Freeing Congregational Mission

A Practical Vision for Companionship, Cultural Humility, and Co-Development

B. Hunter Farrell

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514000687
• eBook ISBN: 9781514000694
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

There is a deepening crisis in mission as practiced by North American congregations. Many mission activities are more effective at satisfying church members than making a lasting difference, producing what's too often consumer-oriented "selfie mission." Too much effort is based on colonial-era assumptions of mission launched from a position of power. These practices are not just ineffective—they deviate from mission in the way of Jesus.

Hunter Farrell and Bala Khyllep want to help free congregational mission from harmful cultural forces so churches can better partner with God's work in the world. They invite leaders to lay the foundation for more faithful and effective missions with three core elements:

• a Christ-centered theology of mission rooted in companionship
• an appetite and competence to engage across differences with cultural humility
• insights and strategies to accompany local and global neighbors in co-development

Farrell and Khyllep deliver key takeaways from the latest mission research, inspiring examples from innovative congregations, and a set of step-by-step tools for churches to discern and implement sound practices that will work for them. The local church community is well-positioned to build a spreading circle of relationships centered in Jesus Christ. With this book, congregations of every Christian tradition will find practical help to direct their resources in truly life-giving ways as they seek the mission of God.

SIX

Redeeming Short-Term Mission

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

Though it hardly existed fifty years ago, short-term missions (STM)—groups of Christians who travel locally, nationally, or internationally for four to fourteen days to engage in mission in another community—has grown to become one of the mission activities to which US congregations give the most time and money. Today, it is estimated that US Christians and their local churches spend between 3.5 and 5 billion dollars annually to send more than 1.6 million participants on these trips.1 Seventy percent of the 670 US Catholic, evangelical, and mainline Protestant mission leaders we surveyed in 2019 indicated that their congregations participated in STM as a congregational mission strategy.2

Many STM participants experience what they describe as a transformative experience and feel motivated to take another trip or engage in other forms of congregational mission. Hundreds of new organizations have sprung up to organize STM trips for congregations. It’s important to acknowledge how new and utterly revolutionary this understanding of mission is. In reviewing the last half century, I am convinced that short-term mission is by far the biggest and most profound innovation in the way American congregations participate in God’s mission. Curiously, despite the rapid growth and current massive scope of the STM phenomenon, only recently have mission scholars begun to study it.

Perhaps it was simply because of the deep level of innovation that the shift to short-term mission represents—the move from the traditional “centralized mission agency” paradigm to the newer “congregationally led mission” paradigm—that mission scholars were slow to perceive the importance of this “new kid on the block.” While there had been a few earlier studies on STM, evangelical missiologists Robert Priest and Brian Howell did much to shine the light of research on STM’s impacts on both short-term travelers and the communities visited. Robert Priest’s Effective Engagement in Short-Term Missions (2008) gathered contributions from twenty-two other scholars on short-term mission, and he challenged others to deepen their understanding of the phenomenon. Brian Howell’s ethnography of short-term mission (2012) helped stimulate a broad range of mission scholars to begin to consider STM as a grassroots movement worthy of serious study. In a similar way for the Catholic Church, a 2015 article by Robert Schreiter of Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union noted the shift from the traditional, centralized, top-down mission structures (such as Catholic missionary orders, Protestant denominations, independent missions) to what he termed the “Third Wave of Mission,”3 which includes short-term mission trips, parish twinning relationships and activities, and other mission work initiated and led primarily by local parishes. Today, a growing group of scholar-practitioners is researching Third Wave mission activities and sharing their results in books, scholarly journals, and useful training videos on a YouTube channel.4 While some missiologists’ initial impressions of STM were quite negative—among them Ralph Winter, who called STM “the re-amateurization of missions”5—for the most part, the academy followed Priest, Howell, and Schreiter in their approach of meeting the growing movement where it was and bringing missiological research to strengthen STM practices.

