Just as most of the above posts have focused on how good STM are for the missionary,medical missions can end up being all about the people who go and not about the people who are served. Until they learn that it doesn’t work that way, students just love the idea of going overseas to practice doing things they are not allowed to do yet in the US (“and I got to do a C-section all by myself!”), even if it’s a bit rough on the poor people they are practicing on. Boring and cold-hearted as it may seem, all that enthusiasm has to be channeled into work that is sustainable and partnered by someone in the host country, and it has to be part of a strategic plan (though I admit there have been some very lucky mavericks)

And yes, it has been argued that it is better to send over expired drugs, substandard equipment, and untrained practitioners because it is better than nothing. However, this is not the best way to build a really solid relationship with the host country.

First, I think Bono said is best when he said, “My God isn’t short of cash, mister.” I agree with one of the commenters that this isn’t a zero sum game where X dollars given for STM would be instead given for LTM, not even close.

STM works best in conjunction with long-term strategy on the field. It is a tool in the toolbox for saturation Church planting (in our case) and evangelism, not the toolbox. Dr. George Robinson wrote a terrific book on how this works really well. “Striking the Match”

I’ve heard that 90% of LTMs come from STM. I’m a case in point. After working in this model for over five years, I think STM are critical to:

Focus a U.S. church on the Great Commission
Give the U.S. church a heart for the world, and a global perspective
Quickly mature believers in the church
Radically alter the giving philosophy of the church in the U.S.

There are countless examples of the above. For STM to be successful, you have to:
* Have a long-term strategy led by indigenous leaders on the ground that STM supplments. In our case, Americans serve as an evangelism spark.
* Actually, verbally share the Gospel. Without seeing a transformed life with the Gospel, the trip is empty and poorly stewarded.

Here’s Dr. Robinson’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Striking-Match-Ordinary-Short-Term-Missions/dp/B0015YL8F6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280254739&sr=8-1

I went on three one-week evangelistic short term trips with our state youth department my senior year in HS and first two years of college, over Christmas break each year (Tegucigalpa, Honduras in 1986; Torreon, Mexico in 1987; and San Cristobal, Venezuela in 1988). In the summer of 1989, I went back to Venezuela for 6 weeks, where I shared an apartment with the Venezuelan pastor and another single guy in the church, who did the maintenance work. I became decent with spoken Spanish (I already had decent reading/writing skills from my HS and college classes and summer studies in Spain in 1988), and really developed a love for the language and culture.

After returning home to Arkansas, I tried to keep my Spanish up, doing my Bible reading in both languages and trying to converse with the wait staff in the Mexican restaraunts.

Fast forward to spring of 1997. My church took a special offering to help a Mexican pastor who had just moved to Little Rock to help start a Spanish-language congregation as part of A/G Home Missions’ Hispanic Project 2000. I called the district office and got the pastor’s phone number, found out where they were meeting, and started attending their services in addition to my home shurch (they were sharing a building with an English-language church at the time, so the service times were such that I could do that).

In the fall of 1998 I met Diana there, and in January 1999 we got married. My Mexican bride and I now have two daughters. I have served as missions director for the Spanish church, and am now leaving that position to help teach in their Bible Institute this fall. My wife is the church bookkeeper and on the deacon board. This September the two of us are going with a team from my home church to Cochabamba, Bolivia, to work with the Bolivian Hope Center doing some finishing work on the new dorm building for the children of women who are incarcerated at the women’s prison there. This will be my wife’s first trip to a country outside her native Mexico and the U.S.

I doubt I would be where I am today (family and ministry-wise) if not for those short-term missions trips in HS and college.

Having read through a copy of the results, I am impressed with the careful academic rigor of the survey.

From a personal conversation I had with him at a conference on short-term missions sponsored by Dr Priest at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School July 2009, I confirmed that the 1.6 million number did not include those under age 18, i.e. all the youth groups, it did not include those who took mission trips within the US, and it did not include those who went for the summer or longer.

Considering those three additional groups, and using Barna’s figure (http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/20-donorscause/22-despite-benefits-few-americans-have-experienced-short-term-mission-trips) that 33% of short-termers never leave the borders of the US, I asked Dr Wuthnow if he would be comfortable with someone saying that a total of 2.4 million went on STMs in 2004 (the year of the data)? He responded affirmatively. This total is obviously a guess, but it is extrapolated from fairly recent solid data.

