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

By Roger Peterson
March 2006

CASE STUDY #1: A SCHOOL Bethany College of Missions (BCOM), Minnesota, USA

Although recently amended to a much more intensive short-term phase, a core piece of the original four-year curriculum requirements of Bethany College of Mission was short-term mission. Not short-term mission trips. But short-term mission outreaches. Not just one—but two of them prior to graduation.

etween their freshman and sophomore years, all students were sent out in teams (six to twelve students per team) on three-week outreaches around the globe, including many fields where Bethany’s career missionaries work. Students didn’t waste time just observing missionaries or national people, but engaged hands-on in the work being done by the receiving missionaries and their national hosts. Many of the college faculty were trained to lead these teams. Returning for their sophomore year, students (and the faculty who accompanied them) continued their study of mission and the Bible no longer from a theoretical vacuum, but now from the womb of actual hands-on missionary experience—student and teacher together.

One year later, students then spent their entire junior year (nine months) overseas on a second short-term outreach (usually in pairs or much smaller teams). Students tackled the local language, wrestled with the culture, survived its gastrointestinal consequences and at times even battled the ideologies of missiology with the local missionaries. All the while, students remained engaged in hands-on missionary work as determined by their field receiving hosts. Some students had a great nine-month outreach, while others crashed and burned. Returning back home for their senior year, the faculty spent the remaining year applying balm to students’ battle scars and working through all the issues encountered while on the field.

When students graduated that fourth year, most were ready for some serious kingdom work wherever God sent them in the world.

CASE STUDY #2: A MISSION AGENCY

Youth With A Mission (YWAM), Worldwide

Loren Cunningham launched YWAM in 1960 as an evangelistic outreach program focused on getting youth into short-term mission. Now forty-five years later, YWAM’s website lists nearly sixteen thousand full-time staff and more than twenty-five thousand short-termers in more than 149 different nations. Yet when speaking off the record with some YWAM leaders, unofficial estimates run as high as 300,000 or more short-termers per year. YWAM is unquestionably the largest mission sending group in the world—not because of their financial fund raising savvy and ability to pay high buck salaries—but because of their innovative use of short-term missionaries. In their early years, YWAM’s growth didn’t really take off until they initiated their DTS (Discipleship Training School). Although it varies from one YWAM base to another, the usual three-month DTS consists of about two months of training living in community (students and staff together) followed by a one-month short-term mission outreach, with everyone trusting the Lord to provide all the financial support needed. DTS training focuses on knowing God, then on making him known, using an extremely high-level of very personal student/teacher interaction involving key teaching topics that result in personal issues resolution and much prayer. DTS students are taught to hear the voice of God—and then obey.

What makes YWAM unique is that it is the only missionary organization that has had ministry outreach within every single geopolitical nation in the world. No other missionary society has come remotely close to accomplishing this. But YWAM has, because they’ve come up with a relatively simple short-term mission system to swiftly and temporary send volunteers to every corner of the globe.

CASE STUDY #3: A CHURCH
Perimeter Church, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Perimeter Church (thirty-five hundred members; five thousand weekly worshippers) began in 1977. Perimeter held its first mission conference in 1979, sent their first short-termer (one person for two years) to Sudan in 1982, and their first short-term team in 1986. Fast forward to 2004, where Perimeter now trains a cadre of church volunteers who in turn train, prepare and debrief the dozens of “GO (Global Outreach) Journey” short-term teams the church sends out each year.

The innovative factor in Perimeter’s use of short-term teams is that they work primarily within the 10/40 Window, including many restricted access nations. Each of Perimeter’s “GO Journey” teams works with one of Perimeter’s national church planting partners, specifically assisting their long-term church-planting efforts. And throughout the pre-field, on-field and into the post-field portions of each short-term outreach, Perimeter leaders are also intentional about helping develop world Christian attitudes and life-change behaviors in each of their short-termers.

Perimeter’s short-term teams work well in the “mission frontiers” of this challenging part of the world, because Perimeter has invested (and still continues to re-invest) time and money with their national church planting partners in order to make it work for everyone involved— the senders, the goers and the receivers.

CASE STUDY #4: A CHURCH
Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, Kentucky, USA

SECC began in 1965, growing in less than forty years to more than seventeen thousand weekly worshippers. SECC’s first short-term mission was a large team of sixty people (too big, says Global Missions minister Brian Wright) to Jamaica in 1990. In 2002, SECC sent fifty-seven short-term teams—more than 750 SECC members—to twenty different nations.

