How Short-term Trips Can Produce Long-term Missionaries

Short-term trips provide a great opportunity for church members not only to be exposed to God’s global vision, but also to be discipled toward long-term service. Drawing from Scripture, missiologists, and the testimony of long-term missionaries, this resource offers a biblical and practical framework for understanding the role of short-term missions. Church leaders can use this resource to evaluate, design, and advocate for short-term mission efforts that intentionally serve a broader sending strategy rather than limiting them to isolated experiences.

If you were to pass through an airport during a spring or summer break, it’s almost a guarantee you would see pockets of short-term mission teams at many of the gates. In his book Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global, Andy Johnson writes, “The advent of international short-term mission trips has probably done more than anything else to change the world-wide missions landscape.”

Some estimate that with the rise in short-term missions from the 1960s to today, we have seen perhaps millions of volunteers deployed to the nations. Yet some look at the landscape and question whether the value of short-term missions truly holds. Why waste time, resources, and dollars on short-term efforts that could be spent on long-term work? Aren’t these trips just a means of creating a “spiritual high” or taking a “spiritual vacation”? Why would we go “over there” when the need is so great here? While there are undoubtedly short-term volunteers who have ulterior motives for going, many are going because they want to know, discern, and do God’s will, and some of them are eventually called into long-term service.

What Does Scripture Say?

As we take a step back and consider the call to missions, we might ask if there is a true biblical basis for the notion of a missionary call. In his book, Introduction to Global Missions, Zane Pratt highlights three views on this issue: 

• There is no specific call

• Every believer has the same call

• Each call is specific to the individual

Pratt believes we are all called to participate in the mission of God: “God never pulls you into himself without hurling you back out into mission. Jesus doesn’t pull you in to stay and soak; he pulls you into salvation to send you out as a part of his global mission.” A knowledge of God, his Word, prayer, personal desires, experiences, and giftings all play a part in discerning this inward call to missions. But how do short-term mission trips help fuel and funnel people to long-term cross-cultural service?

We can discern a biblical basis of short-term missions in the Book of Acts. As Phillip carries the gospel outside of Jerusalem for the first time, he shares it with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–39). God used the Scriptures and Phillip’s witness to draw the eunuch to faith and then send him back to his own context. From this we can draw out at least three principles:

1) Short-term missions provides the circumstances and the context through which we can evaluate a calling. 

While there are pitfalls to short-term mission trips—like seeking a spiritual high, the romantic experience of a new culture, or desiring simply to find the furthest frontier opportunity—these experiences can also serve as a laboratory in which the Lord begins to fuel the flames for long-term service.

2) Short-term missions provides an intense time of discipleship that would generally be spread across multiple weeks, months, or years. 

These trips help expedite the spiritual formation of the individuals who are participating in them. They’re not intended simply to punch another stamp in the passport or create a new photobook, but to serve as a primer for long-term ministry. This discipleship can be experienced across three phases:

• Pre-field training: reading books, memorizing Scripture, sharing testimonies, and engaging with field personnel

• On-field service: ministering side by side with teammates with whom they are already in a covenant community (i.e., the local church)

• Post-field: experiencing the re-entry and debriefing process that takes place after the trip

Many who were initially hoping for an “experience” end up giving testimony to how God used their experience to shape their hearts for the nations.

3) Short-term missions helps propel participants in giving toward missions and even leading future trips. 

As pastor J.D. Greear attests, “People who see mission firsthand typically give more in missions offerings; in other words, money spent on short-term trips multiplies itself by creating greater willingness to give in the future among those who go.” He further notes that in his own church, many who go as volunteers end up leading a team the next year. Some eventually even leverage their lives for the cause of Christ in vocational ministry across the globe.

What Do Sent Ones Say?

