Over the course of twenty years I have, knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, led teams or sent people on all of these kinds of trips except the “Youth Trip”. So, when should you and when should you not go on a particular type of trip? Great question! Let’s review the smorgasbord.
The Youth Trip - The purpose is to have fun and, perhaps, do some “bonding” together. A mission trip is the wrong place to carry out these objectives. Youth pastors/directors/leaders that put these trips together do so out of a variety of motives, none of which has anything to do with discipleship or reaching the lost with the gospel of Christ. The most popular reason for the trip is that it looked like a cool place to go together, see the sights, and have a fun time doing whatever there is to do there.
Another trick by such leaders is to tag on a “missions ministry” to a tremendous vacation package in order to raise funds. I know of a church whose youth group took a mission trip to Tijuana, Mexico, for a week. Three days were spent in Los Angeles going to Disneyland, Magic Mountain, and touring Hollywood. Two days were spent in Tijuana building a house. Two days were spent in San Diego seeing Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. All fund raising efforts were for the “Missions Trip to Mexico”. The youth leader was the one who wanted to do all this and the youth gladly followed their leader’s leading. Many parents think it will be a great time for their kids. It’s a step above a band trip that does the same thing. But church kids can’t send out fund-raising letters to vacation in Southern California. Neighbors, school teachers, and Uncle Harry aren’t going to give toward a trip like that. However, they WILL give toward a mission trip to build a house for peasants in Mexico. If you are one of those leaders that have led such a trip on the pretense that it was strictly a mission trip, you have deceived a lot of people. That’s sin and you need to confess and repent, turning away from this mockery of a “missions trip”.
Then, make the next trip truly a mission trip. Read on.
The most unfortunate reason for a mission trip is when the youth leader is desperately trying to get something good going on in his/her ministry. This person may either be brand new to the ministry or close to being dismissed. So the hope is that a trip to an exciting location will both be fun for the kids and look good to the church leaders. For whatever reason, the youth leader has no idea how to use the trip for discipleship. If you have been one of those leaders, it’s time for a new beginning for you in the world of summer mission trips. If you have never done a mission trip, then learn from others’ mistakes and steer away from the temptation to throw together one of these “Youth Trips.” The rest of the smorgasbord is much more nourishing. However, be sure the type of trip you select meets your discipling diet.
The Missions Observation Trip: The purpose is to go, look, and learn about missions work. This is still worth doing with adults. Advertise it as an observation trip. No one is required to do anything more than just learn about the ministry in that field. Once there, they will most likely find themselves volunteering to do things they weren’t willing to agree to when they signed up. The second time they go on a mission trip, they’ll want to prepare to do more that just watch. Then they will be doing one of the other trips on the smorgasbord. If you have youth in the same boat, take them to local ministries to observe rather than to another country. Then take them on a service trip somewhere. The only time youth should be on an observation trip is if they are doing the trip with their parent(s). A parent and child doing this together provides a good discipling opportunity for the parent in the life of the child.
The Encouragement Trip: As stated earlier, this type of trip should be a function of your mission committee’s ministry to its missionaries. The “encouragers” mostly provide a listening ear and sometimes a shoulder to cry on. When they return, they can report back to the church about the reality of the missionary’s ministry in a way the missionary cannot do on furlough visits. This is not a trip to send teams on. If a team shows up with nothing to do other than “encourage”, the missionaries spend more of their time keeping the team occupied with site-seeing than being encouraged. As with the Observation Trip, a youth should only be on this trip with a parent. A committed youth can be an encouragement to the missionary kids. Otherwise, do not send youth on such trips. Other trips are more suitable for youth and meeting discipleship goals.
The Agency Promotion Trip: Such a trip primarily is geared to only benefit the agency. Unless you have people that want to go meet a child they support, it is better to direct them to other trips more suitable for meeting discipleship goals.
