PCPrays

**Disclaimer**  Many Christians today are shallow.  We do not ask the harder questions.  This post is just mean to ask some questions.  The reason the topic is on my mind is because my church youth group is currently on a short term mission trip to West Virginia.  However this post is not meant to be about them.  We have also had three people from our church go across the ocean this summer on short term mission trips.  This post is also not about them.  Rather it’s just about the whole idea of short term mission trips and if they are good or not.

Also I’m not focusing on any of the good things about short term mission trips because that’s not the point of this post.  I think it’s rather easy for anyone to come up with a list of pros, so I’m not going to do that for you 

**End of disclaimer**

Short term mission trips.  Could anything be more ingrained into the American Christian thinking?  I know I have been thinking about them a lot the last few weeks and I must confess that I’m not sure that they are really that good us or the people we try to help.

Our Youth

I think I’m going to call it STMTH.  That’s Short Term Mission Trip High.  You know the feeling, you go to some great place that really needs your help.  For a week or 3 you have really seen the Lord moving.  You feel great, been reading your Bible everyday and your prayer life has never been better.  In fact you have never been closer to Jesus.  You my friend have STMTH.

In his book “The Practice of the Presence of God” Brother Lawrence writes

“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in a great tranquility as if I were upon  my knees at the blessed sacrament.”

What are we teaching when we go to some far off place to serve the Lord?  Last year my church went to West Virginia to a place called “The Wade Center” (now I’m sure it’s a great place that is worthy of help so I’m not picking on the Wade Center any) to do some maintenance type of work and to help with their VBS.  Now I’m not kidding you the same week they were in W.V. a church group from Virginia came down to The Bread Of Life Mission in Plant City to help out with maintenance type of work and to help do their VBS.

And that is really the first time I began to wonder about STMTH and if it’s a good or bad thing.  What are we teaching our youth?  How many of them would serve the Lord in Plant City with the same excitement as they do at The Wade Center?  How many of them do?  Two months after they get back is there any lasting change?  Are they still reading their Bible and praying everyday?  I would guess that 99.9% of the time the answer is “no” they got back to “normal life” and the STMTH has worn off.

The People We Try To Help

It’s all about the kids.  We just have a desire to go and show the love of Jesus to these kids..  Sure thats it.  I guess all the kids locally know the Lord and are saved?  In fact we need to drive for 14 hours to find anyone who is not saved!  Lets be honest, we do not go on short term mission trips to help the kids (Now I’m not talking about places like Haiti or New Orleans where the need is so great that it can not be meet locally).  We go for STMTH, but I already talked about that.

So the next question to ask is do we really help these kids by doing a VBS for them?  Do you know that many third world orphanages refuse help from short term missionaries.  Why?  Because the kids grow attached (even love them) to the missionaries only to have their hearts broken when they leave.  It got to the point where many orphans would first ask the people “how long are you staying”.  They have had their hearts broken by too many people.

And what about our week long VBS?  Many of the children that we are serving come from broken homes.  They grow close to our kids and then just like other people in their lives we leave.

What if instead of driving 14 hours, we encouraged our youth to grow long term relation ships with local children?  Lives are not changed in a week, they are changed over years.  What if our youth did the VBS for the Bread of Life Mission and then also helped the same kids all year long with their home work?  What if they were their for their birthday and for Christmas?  Do you really think that we can make a great impact in the lives of children investing on a week of time?

The Money

I’m going to keep this one short.  How much money does the American Church spend on short term missions?  We have full time missionaries who are struggling to stay alive and we spend over a billion every year just for short term missions that see little results.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 5:47 am and is filed under Faith, _Roger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.