Short Term Missions - Part 2
My ideas about short-term mission trips were developed further when I went to Uganda in 2000. I did a 13-week internship with Tim and Colleen Stevenson as one of the requirements for my Bachelor of Theology degree from Gardner College.
I had my trip to Haiti as a frame of reference, but Uganda was quite different. New language, different culture, unique foods… I was a minority again, but seeing security guards with machine guns in front of fast-food restaurants caught me off guard.
This was a much longer excursion and allowed me time to really see what the lives of missionaries were like. While many things were different, we still celebrated birthdays for their kids and took some time to go for dinner or go swimming occasionally. There was visiting, preaching and building to be done, but the life of a career missionary wasn’t totally foreign. After all, they are still human and engage in the human experiences that are common to all of us and evoke a taste of 'home'.
It was great to have time to observe; to ask questions about what I was experiencing, what life was like to live abroad and to host mission trips. In my conversations with Tim he explained that the value of having teams of people come over from N. America was not in their building skills. In fact, he could find local labour who could work harder in the heat, for less money, and who know how to use the local materials better than anyone coming from abroad.
The TRUE value was in the relationships built and the life change that takes place in the person who travels thousands of miles to see and participate in what God is doing through His church around the world. The transformation that takes place in the Canadian who comes to engage with the church in East Africa is something that lasts a long time and leads to changes in how they interact with their church and world. It provides a fresh perspective, even empathy towards situations that are drastically different from “home”, or towards people who look and sound different from themselves.
As I re-engage with a short-term mission trip again after many years, I look forward to a refreshed perspective; to a recollection of lessons learned, and some new ones. It is my prayer that God will use this experience to teach me again what it means to be part of the kingdom of God that covers this earth. We are part of the people who live as though Jesus is real and really is Lord of all!