This figure matches the best guesses we hear from short-term mission leaders at the Fellowship of Short-Term Missions, The Standards of Excellence in Short-Term Missions and the Alliance for Excellence in Short-Term Missions.

That data was from 6 years ago. The last couple years have seen decreases in the numbers going to Mexico and reports of fewer and smaller teams going overseas, but at least in terms of interest as revealed by traffic on http://www.ShortTermMissions.com, traffic and interest in STMs is stronger this year than in any previous year. Interest has not plateaued or decreased. Interest displayed isn’t the same as the numbers going, but are related.

If you would like to see the preferred countries, ministries, ages, etc, that people looked for in the 106,702 unique searches done on our website this Spring, you may download the report at http://mdat.org/files/2010_stm_search_report.pdf

In June, we sent 11 people to Cochabamba, Bolivia, to work with Food for the Hungry in a periurban area called Uspa Uspa. Our project was to help build a community center for the people of Uspa Uspa, though we just poured some concrete for it. In addition to the manual labor, FH also put us in contact with a number of the community leaders–governmental, church, and NGO–so that we could hear their vision for the community. We got to visit the homes of sponsor kids, we participated in FH’s Child Development Program, and we did a VBS with a local church.

The total cost of the trip for 11 people was just over $29,000 for seven days in country. The only tangible product of this was a concrete slab and some computers. If you do a cost/benefit analysis on that, you may conclude that we should have just sent the money.

However, $5,000 of the $29,000 went toward the computers and other materials, so only $24,000 went to travel expenses, etc.

Today we shared with the congregation about our trip. To date, our congregation has sponsored 33 kids in Uspa Uspa. At least five of these children are sponsored by people who went to Bolivia. Some were sponsored before we left, but all were sponsored in relation to this short-term trip. Child sponsorships are $32/month and there is a 10-year commitment.

So far, our $24,000 investment in a short-term trip resulted in a $5,000 project, and $126,720 of child sponsorship giving (over the next 10 years) that otherwise would not have happened. Now, we were careful about the way we promoted this trip and we worked with a great organization. But, in our case, investment in a short-term trip resulted in increased long-term giving. This is not to mention non-tangible spiritual benefits.

I highly recommend checking out Food for the Hungry’s Community-to-Community program. Our elders are praying over it, but I am pretty sure we will be entering into a C2C relationship with Uspa Uspa. C2C involves a commitment to prayer, child sponsorship, short-term trips, and advocacy. It’s good stuff.

While I don’t think it can accurately be said that churches in this part of the developing world sit back and wait for anybody to help them, there are very serious questions to be asked about the allocation of resources, especially when it comes to short-term projects that likely have minimal impact. For example, the cities in which I work have 80-90% unemployment in the formal sector. For about half the families in some of those cities, people eat only once every other day, alternating between children and adults. To say the poverty is desperate is an understatement, which is why it’s incredibly difficult to look at a western Church that spends $50,000 plus to send out a team for two weeks and say that that is a wise use of resources. $50,000 could fund 100 workers for a year, doing everything from construction to improving health centers and schools to paying pastors regular salaries. In a very real sense, short-term missionaries often deprive those in need of work, and the dignity that work provides (When Helping Hurts is an excellent summary of these issues, btw).

If we are honest with ourselves, we will also have to admit that most of Africa doesn’t need Western missionaries anymore. It’s ridiculous to send untrained, unqualified teenagers to “evangelize” in countries in which 90%+ of the population are already Christians, especially when there are long-established seminaries and Biblical training institutes where local Christians are well aware of the call to go and tell others of the faith.

The remarkable thing about this region is how much local Christians have been able to do without resources, visiting missionaries, or adequate funds. They run the schools, keep people healthy, and attack social problems head-on with a determination to make things work. Christians in this region may need occasional technical support or training, but they don’t need us to do jobs that they can do. We’ve got to stop making missions all about us, and start listening to those we purport to help. If we honestly listened to them, I doubt most would want us sending STM teams.