Short term missions has its challenges. One of the themes of difficulty discussed much in my world lately is the propensity to abandon relationship for action.
There's a lot of pressure placed on short termers. First, you have to prove you're going to accomplish something viable in order to raise support. Second, you're spending a lot of money to spend a little time somewhere and you want to walk away able to pinpoint a discernible impact..."what I did mattered." Third, once you get home, you need to prove to people who invested time, prayer energy and money into the mission that their resources were not wasted.
None of this is necessarily a bad thing. But we need to look at it in context. Western American context says that time and energy are wasted if there are not visible, tangible results. We are goal oriented. We set goals, and once the goal is set there is pressure to meet it because we are also result oriented. Often we consider the result to be the measure of the person. Why? What you DO is often equated with who you ARE. i.e. "I do a lot for God. I am a good Christian."
I know that when I get home from a short term mission trip I had better be able to pony up some numbers. Numbers of people who made decisions. Numbers of literature distributed. It often doesn't matter what the numbers are, as long as I can neatly summarize in two sentences an entire month of blood, sweat and tears so that you know it was "amazing" and that we accomplished something.
Don't mistake my words for bitterness. This is not a diatribe. I am not bashing our culture. There is significant value in being able to quantify what has happened, of using data to help determine the effectiveness of what we are doing. But it is not the only way to measure results. We are in danger, as a church culture, of depending too heavily on data as an evidence of change. But growth cannot always be measured empirically.
What I learned in Uganda was the power of presence. Our team had work to do, and we did it, a lot of it. But we also had people to be with, to share life with for a few hours, a few days and a few weeks. Relationships are the heart of ministry in Africa. Actually, relationships are just the heart of ministry. Period. I have been the first to forget that. Sometimes time spent trying to learn a few words in a new language, or holding the hand of a child, or watching soccer with a church member, or eating with co-laborers is the most productive thing you can do. Time spent with people, knowing people and investing in people is immeasurably important.
My boss at Liberty, the incredibly wise Dr. Fanning, reminded me when I got home that we will never know the fullness of the impact of our time. God uses our genuine, messy servanthood to reap a harvest of righteousness that we can't begin to imagine.
We have numbers, don't get me wrong. We're excited about the visible work that we saw God accomplish and the very tangible ways we were able to serve. And we're excited to share those things with you. But at the end of our trip we left Uganda. The people we spent our time with remain. If we truly invested in their lives and they in ours, both of us walk away better equipped for what God brings in the future. The results of that are beyond what we can measure in numbers. They are the stuff of the Kingdom.
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