I teach anthropology at Wheaton College. Every year several students take my classes because they feel called to missions. For these students, and for most evangelicals, a call to missions still implies a career—a long-term (if not lifetime) calling to become immersed in another culture, language and life in a far-away place for the sake of the gospel. Yet we evangelicals have also come to accept 10-day excursions to Mexico building homes for the poor or conducting wordless versions of Vacation Bible School as “missions.”
How do these two activities occupy the same conceptual space in evangelical Christianity? When and how did these short trips come to be known by the same term as those life-time commitments made by those who purportedly packed their belongings in coffins, never expecting to see home shores again? To answer that question let’s look at how early short-termers came to view their trips as a unique kind of experience.
Youth Missions in the Evangelical Movement
Following the Second World War, many conservative young Christiansgrew dissatisfied with the established mission agencies. They saw these agencies as insufficiently evangelistic and unable to respond to a new generation’s enthusiasm and exposure to foreign travel and culture. One commentator describes how powerfully the new global awareness shaped the imagination of the new generation of young Christians.
These men had seen the world as no previous generation of students had ever seen it. They had been around the globe in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, and they had a worldwide perspective never before seen among collegians. As Christians, many of these men had a great desire to go back and help restore the countries that had been so devastated. (Howard 2001:4)
Between the years 1946-1960, an enthusiasm for evangelism drove these young Christians into missions. Two organizations in particular, Youth with a Mission (YWAM) and Operation Mobilization (OM) developed new paradigms of mission around the potential of young people bringing their enthusiasm to the task of world evangelization. These organizations developed a term-limited approach to mission work. This innovation was more about adapting to a life stage rather than any explicitly redefining “mission.” However the notion of spending a specific term “in the field” stuck in the mission community. Strengthened by the establishment of the Peace Corps in 1960 and the powerful rhetoric of American vigor that accompanied it, the idea of vital American youth surging into the spiritually and materially poor areas of the world gripped the imagination of evangelicals along with their mainline, Catholic and secular neighbors.
Long-Term, Short-Term
Through the tumultuous years of two World Wars, economic depression, and the independence movements in many of the countries where mission work was most concentrated, most mission agencies appeared fixed on the image of the lifelong missionary. By the 1960s, however, conversations were beginning among mission organizations about the place of “term assignments” as a way to address the “crisis” in missions and declining recruitment. This was a controversial position, however. Many remained committed to a vision of the missionary as being only those who could declare a lifetime commitment from the beginning. Some, such as Associate Home Director of Africa Inland Mission’s (A.I.M.) John Gration, sought to moderate the traditional position by suggesting term service and “missionary call” could exist simultaneously. Though some may only spend a few weeks, months or years on the field, he wrote, the call to missionary service had no room for setting the timeline for one’s self. “We’ll leave the time element up to Him,” Gration wrote. “He alone determines the length of one’s service … If a short term on the mission field is for you a substitute for what you know God really wants from you, then don’t apply.”
Others working in career missions saw term-service as an opportunity to support long-term missionaries by bringing particular skills and new enthusiasm to established missionary work, while exposing young people and lay leaders to the missionary life. In 1965, General Director of Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Raymond Davis, wrote of “A New Dimension in Mission,” describing the newly established Sudan Interior Program (SIP). This program of “short-term assignments” for “specified need” was promoted primarily in terms of how it might help long-term missionary efforts and the national church in the countries served by SIM. “Short-term service,” he wrote, “is first and foremost a missionary program. Its objective and goal is the calling out and development of the Church of Jesus Christ. It is not a substitute for, but a complement to lifetime missionary service.”
Short Terms Abroad
One organization that emerged toward the end of the 1960s specifically to harness this emerging enthusiasm for short-term work was Short-Terms Abroad (STA). STA defined their purpose as being for the “assistance to Christian missions in the United States and in other countries by recruiting and selecting personnel for special short term service.” In practice, this meant encouraging their evangelical audience to reconsider the definition of missionary itself. Judy Barr, who is described as a “secretary” of STA, produced a comprehensive manifesto in the form of a manual on “The Rationale of Short-Term Missions.” In it, she asked:
What really is missionary work? Generally people do not know that the work and responsibility of a missionary are the work and responsibility of every Christian. This misconception has arisen because somehow the call of God has been equated with a call to overseas missionary service. The results of this emphasis have been detrimental to the cause of Christ. Laymen have failed to understand and grasp their responsibilities as Christians, and potential candidates for overseas service have been confused and misled.
As STA developed its vision and structure, it began forming strategic alliances with other organizations working to connect potential missionaries with appropriate opportunities, including the group with which it would eventually merge, InterCristo. InterCristo began when ABC News producer Phill Butler volunteered to produce public service-style announcements for a mission organization that needed to recruit teachers for the Belgian Congo in 1967 (InterCristo 2009). From there, Butler founded InterCristo, which today has expanded beyond mission referral and recruitment to Christian job placement generally. STA began contacting InterCristo in the 1970s for assistance in promoting the idea of short-term missionary service. Part of the strategy was to redefine the image of the missionary in the Christian imagination. Like the mission agencies themselves, the evangelicals of the 1970s generally defined the missionary as a long-term, career worker in cross-cultural Christian ministry. Butler and Philgreen, in forming a strategic partnership, began recasting the term “missionary” to include more than career service and the tasks of evangelism and church planting. For example, the following is a radio spot that was proposed by Phill Butler to STA on in a letter dated May 30, 1973. Scripted as a conversation between two friends (with a few lines of voiceover), it is entitled “PICTURES.”
