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Q & A
Q&A: Short-term missions are ‘pilgrimages’ Mary Jacobs, Oct 31, 2008
Don Richter
Church members heading out on short-term mission trips need to do more than pack their bags; they need to prepare their hearts, too, says Don C. Richter, author of Mission Trips That Matter: Embodied Faith for the Sake of the World (Upper Room).
The Rev. Richter, an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), is associate director of the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in the Faith, a Lilly Endowment project based at Valparaiso University.
He spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
Mission trips involving long-distance travel can be quite costly. Realistically, wouldn’t a direct donation be a better use of the money?
We need to be very open and honest and transparent about the costs of these trips. We need to reckon with the understanding that the money could be spent more effectively by supporting indigenous workers in those places we go to serve.
However, we need to be ambassadors for goodwill from this country. So many Americans are going out in the world in military attire for military purposes; Christians need to go as ambassadors of goodwill and as ambassadors of the gospel. Even though it’s costly, we need to engage in this costly travel and to stand in solidarity with others in ways that we can’t do secondhand, just by sending money. We serve others by being present with them in joy as well as in sorrow.
The larger theological reason for this is that we see ourselves participating in God’s own mission in the world. That’s been the case ever since the beginning of the church. Yes, we need good stewardship and discernment, but I think we need to make that investment and go and stand and serve with others.
You talk about mission trips as “pilgrimages.” What did you mean by that?
When we’re on pilgrimage, we leave from our home and go somewhere and serve and have experiences with others while we’re on the road, and then we return home.
Classically, pilgrims came from different social strata. Often it was a “leveling” experience while they were on the road. So the prince and pauper might enjoy this brotherhood on the road, but once they returned home, nothing changed much. Insofar that short-term mission trips are like a pilgrimage, we need ask: In what ways is the status quo being challenged? In what way is it being legitimated and enforced?
The trips can function either way. That’s why I wrote the book: to help people mine the experience of these trips for ongoing reflection so we don’t go about our life the way it was before. There needs to be ongoing reflection about the meaning of the experience.
It’s very common for people go to Central America and see the conditions there and come back and realize, “My goodness, my life is filled with so much stuff. I don’t need all of these material things to bring me happiness and joy.” I know people who have made these trips and came home and purged their closets. They pull out clothing they have not worn in years. They will simplify their eating patterns, not eat as much meat. I would hasten to add that it takes a community to sustain any practices we might develop on one of these trips. These are challenging, historic Christian practices and we have wisdom for how to engage in them, but we can’t just do it on our own and sustain it.
It’s a cliché, but people often return from mission trips saying, “I got more than I gave.” Why?
One of the things that we get when go on these mission trips is an expanded understanding of the Church. That’s a great gift that’s difficult to get in just the local congregation. Our local church is a means of grace on a week-to-week basis. We need that experience to be balanced by this larger, trans-national and trans-historical understanding of the Church. To be with Christians—say in Guatemala—as an American, to be in service, prayer and worship with the Christian community there, expands my understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.
In what way?
I may go down there thinking that I have specific gifts to bring, and work to do to serve them. But what I find is that they are opening their doors and lives to me. In fact, on one trip I lost my luggage. There I was, almost literally naked and needing to be clothed. Folks were already bending over backwards to take me in and feed and lodge me; now they had to clothe me as well. But they did that with great joy. It was a very humbling experience for me. It reminded me of how the early disciples must have felt when they went out and were told not to take much with them, but to depend on the hospitality of others. It’s a humanizing thing to allow other people to serve us, especially people we might consider less affluent, who have less means to do so. When we feel like the tables are being turned in that way, it can be a real experience of grace for us.
You talk in your book about how mission trips “directly counter consumer tenets.” Explain.
In our society, we render certain services or we sell products, and we get paid with money. The consumer culture is a way of transacting day-to-day life, and that’s part of the way the world works. However, it has its limits. We’re seeing that right now with roller coaster ride of the financial markets.
Mission trips offer a chance to step out of that consumer culture and serve in a way that doesn’t expect anything in return. Ideally, a mission trip is part of an ongoing relationship, and we don’t expect to get paid in a way we would in our ordinary consumer lives. And it can subvert our consumptive practices. We realize that there’s a “gift economy” out there as well as a consumer economy, and we need to be more attentive of that. It’s an awareness of God’s abundance and God’s providence that sustains us day to day.
The consumer economy operates out of a suspicion of scarcity. That’s why the markets are going crazy right now. So how do we live in a way that is not consumed by fear? Consumer society detaches us from place—a particular spot of land that involves people and stories. Capital can be moved around without regard to place. And paradoxically, consumerism detaches us from our material possessions. We think we’re attached to our stuff. We’re not. We don’t care for our things. It’s the pursuit of things, rather than appreciating the things we do have. Advertising actually tries to detach us from the material things we do have as a way of getting us to buy more.
Mission trips can help subvert those dynamics by getting us to pay attention to the particular place that we are in a deeper way, and to pay attention to how people without much material affluence appreciate and make use of what material possessions they do have.
When I participated recently in a mission trip to Juarez, Mexico, I noticed how people built houses out of almost anything—plywood, sheets of aluminum, an old billboard.
There’s great resourcefulness in communities. That’s one of the things we can appreciate when we go on one of these trips. Not just look at what the deficits are, but what assets they do have. We see how people are able to pull together and be resourceful, especially where the church is vital.
Don Richter
The trips can function either way. That’s why I wrote the book: to help people mine the experience of these trips for ongoing reflection so we don’t go about our life the way it was before. There needs to be ongoing reflection about the meaning of the experience. 
