When Short-Term Mission Trips Help and When They Hurt

The short-term mission trip is one of the most common and most debated practices in contemporary evangelical church life. Millions of Americans participate in short-term missions annually, spending billions of dollars to travel to developing nations for periods ranging from one week to several months. The intentions behind these trips are almost universally good. The outcomes are considerably more mixed.

This is not an argument that short-term missions are inherently problematic or that churches should stop doing them. It is an argument that the question of whether a specific trip will genuinely help or inadvertently harm the people it intends to serve is worth asking honestly, before the commitment is made, with reference to research and the perspectives of people in the receiving communities.

When They Help

Short-term mission trips tend to generate genuine benefit in specific conditions. When they are part of a long-term partnership — when the short-term team is building on an ongoing relationship between sending and receiving churches, contributing to work that the receiving community has identified as a genuine priority, and operating under the leadership of national believers rather than assuming their own leadership — the experience tends to produce genuine value for both the participants and the community.

Short-term trips also tend to be genuinely beneficial when the skills being brought are genuinely scarce in the receiving context. A team of medical professionals providing care that is genuinely unavailable locally, a construction team building what the community cannot build with available local skills and resources, an English-language training team meeting a specific educational need — these are contributions that the community actually benefits from, rather than contributions that displace local workers or communicate that outsiders can do what locals cannot.

"Short-term trips tend to help when they serve the receiving community's priorities under local leadership. They tend to hurt when they primarily serve the participants' experience."

When They Hurt

The research on the harm caused by short-term mission trips is substantial and sobering. Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert in "When Helping Hurts," Robert Lupton in "Toxic Charity," and a growing body of missiological scholarship have documented the specific ways in which well-intentioned short-term trips can produce dependency, damage local economies, undermine national leadership, and communicate — despite the best intentions of the participants — that the Western team knows better than the local community what the local community needs.

The mission trip that sends unskilled volunteers to build structures that local workers could build more efficiently and economically is not providing help — it is providing a cross-cultural experience at the expense of the local economy. The team that arrives with a predetermined program and implements it without reference to what the community has asked for is not serving the community — it is serving its own vision of what service looks like.

Questions Worth Asking Before the Next Trip

Before organizing or committing to a short-term mission trip, honest reflection on several questions is warranted. What has the receiving community asked for? What would it cost to hire local people to do what the team plans to do, and is that a better investment of the funds that will be spent on airfare and logistics? What is the long-term relationship between the sending and receiving communities, and does this trip strengthen or complicate it? How will the trip be evaluated — by the experience of the participants or by the genuine benefit to the receiving community?

The answers to these questions should shape the design of every short-term mission endeavor. The communities on the receiving end deserve that level of care, and the mission of the gospel deserves to be pursued with enough wisdom to genuinely serve the people it claims to love.