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

Dear Kurt,

Your commitment to exploring the impact of short-term missions (STMs) on the communities where STMs serve is right on the mark! Dr. Tito Paredes, a Peruvian missiological anthropologist, and I are leading a research team that is just starting research on this. With several Ph.D. students from North America and several Peruvian Master's students (themselves church leaders), we are beginning to explore the experiences of Peruvians with STM groups from North America, Korea, and Europe.

Of course we are not nearly so far along as you are, but are nonetheless already learning much.

Let me pick up just one of your themes this time around. You mentioned how much Hondurans valued relationships with North American visitors. Social scientists have often stressed that relationships and social connectedness are core to the good life in society. Whether within a society or on a global scale, such patterns of connectedness (of trust, reciprocity, relational commitment, volunteerism, and philanthropy) constitute a kind of "social capital." That's something well worth fostering. Furthermore, Harvard professor Robert Putnam has famously claimed that half of all social capital in America originates in religious institutions and practices. Certainly STM can be explored in terms of the extent to which it fosters social capital.

Putnam has distinguished between "bonding"and "bridging" social capital. "Bonding capital" involves the sorts of connections within a social group, while "bridging capital" involves building relationships across social divides. If an Anglo American youth group engages in activities that strengthen in-group ties, this fosters bonding capital. Certainly when a church group travels, lives, and serves together for an intensive two weeks, this often has an incredible effect in terms of bonding them together. They have shared memories, inside jokes, and personal relationships. Sometimes the very elements bonding a group together simultaneously serve to exclude and deny others.

But since STM teams are deliberately crossing cultural, racial, and ethnic divides, they are also potentially helping to construct bridging capital. In terms of our discussion, bonding capital benefits the sending church—and is without a doubt one essential outcome of STM practices. But bridging capital is my interest here.

"Status-bridging" (or "linking") capital involves relations across major differentials of wealth and social class. Scholars note that economically marginal and subordinate people typically lack the sorts of strategic social connections that others have, and that the well being of such people hinges on their acquiring "status-bridging" or "linking" capital. STMs frequently originate within communities having wealth (the United States, Korea, Singapore, Europe) and typically go to settings where such resources are in scarce supply. That is, STM potentially contributes to such "linking" capital.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49