Well said - like the old "Give someone a fish, they eat today; teach them to fish, they eat forever." Even better - work also to break the cycle of poverty in our own country.

For more on this (as I'm sure I've written before), I highly recommend the website Good Intentions are Not Enough.
http://goodintents.org/

Laura Toepfer

To build something as the sole act of foreign mission misses the point of mission, IMO. The tangible task is secondary; the building of community and the transformation of all the people involved is its primary reason.

The idea of building skills and self-sufficiency has great merit. It can be employed in the same manner as a Habitat for Humanity project, but we must not miss the real reason why we are there – if we do, it no longer becomes mission but simple social work.

If mission is at the heart of the Gospel, then we go on mission to spread the Gospel and live the Gospel. A transformed community is what we hope to leave behind, not just a house or a skill set. What’s more, we hope to never leave anyone behind, but become a permanent resident in their lives. Those who go on mission are as much served as those who receive the missioners.

Kevin McGrane

I'm glad to see thought-provoking articles like this one sparking a conversation. What worries me is that we'll have a new trend where certain projects are reflexively categorized as "bad" or "good" without thought being given to the overall relationship with the host community. I agree with Laura that the "Good Intentions" website makes for very enlightening reading. The book "When Helping Hurts" by Corbett & Fikkertt (http://www.whenhelpinghurts.org) also adds much-needed depth to the conversation. I'd like to suggest that building or painting isn't necessarily good or bad - it depends on the context. What has the host community asked for? Does the activity facilitate long-term relationships and justice? Does a visit encourage members of the host community in their work? Does the meeting of cultures encourage us to pray about our own role in bringing about the Kingdom? Are we able to see not just the needs of the host community but also what they have to teach us?

Right now I think we in the church are caught between two models that, implemented simplistically, are not necessarily conducive to building relationships. One is the "business plan" model that asks what our end result or "concrete deliverable" is going to be. It's easiest to raise funds to build a house or implement a program that our funders understand. Building a relationship and learning from a local culture's way of doing church is a much tougher sell. The "instant information" model - where we can report back with tweets, posts, and Skype conversations - is not necessarily wrong, but it does play into our culture's need for immediate gratification. As I've mentioned before, feeding raw information back to friends at home doesn't always communicate the subtleties and ambiguities of evolving relationships.

I was very heartened to read the entry posted by Kurt Weisner on August 8, which cites Courtney Martin's thoughts on friendship, willingness to mess up, and accountability over guilt. To my mind, prayerfully bringing this attitude into any conversation about mission will help us to choose activities that will benefit communities who receive missionaries, as well as those who visit.

I'm so glad to see this in print. In Haiti, the Haitians are quite cynical with NGO's and "mission trips", to say the very least. Anyone will tell you what's said here, and I think it has taken awhile to listen. And this article is just about modest mission trips. The large NGO's, apparently with big expense accounts, are creating a luxury economy that is pricing even middle class Haitians out of rent and services that they were used to being able to purchase. The unintended consequences can be devastating. But a mindful approach, in close communication with the locals, can make an incredible difference. So, engage!

I do think someone (so that = me) should put in a good word for the formational reasons for missional pilgrimage as well.

At least for me, growing up, doing service work and going on service trips was a lot (looking back) about forming me as a person who valued service, cared about justice and had compassion for those less privileged than me. I can sit here and have conversations about stuff like the article above and care in a deep and involved way about doing what's best for folks BECAUSE I was shaped by my experiences as a teen.

I think that's an important value that gets sometimes neglected when we only focus on the results of service work.

We are looking at how we can start doing mission trips in my parish, and one idea I have been mulling over is to establish relationships with partners in the "mission field" where we can also invite members of that community to come and visit with us as a way to establish mutuality in the relationship. This might work better in a domestic setting, say with an Episcopal congregation that is in a reservation area so travel for them would not be as expensive or require things like visas.

It would be interesting to know how much actual mission work the critics have actually done - is this just armchair quarterbacking (as so many of these articles are), or attacking a simplistic straw man?

