Short-term mission trips get a bad rap these days. We’ve done enough cultural reflection to realize that the cost of a plane ticket may better be sent in dollars than in people to foreign countries, and that most of what we call missions is actually religious tourism. Books like When Helping Hurts and Toxic Charity have challenged Christian service and evangelism to its core, confronting us to not only check our good intentions, but to do the research on whether our actions for the good are actually just perpetuating cycles of poverty. Michelle Acker Perez hosts short-term mission groups in Guatemala and offers this advice: “Developing countries do not need short-term heroes. They need long-term partners,” (see full article at RelevantMagazine.com). Going on a short-term mission week can be a magical and life-changing experience for the one going. But is it leading you to long-term relationships with the poor? Is it leading you to long-term partnerships that bring a real sense of Christian fellowship and community? Or does it just give you a feel-good fix that you can only get from a big trip? Perez asks, “We work hard for a one-week trip, but then what? What if your church or youth group or school worked on matching every dollar you spent on your one-week trip to send down to the place you served over the course of the year?”
John and Charles Wesley headed out on their own international mission trip when they were 32 and 28 years old, respectively. Along with fellow Holy Clubbers Benjamin Ingham and Charles Delamotte, they left the academic safety of Oxford to become volunteer missionaries to Georgia, the last of the original 13 colonies in America. Representing the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG-FP), they were given little direction other than to form religious societies, “cultivate a sense of religion among the Europeans in your settlement, and if possible among the natives who for many ages have lived in the utmost darkness” (Wesley’s Letters, 25:439-41). Charles was quickly ordained and spent most of the journey to America copying out his brother’s sermons so he would have something to preach. The others spent the journey practicing Holy Club disciplines. For John, the journey to America was just as much, if not more, about fully converting himself in faith as it was about converting others. I love this line where he writes, “Nothing so convinces us of our own impotence as a zealous attempt to convert our neighbor; nor indeed, till he does all he can for God, will any man feel that he can himself do nothing,” (Letters, 25). Already, John was coming to the healthy realization that it was not his best efforts that changed hearts…either the hearts of others or his own heart…but only the hidden work of the Holy Spirit. While John hoped to do good in America, and was eager to preach the gospel to the Native Americans, this mission trip was also clearly a soul-searching venture for him.
We’ll spend the next few weeks exploring that adventure as John and Charles get up to some crazy hijinks in The South. In the meantime, I encourage you to reflect on your own patterns of mission. The Missionary Assembly in Ghana once had as its motto, “The mission is not ours, but God’s” (Trinitarian Doctrine for Today’s Mission, Newbigin, 83). How are you making disciples in your everyday life, living in loving obedience to God the Father, bearing witness to the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead and works to reconcile all creation to God through Jesus Christ? The mission may call you overseas, but it most certainly calls you to engage in God’s central purpose for creation wherever you find yourself. We will see that the Wesley’s missionary journey felt far more like a giant failure, but God does not call us to be successful…only to be faithful. In your daily life as a missionary of this reconciling God, sometimes the greatest witness we bear is of God’s unfailing love and peace in the face of our own great ignorance, struggle, and disappointment.