A. I’d like to show ya some pictures.
B. Of what?
A. Missionaries!
B. Oh! All right!
A. Here! This is the first one.
B. That’s no missionary!
A. What?
B. That’s no missionary, that’s a mechanic! Anyone can see that!
A. They can?
B. Sure. He’s got grease on his hands!
A. Well, that’s because he is a mechanic.
B. But you said he’s a missionary
A. Well, he is! But he’s also a mechanic – you might call him a “missionary mechanic”
B. Wait a minute…How can someone be a mechanic and a missionary?
A. The same way a person becomes anurse and a missionary.
B. Howzat?
A. By writing a letter
B. By writing a letter?!
C. 5,600 openings for Short-term Christian service. Openings for professionally-trained people as well as those with general aptitudes. To find out how you can be part of the Short-term service, simply write to Intercristo, box 9323 Seattle.
B. Here, let me see another one of those pictures.
A. Ok, here’s one of another missionary B. But this one shows a lady takin’ care of some little kids. You tryin’ to tell me that she’s a missionary too?
A. (despairingly) I’ll tell you what-why don’t you drop a note to Intercristo…they’ll explain SHORT-TERM service to you.
C. Intercristo, box 9343, Seattle 98109
Throughout the mission community, new initiatives were proposed to draw professionals and recent college graduates into serving for terms of service alongside established missionaries, bringing needed skills, fresh enthusiasm and support to long-term work. At the same time, recruitment and exposure emerged as important aspects of short-term programs as agencies saw the potential for these trips to create support on the home front as they created new “missionaries” through the use of lay people in their work.
“Youth Try the Impossible!”
The next phase of STM came as these short-term programs aimed at high school students and college-age youth. Expanding the purpose of these trips from recruitment and exposure to personal transformation and spiritual growth, these trips became available as activities for youth into the pre-teen years. The concept of the “missionary” was to undergo another subtle shift.
Don Moore, a campus minister at Briercrest Bible College, published a 78-page booklet in 1982 entitled Youth Try the Impossible! The booklet uses a breezy narrative style, giving a third-person account of the adventures of various teams on “summer mission opportunities” in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia. With chapter titles such as “Help Yourself…Help Others,” “Expanding Your Horizons,” and “Making Your Mission Possible…Now!” the book aims to break down the resistance youth and youth leaders may have to leading groups on trips overseas. Moore’s writing conveys the conviction that cross-cultural travel represents some of the best opportunities for Christian education (i.e., “spiritual formation”), developing group cohesion, and personal development. Moore’s work appeared at the beginning of a decade in which the summer youth mission trip would gain enormous acceptance as it began growing into a massive phenomenon of the 1990s and 2000s. Youth Try the Impossible! preceded this explosion, yet it too was building on a phenomenon that began more than ten years earlier.
One of the first organizations to actively promote the use of teens in summer missionary service was Teen Mission, Inc. (TMI). Founded in 1970, TMI recruited thirteen to seventeen year old students to participate in teams traveling outside the United States for service projects or evangelistic outreach. Founder Robert Bland gave his vision for the organization in an article, written by Gary Hardaway, which appeared in Christian Life magazine in 1974. In addition to the familiar rationale that short-term trips would inspire young people to consider missionary work as an eventual vocation, Bland added a third element to the call.
“Above all, [Bland’s] young contacts represented the future of missions. They should be exposed to the urgent needs of foreign fields and sense the burden of a lost world during their crucial teen years. God seemed to be saying, ‘You are somebody.'”
The final section ofthe article laid out the personal benefits of STM work even more clearly. “Does the impact last?” Hardaway asked. He answered the question by first asserting that “a whopping percentage” of the students participating in a trip took second and third trips with TMI. Moreover, many of those decided to enroll in Bible colleges, rather than liberal arts institutions, presumably testifying to their desire to be devoted to Christian vocation. But the most convincing evidence seemed to be the changed attitudes and actions of former participants. From examples of returned short-term missionaries leading revivals in a high school, to raising money for Nicaraguan earthquake victims, the article highlighted the impact of travel on the travelers themselves. Parents were encouraged to support the participation of their kids by reading quotations from other parents impressed by the impact these trips have on their children. “‘Our daughter has come back a different girl,'” enthused one mother quoted in the article. “‘We are just thrilled.'”
Seeking Personal Growth
Throughout the 1970s, these trips were becoming a means for relatively affluent Americans to be exposed to poverty and hardship. They were opportunities to gain spiritual insight through experiencing the simple faith of the poor, while enduring a taste of the hardships of living outside of the United States. For youth ministers, this would become a preferred method of bringing about their goals of spiritual maturation and emotional growth. At the end of the 1970s, congregations themselves were picking up the work of actually organizing their own short-term missions programs. No longer were these travels organized solely by parachurch ministries, college programs, mission agencies, or denominational boards. Individual congregations saw value in these trips for their youth and adults.
Round Trip Missions contributing editor, Paul Borthwick, published early manuals guiding the organizations of these trips congregationally. The history, then, is best picked up in the context of congregational life. My own research involved Wheaton Central Church (WCC), a large congregation located near Wheaton College, where missionary support has long been a central feature of church life. Two ministry leaders working at WCC in the 1980s, one with youth and the other in adult missions ministry, each felt these trips would serve to promote their concerns while fostering growth in their members. Like the separate streams of thought running through the evangelical world—one from youth travels and the other the traditional missionary community—these two pastors saw their purposes somewhat differently. Even twenty-five years later the use subtly different language to talk about the first trips taken by members of their congregation. In the early 1990s, however, those two streams merged at WCC, and in the evangelical world in general. As might be expected there would be much turbulence at the meeting of these mighty rivers.
Note: This article is Part I of a two-part history of the emergence of the idea of “Short-Term Missions.” This is not a history of when the first Christian spent two weeks in the Dominican Republic, or who was the first team to build a latrine in Honduras. Rather, this is a brief look at how the contemporary form of STMs in the United States came to be widely considered “missions.”
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