Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Urbana and Short-term Missions
March 2006
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Since its beginning in 1946, Urbana, InterVarsity’s triennial student North American missions convention, has challenged delegates to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ and join in God’s mission of bringing the gospel to the whole world. Stacy Woods, first president of InterVarsity, said in 1951, “To me one of the greatest motives in this whole matter of foreign missions is ordinary everyday obedience to our sovereign Lord and Master.”
At Urbana, students have listened to God’s call on their lives and responded. However, over the decades, the nature of their commitments have changed. Of the seven hundred students who attended the first convention in Toronto in 1946, nine went out to spend their lives in Afghanistan as career missionaries. Many others lived out life-long commitments in service around the world. In the 1970s the missionary agencies at Urbana were asking students to commit to two years overseas with the assumption that they would decide whether or not to make a lifetime commitment to the foreign mission field. At Urbana 03, many mission agencies offered short-term experiences of one to two weeks.
General Trends in Short-term Missions
With faster communication, easier travel and a more mobile population, the very nature of short-term missions has changed. Rather than being sent by mission agencies, many individuals go overseas with groups organized through local churches. These churches often have little expectation that the participants will return to the mission field for a lifetime of service. According to Abram Huyser Honig, “Between one million and four million North American Christians reportedly participated in STMs [short-term missions] in 2003, and the number keeps rising.”
The goals and results of these experiences differ from program to program and person to person. Some assume that the goal of STMs is to change the life of the person sent overseas. For instance, people going overseas may seek to simply develop a broader view of God’s mission and their role in it. Robert Priest and Terry Dischinger studied seminary students and found that experience in a well-organized short-term mission did change the ethnocentricity of the participants. They had more positive feelings toward the ethic group visited during the project.
On the other hand, Kurt Ver Beek, professor of sociology and Third World development at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, surveyed 205 people involved in a short-term project: 127 North Americans who went to Honduras to rebuild houses devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and seventy-eight Hondurans who had their homes rebuilt. The study found that neither group had experienced notable life changes. While the participants reported that they gave more to missions and would like to keep in touch with the people they met in Honduras, the church mission budget was not significantly increased and letters or emails were not sent.
Another goal of STMs might be to benefit those being served by improving their physical situation and by sharing the gospel. Judgment differs as to how well this goal is met by the short-term missionary project. According to Jo Ann Van Engen, “Short-term missions groups almost always do work that could usually be done (and done better) by the people of the country they visit.”
However, Erik Lawrence, the short-term coordinator for Africa Inland Mission (AIM), sees benefits in sending short-term missionaries to the field. “Most of the missionaries who serve long-term with AIM went on a short-term trip prior to committing their lives fully to serving as foreign missionaries. In this way, it could be said that the greatest benefit to the people we serve is that even though a person may come and work for a few weeks and go home, they sometimes commit to returning to Africa and give many years serving the people there.”
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Kristine Whitnable is a writer for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. She also teaches medical ethics and theology as an adjunct professor for Marian College, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, USA. |