Lausanne World Pulse – What’s Happening in Short-term Mission?
By Roger Peterson
March 2006
How Long Has Short-Term Been Around?
Short-term mission strategies have been used as far back as the early biblical times. Moses used a short-term strategy at least twice: Consider the temporary forty-day, twelve-man fact-finding team he swiftly deployed from Kadesh into Canaan (Numbers 13-14); or his temporary five-day, two-man team swiftly deployed—with less than a day’s notice—from Shittim to Jericho (Joshua 2). Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Nehemiah, Jonah, Jesus, the Apostle Paul, Philip, Barnabas, Peter, Tychicus, Titus, Apollos, the women, the twelve disciples and the seventy (seventy-two, actually) disciples were also involved in short-term mission strategies that were all temporary, swift and usually done in a non-professional volunteer context. How long has short-term mission has been around? More than three thousand years.
Current Short-Term Mission Trends
With an eye toward bona fide strategic use of short-term mission for world evangelization, practitioners need to note the following four trends affecting the bigger short-term mission picture:
1. Exponential Growth
In 1965 student researcher Thomas Chandler noted only 540 individuals from North America involved in short-term mission. In 1989 an estimate by a Fuller School of World Mission doctoral student put the number at 120,000. Three years later it had more than doubled to 250,000. By 1998 Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies (EFMA) vice president and former InterVarsity Mission Urbana director John Kyle’s research put the figure at 450,000.
In 2003 Peterson, Aeschliman and Sneed estimated at least one million short-termers were being sent out from a globally-sent perspective each year. In 2004, Robert Priest, director of the doctoral program in Intercultural Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, reported he was beginning to locate data suggesting the number could be as high as four million.
Who is sending all these short-termers? In the United States alone, there are currently at least forty thousand sending entities (thirty-five thousand churches, thirty-seven hundred agencies and more than one thousand schools) that do the sending.
Why the explosion of growth? Among the myriad of possible answers lie six plausible explanations over the past six decades—all of which are sociologically immense and therefore outside of any missiological ability to direct or control:
1940s: World War II. Many mission societies began soon after the war ended. There was a flood of energetic, enthusiastic young people coming home from the war. Many had traveled far and wide, seeing devastation in much of the world first hand. For the first time in history we saw relatively young people who had experience in worldwide travel and who now had a global perspective. Combine that with a passion for God’s glory among the lost, and it’s easy to see why direct hands-on involvement in Christian mission began growing after the war.
1950s: Modern Airplane Travel. The idea of the average citizen flying commercially didn’t really take hold until a decade after the war. By the mid 1950s more planes were in the air, air travel was not seen as the exclusive domain of the rich or the military and the cost of a flight was within the financial reach of more citizens. As a direct result, “average” western Christians could now go virtually anywhere in the world with relative ease and speed.
1960s: The Peace Corps. US President John Kennedy launched the Peace Corps in 1961. By 2005, more than 182,000 Americans had become Peace Corps volunteers in one of 138 nations. This government-sanctioned “blessing” to travel abroad, to volunteer time to make a difference in a developing country for a cause greater than one’s self–did this have a positive impact on the growth of Christian short-term missions? I think it’s safe to assume that it did.
1960s–1990s: Rise of Postmodernity. Thanks in part to the growing societal distrust of leaders in the 1960s (due in large part to the confusion and manipulation surrounding such mega-events as the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War), young people began fighting stock answers and prodding behind what they were now beginning to perceive as leadership rhetoric and spin. They began demanding that experience and action match what was said. Experience therefore was now being equated with “truth.” The experience-equals-truth equation (which was becoming one of the characteristic hallmarks of emergent postmodern thinking) was further accelerated by the mesmerizing sight/sound/sensory experience now being generated by the film, television and music industries. The impact of these two sociological phenomena on current postmodern Christianity is that it compels its pew-sitting participants into the actual hands-on “experience” of missions.
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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).