5 Ways to Refocus the Mission of Your Missions Trip

There are many people opposed to mission trips. They see these trips as a waste of money, charity tourism, or a vacation with service mixed in. Challengers say participants create no true change and return with Instagram photos with poor children and less guilt. If we want to help people, the opposition says, churches could take the money spent on flights, housing, and food for the trip and employ local people to do the work instead.

In some ways, they are right. For example, if we pay to build a house for the poor, our money is better spent on local workers rather than flying over 14 teenagers and their chaperones for a week. However, these arguments miss the true mission of the trip. Youth mission trips are not a direct investment in the places served, and we must stop pretending they are. If you really want to develop a particular place, send the doctors from your parish, send the business people who can train others, send the money in an envelope, do not send your teenagers.

The purpose of a mission trip is not to benefit the people you are serving but to deeply shape the participants into the kinds of people who will dedicate their lives to service. Think of mission trips as a slow-growing investment – when we invest in youth, they bring an exponential change over a life of service. 

The money spent on a mission trip is inefficiently spent on the project, but think of how a student repays the investment if she becomes a doctor serving under-insured people rather than a plastic surgeon. Or if she becomes a plastic surgeon and gives away a substantial portion of her income! On the other hand, if hearts are deeply changed, our investment will be repaid repeatedly. Think of the great saints who served the poor – St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Damien of Molokai, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati – that kind of devotion to the face of God in the poor is the true mission. 

Our goal is not painting a house – it is no less than the true conversion of souls and lives. 

Okay, so how do we get there? 

1. Devote time to Catholic Social Teaching 

I have spent a lot of time in Protestant ministry, and I have never seen a paradigm as powerful for thinking about social issues as Catholic Social Teaching. Hopefully, this is something your students learned about in religious education; it becomes much more powerful when matched with service experience. This means that you cannot work 8-5 every day. Think of this as a service retreat rather than a workweek. If the real investment is the students, then ample time should be spent teaching and discussing the impact they have on them. There should be time for students to pray and reflect individually and commune in prayer and song. Mass should be offered frequently, and I would encourage time for a confession. Who among us has nothing to confess when confronted by the inequality in our world? 

2. Choose students carefully 

A mission trip is an investment, and you want to choose students who are ready for that commitment. Mission trips should not have a sign-up; they should have an application. Students should be asked to articulate why they want to go, and it is good to be selective. Balance the application criteria with what you know about your students and their readiness to be changed. Seeds do not grow in rocky and weedy soil. 

3. Choose sites carefully 

I would highly recommend a site that offers its own teaching component. You will have much deeper, more personal discussions with your students when you are not doing the teaching and managing the service schedule. Look for nonprofits that are integrated with the local community and creating sustained change. I would personally recommend looking at Jerusalem Farms in Kansas City, MO, and their sister organization Nazareth Farm in Appalachia. 

4. Look for witnesses 

If your site has a teaching component, people will naturally be willing to share their story of devoting their life to service. If not, you need to find them and ask them to share with your students. Who are you interacting with who has been changed by the call to service? Those are the people you want to hold up as a model. They could be religious or laypeople, local or international – you are looking for people who have seen the face of God in the poor and responded. 

5. Call for change 

How can your students return home and create a change? You could ask them to make resolutions and write a letter to themselves to read in 6 months. You could host a sale to raise money for organizations you served. Your students could present after service and ask for donations. Prioritize teaching on the virtues of simplicity and generosity, and show students the path to making a change in their lives. Some of your students may want to return – make sure it is in a leadership role where they have active responsibilities to guide others on the trip. 

What kind of changes do you need to make for your mission trip to fulfill the true goal of awakening your student’s hearts to God’s love for the poor?

Brooke is a cradle Catholic who has done a bit of everything in Youth Ministry – summer camps, high school campus ministry, parish ministry, youth conferences, etc. Currently, she lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and works at a Classical Catholic school teaching second and third grade. She loves her job because she gets to go to Mass every day and her kids love bird watching as much as she does. You can find her at https://brookeannbuth.wixsite.com/writer.