Paul Borthwick holds a doctorate in Cross-Cultural Ministry from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and teaches missiology at Gordon College near his Boston home. He’s the author of How to Be a World-Class Christian and 14 other books. Borthwick has coordinated over 100 missions trips all over the world. He also serves as a senior consultant with Development Associates International. Borthwick spoke with Round Trip Missions about the future of short-term missions and about how to best serve with our Christian brothers and sisters in the Global South.
How would you describe the present state of the short-term missions movement?
When I think about short-term missions, I recall a comment someone made about the People’s Republic of China: “Anything you say about China is true.” Well, almost anything you say about short-term missions is true, too. On the positive side, is it producing new missionaries? Yes, there are cases of that. Is it giving people a greater vision, and taking people across cultures into places they would never have gone on their own? Yes, absolutely.
But on the negative side, are there places where it’s doing cultural harm? Yes. Are there places where people are coming in with incredible cultural insensitivity and maybe undermining the long-term work that’s being done? Yes. So short-term missions is all over the place. It’s big, it’s untamed, and the results, I would say, are kind of random at the moment.
What’s the most common mistake that churches make in short-term missions?
Definitely a lack of long-term planning. If short-term missions guaranteed long-term results, then Mexico would be the most Christian nation on earth, and Tijuana would be the Holy Land. I heard a statistic recently that 30% of all teams from the United States go to Mexico. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t needs in Mexico. But from a long-term, strategic point of view, that’s not the place that needs the most new evangelical ministry.
I’ll give you an example from my own church experience. Our long-term strategy was to invest in the 10/40 Window. Yet all of our short-term missions trips were going to the Caribbean and Central America. So we had these people coming back with a heart for Haiti, and we couldn’t support them long-term because our strategy was for North Africa.
In other words, we were not thinking about the big picture. Many times, short-term thinking goes along with short-term missions. When you ask churches and missions agencies what their long-term kingdom goals are, you usually find them coming up short.
What’s the best thing you have seen short-term teams accomplish?
Like Peter’s encounter with Cornelius in Acts chapter 10, the most important thing is a change in the participant’s view of another culture. In other words, it can expand people’s picture of the Christian family.
I don’t think we should tally up conversions, because that’s sometimes a little bit sketchy. I don’t think we should count the number of buildings painted for Jesus, or anything like that. I think the most significant thing is that it changes the lives of the participants and the hosts. Everybody can find out they have a bigger family than they thought they did.
Read this interview in its entirety at Round Trip Missions.
