Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – What’s Happening in Short-term Mission?

By Roger Peterson
March 2006 1990–2000s: The Internet and World Wide Web. Contact with far away places is no longer the domain of the news media or the highly-networked socialite. Average people now easily communicate with missionaries in far away places, making the world seem a much smaller place. As my writing colleague Wayne Sneed notes, “Before the Internet, Joe the missionary was someone we heard about from the pulpit on Sunday nights. Now, going five thousand miles to help Joe my friend (who emails me every week) is revolutionizing Christian mission.”

The Holy Spirit. Rapidly growing numbers alone don’t prove God is behind the flurry of short-term mission growth. Yet the Lord of the harvest cries out to us to pray for laborers, and commands us to go and make disciples. And two thousand years later? With somewhere around 4.8 billion people currently crawling their way along the wide road to hell, only an insane person would refuse to recognize the church’s colossal failure. But because short-term mission allows swift, immediate response by any believer to the action explicitly demanded by the gospel; because short-term allows temporary engagement by Christian people not called, or not yet called, into full-time professional ministry (realistically, that’s the overwhelming majority of the church); and because short-term mission allows lay non-professional volunteers (again, that’s the overwhelming majority of the church) opportunity to perform what God commands of all disciples—regardless of age, gender, race, culture, training, social status, economic status or experience—perhaps short-term mission is a current “tool” the Holy Spirit has launched in order to accelerate completion of the Father’s command.

2. Codified Standards
The missiological validity of short-term mission has been rightly questioned on countless occasions—especially when it pertains to frontier mission work among unengaged and unreached peoples. The anecdotal evidence abounds on both sides of the fence: there are stories of scandal and selfishness; there are stories of success and indelibly changed lives. But until recently, no “standards,” no “best practices,” have existed to help mission strategists separate the short-term wheat from the short-term chaff.

Developed over the course of two years by more than four hundred people from across the United States, the U.S. Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Mission (SOE) was recently launched in October 2003. It formalizes the ethical and operating procedures many sending entities believe should be standardized. The SOE helps improve any short-term mission program by mandating periodic training and peer review for sending entity leaders. For the first time in US history, a national code of ethics now exists to help donors, parents, volunteers, churches, field personnel and others to help distinguish effective short-term mission programs from glorified vacations.

3. Agencies No Longer the Only Sending Entity
The number of short-term mission sending agencies is on the rise (around 3,700 US agencies currently send short-term missionaries). Many of these groups are small ma and pa operations that know nothing of the EFMA or IFMA or other similar traditional mission networks. But what they do know is that God called them to send as many short-term groups as they can muster, to help a certain people in a certain country somewhere in the world.

However, these thirty-seven hundred agencies pale in comparison to the thirty-five thousand US churches which do the same. Thousands of people in thousands of churches also believe that God has called them to send their own church teams to help certain people in certain countries somewhere in the world. Increasingly the church sees itself as the direct recipient of the Great Commission, and is beginning to put its local feet to the worldwide task.

Christian schools (colleges, universities, high schools, home schools) are also hearing the Great Commission call—and responding personally. Schools now send thousands of short-termers, often issuing academic credit for the effort. Some of the major school sending entities include Wheaton College, Master’s College, Bethany College of Missions, Azusa Pacific University, Messiah College, Vanguard University, John Brown University, Northwestern College (IA), Northwestern College (MN), Bethel University, Trinity International University, Biola University, Taylor University, Point Loma College, Gordon College, Oral Roberts University and others.

Other Christian institutions—none of them chartered or organized for Christian mission—are also beginning to respond personally to the Great Commission. Christian radio stations, campus fellowships, community hospitals and other groups have founding charter documents that state the purpose of the given group, and the purpose was something other than cross-cultural Christian mission. Yet these groups, too, are beginning to send short-term missionaries themselves.

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Roger Peterson is CEO of STEM Int’l. He is also chairman, of FSTML (Fellowship of Short-Term Mission Leaders) and chairman of SOE (US Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Mission).