The Service Project Trip: This is the usual starting point for most churches new to summer missions. Since they have never done anything like this before, it is very safe. No ministry skills are needed. Most of these are one-week trips in the U.S. or a Mexican border city. So they are very affordable. Since there is no ministry, the team leaders don’t have to worry about ministry preparation or having to lead the team in a ministry. This is a trip that saved and unsaved youth can go on. Because the service is usually among the underprivileged and attached to a Christian ministry, God often moves in powerful ways in the lives of youth and adults alike. Often, on youth projects, there are evening worship programs with a speaker to challenge the youth in their relationship to Christ. It’s not unusual to see youth come to Christ on these trips. If your potential team of youth is going to have unsaved and “who-knows-for-sure-where-they-are-at” youth, then this is the type trip you should start with. There are summer-long varieties of this kind of trip. They are discussed under the Service/Site-Seeing Trip.
The Service/Site Seeing Trip: These longer trips are usually not for sending a church team. What adult leaders can take several weeks off to lead a team on such a long trip? Many different mission agencies offer these trips for individual young people to join. It is a bold step for such an individual to want to go do such an extended trip with other youth from around the country. Benefits are: that the extended trip away from home really forces the individual to rely solely upon God for the long haul; extended exposure to cross-cultural ministry; participants may get a glimpse of the spiritual darkness that many of the nationals live in, thus becoming more burdened for the lost around the world; and, new lasting friendships made with some of the team mates. Drawbacks are: it’s a pity that there is a real possibility students could spend up to eleven weeks in a foreign land and never interact with the nationals; the missionaries the team was sent to help often have no interest in trying to use the team in any way beyond the free labor given; with no opportunity to minister cross-culturally, there is no opportunity to see God use the individual’s spiritual gifts in that context, which leaves them with no idea if they could be effective in the cross-cultural context; for the cost (and these trips are costly), the construction project seen in the slide shows back home doesn’t seem to account for the cost when multiplied by how many team members were there; and, since there is no real ministry involvement to get excited about, day after day manual labor tends to make the site-seeing times the real excitement and pinnacle of the trip experience. Be aware of the benefits and drawbacks as you help young people evaluate trips by different agencies. Call the agencies and ask direct questions. Not all have the same degree of these benefits and drawbacks.
The Ministry/Site Seeing Tour: These trips at least have the participants involved in some form of outreach. Again, these are trips individuals join rather than a team sent out by a church. Sometimes students from one college ministry go together as a team. Benefits include those on the Service/Site-Seeing Tour. Other benefits: people, not construction projects, are the focus of attention; participants are able to use a talent or ministry skill as a cross-cultural bridge to carry the gospel to people. Drawbacks: for some Tours, there is far more traveling and site-seeing than there is ministering; since the same ministry is repeated over and over, it begins to feel like “show time” rather than “ministry”; sometimes only one person gets to speak after the performance or competition and that same someone does it in every location. Thus, many on the tour never have a chance to interact one-on-one with anyone. Again, call agencies and ask direct questions. Better yet, call someone who went the previous year. The agency can give you names.
The Service/Ministry Trip: For church teams, these one-to-two week trips are the best place to start for raising up Acts 1:8 disciples. This assumes the team leaders are willing to prepare the team for this kind of trip. If not, then start on the Service Project first and come to this one your second year. The flexibility of the trip enables the team leader to find something that will be rewarding for all team members that go. Experience in both servanthood and ministry is what makes disciples. Drawback: This requires a lot more responsibility and work from the team leader to get the team prepared to serve and minister. If the team leader does not prepare the team for this kind of trip, it will be embarrassing once on site. For the project leader is expecting them to show up prepared and then the team leaders will be scurrying to try to throw something together. Or worse, the team drifts into being on a youth trip, for they aren’t prepared to be servants or ministers. A word of caution: Many agencies that advertise extended trips of “construction and evangelism” for individuals have a lot of construction and very little, if any, evangelism. They are often just Service/Site-Seeing Tours. Again ask questions!
The Ministry Trip: This is what you are building toward with your teams. This should be a ten-day to two-week trip of summer missions veterans. Again, the leader must be willing to prepare the team for the various ministry possibilities. By this point, the team members should have confidence to minister cross-culturally. Benefits: The team members step up to tackle any ministry opportunity God opens the door to; it is usually the team members’ greatest ministry challenge up to this point in their lives. Drawbacks: It may take two or three years to build youth up to this point. You must be patient in the discipleship process. Because it is not an orchestrated “missions project”, there may not be the gratifying results and cool slide show to bring back home. It is hard to photograph spiritual impact and changed lives. But such is the reality of missionary work.
