one I visited in Nairobi, that were developing a very different kind of short-term missions. They were planning their trips carefully to build long-term partnerships rather than just provide one-off experiences. They were sending not just high-school students but senior pastors. They were making it possible for the less affluent partners to make return trips of their own to the United States, so that mission was no longer unidirectional but truly “round trip.” The result in each case was lasting results, in both locations.
Round Trip tells the story of two such trips—one from Chapel Hill Bible Church in North Carolina, the other from Mavuno Downtown in Kenya—weaving documentary footage together with commentary from some of the world’s foremost experts on mission and cross-cultural relationships, and providing all the practical basics that team leaders need to make sure their teams are ready to go.
We’ve carefully prepared leader’s and participant’s guides so that you can prepare your short-term team for an adventure in faith, friendship, service, and learning that will continue long after you and your team have gotten off the plane back home. They’ll help your team to understand that no mission worth undertaking is really “short-term.” Round trip missions are one way God can launch a lifelong process of transformation—far away and at home.
Adapted from “Unexpected Global Lessons,” Christianity Today, December 2007.
