Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions: Leader's Guide - Softcover

Corbett, Steve; Fikkert, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802412297 ISBN 13: 9780802412294

Verlag: MOODY PUBL, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

With over 300,000 copies in print, When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation. This stand-alone resource applies the principles of that book specifically to short term missions.

Helping Without Hurting: Short Term MissionsLeader’s Guide is aimed at the preparation and debriefing of short-term missionaries. Accompanying Helping Without Hurting: Short Term Missions Participants’ Guide, it is an ideal resource for church leaders, missions pastors, and youth pastors who make short-term missions planning decisions and desire to prevent inadvertent harm as they enter materially poor communities.

With direction for designing STMs well in light of the principles of When Helping Hurt, practical examples from short-term trips to illustrate those principles, and suggested resources for further learning and implimentatin, this guide is an all-in-one manual for leaders. Plus, it shows the content of the participant’s guide with annotation and teaching notes to guide leaders as they facilitate sessions with participants.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Corbett is the Community Development Specialist for the Chalmers Center at Covenant College and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Community Development at Covenant College.

Brian Fikkert is the Founder and Executive Director of the Chalmers Center at Covenant College, as well as a Professor of Economics and Community Development at Covenant College.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Good intentions are not enough.

We need a different framework for thinking about poverty. Rather than simply defining it as a lack of material things, this approach addressed the roots of the issue: broken relationships with God, self, others, and the rest of creation.

What does this mean for your church’s short-term mission trips to materially poor communities?

Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions:Leader’s Guide

guides team leaders through the process of planning and executing effective short-term trips, both international and domestic, by blending research, stories, practical guidelines, suggested resources, and reflective questions. Based on the core ideas of When Helping Hurts

, this two-book guide with free, online video content equips leaders to design healthy short-term trips and shepherd team members toward lasting engagement with missions and poverty alleviation.

This is an ideal resource for church leaders, missions directors, and youth pastors who are seeking to move beyond good intentions, doing short-term missions without doing long-term harm.  

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Helping Without Hurting In Short-Term Missions

Leader's Guide

By Steve Corbett, Brian Fikkert

Moody Publishers

Copyright © 2014 Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8024-1229-4

Contents

• Introduction—The Need for This Guide, 7, 
• Suggested Learning Sequencing, 14, 
Part One: A Different Sort of Trip, 
1: Mission Accomplished?—Uncomfortable Questions and STMs, 17, 
2: "Do Unto Others"—Counting the Costs of STMs, 29, 
3: Presence or Projects—A Path Forward, 45, 
Part Two: Implementing a Trip, 
4: Preparing for Complexity—Culture at Work, 61, 
5: Dancing Well—Identifying Hosts and Exploring Partnerships, 79, 
6: Overcoming Inertia—Applying a Different Framework, 89, 
7: Some Assembly Required—Building the Team, 99, 
8: Posture Formation as Discipleship—Training the Team, 111, 
9: The Field and Beyond—From Experience to Change, 121, 
• Final Encouragement: Respond, Don't Overreact, 129, 
• Suggested Resources, 132, 
• Notes, 134, 

CHAPTER 1

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS AND STMs

They stream through the airport, backpacks and matching shirts bobbing through security lines, and then sleepily relax at the gates. They pile into vans, pillows and trail mix crammed between every seat. There were 120,000 in 1989; 450,000 in 1998; 1,000,000 in 2003; and 2,200,000 in 2006. The numbers reflect a tidal wave of American short-term "missionaries" flooding the world.

And the movement continues to grow. Research from 2010 suggests that the number of people from the US traveling on international STMs each year has likely risen to 2–3 million. To look at it from a different angle, Robert Wuthnow, professor of sociology at Princeton University, estimates that the likelihood of any given US church member going on an international STM sometime in their lifetime could be as high as 20–25 percent.

But STMs as we think of them today are a recent phenomenon. Sixty years ago, traveling from Iowa to Kenya required an enormous financial and time investment. Now, high school students from Seattle can afford a plane ticket to visit South Africa for two weeks—and they can make the trip year after year, easily raising funds each summer.

