Thursday, July 10, 2008

 

Short-Term Missions

Kruse Kronicle recently reprinted an article from the Mandate newsletter entitled: "Doing Short-Terms Missions without Doing Long-Term Harm." The piece makes several important points - just some:

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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