Learning Christianity Together

I read with gratitude Joshua Musser Gritter’s recent paean for youth group trips. My own teenage experiences in Haiti and Honduras nearly twenty years ago opened my eyes to my wealth and to the wideness of the world. On youth group retreats in the wooded edges of Arkansas I found community, connection with the transcendent, and challenges that helped me take my faith seriously. Now, as a parish priest in Asheville, I’ve wondered how to create such experiences for the youth in my church.

Doing so feels not only important, but urgent. We are in a national teen mental health crisis. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of teens and young adults with clinical depression more than doubled. The suicide rate for 10-14 years olds tripled. A recent C.D.C. survey found that in 2021, almost 60 percent of high school girls experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and nearly 25 percent made a suicide plan. Meanwhile, the latest brain science concludes that “spirituality is the most robust protective factor against the big three dangers of adolescence: depression, substance abuse, and risk taking… The totality of recent, cutting-edge research paints a definitive and unambiguous picture: the adolescent brain is a spiritual brain, primed for development and responsive to the protective benefits of personal spirituality.” (Lisa Miller, The Spiritual Child) Youth group trips are a fantastic way to help young people cultivate meaningful spirituality, and spirituality is key to adolescent health.

But I don’t call think we should call these trips “short-term mission trips” just because they involve travel to a foreign country or some measure of service. It’s not that I’m opposed to the language of “mission” in general, or that I think the church should give up missionary endeavors. Rather, it’s that if a “short-term mission trip” is designed more for the spiritual growth of our youth than for evangelism or service, both the meaning of the trip and the meaning of mission in our common life is obscured. We need to find better  — clearer, more precise, and less-burdened — language.

History of the Term

The term “short-term mission trip” is only about fifty years old.

Short-term mission trips as we know them today began in the 1960s. The success of projects like the Peace Corps, paired with the growth of mass commercial air travel, inspired Christian organizations to experiment. Recruiting primarily college students and single twenty-somethings, organizations like YWAM (Youth With A Mission) and OM (Operation Mobilization) created cross-cultural experiences that lasted from a month to a year or two. A narrative grew up about these trips: they were ways for American young people to gain spiritual insight and grow personally while serving “the least of these.” Individual churches adopted the trend and set up their own trips, too.

But established missionary boards and agencies were slower to adopt short-term missions, and when they did, the narrative was different: it was less about spiritual formation for the young people and more about helping established missionaries — even recruiting new, long-term missionaries. For these boards, mission had always primarily been about evangelism, church-planting, and scripture translation.

It was not until the 1970s that high school students began to take part in short-term mission experiences. Summer youth trips gained widespread acceptance in the 1980s, and by the 1990s, they had exploded in popularity. The established missionary community, faced with the ubiquity of short-term trips, was forced to concede: finally, they too began calling them “missions trips,” and referring to people who made one- or two-year commitments overseas as “missionaries,” even if this linguistic change obscured some real differences between the purposes and kinds of work done.

So you might say that in the brief history of short-term mission trips, there have been two competing narratives to justify their existence: the established missionary community wanted the story to be about recruiting potential missionaries and aiding established missionaries, but local churches and new organizations wanted the story to be about the spiritual growth of those who went, along with serving the poor (not traditionally a goal of missionary work, which had primarily been about evangelism, Scripture translation, and church planting). This second narrative, for the most part, won out.

And this is why when people come back from a short-term trip, you’ll hear them say things like, “They [the poor] taught me so much more than I taught them,” or “They gave me so much more than I gave them.” This is the narrative their preparation has primed them to use. They had been told that they were going to serve the poor and experience spiritual growth; they’re simply saying that their spiritual growth seems more valuable than their service was.

And undoubtedly, in a lot of cases, that’s true! Especially if the service they’ve gone to provide was a project their church dreamed up, rather than something the people they served had asked for.