This is a gift. The world has shrunk remarkably in the space of a few decades, creating new opportunities to engage with the body of Christ and see the work God is doing through His people. The apostle Paul spent his life sailing around the Mediterranean world visiting churches, often arriving shipwrecked, waterlogged, or snakebitten. Now we can hop on an Airbus and arrive halfway across the world ten hours later, rarely experiencing anything worse than a bit of turbulence and jetlag. Early believers, or even the missionaries of 150 years ago, could never have dreamed of such an opportunity.

But the rise of STMs has left church leaders, missionaries, and organizations on both the sending and receiving side of the STM equation asking important questions: How well are we stewarding this opportunity and the resources God has entrusted to us? How do we do STMs well? What are the potential positive and negative effects of STMs? How can we shepherd participants in meaningful transformation and learning through these trips? How can we ensure our STMs are not harming the materially poor? These are weighty questions, and they require honest reflection by church leaders and congregation members.

It is exciting to see churches wrestling with the place of short-term missions in the life of the body of Christ. But this conversation has a context. How STMs began and how they became known as "missions" should inform where we go from here.

NOT MERELY SEMANTICS

At the end of the nineteenth century, the word "missionary" described someone who packed up a few meager belongings, sometimes in the coffin they planned to be buried in, and permanently said goodbye to their families. They then sailed for an unknown region of the world, spending their lives sharing the gospel with people who had never heard of Jesus Christ. Of course, the missionary movement was not perfect. "Conversion" to Christianity was sometimes associated with political and cultural domination, not just proclaiming the gospel and partaking in equal fellowship in the body of Christ. But one thing was certain: being a missionary meant sacrifice. And it meant long-term permanent commitment. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the idea of a short-term presence on the mission field grew in popularity, largely thanks to the development of cheaper and faster travel. And even then, short-term work typically lasted several months and was seen primarily as an opportunity to recruit lifelong missionaries. These short-term experiences were not frequently labeled as "mission," a word reserved for long-term work.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, more and more people, including students and youth who had no direct interest in becoming long-term workers, began taking short-term trips. As a result, trips were increasingly framed as opportunities for personal growth in addition to local service and impact. The label of "missionary" was gradually applied to short-term participants, in spite of this heavy emphasis on personal transformation. But even in the early 1990s, there were still many theologians and missionaries who were uncomfortable using the same word, "mission," to describe both a two-week trip and a twenty-year commitment.

Nonetheless, by the start of the twenty-first century, the phrase "short-term mission trip" was cemented in the popular vocabulary of many evangelical churches. However, the typical structure and purpose of these trips is still shifting. Between language barriers and cultural differences, many churches are realizing that STMs are not always conducive to evangelism and discipleship efforts. As a result, there has been an increase in the number of STMs focused specifically on poverty alleviation—an endeavor that seems manageable and concrete in the space of the typical two-week trip.

Many churches are not even aware that the rise of short-term trips as mission was a controversial process, or that the definition of STM is constantly evolving. But this nuanced history should inform the way we use the word "mission" today. We need to use it carefully, for when we speak it we are invoking nothing less than God's purposes and His work in the world—not simply a brand of program or service project to be constantly adapted to the latest trends. How does the work of our short-term teams fit into God's overarching mission? Are our current trips self-consciously and introspectively submitting to His goals, not just in theory and language, but in practice?

THE MISSION OF GOD

Answering these questions requires us to step back and ask, "What exactly is God's mission in the world?" Christians often answer this question in slightly different ways. Some say that God's mission is to glorify Himself. Others say it is to save people from their sins. Still others say it is to serve the poor and oppressed.

This guide is not intended to be a missiological treatise. But for the sake of clarity, we will talk about the mission of God in the terms of Colossians 1: God is reconciling all things to Himself through the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross.

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MOODY PUBL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802412297
• ISBN 13: 9780802412294
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 112
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland