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

By Roger Peterson
March 2006 4. Improved Literature
Until recently, very little solid printed literature existed to guide short-term mission practitioners in their work. The little that was available was often self-published and usually provided only anecdotal evidence to support the bias (either for or against) of the given author. Or it was a graduate study so entrenched in the given school’s academic requirements that the average practitioner couldn’t make use of it (nor could the average practitioner easily get a copy of the study in the first place).

Fortunately we are now entering a season in the short-term mission industry where better editors and known publishers are beginning to release quality books and other material authored with solid content which is directly applicable to the short-term practitioner’s needs.

Short-Term Mission In the Future
Should the Lord tarry, the next few years will likely challenge the prevailing mission community at-large to grapple with these three changes:

1. Fields Will Limit their Short-Terms to Proven Groups
Receiving mission fields will begin to recognize the value of short-term groups submitting to the United Kingdom Code of Best Practice or the Canadian Code of Best Practice or the US Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Mission. As a result, many fields will begin limiting the short-term missionaries they receive to only those who comply with one of these code-setting networks. Receiving fields will therefore have demanded—and can now enforce—a higher quality of short-term mission.

2. Formal, For-Credit Academic Training in STM Methods
Several Christian schools now provide courses in world missions—and many of those provide entire degree programs in some aspect of missiology or Christian cross-cultural study as well. But as of this writing, I know of no credit-granting institution which provides an entire for-credit degree program in short-term mission.

But some savvy school administrator somewhere will soon recognize not only the importance of providing for-credit courses, but an actual entire degree program in effective short-term mission methods and strategies. The first school to actually figure this out will have applicants lined up a mile long waiting to get in.

3. New Short-Term Mission Networks Will Bypass Traditional Networks in Attendance and Membership Numbers
Traditional mission networks such as the IFMA and the EFMA—as good and necessary as they are—have plateaued and now struggle to maintain one hundred member mission societies. Unless such groups are able to re-tool their understanding of who the new mission sending entities are, the overwhelming majority of the forty-thousand US-based short-term sending entities won’t give them a second thought.

Short-term sending entities are already beginning to band together, completely bypassing the traditional mission networks. The UK Code of Best Practice was launched in 1998 and achieved sixty member “organisations” within its first few years. The US Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Mission is just two years old (as of this writing) and already has eighty members—and is forecasting membership of more than eight hundred sending entities within the next five years. The National Short-Term Mission Conference (held every January in either California or Florida) draws around three hundred attendees each year, helping to train short-term mission team leaders and improve short-term mission programs.

Older conferences and associations must make radical changes in order to incorporate the newer short-term practitioners into their much-needed spheres of influence. Older conferences and associations have an immense wealth of experience and insight to draw from—all of which is desperately needed by short-term mission practitioners. But history shows an overwhelming refusal for many such older groups to adequately adjust to the changing times. And the result will be newer short-term mission networks which spring up and completely bypass the very groups that could—and should—be helping them.

Conclusion
Short-term mission has been around for a long, long time—at least three thousand years. It has been sometimes composed of sloppy work and selfish agendas. But with or without the help of the older traditional mission networks, the pressure of forty thousand US short-term sending entities and their one million or more short-termers has already created its own standards of best practice, better training and launched networks designed to improve the effectiveness of short-term mission efforts.

Short-term mission can be a bona fide (and perhaps the best?) missiological strategy when the field need is for swift, temporary, non-professional volunteers.

Following are some Case Studies >>

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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).