What are the Pros and Cons of Short Term Missions?

What are the pros and cons of short term missions?

I think short-term missions can be really helpful if we understand that the purpose of short-term missions maybe lies in a couple of areas.

One, if we have young people, we want to educate them about God's heart for the world and we want them to see what's happening in the rest of the earth and we want to raise them up to that end. I think short-term missions can be really helpful in training the next generation to support and to go.

I think short-term missions can also be very helpful in supporting missionaries who are presently on the field. So there are missionaries serving in various contexts who might need work projects or might need help with some kind of a healthcare issue, or there's a variety of things like that where we could go support the long-term missionaries on the field.

I think where short-term missions become a bit of a disaster is when we start to say that I can go to a language and culture I do not know, that is foreign to me, and I can just start preaching the gospel to them. I don't know what they're hearing—not only from a language perspective, but culturally. I don't know what they think about God or what they think about sin or what they think about the gospel. So I have no idea what they're hearing. I could come into an animist people and start talking about Jesus as the Savior of the world and all they're going to do is add Him to their pile of gods. They might put Him at the top of the heap, but they're not understanding Christianity properly. And so I think missions in the short-term fashion can be really damaging in that respect. Or these claims that we can go plant churches on a short-term basis—I just think that's absurd. And so we're not thinking well of short-term missions when we think of it in those contexts.

But if we use them for education and for supporting long-term missionaries, I think they can be quite helpful.

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