What makes SECC’s short-term mission outreaches innovative and effective are two items: their strategic and accountable link to the field; and their three-level “line upon line, precept upon precept” methodologies. SECC’s “Great Adventure” mission outreaches go only to SECC-supported partners (strategic link to the field), and are planned within three levels:

(a) Exploration (closer, easier, less costly, about five days);

(b) Excursion (outside the U.S., more cross-culture, about 10 days); and

CASE STUDY #5: A RADIO STATION KTIS AM/FM, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

Started in 1949 when Billy Graham was president of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota, KTIS has grown to more than 250,000 weekly listeners in the central Minnesota and western Wisconsin area. Additionally, their SkyLight Network now feeds programming to more than 250 Christian media affiliates around the United States. KTIS currently places in the top five of one of the highly competitive “morning drive” Twin Cities markets which consists of dozens of well-financed secular stations.

In the late 1990s, Music & Promotions director Dan Wynia wound up in Belize for a few days—and came back to the station with an unquenchable burden to help ramp up evangelistic broadcast efforts in Belize. KTIS has since provided money, equipment and technical expertise on several occasions—most of that delivered through short-term efforts.

More recently (2003 and 2004), KTIS partnered with my organization, STEM Ministries. After selecting six of their own people, we went live on-air and recruited another two dozen people to form a team of thirty short-term missionaries (more than seventy listeners made preliminary application for this team). These “average listeners” were trained and joined the KTIS staff to provide a three-day media seminar for Christian broadcasters in Belize, some on-site technical trouble shooting, prayerwalking for the peoples of Belize, some construction and building efforts and ministry to HIV-infected prisoners.

KTIS discovered an innovative way to put international feet to the Gospel they broadcast locally every day. They discovered how to help transform passive listeners into active missionaries. Their secret? Short-term mission.

Editor’s note: For Standards of Excellence in short-term missions, go to http://www.stmstandards.org/

This article excerpted from a chapter in Innovation in Mission, gen. eds. Jim Reapsome and Jon Hurst, published by Authentic. 2006. Waynesboro, Georgia, USA. Permission granted from publisher. Cannot be reproduced in any way without permission from Authentic.

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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).

Comments on this article

As Coordinator for the Global Internship Program of Bethany College of Missions, mentioned in case study #1 above, I would like to give the update to this article alluded to at the beginning of that section, Yes, we have recently changed our program! We have done so in order to deliberately capture the value of the short-term experience in training for the long-term. Missions is, after all, a highly diverse, contextually defined activity, and while many lessons on missions can be had in the North American classroom, our experience has been that the lessons brought about by our previous three-week summer outreach and nine-month third-year internship were some of the most profound learning experiences for our students. Beginning last year we reorganized. We condensed our on-campus experience to a year (a full twelve-month experience) focused on discipleship, Bible and introduction to cross-cultural ministry. Students then take a short break to reconnect with home churches. They then enter a sixteen-month team-based cross-cultural learning experience which includes continued in-context studies in Bible and Missions courses, with a focus on application and reflection on experience through daily engagement in ministry opportunities. Our initial year launch has students going to two locations in Southeast Asia with more sites to be added over the next several years. For more information see our web site at www.bcom.org! From our perspective, one of the greatest values of a short-term experience is the way it contributes vision, insight, passion and experience back into long-term ministry both at home and abroad. We are trying to capitalize on the experience by turning short-term mission into intentional missionary learning. Paul F. Hartford Coordinator of Global Internship at Bethany College of Missions. [email protected]

Paul :: 11 Apr 2006

Thanks very much for the articles on short-term missions. It is rare to see this aspect of the Harvest appreciated. I joined YWAM in 1972 as a short-termer, and then was led to stay on. I have been a missionary ever since to francophone Europe. Many of my friends have been in YWAM 20-30 years also, and almost all of us came first as short-termers. Please allow me to correct a couple things about us, and to add a few points about YWAM. YWAM pays no salaries, and all fundraising is decentralized. (Indeed, one of the the primary factors in our growth has been that we are the most decentralized of any mission.) Although your article technically says that, it could be read as the opposite. While quite a bit of variation existed in DTS’s in the 1980s, since then an ongoing quality-raising program has standardized all DTS’s at twelve weeks of lecture (eleven minimum) and twelve weeks of short-term, cross-cultural outreach (eight weeks minimum). Some numbers for the DTS: ten thousand students are trained every year in sixty languages in 449 training centres, located in about 120 countries. While we do not offer a degree in short-term missions, the B.A. program of our University of the Nations is based on short-term missions. It requires thirty-six weeks of short-term outreach, done in three separate modules, for graduation. In addition, our two-continent requirement obliges degree students to study in twelve-week classroom modules on two separate continents, in different cultural settings. Most of YWAM’s training schools, but not all, are registered as twelve-week modules in our University. Our catalog is available at www.uofn.edu. Once again, my appreciation for these articles, and for the good work of LWP. Blessings, Tom Bloomer, Ph.D. International Provost, University of the Nations Burtigny, Switzerland

Tom :: 31 Mar 2006