In the weeks after my wife returned from her mission trip to
Haiti this past June, I was bombarded with questions from so many people, that
I decided to do a little research so I could answer them for everyone. The big
question I had intended to write about was the one about why it costs so much
to go on one. But as I looked online for information to supplement what I was
told by someone else who’s had experience with them, I discovered something
else that really needs to be talked about…the actual definition of a
mission trip.
I saw a lot of derisive comments on a lot of websites about
“voluntourism”, and about the people who “get in the way of the people doing
the real missionary work.” And those comments didn’t sit well with me.
Those comments implied that no matter how much good you did in the country you
went to, unless you were actually preaching, unless you were actually trying to
“win souls for Christ”, you weren’t part of the real work that needed to be
done there. I got the impression that unless your group’s goal was to “preach
to the heathen”, then you had no right to use the term “mission trip” at all.
Oh sure, you could call it a “humanitarian aid” trip, but don’t call it a
mission trip if you’re not doing missionary work.
At that point, I decided that my mission was to preach
to you just how much male bovine excrement that is.
I was going to rhetorically ask if you have to be preaching
in order to have a mission? Can’t your mission be to improve
health care in a certain remote village? I was going to ask why is it that some
of my fellow Christians have defined the term “mission trip” so narrowly? Then
I was going to point out that often these are the same people who define the
term “Christian” so narrowly that I, and many others, would be left out.
But other things came up. There were other issues to write
about, and my piece about mission trips got put on the back burner…that is
until I made a comment about missionaries and missionary work on Facebook the
other day, and a friend replied:
Effective missionary work just serves people.
It does not proselytize.
Whoa! This was huge! And it pretty much echoed what one of
the leaders of the Haiti trip said when he said, “We’re not there to bring Jesus
to Haiti. Jesus is already there.” And my friend’s comment was enough to put
this back on the front burner.
For some reason, some people think that a mission trip is,
or should be, all about proselytization, which if you haven’t heard the word
before, or figured it out by now, is just a ten-dollar word for “preaching and
trying to convert people.” But that’s not true. As my Facebook friend said,
effective missionary work just serves people.
Let me put it a little differently, at its best, a mission
trip is really no more than a “humanitarian aid” trip done by a congregation or
sponsored by a religious group. Really. If students and teachers from the
Camillus Academy in Camillus, NY decide to go to Puerto Rico for a week to help dig
people out from Irma; as a secular organization, that would be called a humanitarian
aid trip. But if the students and teachers from St Camillus Catholic School in
Ampere, NJ went to do the same thing, it would be called a mission trip…whether
they preached or not. Why? Because that’s just the way it is…just like how a
skirt on a guy in Scotland is called a kilt.
And what of the derisive comments about “voluntourism”?
Well, my friend went on to say:
Some people get curious about what it
is that motivates others to go somewhere else and serve, and maybe they ask,
and maybe they are inspired to try what they see others doing. In some circles
this is called “a policy of attraction.”
There is still help needed in these places, and it’s not
always simply about throwing money at the problem for someone else to take care
of. Often it’s also about throwing people at the problem as well. These “voluntourists”
who go down for a week, make a difference, perhaps build relationships, and
then come back and tell others, who also go down and make a difference. They
also often continue to be somehow involved with that community when they
return. And the cycle continues.
This is what a mission trip is all about…
No matter what you call it.
And if you want to find out more about the organization my
wife traveled with, check out Stone by Stone.
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