The Special Skills Trip: There is a crying need for individuals or groups with certain skills. If your church has people with the required skill, by all means encourage them to consider such a trip. A drawback is that not just anybody with the desire to serve in summer missions can qualify for these trips. Never build a summer missions program around this kind of trip. Too many people will then view summer missions, like career missions, as not being for ordinary Christians.
The Missionary Training Trip: This is a great step past church team trips for individuals seriously considering a career in missions. Such trips provide study and training in missions issues rarely addressed in any of the previously mentioned trips. Benefit: The individual must look at the real issues involved in full-time missions that aren’t issues at all on summer teams. Drawback: While studying the real issues on the field, the individual probably won’t experience the real day-to-day routine of a career missionary.
Walk In The Missionary’s Shoes Trip: After going on team trips provided by your church, those interested in a missions career really need to get a good taste of life on the mission field before finishing Bible school and heading out to conquer the world for Christ. The key to successfully walking in the missionary’s shoes is to work through an agency that has designed such a program with their career missionaries on the field. Unless you have a supported missionary experienced in supervising such a trip, sending your budding missionary to your church’s favorite missionary should be avoided. Benefit: this takes the rose colored glasses off anyone’s romantic view of missions; such a trip can be the confirmation an individual needs in knowing if God is calling them to the mission field or not. Drawback: Sometimes it is discovered that this missions-minded individual is just not missionary material, which can be a devastating blow to the individual, his/her family, and the sending church. Yet, it is far better to discover this on a two-month, six-month, or longer trip than a year into the first term as a career missionary.
Picking Your Trip
Aside from the Youth Trip, I have sent individuals and teams on trips of every kind as well as some that are a blend of two descriptions. Every type of trip can be used by God to change the lives of those that go on them. But if the local church is going to focus on making Acts 1:8 disciples, a missions program of Youth, Observation, and Agency Promotion trips alone will not require any ministry preparation or provide much ministry experience for the participants. If we are going to raise up ministers, we need trips in the summer missions program where the purpose is devoted to ministry.
Assuming we agree on this, by now you ought to be getting an idea about what kind of trip you are looking for. If it’s a trip for individuals, pick what matches the individual’s desire for going. If you are looking for a team to do something on the field, then that leaves the Service Project, Service/Ministry, Ministry, and Special Skills trips. If the team is not designed for those with a special skill, then you are down to three choices for your team. I leave the Service Project trip as an option because sometimes that’s where you have to start with inexperienced summer missionaries.
If you still aren’t sure between the Service Project, Service/Ministry, and Ministry trips, then you need to start with evaluating where your potential leaders and team members are in the discipleship process. Team members rarely minister beyond the capability of the team leader. So begin first with who will be the team leader. While there are usually multiple leaders on a team, it’s THE team leader, the one the other leaders answer to, who sets the pace for the team.
If the team leader cannot give a coherent testimony or gospel presentation, then it is unlikely he will be able to teach others to do so. A solution to that problem would be to bring in someone else in the church who can train the leader and team together so that they will be equipped to reach the lost. However, if, for whatever reason, the team leader is not evangelistically minded, then that pretty much limits the team to a service project trip or a service/ministry trip that only has vacation Bible school and/or a performance program (music/puppet/mime) for ministry.
It is best when the team leader is very competent with his testimony and gospel-sharing ability. A person only gets that way from practice in sharing with others, which is a good indication that this leader will be evangelistically minded on the field. With that being the case, the issue is: can he teach others to do the same? Does he have other ministry skills that can be an asset to the team? What additional gifts or abilities do the other leaders have that can help mold the team into a ministry unit?
After you know what the leaders can bring to the table, evaluate the potential team members. Are they new to summer missions? Where are they in the discipleship process? Evaluate their abilities just as you would the leaders. What you don’t want to do is select a trip that you know the leaders can do when the rest of the team is not yet at that level.
