Great White Savior

This is the second post in a series of thoughts about evangelical missions from a trip I (Jim) took into the valley to distribute food among the Maasai people.  If you haven't done so, you should definitely read the introduction here.

There has been a lot of discussion lately among our missionary friends about the usefulness of short-term missions.  I don't know if this is a new topic or whether we've simply fallen into a community for which this is a frequent point of discussion.  The discussion usually centers around this question: With all the damage short-term missions do, shouldn't we just stop organizing short-term mission trips?

Now you may be wondering what damage short-term trips cause.  There are a ton of examples of this damage. Here are just a couple:

They foster dependency.  My first short-term trip was to Tecate, Mexico.  We built a house for a poor family.  It seemed like almost everybody we met was hoping to be the next family to receive a house.  There was almost a culture present which enabled a "wait for the Gringo heros" mentality.  They weren't interested in our message.  They just wanted another handout.

They steal jobs.  When a short-term mission group travels overseas and 'serves', it's often doing menial labor such as painting church walls.  This looks bad.  Usually, there's almost as much paint on the floors, shirts and faces of the wealthy white kids as there is on the walls.  In developing countries, these jobs are at a premium.  Why not put a fraction of the cost of these plane tickets toward employing a local person who needs work?  They'd appreciate the work, and probably do a better job!

They mock poverty.  If you were living in a hut wondering not what to prepare your family for supper but if you'll eat anything for supper and some wealthy American with culturally inappropriate designer jeans, stylish shades, and flashy jewelry bounces up in a fancy new car, drapes their headphones around their neck, hands you a bag with a good day's meal, snaps a couple of pictures and says perkily, "God Bless!" before rushing off again, how would you feel?  Just imagine how much it cost that person to get to Africa to hand out that simple meal in the first place!

__________________________________________________________

When we arrived at the project in the valley, it was easy to feel like a rock-star.  Everybody was so excited to see us.  Faith, the mzungu kidogo (little white person), was a huge hit.  Everybody wanted to shake her hand and mine.  Each and every person wore a huge smile.  It's a thrill, to say the least.  The joy in the air was palpable and I think just about anybody would expect to get hooked on that feeling.

When handing out food, people are so grateful.  They're thrilled.  That gratitude is a subtle trap.  It's not long before you start to feel that you're really awesome.  That these people really need you.  That you're some sort of savior.  In fact, there are missionaries and people in charge of NGOs all over Kenya who have this aura about them.  It's not the presence of God.  It's a huge ego.

Feeding projects in Kenya are big business.  Some are done well, but others are just a job.  It's easy to raise money to feed starving people.  We're even given a Biblical mandate to feed the hungry.  But in projects like these, it's easy to see that the wealthy person is in authority.  They are not really empowering the poor, not enabling them to become self-sufficient.  In this setting, the poor are indebted to the wealthy, dependent upon them for just about everything.  These projects foster an endless cycle of inequality.  Eventually, the poor begin to view missionaries as some sort of great white savior.

So it seems pretty clear.  Short term missions need to stop.

But there are two reasons I believe short-term missions are essential.  The first is that most people who go on a short-term trip will leave feeling like anything but a 'great white savior.'

It's basically a given in Kenya that if you're an adult white male at any religious gathering, you'll be asked at some point to speak to or pray for the group.  I said some stuff about loving our brothers and that we hoped that our small gift would be a blessing to each of them, and that Christ would somehow multiply that blessing.  Then I finished with a loaded statement which I almost swallowed as it came out:

"But we know that Jesus Christ is the greater blessing."

True, no doubt.  But what if I were to look at that statement through the lens of poverty?  I made that statement out of my wealth.  It's an easy statement for me to make - I haven't been hungry in ages.  What if simply having food were a big-to-me blessing?  Would I still be able to make that same statement?

As we began handing out food I felt chastised by my own words.  Here I was giving 6 pounds of flour and 2 pounds of cooking oil to each family knowing that as soon as we were finished, they would be feeding us.  And not just cornmeal paste.  Rice, chapatis, carrots and peas, and beef.  They even gave us some oranges and bananas.  We were giving out of our wealth; They gave out of their poverty.  Any inkling of being the hero was gone and it was replaced with a healthy sense of humility.  If more people in the evangelical church could actually experience that sort of humiliation, a lot of our messed-up attitudes about poverty and wealth, the global church, our own personal needs and even our worship would be corrected.

The second reason I believe short-term missions are essential is this:  almost everyone I've met here in Kenya who is currently trying to help the hurting with long-term sustainable projects either grew up here or was drawn to long-term service by first experiencing a short-term mission trip.  Short-term missions create life-long servers.  I'm convinced.  Yes, there are a lot of messed up things about short-term missions.  Yes, a bunch of jobless Kenyans would really like to earn a little money by painting that classroom... and they'd do a better job than your youth group too.  Maybe if short-term trips were organized specifically to help us as westerners directly confront our material privilege and our spiritual bankruptcy, they'd be more effective.

Anybody going on a short-term trip or leading a short term trip should have to read the chapter on short term missions in the book "When Helping Hurts" which talks about some of these issues.  Reading it might make you never want to go on a mission trip to Mexico again, but short-term trips ARE useful.  If half the people sitting in the comfortable evangelical churches of the West did attend a good short-term missions outreach, the American church would be fundamentally changed for the better.