Andy Crouch, a trusted observer and advisor of churches, wants American Christians to experience better short-term mission trips. He told us what global church leaders say about Americans who minister overseas—and how short-term missions should change.

Almost two million Americans from 40,000 churches and other groups go on short-term mission trips each year. How many of these trips would you say are successful?

That depends on how you measure success. From the point of view of participants, as many as 80% come back feeling they had a significant or even life-changing experience. (Americans would not be doing so many trips if they did not feel they were getting some benefit from them.) Perhaps 40% of participants show long-term changes in their choices and behavior regarding money and time 6-12 months after their trip.

People who have studied this for a number of years say it’s actually very rare that lives were really changed. The stats go down even further if you talk to those people who receive us and host us in the countries to which we go. This is tricky, because these people do their best to be polite. But I have found that only around 30% of the people who host these trips genuinely and honestly feel that they are a good use of everyone’s time and resources.

You helped create Round Trip, a curriculum package groups can use during the months they are preparing for their trips. Where did you get the idea to create this curriculum? [Ed. note: The videos interspersed throughout this interview are clips from Round Trip.]

It came from talking with leaders of churches around the world as I worked on Christianity Today’s Christian Vision Project. My assignment was to examine the global mission of the church and talk with global church leaders. One of the most striking things was that these leaders would often ask me: “What do you Americans think you are doing on these short-term trips?” So I set out to find a church that was doing this well and create resources to help others do it well.





Round Trip focuses on a North Carolina church that goes to Kenya and a Kenyan church that comes to North Carolina. Is this kind of reciprocal involvement a new model for Christians to consider?

Yes. Reciprocal relationships are fantastic. In the case of these two churches, they exchanged senior pastors and other staff for a year. This is a powerful model, but it’s hardly typical.

Most of the two million Americans who go on mission trips each year never plan on going back to the same place. It’s more like, “OK, we’ve done the Dominican Republic. Let’s do Romania next time.
 
One initiative that does pursue a reciprocal model is Saddleback Church’s P.E.A.C.E. Plan, which emphasizes going to a place first as listeners, getting to know a particular place, learning about a people’s needs, and forging a lasting partnership. This is a new and positive model.

I suppose you heard your share of embarrassing tales of cultural insensitivity and mismatched expectations.

Yes. Americans tend to be activists and they want to see concrete outcomes. This can lead to make-work projects, sometimes with comic results. As a Nairobi pastor told me, "After you leave, we repaint many of the walls that you painted!"

What I really hope is that Americans will listen well to their hosts. Unfortunately, Americans are not always real good at being aware of how to form real partnerships. We tend to go with an agenda or a plan and dictate that plan to the community we’re visiting instead of working alongside our hosts on something that’s really important to them.

Often, our hosts will not impose themselves on us, because our power and wealth surround us like a cloud. They are polite, so they don’t come right out and say when they’re disappointed.





Where did the whole idea of mission trips come from?

It goes back to the medieval idea of pilgrimage. A pilgrim travels in hopes of transformation, while a tourist doesn’t look at it that way.

Combine that with the fact that today we live in an era of extraordinary global peace, affluence, and technologies of travel and communication that make it possible to go almost anywhere in the world in 24-36 hours relatively inexpensively. This has been a big change. My high school youth group traveled from the Boston area to Montana. Now a local middle school group is going to Nairobi!

What would you like to see changed in the way Christians look at mission trips?

When I asked global church leaders from outside the West about the goals for these trips, they said they were really looking for partnership. It would be easier for us to send them a check, but they tell me, “We don’t just want your money. We want you! We want a lasting relationship with you.”

I hope we can undergo this basic paradigm shift. Let’s not fool ourselves. There’s very little that groups of Americans can do in 10 days or two weeks that will be really helpful, so we might as well admit it up front that these trips are actually about learning. So let’s just start calling them learning trips. And unless we do a good job of preparation and follow-up, it’s unlikely these trips will actually lead to any lasting changes in our lives. 





What about you? What’s your life purpose or mission?

A big part of my purpose is to be a connector of people, of worthwhile projects, and resources. I like to look for people who have stories to tell and then I put the pieces together.

I’m also passionate about changing culture, which is why I wrote the book Culture Making. The only way you change culture is by creating more of it. So I feel every human being needs to create little pieces of culture that lead to change. That’s why I wanted to create something that would help bring change with short-term mission trips. But it certainly doesn’t end there.

About Round Trip
To watch the trailer or purchase Round Trip, visit http://www.RoundTripMissions.com.

Steve Rabey is an award-winning writer and an adjunct professor with Fuller Seminary.