This is particularly an issue when working with youth. Sometimes the leaders have a lot of ministry experience and confidence. So they pick a trip that would be challenging to them while the youth are not ready for that level of ministry. Then on the trip, the youth play cheerleading observers while their leader(s) do the meat of the ministry.
For example, I once took a youth team on a ministry trip to South America. We partnered with another church team in evening evangelistic outreaches in churches and the city plaza. During the day there was VBS and door-to-door ministry. The adults of this team were very evangelistic. The youth were trained to do their VBS and could do a couple of mimes. When VBS was over, the youth spent the rest of the day playing with the children while their adults did door-to-door evangelism through translators. My team spent the days in a nearby village building relationships and sharing the gospel during the days. In the evening outreaches, the other church’s youth did their mimes and then watched as their adults and my team of youth mingled in the crowds to share the gospel.
The youth of the other team were just spectators when it came to ministry beyond their VBS and mime programs. When I asked that leader if his youth would like to come share their testimonies or the gospel, he responded, “They aren’t at that point in their walk yet.”
The trip was not a waste for that church group. The youth rejoiced in what they saw God was doing through their leaders. But wouldn’t it have been better to have the youth involved in more ministry at their level so that they could rejoice in what they saw God doing through them? If the youth aren’t ready, or the leaders are unwilling to train them for personal evangelism, then don’t send a team on a trip that is heavy in personal evangelism just so that the leaders can do it. All that does is convey to the youth that personal evangelism is for adults. Or, since they saw my team ministering, personal evangelism just isn’t for them. And that is the last message you want mission team members, or any disciple for that matter, embracing.
Therefore, leaders, pick a trip that maximizes the use of the team members’ abilities at the current point of their spiritual lives. Then use that trip as a springboard to developing new ministry skills through the preparation meetings and the experience gained on the field. Then, perhaps the next year, the team can be capably ministering along side the leaders in personal evangelism.
When in doubt, go with the less challenging trip the first time out. It’s better, at the end of the trip, to have the team talking about how much more they could do next time, than coming back feeling they were in over their heads and vowing to never go on a mission trip again. Start with the simple, either the Service Project or the Service/Ministry trip. If you start with the Service Project trip, you need to be thinking about what discipleship goals need to be met to get the youth ready for a Service/Ministry trip next year.
When it comes to youth trips, if the church only has one trip offered each year, then the Service/Ministry trip is the best choice. That way the leader can assign those new to missions more time in service and ease them into ministry while the veterans can devote more attention to the ministry opportunities. However, if there are two or more trips available for youth to pick from, then it is a good idea to have a “first timers” trip and a “veterans” trip that have different discipleship goals. The “veterans” trip should have greater ministry challenges that build upon and go beyond the discipleship goals of the “first timers” trip. If you have a summer missions program with more than one trip offered each year, then you must start thinking about how to prepare an experienced team to be ready for a Ministry Trip.
The tendency for most gung-ho youth pastors, is that they want to just leap up to the Ministry Trip their first time out with a team. The problem is that few youth (or adults) who have had no summer missions experience are spiritually mature or confident enough to minister on the level of the Ministry Trip. The service oriented, less ministry-demanding type of trip is where most people need to start in a summer missions program. The problem that immediately arises in most churches is that only one summer mission trip is being planned and it must be something for everybody that wants to go. While one trip is better than none, a church that limits itself to only one trip limits itself in its effort to make Acts 1:8 disciples.
Typically, a discipleship program to raise up disciples to minister in the local church has a variety of levels the disciples progress through on their way to maturity and ministry skill development. While we may have heard of it happening somewhere before, most of us would not advise a fairly new in the Lord, totally inexperienced, person to lead the outreach program of the church or become the director of women’s ministries. We would advise them to start somewhere lower down on the ministry skill ladder and work their way up. Acquiring training and ministry experience would be a preferred course of action before being thrust into a more demanding ministry role.
The same is true for Acts 1:8 discipleship.
