Why is follow-up important?
This question takes us back to the purpose of short term mission ministry. Why do most teams go out in the first place? What were they hoping to accomplish? Most of the time at least one of the team’s goals is to experience spiritual growth. You’re really going to struggle to accomplish that goal if you don’t do follow-up. We come back to a busy life in this culture. We’ve had our mission experience, but then we have to get back to bills that need to be paid, and work that needs to be done. We can’t properly process the experience we had because we’re so busy. Serving your partner community should be the primary reason for going on the trip. But personal growth is important too. And if you have any hope for growth, you will not attain it without a good follow-up program.
In the months leading up to a mission, it’s relatively easy to keep people excited about the trip. But when you come back, that enthusiasm tends to fade. What are some of the practical ways you suggest doing follow-up?
One idea is to have the team members write themselves a letter at the end of the trip. These letters can be about what they’ve learned and what they want to see changed in their own lives. Then they put the letters in envelopes, seal them, and put their own address on it, but they don’t mail them. The leader collects them and the leader sends it to all of them three months later.
It’s important to have follow-up done in phases. There should be something done immediately when they return because “reentry” can be overwhelming for some people. And then you need follow-up a week or two out, and then a few weeks after that and then maybe a few months down the road. Have them articulate some goals early: “This is what I think God taught me, this is what I believe he’s leading me to change in my life.” It could be a whole scope of things; you don’t have to put any parameters around that. Have people share with their team and maybe with a mentor who has been assigned to help them through this process. The next time they come together they can share how they’re doing at accomplishing those goals. This is simply for encouragement, not to make anyone feel badly. But as they mutually encourage each other towards those goals, they start to experience real change with the Lord’s help.
It’s also important to just help them process the experience. Give them good questions to journal on when they get back “How was your trip?” is not helpful. That’s too broad. They don’t know where to start. Give them open-ended questions, such as, “Was there anything that you learned about God? Was there anything you learned about yourself? What were some highlights? What was difficult? What was a typical day like?” Just get them expressing their experience and reflecting. Many of us really don’t know how to stop and reflect because we are not living in a reflective culture. We don’t lead contemplative lives so we have to be intentional about processing our experiences.
How can a leader guard against having team members creating a narrative that is romanticized or too idealistic?
When my students return, in the first reentry session, I talk about the danger of setting goals that are not achievable. I will give them a list, “These are some of the possible ways you may be thinking you want to change.” Then I’ll encourage them to pick one or two of the ways they hope to change. We talk quite a bit about expectations throughout the program so that they’re expectations before they go are released and surrendered. I often tell them, “You may know someone who’s been completely transformed by a short term mission, and that does happen, but what often happens is more incremental change.” So we just explain that incremental change is a valid option. We’re not expecting complete transformation of everyone who went. Sometimes they feel like a radical change is what’s expected of them by those who organized the trip or those who receive them back.
Can you talk about how establishing a partnership with your host community aids in the process of follow-up and long-term change for the members?
When my Paraguay teams come back this coming February, there are two previous Paraguay team members still around. A few have graduated, but not all. So we have students who went to Paraguay who are on campus, and it’s the same for every other trip we do. So right there you have students who have had a similar experience. So it builds some continuity. It helps the ones who went months ago to remain engaged with what’s going on in Paraguay, and they don’t feel like no one understands the experience but them. Because of our partnership focus, we have these leaders from the field come visit Taylor, so there’s another opportunity for them to remain engaged. So both groups, the Taylor and the host group, can remember what God did together, and then can think again about what he wants to do with them now. It cements those lessons from the Lord, for both sides.
Tell me about the Standards of Excellence, these guidelines for short term missions that you’ve been part of creating.
It’s a volunteer set of mission leaders from around the U.S. The concept of a code of best practices for short term missions was in the minds of a lot of different mission leaders in the nineties. There were a lot of informal conversations at short term mission conferences in the hallways about how we really needed something to call people to excellence. So this ad hoc committee of volunteers was formed. It was totally grassroots and whenever we would get stuck, we would just pray, “We don’t know what to do. This is so hard to work through.”
We tried to keep the standards very principle-based so they could be applied to any type of short term mission, and that was difficult. There were some people that were adamant that we had to include exactly how evangelism should be done. But ultimately we felt like that would be getting prescriptive, and we wanted to keep it principle-based, so it could be used in a variety of contexts. There are about eighty organizations that have adopted the standards. About half of those have gone through the peer review and become covenant members. It’s not the number that we would like. Financially, we can barely sustain ourselves; this whole thing is now done by volunteers. But I’ve talked to many people here who have said, “You know what, I actually measure my program against the standards. We will probably not adopt them since we don’t have the resources to do a peer review or pay the annual fee of $135, but we are using them.” I would just love for the forty thousand churches sending short term mission groups to take a look at the standards and use them as a guide as well.
