How To Know If Your STM Trip Is Too Risky

Recently, a short-term mission team from New Zealand was in a car accident in Kenya and three team members died. It was nothing short of a tragedy. From an earthly perspective, I can’t imagine why people who sacrificed to serve God would die what seems a senseless death. While most trips go off without a hitch, tragedies can happen whether a team is in a safe place or a dangerous one. As leaders in short-term missions, what do we do with risk and danger?

This brings up an interesting dilemma. If God has called us to something, should the risk even matter? The argument can be made that the very fact that one would consider risk shows that he or she should not participate in a trip. However, we are also the overseers of precious lives that trust our leadership. We would not be good stewards of our team if we took them into risky situations unnecessarily. So how do we go about managing risk and taking care of our people? Here are some ideas to consider as you plan and even make policies.   

First, you have to decide as an organization or church how much risk you are willing to take on. At DELTA, we classify ministry locations into mild, medium, high, and critical. Some groups might find they don’t feel comfortable with anything more than a medium while others might be ok with a high or a critical field location. What is important is that you have considered this and made a decision on what is acceptable before you are faced with the specifics of a particular team.

Once you know your risk threshold, develop a system for gathering information. Consider a service like Frontier Medex that sends daily updates of current events so you are informed of new incidents. The US State Department as well as other international state departments can have some good information too. Make sure you also include local sources of information like local news outlets, missionary partners, or others who have first-hand knowledge.

Second, develop a way of quantifying the risk. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard objections to mission trips over safety, but the person can’t vocalize what makes the trip dangerous. The best way to handle generic objections is to have information. I use a Risk Assessment Tool that allows three people to name the 3 or 4 biggest dangers and evaluate both the likelihood it would happen and the severity of the impact if it happened. For example, getting kidnapped might be low on the likelihood but high on severity. Contracting an intestinal bug might be high on the likelihood but low on severity of impact. Once the risks are defined, you can make a plan to mitigate them.

Third, have a crisis and contingency plan. Don’t wait for something bad to happen to figure out how you would react. A good crisis and contingency plan includes an emergency response team. It should also spell out the duties of the emergency team members, procedures on notifying families, who will monitor the ongoing situation, who will be a “spokesperson,” how you will document your action steps, and so on. It should also include policies on who decides when evacuation is mandatory and who pays for mandatory and optional evacuation.

Fourth, be prepared. Make sure you purchase travel medical and evacuation insurance. It can cost, literally, less than a couple of dollars per day. Other ways to be prepared are to ask your host about what plans they have for emergencies, give your team leader an In Case of Emergency form that has emergency contact numbers for people in the host country and at home, include forms for logging injuries and collecting the information required by the insurance company. You may also want to have the name of a crisis consulting agency handy so you know who to call in an emergency.

Does this seem overwhelming? Start with the first step before worrying about the other 3 or contact DELTA Ministries to purchase their Crisis and Contingency Plan or to receive coaching on developing your own.

Questions for the author? Need coaching or consulting? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@deltaministries.com.

4 Characteristics of Potential STM Leaders

Many churches are looking for new STM team leaders. It can be difficult to find the right person, yet the burnout on the experienced leaders is even harder. Or, maybe you have tried new leaders, but they never work out. Do you know the necessary characteristics of a STM team leader? Do you know what to look for in potential leaders? Let’s see what the Apostle Paul, a trainer of leaders, has to say.

Is a leader simply someone who is good at being in charge—who can be a good boss? No! Jesus himself said in Mark 10:45 that he didn’t come to be the boss but to be the best servant.

Should we look for the oldest person or the one with the most experience? No! Or the Apostle Paul would not have told Timothy not to let anyone look down on him because of his age but to set the example for them (1 Timothy 4:12).

Do we look for the person who is a “natural-born leader?” You know, the person with the charisma; the “it” factor. Again, no! In 1 Corinthians 2:1-4, Paul reminds the Corinthians that he came not with elegance of speech or fanciness but in humbleness relying on the message of Christ crucified and the Holy Spirit. Paul didn’t rely on persuading people through his own gifts but on letting his message and the Holy Spirit do the work.

Is being the best a requirement for being a leader? No! Again, Paul tells us that God chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise and the weak to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). The perfect person glorifies him or herself, but the chosen of God glorifies Him.

So what then is a leader? A leader is the one who sets the example to be followed. Paul tells the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 4:16-17 to imitate him and that he is sending Timothy as his example. Paul says Timothy will remind them of his way of life in Christ Jesus! What a statement!

What is the example that leaders should be setting? What are the character qualifications for being a leader? A leader should be a person of prayer, a person of the Word, a person of love, and a servant. When you are looking for potential leaders look for people who pray from the heart, pray in the face of trials, and who pray for others. Look for a person who knows and follows God’s Word. Look for a person who truly loves God and others, and someone who is a servant of others.

