Yesterday I wrote what may have seemed to some short-term missions (STM) practioners a fairly inflammatory blog. Some readers may be forgiven for asking the follow-up question, “Given the fact that so many one-week STMs fail in their intended result of mobilizing people, are they bad?” Here’s my response.

Short-term missions get a bad rap for three reasons in particular:

1. The missionaries allow their needs and agenda to supersede the local needs.
2. The missionaries are poorly equipped to do what needs to be done.
3. What they’re doing has no lasting impact.

For the most part these reasons are valid or are at a minimum should be grave concerns for any practitioner. The typical short-term project involves construction or work that could be done cheaper by locals, begging the question, “Why not just send them the money?”

A counter-argument is that STMs can impact participants enough to justify the project. To which one must ask, “To what end?” If, as I noted yesterday, the end is to mobilize them to build the Kingdom, that is a good thing. But many do not. One good place to start would be for church youth groups to track those who have been mobilized for ministry by their short-term projects. Let me suggest to youth pastors - if that is your goal, please measure your results.

So, do we scrap the concept of short-term missons? No, Jesus showed us how to do them in Matthew 10. They can work, but we need to look much more closely at the various models of STMs and hold many to a more rigorous standard of evaluation. In the next few days I’ll look at models that are both effective and ineffective