Thursday, July 10, 2008
Short-Term Missions
- "Unfortunately, STM trips often make the serious mistake of providing relief in contexts in which development is the appropriate intervention. Providing handouts of goods and services in such a situation can do enormous damage by undermining the willingness and capacity of low-income communities to be stewards of their own human and physical assets. Doing relief in a development context isn’t just ineffective; it’s damaging!"
- "Instead of focusing on the gifts and abilities that God has placed in low-income communities, the implicit assumption of many STM trips can be, “We must come in and build houses for you, because you don’t have the materials or know-how to do so yourselves. You need us to show you how to run Vacation Bible Schools in your community because we know more than you do.” This “needs-based” approach exacerbates the feelings of inferiority that are rampant in many low-income communities and can inflate the sense of superiority of the STM teams. In addition, these assumptions are not always true!"
I am, and have been for some time, less than enamored with the whole STM thing. My biggest beef with lies in the fact that most I have experienced are not about the recipients of the aid, but about the senders. This trips really do help build local congregations, but, as these quotations point out, they do not necessarily help the people they are aimed at helping.
Which raises, to my mind, a deeper question - do they REALLY help the senders? Oh sure, they help the sending church - they build community, organization, etc. But does it help the senders, as disciples? Consider, if the call to discipleship is the call to selflessness, would the issues raised in the Monitor piece really be issues?
We so often rush in to do ministry where we sense need, but the need we sense is often our own - our need to do something - so we do the wrong thing to serve our need when we should figure out the right thing.
How often do we think Jesus died and was resurrected because God needed us? God could have easily left us to our sinful suffering. God could also just have easily fixed everything. But God chose a very different path - He chose the path that honored our needs as He created us. That is food for deep thought when we think about missions of all types:
Phil 2:5-8 - Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, {and} being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.Those words take on new and deeper meaning in light of this, don't they? Think about it.
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