Don’t confuse the characteristics of a leader with the skills of a leader. We want to put character before skills when looking for potential team leaders. Once we have selected new leaders, then we can worry about training them.  

Don’t know how to train team leaders? Go to DELTA’s website to learn more about their Team Leader Training. You can also email me for some free resources on the qualifications and job description for a team leader, a team leader application, and team leader references.  

Questions for the author? Need coaching or consulting? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@deltaministries.com.

How To Solve Mission Trip Dilemmas

I remember my first mission trip, November 1998, like it was yesterday. We spent five days in Ensenada, Mexico working with a church in Colonia 89. It was not just my first mission trip but my first time out of the country. While I watched the news and new the world was bigger than my country, I had never come face to face with a world that was not my own.

I can remember sitting by myself on a rock on the second to last day of the trip with a slew of questions floating in my mind. One series of questions went like this: “Is this pastor sincere? Authentic? He seems full of faith but he is so poor, how can that be? Doesn’t God bless the righteous? Is he really not that righteous? Or do I have something wrong?” This began a time in my life when I, as I call it, had my personal theology turned upside down.

Somehow I don’t think I am alone in this experience. Your dilemma might not have been the exact same issue, but I bet you have struggled with difficult questions at some point. I even have friends who have walked away from God after a short-term mission trip because the questions are so difficult. Why is that? Why such deep despair?

These dilemmas creep up when our experiences don’t match our beliefs. In my case, growing up in America, I had the belief that faithfulness leads to material blessings. This, of course, is not always true but it is not hard to understand how I came up with this belief. The tricky thing, though, is that I didn’t even know I held this belief until I faced an experience that defied it! When our experiences don’t match our beliefs, we can go into a funk. A common dilemma is how can a world created and governed by a good, loving, and all-powerful God be so…for lack of a better word…wrong. What is your dilemma?

When our experiences and beliefs conflict, we often feel the need to choose one as true and the other as false. What does this look like? Choosing our experience to be ultimate truth usually results in us walking away from God. Choosing our belief to be true (especially when it is not) usually leads to us dismissing our experience and never changing for the positive. I don’t know about you, but neither of those seem like good options, but what should we do?

I tell people all the time, this is an opportunity for integration. Don’t throw out your experience for there is truth in it. Don’t throw out your core belief in God for it is true. Instead integrate your experience with the Bible and come out with a new belief that is true! Here’s a simple (but not easy) four step process:

1. Identify what is troubling you and why. That is to say, identify the specific belief that is in conflict with your experience.
2. Share your struggle with an expert. Don’t struggle alone—you need someone around you. But, you wouldn’t go to a doctor for advice on how to fix your car or to a mechanic for medical advice. Don’t talk to just anybody, talk with someone you respect. Someone with knowledge of the Bible, understands the world, and is spiritually mature.
3. Read God’s Word! Go right to the source. Learn all you can from Jesus’ life and teachings. See what God has to say about the world and His values. Ask God for answers.
4. Redefine your belief. Don’t pick the experience or belief as ultimately true. Work out a new belief that is biblical and true.

In my case, I didn’t just accept the experience or the belief. I went back to the Scriptures and considered how God views money, who was wealthy in the Bible, who wasn’t, and so on. I sought counsel from people who were wiser than me. Eventually I recognized my belief was flawed and needed to be redefined. I didn’t reject God or my experience, instead I used the situation as a catalyst to understand God better and bring me closer to Him.

So, how about it? Are you struggling with any mission trip dilemmas? Have you in the past? Did you find reconciliation? Or maybe you are ignoring your experience and pretending like it never happened. No matter what the situation, share it here. Post a comment on your dilemma and how you resolved it (if it has been resolved). Allow all of us to benefit from your journey!

   

Questions for the author? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@delaministries.com.

3 Follow-Through Meetings For When You Come Home

Coming home is always so anticlimactic.  Most teams spend months preparing for two intensive weeks in a foreign country bonding with team members they barely knew. Then they go home to their normal and overly busy life in which they rarely see their former team members.

If you have been involved in short-term mission trips for any length of time, the story is all too familiar. A team comes home excited to share their story and influence their community, but they lose their connection and thus their energy. We all know that we should be doing something for follow-through with our team, but what works?

Follow-through meetings don’t have to last forever, and don’t have to be complicated. I recommend pre-planning the dates for three follow through meetings. Set these up ahead of time so people realize they are important, and will schedule them well ahead of their calendar filling up. Each of these meetings should have a theme, and be planned with the intent of moving the team along a process from debriefing to next steps.

Here are the three meetings I suggest:

1.      Celebration. Schedule this meeting to happen within a week to 10 days of returning home. This can be a pizza party, an ice-cream social, a potluck, or whatever you want. Have everyone bring their pictures, a CD with pictures, or something else by which to remember the trip. Simply sit around telling stories, laughing, and reminiscing. You need this time to connect and remember. You don’t need to get overly spiritual —this meeting is simply to celebrate the trip and connect.

