Dreaming of the Ideal \u201cMission Trip\u201d<\/p>\n
For those of you who don\u2019t know what a \u201cmission trip\u201d is: Many churches of all denominations send their people, usually young people (but not always), on \u201cmission trips\u201d to work and witness in a different culture from their own. Often (but not always) such one-to-two-week excursions aim at a place far from home perceived to be \u201cneedy\u201d in some sense. The church people go in vans, for example, pulling trailers loaded down with the mission trippers\u2019 clothes and sleeping bags and \u201cgoodies\u201d for the needy people they will live and work among. Or they go in busses or planes\u2014depending on how far away the \u201csite\u201d is. Often the \u201csite\u201d is somewhere \u201cup North\u201d if the church is in the deep South; often the \u201csite\u201d is \u201cdown South\u201d if the church is in the North. Often the \u201csite\u201d is Mexico (rarely Canada)\u2014if the church is in the U.S. Some go as far as Asia, Africa or South America.<\/p>\n
The usual stated purpose of the mission trip is to carry out \u201cChristian witness\u201d either by some kind of preaching (e.g., holding Vacation Bible School for the site\u2019s children) or some kind of social work (e.g., fixing up buildings badly in need of repair and\/or doing some kind of medical care). Often the purpose is both evangelism and social work. Then, when the mission trippers return to their church, they talk about their missionary work to their fellow congregants.<\/p>\n
There are whole companies that organize these mission trips for churches. For many churches, these events have become routine and even in some sense sacramental. But some \u201creal missionaries\u201d have begun in recent years to raise certain objections to them. They say, for example, that these trips really amount to a kind of \u201cevangelistic tourism.\u201d Some have even condemned them as a kind of cultural voyeurism. In other words, in the eyes of some long term pastors and missionaries who actually live among the people and strive to be part of their culture (and maybe are that), the mission trippers often have little to no understanding of the people they visit on the mission trip. In other words, they just \u201cdrop in\u201d and \u201cdrop out\u201d without becoming deeply embedded in the people\u2019s lives. Some critics of these mission trips say they are more for the trippers than for the people they visit. A few critics of these mission trips actually claim they do more harm than good.<\/p>\n
Without wading into that debate, please allow me to depict what I think a church might do instead of sending their people on a classical one or two week mission trip. Here\u2019s an alternative scenario of an entirely different kind of mission trip.<\/p>\n
Imagine a church that really wants all their people<\/em> to know a group of Christians from an entirely different culture, American or not. (There are many cultures within the United States.) And their goal is real transformation\u2014of themselves. What if they paid for a group of twenty-five to fifty people from another part of the U.S. or from another country altogether to visit them? They host them in their own homes, worship with them, let them lead the worship\u2014as they would in their own cultural and religious context, listen to them talk about their view of the host church, its denomination, its cultural environment, ask them to point out areas of the host church\u2019s total way of doing things that might need reconsideration and change, and generally receive from them \u201cwitness\u201d and \u201csocial work.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, \u201cmission tripping in reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n What would be the advantages of this? Well, the whole congregation would get to benefit directly rather than only indirectly through the mission trippers\u2019 after the mission trip reports. What benefit? They would get to meet and, hopefully, be challenged by the others<\/em>\u2014people of different cultural contexts\u2014showing them what it\u2019s like to different. They, the church members, would be on the receiving end<\/em> of the evangelism and social work. It might, hopefully it would, shatter some of their settled ways of looking at the world, at Christianity, at worship, at others.<\/p>\n I suspect that most American churches that organize and send their people on mission trips never think of themselves<\/em> as \u201cneedy.\u201d Chances are, however, they are very needy<\/em> in some senses. A very real need in many, perhaps most, American churches is to be evangelized by other Christians very different culturally, economically from themselves. They have unconsciously settled complacently into a routine of middle class American Christianity cocooned by all kinds of cultural habits they take for granted. Only true outsiders<\/em>\u2014outsiders to all that\u2014can help them see it and recognize it for what it is\u2014culturally accommodated, mostly suburban, Americanized Christianity.<\/p>\n I suspect that when such American Christians send a group of their people, from their church, on a mission trip, they go with the attitude that they are doing those \u201cpoor other people\u201d a favor. (Often when Southern churches send their youth on mission trips \u201cup North\u201d they go to relatively affluent areas to help a \u201cchurch plant\u201d from the South \u201cevangelize\u201d those poor godforsaken pagans \u201cup North\u201d where, as one Southern Baptist pastor I heard preached \u201cThey have a head knowledge of Jesus but don\u2019t have him living in their hearts.\u201d) A famous motivational speaker and writer my wife has worked for had a motto: \u201cAttitude is everything!\u201d In this case, I fear he\u2019s right. Churches sending people on mission trips often go with the unconscious attitude that \u201cThey need us; we are coming to help them.\u201d But what if we need them as much or more than they need us?<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>Students of world Christianity tell us that the \u201cplace\u201d where Christianity is growing fastest is the \u201cglobal South\u201d\u2014Latin America, Africa, Asia. They also tell us that Christians there, in those cultures, do things differently. They have developed their own, indigenous forms of Christianity. Do they need us? Or do we need them? Which need is greater? I\u2019m not asking about financial<\/em> matters; I\u2019m asking about complacency<\/em> which I have here earlier identified as the greatest danger to Christianity\u2014especially in America.<\/p>\n If we believe that God is busy<\/em> in the global South, and there is much evidence for that, then perhaps it is time we, Europeans and North Americans, receive those other Christians<\/em> among us\u2014to evangelize us and do a kind of social work among us. We may not need them to fix our roofs or dig wells or bring us Bibles in our own language, but we might very well need them to stir us up<\/em>, to tell us how, in what ways, we have accommodated our Christianity to our culture of entertainment, consumerism, and individualism.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dreaming of the Ideal \u201cMission Trip\u201d For those of you who don\u2019t know what a \u201cmission trip\u201d is: Many churches of all denominations send their people, usually young people (but not always), on \u201cmission trips\u201d to work and witness in a different culture from their own. Often (but not always) such one-to-two-week excursions aim at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n