The New York Times has an article today entitled “Churches Retool Mission Trips”. It discusses the rise in popularity of short-term mission trips as well as some of the problems with such trips. It is well worth a read, especially if you are a member of a church that sponsors trips like these.

I have often wondered about the effectiveness of these trips, especially those that involve building projects. It costs a great deal to reach some of these destinations, and often we are flying in unskilled labor. The article addresses both of these issues. On the one hand, it notes that sometimes missionaries have paid as much as $30,000 to fly a team to Mexico to build a house that could have been built by locals for $2,000. On the other hand, some structures have had to be torn down after the missionaries left because they were of substandard construction. In one case, a missionary-built building collapsed in a storm, killing two children. The article also raised the question of how culturally sensitive missionaries are being when show up in poor villages with lots of expensive digital cameras. If we want to help people, perhaps it would be better to send the $30,000 to the village to pay for them to build their own churches and houses. They would get better buildings and the influx of money would help the economy. We wouldn’t get the first-hand cultural experience, but it seems to me that missions work is supposed to be about enriching the lives of others, not about our own personal growth.

In the interest of full disclosure, I participated in one of these trip twenty years ago. I went to Jamaica for ten days to run Vacation Bible Schools in inner city Kingston. I enjoyed the trip, but I wonder how much any of the Jamaicans got out of it. I have always felt that the Spring Break trip I took to help clean up Charleston, SC, after Hurricane Hugo was a much better use of resources. Since serving in Lithuania for 2.5 years as a missionary, my ideas of what missions work is all about have changed quite a bit.

Update: Adam Couturier linked to this post and pointed to an entry on his own blog entitled “The Problem of Missions and Monetary Contributions in the Missions Field” from last month. It is well worth reading. Adam is a student at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. I presume he found my blog through my friend Calvin Park at Random Bloggings, who is also at Gordon Conwell.

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