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All the best,
Robert

* * *

To: Robert Priest
From: Kurt Ver Beek

Greetings from a lakeshore in Michigan, where I am vacationing with my extended family.

I enjoyed your e-mail. It is astonishing that so little attention has been given to the huge growth in short-term missions. I've run across quite a few people already this summer who are going on trips. The son of a friend, together with ten other teens, raised $20,000 for their trip. They leave in a few weeks. When I asked him where he was going and with what group he'd be working, he wasn't sure. (This was after their orientation.) Another college student from Chicago is going to a Caribbean island next spring. Her only comment was, "Yeah, that will be some great tanning time." Both these young people are bright, thoughtful Christians, so I don't think their comments are atypical.

As you noted in your e-mail, one of the biggest justifications for sending all these people and spending all this money is that the participants will be changed forever—give more money, pray more for missions, etc. That is what several researchers including Peterson have found. But one of the problems with this research is that the findings have been based on self-reporting—people say they are giving more and praying more. In my study, I was surprised to find that giving among short-term participants went up very little despite the fact that over 60 percent said they were giving more. The only other study I could find that cross-checked reported giving with another source was a 1993 dissertation by Tommy Purvis (Partnership in cross-cultural mission: The impact of Kentucky Baptist short-term volunteer mission, Asbury Theological Seminary) which studied 38 churches in Kentucky that had formed sister relationships with churches in Kenya and Brazil. The project had a coordinator and a newsletter to update people on their efforts, and each year sent out dozens of short-termers. Purvis found that from 1980 until 1992, giving to missions went up almost 90 percent. However, when I adjusted those giving figures for inflation, giving by participants went up only 11 percent over 12 years—quite a modest increase given their level of effort and investment, especially since some of that increase was used to fund the short-term missions efforts.

My wife and I run a semester abroad program in Honduras, and our students regularly write evaluations saying that their lives have been changed and that they will now pray and give more for work in countries like Honduras. However, when we send e-mails to our alumni encouraging them to support efforts in Honduras that we think are doing good work, we have been surprised (and disappointed) by how few respond. Even STEM Int'l founder Roger Peterson, whom Abram Honig quotes in the article, recently told me that they do not see a relationship between the number of groups they send out and the giving to his organization. Peterson believes the groups must be giving directly to the organizations in the Third World.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49