The Short-Term Missions Explosion

A veteran Christian teacher in Beijing has had enough of shortterm visitors from her home country. "I used to think I could give them a briefing and orientation that could be helpful," she told a mission agency leader. "Very few ever listened. They all have their own agenda. All they want is instant results." The woman now refuses to meet with such people and does not consider them to really be ministering to China.

In Kenya, a work team brought a missionary couple nearly to tears, reports Andrew Atkins of Emmanuel International. "They lived way out in the bush and one of their few luxuries was a carefully rationed stock of peanut butter," he said. "It wasn't just that the team quickly consumed all the peanut butter, but how they did it - hogging it down and asking for more, then complaining when they ran out."

Another time, Atkins says, a team went to Nairobi to work with slum dwellers. When the members returned home they talked about "how we were able to love the people." What they may not have mentioned was their choice to wear rubber surgical gloves while doing ministry in order to avoid the diseases of those among whom they worked.

Such tensions are increasingly common, not only between short-term workers and their career missionary brethren, but also between short-termers and so-called "national" believers. Jim Raymo of WEC International expresses the skepticism of many in the traditional sending agencies when he says, "short-term efforts without language and culture learning will not yield long-term results."

A new option

Short-term ministry is an option few other generations of Western Christians, much less their non-Western counterparts, ever considered. William Carey spent more than three decades in northern India without so much as a furlough (what we now often call a "home ministry assignment"). Nineteenth-century missionaries to West Africa packed their belongings in wooden coffins, never expecting to return to their homelands. They were short-term workers only in the sense that many of them died within a few years, some within months, of their arrival in that malaria-ridden region.

Diving into the deep end of world missions without putting at least a toe in the water is unthinkable to most boomers, however. Gone are the days when a missionary speaker would make an appeal from a pulpit and his hearers would jump up and volunteer for "the field." Unanswered questions and potential problems - Will I be able to raise my support? Will I get culture shock? Will I be able to use my gifts? - used to be dealt with during long-term ministry. Now they are dealt with before the ministry starts - or, if possible, during a short-term trip.

Part of the reason for this change is a generational difference between earlier builders of missions and today's young and middle-aged adults. As has been well documented elsewhere, baby boomers and busters are less likely to support an enterprise, either financially or personally, without firsthand knowledge of it. Many are interested in projects - the more tangible the better. And that most emphatically includes missions. Putting up a new school or showing the Jesus film to some refugees sounds a lot more doable to them than painstakingly learning the language, religion, and culture of a people.

So we now find organizations such as the Finishers Project, which aims to plug mid-career and retired professionals into, missions. Meanwhile "teen teams" and college students work on targeted projects, teams of skilled builders construct churche and camps overseas, short-termers teach in missionary kid schools and help in leadership training. Jim Reapsome, editor-at-large for Evangelical Missions Quarterly and World Pulse; says, "Churches have developed significant avenues of service with adult teams working from two weeks to two months. Among career missionaries, more of them are working as teams on specific projects, collaborating with church leaders on the field."

Trends

Short-term work had its genesis about four decades ago with the launch of two organizations employing short-termers: Operation Mobilization and Youth With A Mission. The explosion in short-term workers from the West has been remarkable in the last two decades. The Mission Advanced Research and Communication Center (MARC) of World Vision has estimated that the number of US lay people involved in short-term projects increased from 22,000 in 1979 to 120,000 in 1989. Later estimates held that 250,000 were sent out in 1992, and 150,000 in 1998. The Mission Handbook, meanwhile, says the "number of short-termers sent by mission agencies and serving from two weeks to a year increased from 38,968 in 1992 to 63,995 in 1996 to 100,386 in 1999. It also notes that of the roughly 40,000 cross-cultural missionaries sent by US Protestant agencies, roughly 7,000 are short-termers serving one to four years. These figures, of course, do not take into account the long-term missionaries who leave the field during or at the end of their first term of service (the standard is four years).

One explanation for the surge in short-term missionaries is at the definition of "missionary" is being stretched in what one might call the democratization of missions. (Ralph Winter of the US Center for World Mission, however, calls it the amateurization of missions.) Seth Barnes, executive director of the short-term agency Adventures in Missions, writes, "These changes are forcing a redefinition of our concept of a missionary. No longer is the mission field viewed as the province of an elite few. Increasingly, ordinary lay people are finding that they can be empowered to contribute to the missions enterprise with their time and talent."

James Engel, one of the most astute watchers of missions trends in the North American church, asserts in his 1989 book Baby Boomers and the Future o f World Missions, "A shortterm missionary service program is a must. Organizations not providing this option will face a manpower crisis."

Concerns

Proponents of short-term missionary service often assert that these missionaries will later enlarge the pool of long-term, career missionaries. Engel claims that "prior short-term service on the field sharply increases interest in a missionary career."

Yet while the number of short-termers has increased, the number of career workers has leveled off or declined. Even financial giving to agencies, which one might reasonably expect to grow with the bulging ranks of those who have gone on overseas ministry projects, has remained static, at less than $3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars annually.

Yet that is not the whole financial story. STEM Ministries, a short-term sending agency, has surveyed former participants and found that their prayer and giving increased significantly after their participation on a trip. Leslie Pelt, a missionary to Nigeria, has concerns about the justification for short-term missions on the basis of generational differences. She comments tartly, "We seem to be saying that because baby boomers are different, missions should be different. However, the cost of discipleship has not changed."

"Short-term missionaries do not really get to know us," an African believer told missionary Jim Lo. "We may love them as brothers and sisters, but they are still strangers to us. It is hard to be influenced by strangers. We need more long-term missionaries than short-term missionaries."

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