And actually doing something is preferable to the most prevalent Episcopal model - checkbook mission, funded via ER&D.

Youth (and adult) mission trips are many faceted, and all the churches and groups I know are committed to a long term relationship with the areas they choose to serve, and the objective is rarely to simply "build a house". Sometimes it's to fix up a local community center or something else that's useful to the community at large, and often it involves local labor and partnerships with local faith organizations.

So please don't stereotype mission trips any more than you would stereotype people.

Some nice, thoughtful comments here!

Mary's point about resisting a reflexive "good or bad" seems to be what David is echoing. Relationships and working with communities to break the cycle of poverty is likely what most mission trips want to do (even if the agenda is to build a house). I think movement towards educating good souls who are giving their time, effort and money about what is possible beyond building a tangible thing to leave behind can be done without judging past and current "building something" mission attempts as bad or shortsighted. Most people truly want to help, and are more than willing to do what is most effective. And if some you know say "We build a house on a Mission Trip", it is still right to rejoice with them and learn about their experiences and the meaning it had on their lives.

And Adam's point is also critical: every Mission trip can use a leader who can help translate and unpack experiences, and point out the relationships and parallels beyond the specific action. My goal with every Mission Trip was to help teens see that the call to justice and compassion was ultimately needed in their own communities, and not just a place far away.

(Mary: thanks for the props on the Courtney Martin post. I really liked her thoughts as well.)

The Episcopal Church used to have an Overseas Development Office (where I served as Associate Director) which had a fabulous process of working with our Anglican partner churches (and was greatly respected by the NGO community and national governments). The goal was to build capacity at the church-wide level: ability to get grant funds from governments and NGOs, ability to manage fund and projects, and the ability to develop a network of diocesan development officers who in turn created a network of trained parish development teams. The actual "work" was done at the local level -- our role was to provide training at the national level and the funds they could use to develop capacity (training and small "practice" grants) and to leverage to get additional funds from donors much larger than TEC (e.g., one diocese in Kenya was getting $5M/yr in development money).

The decisions were all made collaboratively -- with the locals being 75% of the decision-makers. So we were at the table, but they decided who got the money and they evaluated the projects. Even today there are still many Anglican Provinces that are benefiting from that work.

What I learned from that experience is the value of offering what we had (mostly money) without doing the work or making the decision. We really were partners at the table and not the "donors" determining what happened to our money. We risked putting our money on the table and then taking a minority role in deciding what happened to it. And that's what made this capacity building. Our partners were able to make decisions (and sometime make mistakes and learn from them). But THEY determined what was done, by whom and how it was done. They evaluated the results. And in doing so, they learned the skills they needed to continue the work long after we and our money were gone.

Working this way is counterintuitive....and hard. Especially for those of us from the US who LOVE to lead, direct and DO things. Having to sit by, be outvoted and watch people make mistakes is hard. But, on the other side, discovering that you were wrong is good -- because sometimes the local people are right and you are wrong. Only if you operate on a true partnership level will you come to appreciate that local people have something really valuable to bring to the table. And it isn't just their faith, joy, hope, etc. in the face of adversity. Sometimes (often) they really do know that this project will only work in this way -- a way that seems odd or even wrong to you. But they know their context, and they know what is needed to make it work. One reason so many of our "projects" are long-term failures is because we inflict our "wisdom" on people around the world. I can't tell you how many pumps and buildings and dead projects I saw -- all done by well-meaning groups in the US who "knew" that the village needed water so raised the money for a pump....which couldn't be repaired the first time it broke. Meanwhile, the local people figured out a much cheaper way to get water -- and one that employed the village youth, giving them funds for their school fees. And it cost us a whole $50 which the national team granted them -- and which they asked for (and got) returned to them a year later.

There are other models of mission trips besides going to do things for people. that model makes us feel good....makes them feel "taken care of" which ultimately reinforces the image that they can't do it themselves. We have a great history that we could draw on (and I think ERD may be doing some of that). It would be great if we could use the lessons from that work done by the Overseas Development Office to help congregations and diocese do mission that empowers the local people instead of just inspiring us.