As someone who mobilizes college students and adults and has traveled extensively on short-term trips, I find it helpful to hear from current missionaries about the impact short-term missions had on their decision to serve long-term. Here are some of the encouragements they offered to short-term volunteers who are trying to discern whether they are being called into full-time missionary service:

“Have the mindset of going to serve rather than just looking for the experience, even if that means doing something non-romantic. Seek to be a S.L.O.B.—Servant, Learner, Offering, Blessing.”

“Examine the why behind going and not just the where or the what you’ll be doing. Scriptural motivations are key in rightly following the path the Lord has laid for you.”

“A variety of short-term experiences can be beneficial, but don’t go just to collect more stamps in your passport. Use short-term experiences and vision trips to truly discern character, competency, giftings, fit, and a burden for the lostness of a particular people and place.”

“Do not allow the short-term trip to be the only influence in going; use your involvement through membership in a local church, service within that church, and affirmation of that church as markers in the sending journey as well.”

Leveraging Short-Term Trips

As you think through the short-term missions efforts of your church, here are some practical ways you can leverage them to produce long-term missionaries:

1) Allow your long-term partners to determine the scope and schedule of the trip. Doing so will help you recruit the right people to meet the ministry's focus and needs. It also sets up the potential for these short-term workers to tangibly explore returning to serve alongside partners in a mid-term or long-term way.

2) In your trip training, make sure you are incorporating material that helps trip participants grow in their missiology: challenging their worldview, learning evangelism strategies, and practicing contextualization. Consider reading a book like Effective Intercultural Evangelism by Jay Moon and Bud Simon.

3) While you are on the field, ensure the trip participants have the opportunity to interact with the missionaries in a more transparent way and to understand the joys, challenges, and unique cultural nuances of life on the field. This will provide a more realistic perspective when considering a long-term calling.

4) After the trip is over, make sure you schedule at least one debriefing session to help the participants process their experience. During this time you can help them discern their next tangible step, such as becoming a short-term trip leader or getting involved in local cross-cultural ministry.

5) Proactively communicate to your trip participants about your church’s sending pipeline. Help them understand the key next steps they can take to be assessed and developed toward long-term service. If you haven’t written out your sending pipeline in this way, consider the example below. It doesn’t have to be this detailed to start with, but at least decide what comes after short-term trips.

What Do You Say?

The call to be on mission is a call for all Christians, wherever God has placed you. As Greear writes, “Christians do not need to be specially called to go overseas anymore than they need to be called to live missionally where they are—it is inherent to being a disciple. Each person must evaluate how he is best suited to fulfill that call.” Short-term mission trips offer believers an opportunity to serve outside their normal context, and they can be highly formative and often lead to a vision for greater involvement. 

Pratt describes short-term trips as “repetitive deployment[s] . . . serving a larger strategy.” As such, they often lead to involvement in long-term vocational service. So, to those who are seeking to discern the direction of the Lord in going and those who are faithfully sending: continue to encourage, advocate, and be involved in short-term missions, and do so with a biblical motivation, a heart to serve, and a willingness to lay your “yes” on the table. It may be that on a church member’s next trip to the airport, they won’t need a return ticket—because they have answered the call to lay their hand to the plow and not look back (Luke 9:62).

Next Steps

The journey toward sending well happens one step at a time. Here are three ways you can continue moving upstream:

1. Do you know any churches that have a lot of experience with both short-term trips and long-term sending? Reach out to their missions leader to set up a meeting and learn from them. 

2. Do you have at least one debriefing meeting after your short-term trips? If not, begin scheduling a session after each short-term trip, even if you’re not 100 percent sure what you will cover. For help with these meetings, check out Upstream’s “Re-entry and Debriefing Guide for Short-Term Missions Teams.” 

3. For more on the topic of short-term trips, download Upstream’s “How to Develop a Healthy Short-Term Trips Strategy” or consider utilizing Upstream’s book Listen: How to Make the Most of Your Short-Term Mission Trip to shape your approach to the pre-field, on-field, and post-field phases of your trips.