This tectonic shift in the landscape of mission as practiced in the United States is all about the central question of agency—that is, who will lead, participate in, and financially support these new forms of mission. The Catholic Church’s pre–Vatican II mission structures and Protestant denominational mission boards and missionary sending organizations were structured hierarchically, led by professionals who sent qualified specialists (Bible translators, doctors, preachers, educators, etc.) into mission for long periods of time. But the depth of the changes in the US mission landscape is revealed in the trend toward decreasing numbers of long-term missionaries and increasing numbers of short-term missionaries.6

Today, authors from across the American churches have noted the positive impacts of mobilizing many Christians to meet, get to know, and work together with mission partners, people who are often from different cultural backgrounds and live in places sometimes quite distant from the STM participants. The STM phenomenon has generated a new identity (the short-term missionary) in a way that has encouraged many US Christians to reclaim a missionary identity as they travel to a host community, even if only for a matter of days. While Pope Francis and many missional thinkers are working to help the church reimagine itself as a missionary society, the STM movement has made a singular contribution to the emergence of this new and needed identity. But this massive phenomenon has not been without its critics.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE CRITICISM

A growing wave of criticism of the STM movement has focused on the inherent inefficiencies of STM, the pervading lack of cultural awareness, the negative impacts on local Christian witness or social services, and the superficial nature of the “transformation” of both missioners and host communities that has emerged as a primary objective of STM. Critics point out that funds which could have gone to support long-term missionaries are being used by congregations to support their own short-term mission teams, and mission agency staff are increasingly allocating their time to facilitate US Christians’ experience of STM.7 To take one example, in many Guatemalan communities, where there are skilled, but unemployed, carpenters and a lack of funding for construction projects, we can understand that transporting fifteen US volunteers—none of whom has ever built a building—to build a school in rural Guatemala is inefficient and could be perceived as disrespectful of local capacities. If our overarching goal is to follow Jesus’ model of developing deep relationships with mission companions, what key messages are we communicating to them and their community by arriving en masse in an effort that does for rather than with them? This is the most obvious challenge in the way we have structured short-term mission that can damage our shared witness.

Other scholars have noted the common problems associated with medical STM teams: while cleft palate surgery, for example, represents a one-time, life-changing intervention, the vast majority of medical and surgical interventions require follow-up consultations and care that are not possible in the short-term time frame of STM. Evangelical medical anthropologist Laura Montgomery’s early study revealed the troubling underside of STM medical teams: short-term medical mission teams produce “insignificant and even negative consequences”; patients experience an “erosion of health” as they wait for the free health care offered by foreign medical teams rather than seeking local medical attention; free, foreigner-provided medical care may actually put local medical practitioners out of business because they cannot make a living competing with free care; and the short-term design of the projects emphasizes the role of “cut and fix” surgeons over public health workers, who could address longer-term causes of poor health in preventive and more sustainable ways.8

Due to STM’s short-term time frame, travelers default to strategies of charity work—important and valid as a response to human need—because they don’t have time to identify and address the root causes of much suffering. Thus evangelism (which requires a depth of relationship) and justice work (which requires a deep knowledge of a community and the causes of its poverty or oppression and relationships of trust between allies) are often not possible as STM activities. “Giving a fish” is important in disaster and post-disaster situations, but “teaching others to fish” (education, equipping and training activities) builds the capacity of the local community to provide for its own needs in a sustainable way. But STM teams are often limited to giving fish: the short-term scope of trips makes it difficult to provide appropriate training.

Finally, a growing number of mission scholars are raising pointed questions about the effectiveness of STM in both the visited community and the STM mission group members themselves. A 2008 article by Calvin University professor Kurt ver Beek summarized thirteen quantitative studies that together suggested there was little evidence of lasting change in STM participants—precisely the opposite of what mission lead...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Section One: The Three Stones
• Section Two: Using the Three Stones
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Freeing Congregational Mission
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright