We are an organization that sends people on mission trips. So obviously we believe mission trips are wonderful tools God uses to do his work in the world. But there are also a lot of things mission trips are not.
Kacie Lynn Lester works in the Admissions department at Adventures in Missions. She did the World Race in 2011-2012, and now she interviews future participants and helps them choose which trip is right for them. Kacie noticed some trends about why people want to go on mission trips, and she decided to remind herself and us why we should really be going.
“Worship in the evenings was so good – I mean, God was there. You could feel his presence. If we could’ve just done that all the time, it would’ve been okay with me.”
I sat in my friend’s living room listening to him process the past three weeks that he’s spent leading back-to-back mission trips in Puerto Rico. Over 110 students had come through the sites he was assigned to.
He went on to tell me about how one particular group wanted every hour of their days to be filled with service projects – but then how, in the midst of those service projects, he felt like none of the participants were really there.
This group had paid close to $1,000.00 each to go on a mission trip. They arrived and wanted to do projects that they could stand back from at the end of the day and see what had been accomplished. But in the midst of the service they’d given so much to be part of, their hearts were absent and didn't engage until it was time to worship in the evening.
While he spoke, I began thinking about the question I ask each of the World Race or Passport participants I interview: “What are you hoping to take away from this trip?”
(I phrase it that way intentionally, hoping to infer clearly that they – as missionaries – will gain something from the experience they’re applying to have.)
I almost always hear some form of, “I just want to serve,” in response.
“I want to impact the lives of God’s people–”
“I want to serve the nations–”
“I want to be the hands and feet of Jesus.”
In my friend’s tales from his Puerto Rican adventures, I couldn’t help but pick out similarities between the stories he shared, my story, his story, and so many of the stories I hear through the phone:
We just want to be used.
We’re hungry for something – and somewhere in our cultural theology we’ve learned that, to gain anything, we have to work for it. We have to be better and do better in order to get better.
The issue with that teaching is this: that’s not how grace works. God has freely given us the opportunity to have a transformative relationship with him. And he isn’t asking us to earn it. That’s not the design, so when we try to earn it we are, in effect, rejecting the gift.
That’s why those kids in Puerto Rico didn’t come alive until worship in the evenings. It’s why many people go on mission trips, come home, and find themselves frustrated with how unchanged they feel once the mission-trip-euphoria fades.
We feel we have to earn something in order to receive it, but God wants sons and daughters, not employees.
His purpose in mission trips isn’t so that we can pay penance for, or earn, anything.
That’s the intolerable juxtaposition of this life. We are loved as we are, and it requires nothing but receiving that love and allowing it to change us for us to then become the vessels through which God is changing the world.
You want to be the hands and feet of Jesus? Okay. Do you have a relationship with him? Then you are.
On your way to work, in the grocery store, pumping gas, when you’re with your friends, at family dinners – you are the hands and feet of Jesus.
You are the light of the world. If Christ in you is the hope of glory, then where ever you are – in a coffee shop, classroom, your living room, your parents’ house, or the bush of Africa – you are his ambassador.
God is not ever going to call you to a mission trip for the purpose of asking you to repay him for the cross.
His intention in bringing you to the very most broken places is not going to be to break you.
He isn’t asking you to enter the slums to heap guilt on you and walk you through enough hours until you’ve paid back those years that you spent living apart from him.
He’s called you to go because, this:
“and we know that in all things God is working for the good of those who know Him and are called according to His purposes–“
“For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers.”
There’s been a lot of discussion over what that word ‘good’ means in Romans 8:28, but verse 29 has spelled it out for us: to be conformed to the image of his Son.
Do you want to know why God has called you to the mission field?
It’s not so you can make yourself look like Jesus. Not to look at his 40 lashes and the holes in his body and say, “Thanks for that, but I’m sure your blood forgot to cover something, so I’m gonna go ahead and break my back building this house in the Philippines just to be sure my sin’s all covered and I feel clean enough to really know you, God.”
He’s calling you out of where you’ve been so he can work in you in ways that you cannot. He’s going to transform you from glory to glory into the image of Jesus,
"So that he may be the firstborn among many brothers,"
So that Jesus Christ may be the trailblazer who makes the way for the rest of us into the brotherhood, as sons and daughters who make up the body of Christ on earth, have been anointed by the Holy Spirit, and will be used to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.
Yes, the Great Commission is a real thing and God has intended to use us to bring his truth to the nations.
But he’s got another purpose in using us than just to bring our brothers and sisters, who haven’t yet heard his name, into the kingdom.
He’s interested in transforming us into the likeness of the one whose likeness we were originally intended to reflect – which, honestly? I think we understand. It’s this next part that I’m not sure we quite understand:
He’s interested in transforming us through the means of an intimate relationship with him. He wants to be our Dad, and children do nothing to earn the position of child.
So, if you are called to missions…why?
Because, sweet ones, God wants to take you into depths of his character and his affection for you that you wouldn’t be able to experience as fully or as clearly if you don’t go.
I’m still learning this – learning to stop striving to earn anything and to rest in my identity as a daughter instead, as I follow where the Lord leads. Will you learn it with me?
