Don’t Let Your Summer Mission Trip Sabotage Your Spiritual Life

Summer-Mission-Trip-750x410.jpg


It’s summertime, and you know what that means? Mission trip season. Having the opportunity to go on a mission trip—whether across the country or across the globe—can be an eye-opening, life-changing event. It can also be something that sabotages your spiritual life, and you don’t want that.

I was 5 years old when my parents went to Jamaica on our church’s first ever mission trip. They got bit by the missions bug there. Hard. And so did the church.

A year later, my dad took a six-month sabbatical from his job and moved our family from Tulsa to El Paso, Texas. Our church sent a series of teams to build a dormitory for an orphanage across the border in Juarez, and my dad acted as something like the project manager. I started the first grade there, and some of my earliest memories are these people from our church coming and going through our home.

As a teenager I went with our youth group to partner with a ministry in San Diego working among the poorest barrios of Tijuana. The ministry had relationships with missionaries across the globe, some of whom were on furlough there. One spoke to our group and that opened a whole new world to me. That’s what I wanted to do. As a college student I was able to go to Estonia and Chad and Cameroon. Later in life, as a college minister I led students on trips to Honduras, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and north Africa.

In all those experiences, I’ve seen the profound ways people are transformed and grow deeper in their life with God. I’ve also seen how these trips can undermine and short-circuit a person’s spiritual life. Jesus’s parable of the four soils is an appropriate illustration for the various ways we may respond to a mission trip. Here are a few real obstacles you’ll want to watch out for.

You come to despise home after your mission trip.

In other words, you become dishonest about the weaknesses of the local culture and dishonest about the strengths of your home culture. It’s so different and exotic and exciting. You decides that different is better. You compare cultures and you judge. But this is unhealthy.

Culture is a complex and dynamic thing. We often take it for granted. Imagine a fish attempting to describe water. But when we encounter a different culture, like we do on a mission trip, we begin noticing things about our own culture we may have never noticed before—things like who makes decisions, avoiding uncertainty, or primarily finding identity in community. You come to have different eyes for your home culture, for better and worse.

Traveling overseas can also highlight to us ways that being a Christian and a being from our home culture are not the same thing. They can even be at odds with one another. The Gospel affirms and speaks the native language of every culture. The Gospel also critiques every culture, exposing it’s sinful systems. Jesus tells the truth about humanity in every culture. Every culture reflects God’s image, and every culture is corrupted by human sin.

You leave your experience there.

You don’t let it change you. You took a lot of pictures to broadcast on social media, and you consumed an experience. You had warm fuzzies in the moment. You can go back to life “as normal.”

The call to “change the world” lures us like a siren song. But if we don’t give ourselves permission to be vulnerable and be changed ourselves, we’re simply tourists. And a tourist is the last thing we should be on a mission trip.

Some years ago I took a group of students to the Dominican Republic. One day we visited an orphanage for physically disabled kids. I was wrecked as I fed a little girl her lunch, and I raced a boy in his wheelchair up and down the long hallway. There happened to be another group there from the United States, and I watched as they “oohed” and “aahed” from bed to bed, room to room, as if they were at a petting zoo. And I remembered thinking that’s the last thing we need to be doing.

We want to open ourselves so that our humanity touches the humanity of another person.When that happens, God transforms us both.

You loved a place more than people.

I heard one of my students on that trip quote our host saying, “You’re not called to the Dominican Republic. You’re called to Dominicans.” The commandment in the Torah, that Jesus underlined, is “love your neighbor,” not “love the nations.” A neighbor is a person, with a face and a story. A place is an abstract concept.

It’s much easier to fall in love with “the nations” or a particular country, even neighborhood. It only exists in your head, so you can control it. It exists on your terms, but people aren’t like that. Loving people is harder. Loving people is slow work. Loving people is messy work. Loving real people exposes all of our selfish places, and that can be incredibly uncomfortable. And we can very easily build walls to protect ourselves by retreating into loving our abstract idea of a place.

You put the “Great Commission” before the “Great Commandment.”

Why on earth would we spend so much time and money to go on a trip for the sake of the Gospel but never cross the street where we live for the sake of the Gospel? Why go across the world if we won’t go next door?

The Gospel of Matthew closes with the words, “Go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you” (Matthew 28:19-20). These are words often called “The Great Commission” and referenced as why Christians do mission trips.

But in the very same gospel, when Jesus gets quizzed about the most important commandment, he responds, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37–40).

When I led trips, I often ended them by reminding my students that everything we did—being with kids, building a house, feeding the poor–all of these things need to be done in our own community. Poverty and illiteracy and violence and injustices of so many kinds exist right where we live, and God is actively doing something about it. And they can join in and participate without having to learn a different language to do them. Yes, it’s fun and exciting to travel and see new things, but loving our neighbors, as God adventurously invites us, also means our next-door neighbors.

You take discipleship out of the “Great Commission.”

You cannot forget the one thing is to like and to do the things that Jesus likes and does. Talk like Jesus talked. Think like Jesus thought. God’s dream for you, his will for your life, is that you reach maturity in Christ, that you become a person full of the love of God. A mission trip is one piece of that puzzle.

A mission trip is a way you submit to God in your own discipleship. A mission trip provides an opportunity to learn to listen to others, to stretch to the breaking point your humility muscles. One point of a mission trip should be to grow deeper into becoming a person who is always on mission. Mission should not be an extracurricular activity of Christians. It’s who we are.

Jurgen Moltmann says, “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church.” We don’t have a mission to do something. God’s mission has us.

 

Mission is not a function of our being Christians. It is our nature. God is a mission God, and entering the life of God makes us mission people. This is a part of what makes us Christians.

The adventure doesn’t begin when you got off the plane in the foreign country. The real adventure begins when you got off the plane at home. A mission trip is an extraordinary opportunity to wake up to all that God is doing around us everyday. Don’t waste it.

If you’re looking for something to read as you prepare for or process your trip, I recommend these. I’ve led groups through a couple of them:

Peter White