For example, suppose a church knows of a school in a Latin American country that needs a new building. They send a team of high schoolers to do the work, a common enough type of summer trip experience. But suppose that while these students — inexperienced in the art of building, but happy to serve — are working on the construction, a man from the community walks by. He’s bigger and stronger than the kids are. He’s unemployed. When he looks at them, he sees teenagers who have enough extra money to fly to his country, doing a job for free that he would have loved to have been paid even a small wage to do. Those wages would have gone to feed his family, or to enable him to buy the uniforms his children must have to attend that very school.

This building team has helped the community, yes, but probably not in the best way. They’ve flown in like little gods (to use an expression from Andy Crouch’s Playing God), fixed a problem, and flown out again, leaving community members feeling even more helpless than before. The mission team, on the other hand, has experienced the transcendent, been more open to God than they usually are, faced their own needs and weaknesses in powerful ways, and found new connections with each other. Maybe they have — unwittingly — used the poor for their own spiritual growth.

Admittedly, this is just one example from a multitude of kinds of short- term trips. But even when these trips are done as well as possible,  I wonder about the language: Should we really call a trip that does more for us than it does for the people we serve a mission trip?

What is its mission? Whom does it serve? It certainly does not align with “mission” in the older sense of a lifelong commitment to foreign evangelism or church planting.

In Short Term Mission: An Ethnography of Christian Travel and Experience, Brian Howell concludes that reforming our approach to short-term mission will require changes both in practice and in language. It “will require attention to the power imbalances created through the inequalities of wealth present in these encounters. More specifically, it will require those with more resources to intentionally subvert the inequalities as they exist.” He quotes Dr. David Zac Niringiye of the Kampala diocese of the Anglican Church in Uganda. When asked if short-term mission trips could serve African Christians well, Niringiye suggested that short-term trips ought to be oriented around listening. What if, he said, instead of going with a “mission” in mind, Americans just brought greetings from one church to another, and opened up a conversation, a relationship?

Learning Christianity Together

Should a trip organized around “bringing greetings” from one church to another be called a “mission trip”? Or, as Oscar Murio, a pastor at Kenya’s Nairobi Chapel, suggests, should we call it a “short-term learning opportunity”?

Such short-term trips truly can be opportunities for immense learning. After a week in Honduras as a teenager, I understood for the first-time how upside-down and antithetical to the kingdom of God so many American values were, and I started tithing forty percent of my earnings from my part-time job. Seeing how Christians shape their lives in deeply different cultures can help us understand in profound ways that a comfortable middle class life and a happy family are not the end goal of a Christian life. Seeing how churches shape their ecclesial life in deeply different cultures can help us understand what’s essential to gospel-centered worship, and what’s merely cultural. And the challenge of cross-cultural experiences can reveal to us our own weaknesses, and invite us to rest more completely in the grace and strength of God. For me, it was only after facing my own failures in a foreign country that I actually understood what I had always been told — that my salvation wasn’t something I could earn.

“Short-term learning opportunity” is a less inspiring title than “mission trip,” for sure. We can keep workshopping the language. But the work of clarifying our language can be its own kind of spiritual formation. Language shapes the way we see the world, and the way we see ourselves. Youth — and all of us — need to understand that God’s mission is to reconcile all things to God’s self, and we can participate in that wherever we are. Bringing precision to our shared vocabulary can also bring clarity to our shared mission.

“Short-term mission” has been part of our lexicon for less than fifty years, and it’s the wrong name. Let’s change the term, and let that simple change help us remember us to craft experiences for our youth that are more reciprocal, authentic, and relational, oriented around listening. Let’s be sure we in the West are aware of our cultural power, we use our social capital to help, and we learn about structural injustices instead of just witnessing poverty. Let’s make our trips about cross-cultural communication and relationship, and let’s line them up with the mission of God, which is long-term by definition: the restoration of relationships, the reconciliation of all things to Godself.

Parts of this essay are adapted, with permission, from the book, Dangerous Territory, a new edition of which comes out next month.