mission

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Good Deeds: Construction

When our daughter was in the eighth grade, she joined a short-term mission team from her youth group. Working with a ministry dedicated to this type of ministry, the teens built a house for a Mexican family who until then had been living in a cardboard hut.

It was a great experience for her, and a great blessing for the newly-housed family.

Construction projects are very popular among  short-term mission teams. You don’t need to learn another language, you can use skills you already have, the project can fit into a short time frame, and you are providing tangible results for appreciative locals. With all the hugs and smiles, you certainly return home feeling as if you have accomplished something worthwhile. Our friends and family have roofed churches, built medical dispensaries, constructed playgrounds, and painted sanctuaries.

But is it always appropriate to travel to another country to build something? Is that the best way to bless the people and encourage the church there? Or is it sometimes just a way to check off “good deed” on our spiritual to-do lists?

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Good Deeds: Orphans

It’s getting harder and harder to do a good deed anymore. This month and over the next two months, we’ll look at some case studies of good deeds gone wrong, and what we should do differently next time.

Africa is home to 15 million orphans and “children at risk.” Most Americans are very aware of this crisis, largely caused by the spread of AIDS. We also are familiar with James 1:27—“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress….”

Clearly, the church needs to step up and come alongside these children, but how? The traditional answer has been to build thousands of orphanages. But is that the right answer?

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Missionary Support: A Suggestion

How would you like to walk up to one of your friends and ask, “Hey, can I have $50 or $100 a month for the next umpteen years?”

How long do you think they’d stay your friend? Yet, this is what we expect missionaries and many other full-time ministry workers to do. It’s called “support raising.” Pretty awkward, yes?

We’ve managed to sugar coat it somewhat. We tell people it’s their chance to get involved in what God is doing. We promise significance. And if there’s any way we can connect them to what we do, we show photos of starving children or cherubic orphans.

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Supporting Long-term Missions

It used to be that a missionary heading overseas would say good-bye to friends and family with little expectation that they’d ever see any of them again. It was a life-long commitment, and frequently that life would be very short.

These days, any Christian can be a missionary. According to David Livermore, author of Serving with Eyes Wide Open, “four to five million Americans participate in religious short-term mission experiences” each year, spending $2.25 billion (yes, with a “b”) to do so.

At the same time, there are a little over 1.6 million full-time Christian missionaries, most of whom work in already-evangelized areas (Frontier Harvest Ministries). The numbers may be off somewhat (it’s very hard to get an accurate accounting), but the picture is clear—short-term missionaries greatly outnumber full-time workers. Keep that in mind for a moment.

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At Our Doorstep

Are you planning a short-term mission trip this year? Perhaps you’re heading to Mexico or Honduras or the Dominican Republic. Maybe your destination is India, or Ethiopia.

Or maybe you want to welcome your new neighbors who don’t speak your language or share your customs—but you don’t know how.

Do you want to learn more about other cultures, to be more able to relate to people from other nations?

You can visit China—or Mexico, or India—for the price of a few gallons of gas.

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God’s Special Forces

“There are places in the world many fear to tread, places of darkness where most have given up hope of ever trying to make a difference.”

The young man was standing in front of our Sunday school class, showing photos and telling hair-raising stories about smuggling food and Bibles into North Korea. Finding families for children orphaned by genocide in Myanmar. Even extracting persecuted believers from these and other nations that have targeted them for execution.

The U.S. military has special forces teams that engage in high-risk missions. Alpha Relief is one of God’s special forces teams.

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Is the Great Commission for Every Christian?

“My goal is that everyone in this church go on a short-term mission trip.”

Our Mission Pastor was talking to the “Global” Sunday School about our church’s mission strategy. I was sitting there, mostly nodding, until we came to this declaration. Everyone? Does God want that?

The Great Commission is a familiar passage to most Christians: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you….” (Matthew 28:19-20)

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Would You Support My…?

Will you please support …

  • my mission trip to India?
  • Bible smuggling in North Korea?
  • me as I go to England with YWAM?
  • the college ministry I joined as staff?
  • my church-planting ministry in Germany?
  • our kingdom business in West Africa?
  • our orphanage in San Salvador?
  • the local rescue mission?

The list keeps growing. We have a lot of close friends and relatives who are supported in their ministries by donations. Our “Global” Sunday School class hosts a steady stream of missionaries all needing more money. And all our mission-minded friends have kids who are now graduating from college, joining various ministries, and raising their own support.

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Worth Reading…

Every so often I come across a post on another blog that is so much better than anything I could write on a particular topic, I just have to share it. Actually, I come across superior blogs all the time, but if I told you about all of them, you’d have no reason (or time) to read mine. I’m normally quite selfish about these things.

However, “Jamie the Very Worst Missionary” (see blog roll at left) has expressed an important concern about short-term missions that should be required reading in every church. I just can’t keep this one to myself.

So, here you go. Read “Using your poor kid to teach my rich kid a lesson.” And when you’re done reading that, go ahead and read some of her other posts. And then read her husband’s posts on his blog—in fact, I highly recommend his series on the what, where, why, etc., of short term missions according to the gospels (to find all the posts, just type “short term missions” into his search box).

See you next week. I hope.

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Mission Myths 9 & 10: The West vs. the Rest

I’ve been commenting on an article by Shane Bennett that appeared several years ago in Missions Catalyst.

In his two-part post on Top Ten Myths about Missions , Bennett explained:

I want to understand how the average Lou and Sue, sitting in the pew, think about missions stuff. … From what I’ve seen there are some serious misconceptions floating around in our churches, at least some of our churches. We could call these collective assumptions, beliefs that simply don’t reflect reality, “myths.”

If you want to read all ten myths now, check out the article online. You can see my other articles on this topic by choosing God:World under “Categories” on the right-hand column of my blog page.

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