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Kurt Ver Beek, assistant professor of sociology and third-world development at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently published a study that 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 | DayThree | Day Four | Questions

Dear Kurt,

I agree that we have too easily accepted claims about the benefits of short-term missions (STM), and that research has sometimes failed to support such claims. But I see the implications differently than you do. I remain convinced, for example, that if young people are taken out of their wealthy suburban settings to work in the slums of Tijuana, this encounter creates tremendous potential for reconsidering one's fundamental assumptions and values.

But the encounter, by itself, does not guarantee the desired results. Rather than assume the benefit comes through the sheer fact of an STM trip, the positive results come through a merger of the experiential and the pedagogical. If a person encounters cultural difference for two weeks, without anyone helping them to understand the culture concept and grasp the inner meaning, value, and coherence of another culture, they are more likely to ethnocentrically judge the other culture than to understand and appreciate it. But if an interpreter of the culture guides the encounter and frames the cultural dimensions of it, then the positive growth in cultural understanding may surpass what can be accomplished in a classroom at home.

If intercultural understanding is one of our goals, then I don't think it is only what we do after the trip that matters. What happens before and during the trip are pivotal. As I mentioned, I think I have initial data pointing in this direction. I believe there is an enormous amount to be learned through research about better and worse ways of doing STM. But what we reliably know about STM through good research is remarkably limited.

If people are simply spending vacation money on such trips, I'm not inclined to be critical of naïve understandings. But if people are appropriating the tax-deductible resources of a giving church on behalf of "missions," then I would push for a higher threshold of accountability. If I understand you correctly, when we raise money for STM in the name of missions, then we had better not end up justifying STM purely in terms of the benefits of STM to the short-term missionary or the sending church. Yet, as you point out, nearly all research on STM has attempted to justify STM on the basis of what they do in the lives of the participants.

When I was a youth pastor in 1982, the annual youth event involved a retreat at a beach. At one level the shift to a youth trip involving service (even if still sometimes includes a beach) must be viewed positively. A more ambiguous benefit of such a shift involves funding. If the annual youth event is now "mission"—the youth pastor is not limited to the youth budget, parental contributions, or carwashes for the difficult-to-fund annual event. Youth pastors could appropriate the funding apparatus developed by career missionaries (prayer letters, soliciting support for mission from others, etc.) as the means to fund the annual event designed to spiritually benefit one's own youth.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49