This episode will be focusing on missions, a core value of Harbour City Church. We’ll be looking at the good and bad sides to short-term missions, as well as how we as a church decide where to send our members on our mission trips.

To check out last episode’s questions click here, and for Jim’s foreword on answering these questions click here.

QUESTION 1.

THERE’S A LOT OF CONTROVERSY AROUND SHORT-TERM MISSIONS, AND WHETHER THEY HARM MORE THAN THEY HELP. WHAT IS YOUR OPINION ON THIS?

I have now been going as well as facilitating short-term missions for over 30 years. During these years, I have seen plenty of negative elements as well as plenty of wonderful results. By this, I don’t mean different perspectives or experiences people may have had on the same trip or similar trips where individual opinions differ for inter-personal reasons. I will try to focus on what are hopefully objective criteria. There is also a book called “When Helping Hurts” by Corbett, Fikkert and Perkins. This book outlines in great detail many problems and controversies mainly around poverty alleviation, but they are relevant for short-term missions as well.

Some negatives:

Missions that focus on the goer more than the impact on the field are generally off-based and bound to make many mistakes- When churches and individuals have personal wants and agendas for various reasons, they can trample and disrupt the works of the long-term missionaries, leave negative footprints and become poor witnesses. These poor reasons may be for exotic travel experience, escapism, spiritual merit, church promotion, and host of others.
Poor missiological training causes goers to miss many learning opportunities before going, on the field, and even after they return as they reflect, testify and consider future possibilities. Good missiological training includes both academic and doxological discipline, including lots of prayers.
Of course, there is also the matter of team and logistics management as well. You can easily imagine how many things can go wrong when international travel is poorly managed for a careless group.
Lastly, creating unreasonable expectations or long-term dependency, whether unsustainable or actually sustained, often hurt the mission of the Kingdom.

Now the positives:

When done right, short-term missions are like water to parched ground and a good push of momentum for the long-term missionaries and their works. So, obviously, what you do should be based on what’s good for the mission field (Taking from the above negatives, the reverse effects).
Good short-term missions encourage and refresh the missionaries, and lend real help to the field work.
On top, a trip well done will transform the lives of the goers whether as an even more mature sender, or perhaps even be motivated to commit as long-term missionaries themselves. For all these good things to happen, there are many other ingredients that go in the recipe!

QUESTION 2.

HOW DOES OUR CHURCH DETERMINE WHERE TO GO FOR MISSIONS?

With the above things in mind for what makes a good short-term mission, over the years, a few other practical elements have also guided how we do short-term mission trips. This is true for both our university ministry (SOW) as well as for our church/HCC. In some ministries in the past, our leadership was scrambling from year to year as to where and to whom we should send our short-term teams. The results were a widely varied mixed bag of both good and bad in terms of connection with the missionary and fruitful ministry experiences. When things were bad, we were able to identify a number of incompatibility issues with the host-missionary, such as theology, ministry philosophy, strategy, personality dynamics, etc.. But even when things were good, we hardly stayed in touch long enough to find any meaningful traction throughout the year, nor for nurturing long-term vision together. In short, our short-term missions were disposable, one-time use trips; and this is not to take away from the lasting impact the Lord made on the individuals. However, organizationally speaking, I learned my lessons.

Therefore, I am pleased that we select our partner missionaries and fields based on all those criteria I mentioned above. On top, being a missionary myself with a particular organization (PCAmerican/MTW), many of those same values come “locked in” by our common association. Yes, we send our teams to other MTW and partner missionaries that I personally know and trust around the world. The best part is the ongoing relationship network, of whom some are actual close friends. This means, long after the trips are over, we can continue to nurture the relationship and vision together for years to come.

It is our hope and prayer that through such solid support systems, HCC will soon launch long-term missionaries out of our own congregation into other places!

(Questions have been edited for length and clarity.)

If you have ever wondered about topics such as these, are curious about the how’s and why’s of Christianity or have any other questions in general ask Pastor Jim anything here.