As can be seen from the Summer Missions Smorgasbord, each trip offering has a different emphasis from the others. Some trips expect the summer missionary to have ministry skills, some don’t. Among those that have ministry skill expectations, some expect more than others. If you are going to make Acts 1:8 disciples, then you need to move the summer missionaries up through a series of discipleship levels just as the typical discipleship program does for raising up disciples in the local church.
Moving up to the Ministry Trip is the summer missions program goal.
In the summer of 1999, I took a team of ten youth on a two-week Ministry Trip to Lima, Peru. One sophomore, five juniors, and four seniors made up the youth. Two other adult leaders went with me. This would be the fourth trip for half of the youth. Of the other half, this would be the second trip for one, the third for another, the fifth for two, and the seventh mission trip for the most experienced one (which was the sophomore).
The summer mission agency we went with was very familiar with my summer missions program and worked with me to provide ministry opportunities that would also accomplish my discipleship goals for this level of a trip in my program. The youth on this trip had proven their ability to minister in a variety of ways on previous trips. The only thing the team members knew about the Lima trip was that we would spend all of our time in ministry, and the majority of the ministry would be evangelistic. We would have plenty of translators teaming with us. We knew who our project leader was. Beyond that, we knew nothing…not about the ministry, the accommodations, the food, nor the in-country travel arrangements.
For all you that have gone on summer mission trips before, would you sign up for this trip? For all of you who have led trips before, would you want to lead a trip with no more information than that? In our program, these are the most exciting and challenging trips to take. Of course I only do these kinds of trips with seasoned summer missions veterans who have worked their way up to being capable of ministering at this level. Such a trip is a big step of faith that God, who knows our gifts and abilities, will guide the team on the field to His glory.
When we arrived in Lima and met Pastor Heli, pastor of one of the little churches we would work with, his first question was, “Can you put on a three-day evangelistic crusade at the band shell in the park?”
That was the first, and so far the only, time I have ever had that asked of a summer missions team. For all of you summer missions veterans that said you’d take a trip like this, what are you thinking now? How would you answer the pastor?
I have had people look at me like I am crazy when I tell them about these kinds of trips I take youth on. How can you prepare for anything if you don’t know exactly what you’ll be doing? My reply to that is that we don’t need to know. Real missionaries do not know what doors of opportunity will be opened to them when they reach the field.
Nobody goes ahead of them to set up a good missions experience for them. They just prepare themselves the best they can to be able to seize the opportunities the Lord gives them.
So, guess what? Summer missionaries are real missionaries too. If they are going to get a little taste of not knowing what to expect, they can’t have a predetermined ministry schedule given to them months before their arrival. As a part of a designed discipleship program, team members on this level of a trip are prepared for just about anything a summer mission trip can call for.
Or, at least I thought so. A crusade? I had never even led a crusade in the states. I had attended a few. Can we do this? I looked around at my wide-eyed team members, then smiled at the pastor and said, “Yes. When do you want to start the crusade?”
“Tomorrow (Friday) afternoon.” (There was no lighting in the park for a night service.)
“We’ll be ready,” I said.
There was another youth team from Tennessee on the project. They were there for a Service/Ministry trip. I met with the other team leader to see if we could pool our talents for the crusade. “Crusade” conjures up visions of Billy Graham size events. This crusade was before about 200 people of all ages each afternoon. So, the crusade had something for all ages: children’s songs in Spanish, “adult” songs in English and Spanish, a skit for children, a mime for all ages, a paint board presentation, testimonies, a Bible story with pictures (three sets of the same pictures shown from different vantage points) for the children, an evangelistic message for the older crowd, and a closing gospel presentation and invitation. Each service lasted about two hours, which is long by U.S. standards, but average in Latin cultures. An adult leader gave the evangelistic message for the adults. Everything else, including the closing gospel presentation and invitation, was done by the youth.
Before the end of the Sunday (and final) afternoon crusade, Pastor Fermin, from a different nearby church, asked if we could come to his church and put on a service immediately afterwards. After the invitation, we announced the service that would begin in half an hour at the church. About a third of the crowd followed us to the church for another hour and a half of services. Our team huddled in route and planned the service on the way there. We couldn’t do anything we had just used at the crusade. We were very glad we had learned more songs than we ever thought we would use on this trip.
