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Yesterday Kurt Ver Beek and Robert Priest discussed whether it was good to spend more money on short-term missions than on long term missionaries. One justification was that participants in short-term missions gave more money and prayed more for missions after going on a missions trip. But research shows otherwise. Today they discuss other ways such trips fail to change participants or recipients and how to fix that.

Kurt Ver Beek, assistant professor of sociology and third-world development at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently published the a study which questioned whether short-term missionaries and those served by such missionaries experienced long-term life changes from such missions. We summarized that study and asked Ver Beek to discuss his work further with Robert Priest, associate professor of mission and intercultural studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. At the end of the discussion, Ver Beek and Priest will take readers' questions, which may be submitted via e-mail.

Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Questions

Dear Kurt,

As I've said, I like your research. But, like any research, it has limitations. House construction in response to hurricane damage represents only one sort of short-term missions (STM) activity. House construction teams may differ from English instruction teams in the nature of the relationships with locals which develop. Those who respond to an ongoing catastrophe (such as HIV in South Africa) might have different levels of sustained commitment than those responding to a temporary crisis (such as Hurricane Mitch). Not only are there different sorts of STM, there are different ways in which people are prepared and guided in carrying out STM activities. And STM organizers and participants hope for a wide divergence of outcomes—only some of which are addressed in your research. Your research provides a good beginning, but more needs to be done. Such research, as we've both noted, must be oriented towards identifying patterns that foster long-term results.

STM provides a fertile setting for Christians to reflect on such things as witness, service, community, sacrifice, spirituality, poverty, materialism, suffering, hedonism, self-denial, justice, racism, ethnocentrism, inter-ethnic relations, globalization, stewardship, and vocation. The context is valuable, even if STM leaders do not foster these reflections among participants.

In research with Ph.D. students at Trinity, I've been impressed that while STM may not always or automatically produce desired results, the right sorts of STM, carried out in the right sorts of ways, and accompanied by the right sorts of reflections, have potential for good. We discovered, for example, that M.Div. students who had done STM abroad were just as ethnocentric as those who had never gone (according to a validated measure of ethnocentrism). That is, STM is as likely to increase ethnocentrism as to decrease it. But when the STM experience included culture-learning exercises, then the participants exemplified less ethnocentrism. The fact of STM may be less important to outcomes than the manner of STM.

Terry Dischinger and I administered a pre-test/post-test questionnaire to 169 high school students serving in the slums of Tijuana, Mexico, in the context of a high-quality short-term program. Among these students there was a significant drop in ethnocentrism and a major shift upwards on a measure of "trust of Mexicans." Kurt, you will naturally caution us that these may be temporary changes. To use your vivid image, if one bends a sapling for two weeks, then releases it, one can measure a change in its position. But three months later it may be back to where it started. That is, when these high school students return to the settings that originally shaped their ethnocentrism and negative attitudes towards Mexicans, they may eventually revert to the original pattern.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49