The project I work for during the summer uses the labor and money of church youth groups to do home repair in Appalachia, and my questions about the effectiveness of short-term missions began there. One man we wanted to help was a carpenter. He could have repaired his home faster and better than the volunteers, and he would have preferred to. Instead, he agreed to have high school youth work on his home, because with them came the funds. Unfortunately, cultural insensitivity and construction mistakes also came with some groups. A few even disregarded the carpenter’s construction knowledge and advice on his own home.

As members of the Christian community at Calvin, we have vested interest in short-term missions. Many of us have participated in, worked for and led short-term missions. We accept their legitimacy with ease. Short-term missions, however, are far from a perfect method of servanthood. We must ask how effective are short-term missions as a response to poverty. To begin with, it’s no surprise that short-term missions are expensive. Many youth/college groups spend months fund raising to meet costs of transportation, food, shelter and sometimes supplies for the few weeks they spend in another community. Is this expense justified, or could the money be better spent by local community development organizations which can employ local workers who may desperately need the work and can do it more efficiently with the use of local products? The efficiency of our groups is often dulled by culture shock, which may come in the form of sickness, exhaustion or emotional processing of exposure to both acute poverty and a foreign language.

Home repair projects, a common purpose of short-term missions certainly help families to live in better conditions, but what is causing families to be poor in the first place? If we fail to examine the structural injustices that produce a society in which the wealthy of the suburbs of the world must send their children away for a week to expose them to the impoverished of the world, then maybe we will always be attempting to cover the gaping wounds with a Band-Aid. Our attempts to fix homes and build churches may amount to little if more people are forced to live in such conditions each year. And we may just find that our own lifestyles, and even our Christian churches, uphold the status quo and consumption patterns which cause the gap between the rich and poor to continually grow.

Paternalism is another difficulty with short-term missions. Many impoverished communities have had the power to control their economic, political and even educational systems taken from them, and the only ultimate solutions to their situation are ones in which they are involved. Too often in our desire to help we use our money to make decisions for the poor, causing or maintaining a dependence which undermines our work.

Having raised these questions, however, I am not suggesting that we dismiss short-term missions. They will continue to happen by the thousands each year, and many participants will continue to have their attitudes concerning the poor and their own lives changed. The improvement of short-term missions, then, must be a subject of discussion for the church.

I suspect that solutions will not come easily, and that such dialogue may in fact reveal our differences in opinion on the causes of poverty, how we should live our lives, and what our Christian responsibility is to the poor whom Christ claimed to identify with so deeply. The problem of poverty is that it is progressively overwhelming our world, though we may not realize it. It is a complex problem which requires a complex solution, and as Christians I believe that we must be willing to seek out such solutions. This may require an evaluation and radical change in our global economy, our politics, our consumption patterns, and our relative segregation of the rich from the poor. An awareness may begin with short-term missions, but they are not the only, or even primary, way we should be involved in helping the poor.

I would encourage us to be discening about this subject, for our churches spend millions of dollars in our attempts to help the poor. We must evaluate how our short-term missions affect poor communities and our own lifestyles. We must continually be willing to have our attitudes and methods transformed by the Spirit of God who hungers for justice like rolling rivers, who identifies with the suffering.