The days were spent going door-to-door inviting people to the crusade and, when the opportunity arose, presenting the gospel. Some of the church members, who were mostly Quechua Indians, would go out with our team members on these door-to-door visits. Occasionally we would visit someone who only spoke Quechua. Then we would have a church member translate into Spanish to our translator who would then translate into English.
After the crusade days passed, we spent our days doing door-to-door evangelism.
The church members would tag along, but never engage in the witnessing. We discovered they had never done personal evangelism before. So, our team was able to model how to move a conversation to spiritual issues, share your personal testimony, and give a gospel presentation. Then, if there was a positive response to the gospel, or if they only wanted prayer, the church members would be nudged forward to get the information for the response cards.
For five days of the two weeks, we had a VBS program in a home in a totally different neighborhood in the foothills of the Andes. We had three, and sometimes four, translators with us. It did not require the whole team or more than one translator to put on the VBS. So while a few team members and one translator ran the VBS, the rest of the team used the translators to talk to the many adults that either lived nearby or had congregated to see what the Americans were doing down at the house. Explaining about the VBS at the house made it easy to transition over to the gospel.
At the end of the two weeks, our team gave Pastor Heli over 100 follow-up cards, most of which indicated decisions for Christ. Some he would pass on to Pastor Fermin. For most of them, he and his congregation would make the follow-up visits.
Was every indicated decision for Christ real? Probably not. But some surely were. The follow up visits would be crucial to see if this team had any lasting impact for Christ during their two weeks there. Those that did not truly trust Christ will have another opportunity to do so on the follow-up visits. The follow-up cards will break the ice for the pastor or church members as well as provide an easy means to turn the visit to the gospel and their spiritual condition.
In November 2000, sixteen months after the Lima trip I received a letter from the project leader of that trip.
I have been back to Peru a number of times since you were there in the summer of 1999. I am excited about what I see. The church in San Juan de Lurigancho, Pastor Heli’s church, is doing well. They have been encouraged to keep going. They are building the classrooms on the second floor…The church has grown dramatically. The church was about 70 people in the summer of 1999 and now has 70 youth coming to youth group!!! I know that Pastor Heli was overwhelmed with all the conversions that occurred during that project but has been faithful in following up on those that accepted Jesus Christ. Because your team was well prepared to share the gospel, they were effective. The site where you had your vacation Bible school is now a small church meeting twice a week. The church just a little further away, Pastor Fermin’s church, has grown so, both in size of the church and in numbers of the congregation that I was amazed…The ability of your team to show God’s love to these people in Lima has sown seeds that has caused these churches to grow. Thank you for your obedience to God’s Word in Matthew 28.
When the youth on that Lima team first signed up to do their first summer missions trip a few years before, after eighth or ninth grade, they were typical church kids. They really hadn’t done much in the way of ministry beyond youth choir, nursery help, and a being a helper for children’s church. Most couldn’t give a clear testimony of how they got saved. An attempt to explain the gospel was full of Christianese babble that, if you were a Christian, you might be able to follow what they were trying to say.
Three or four years later, these same youth confidently conducted the ministry on the Lima trip. Most of the time, the leaders were in the background while the youth ministered. How did these youth get to this level of ministry capability? The answer is in the last sentence of the project leader’s letter: Obedience to God’s Word in Matthew 28. We are making disciples, equipping them to make disciples of others as they go into all the world.
Such discipleship needs clear discipleship goals. Making disciples requires training and ministry experience. This is true in local church discipleship. It’s true in Acts 1:8 discipleship. The training goals are met in your summer missions preparation process. The ministry experience goals, if you want to raise up witnesses for the remotest parts of the earth, must be met on the mission field.
Guiding disciples through training and ministry experience on the field... That’s what makes youth ready for a Ministry Trip. That’s what makes an Acts 1:8 disciple.
What training goals should you have? What kind of ministry experience goals should you have?
Just turn the page.
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