2.      Reflection. This is the meeting where you will get reflective and misty-eyed. We want people to not just remember the stories, but to re-experience the impact. And with the perspective that time and distance gives, to be able to see what God was communicating to them. Here’s the thing though: you can’t simply sit in a circle and expect everyone to share. You need some sort of activity to prompt reflective though. If you need help planning a meeting like this, contact me using the information at the bottom of the article.

3.      Planning Next Steps. As an individual and as a team, what are the next steps? “How, then, shall I now live?” should be the theme of this question. Sometimes we consider this too quickly. It is important to have celebrated the trip and deeply reflected before considering what’s next. Hopefully this meeting will lead to next steps for the individual as well as next steps that will help the team impact their community in light of their experience. Again, you can’t expect to sit in a circle and brainstorm to a resolution. Contact me for ideas of how to creatively manage this meeting.

Finishing well can be hard in our fast-paced, high energy world. Our society is quick to move on to the next big thing before the current big thing is resolved and our lives often reflect it. Make sure you finish your short-term mission experience well, for this is how we will see life-long change in our participants. 

Questions for the author? Need help planning these meetings? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@deltaministries.com.

4 Things Every Team Leader Should Do After a Short-term Mission Trip

July is here and you are probably back from your annual short-term mission trip. Or maybe the youth group at your church just returned home. In any case, whether this is your first or 15th trip, you might be wondering what is next. The group got along so well, and vowed to get together, but you just don’t know how to keep everyone connected. Or maybe you have already been home for a couple of months and still haven’t seen everyone.

Here are three things to do:

1. Get them signed up for The Next Mile E-zine. This is an e-zine automatically delivered through email and is free. You only need a name and en email address to sign up. The e-zine discusses issues associated to returning home and helps the participant process their experience as well seek God’s next steps for them. This should not replace follow-through by the church or team leader, but is meant to enhance it. Click here to sign up.

2. Mission Trip Triage—You probably feel paralyzed by the fact that you are responsible for so many people. The problem is that we often try to treat everyone the same even though no one is the same. We use the idea of triage to help team leaders determine what and how much is appropriate to invest in each participant. Upon returning, help your team members figure out what level they are and then plan appropriate next steps for living a more Christ-like life. Check back next week to find out what the levels are and how to follow through with each level.

3. Encourage your team members to continue praying and reading their Bible. We often spend more time than usual praying and reading our Bibles in anticipation of our mission trip or during our mission—and most people like it! Push them not to let that practice end when they come home.

4. Plan three follow-through team meetings. I know everyone lives a busy life so don’t overdo it. The meeting could be for lunch, after church, or dessert one evening. Look for an article in two weeks with details about these three team meetings.

Following through with your team members is a big job, and an important one! It can be easy to let it go because the trip is over, but God’s work in your team members’ lives is not. For more on following through with your team members, I recommend The Next Mile curriculum.

Questions for the author? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@delaministries.com.

You’re Prepared To Go, But Are You Prepared To Come Home?

Many of you are getting ready to go out on your short-term mission (STM) trip in the next few weeks. I'm sure you have done a lot to prepare for your departure, but how much have you planned for your coming home? If you are like most people, the thought of preparing to come home hasn't crossed your mind. That's ok, that's why we're here! What is there to prepare for and how can we prepare? As always, I don't have all the answers, but I do have some ideas. Hopefully this will get you thinking:

1. The final impression--I always say the only thing more important than a first impression is a final impression. Saying good-bye and doing it the right way is important! Do say goodbye, but resist urges to make promises to write, return, or send help. Broken promises break relationships. Email me or leave a comment at the end of this post and I will tell you how I handle situations like this.

2. Knowing is half the battle. Or so that is what GI Joe taught me when I was growing up. Prepare your team for the challenges of going home. Make sure they know what kind of reception to expect from people. Also, make sure they know of some of the pitfalls of going home. The Next Mile goer guide is a great resource that has a section to read specifically about this topic!

3. Ask the team some questions. Before you leave, give people a chance to journal their answers to some strategic questions. Questions like, "what am I most/least looking forward to about going home? What am I most/least looking forward to leaving behind? What from this culture do I want to make a part of my life and how?" Again, The Next Mile goer guide includes these questions and more for reflection.

4. Plan 2-3 team meetings after your trip. Make sure you plan these meetings before you leave. If you wait until you get home, schedules will be too difficult. The time together will be both energizing and therapeutic for team members. I recommend planning three meetings that will focus on celebration, reflection, and next steps.

Coming home can be hard and it requires some preparation to do it right. Don’t neglect this area of your short-term mission trip as it is the key to life long change in your participants and not simply a mountain top experience that fades with time.

Questions for the author? Do you need help knowing what to expect, or how to prepare your team? You can contact Tory at 520-404-0841 or toryr@delaministries.com.