Five Keys to a Successful Mission Trip

Important Factors to the Success of Any Mission Trip

The factors for what makes a successful mission trip may differ in many ways, but they’ll share a few common denominators. Before getting started, it’s wise to look at the following:

1.    Your purpose in going
2.    Your partner on the field
3.    Selecting & preparing team
4.    How you set up & lead the project
5.    How you follow up on your project

Determining your purpose:

In a broad sense, the purpose is always the same:  to challenge participants to grow spiritually while advancing the Kingdom.  Here’s how we do it at AIM with a project involving a church group:

• We begin by talking to the group leaders.  We ask them what their philosophy of discipleship is and what they hope to accomplish on the trip.
• We take the design specs that they give us and talk to our staff and church leaders in the field to find out what is possible.  
• Several rounds of this kind of communication are necessary to get a good fit between the sending church and the host church on the field.  While all of our projects revolve around building relationships and sharing faith in a natural way, sometimes a project may be completely evangelistic in its focus.  Sometimes a project will be more focused on service or another kind of ministry.

Developing a good partner on the field:

Good networking is the first step in the process. It has been my experience to keep these tips in your mind as you develop your network:

• Don’t settle on the first connection you run across, figuring that it’s a divine connection.  Charlatans and manipulators are a dime a dozen in the Church around the world and the rich American Church makes an appealing target.  Instead, compile a list of project options to pray about.  
• Talk honestly about project objectives with your prospective partners – you need to be clear on both sides about expectations. The “ugly American” isn’t just the leader who allows his group to run roughshod over local cultural sensitivities and needs, it’s also the leader who in his politically correct awareness of his own inexperience and in his deferential manner, fails to honestly communicate his own group’s needs.  
• Trust relationships are built with time and experience, but given the abundance of financial resources in the American Church, going back to the same destination more than three years in a row inevitably results in a form of dependence.  Using a mission agency as a third party buffer is helpful.  Mission agencies deal with this issue of partnership all the time.  If you’re really serious about this issue, Daniel Rickett’s book “Building Strategic Relationships” is a must read.  

Selecting and preparing your team:

The selection process should include a personal interview, application and reference, committee interview (so that the youth pastor is not the bad guy).  The most important criterion for any project is that of a servant spirit.  

Frankly, this whole area of participant screening is one where a lot of youth leaders fail to form the right team for the following reasons:

• They cave in to parental and programming pressures.  At AIM, we see too many participants showing up on projects who aren’t ready for prime time.  It is unfortunate to have to send some of the students home.
• Maybe the youth leader wanted to take a certain number, so they let a few candidates slide by.  
• Or maybe they gave in to the pressures of parents or church status.  

Just as group leaders should assess their group objectives and spiritual maturity before selecting a project, so they must ensure alignment of the spiritual maturity of individual group participants with the project they’ve selected.  Ultimately, the most important factor in selecting the group is not the selection criteria per se so much as it is having the backbone to rigorously apply those selection criteria.  

When preparing your group, don’t confuse cross-cultural awareness with discipleship or ministry skills.  One is intellectual and the other is spiritual.  Recognize that most cross-cultural sensitivity training is going to boil down to a list of “do’s and don’ts.”  That’s easy enough.  

The most important ministry skill is sensitivity to the direction of the Holy Spirit.  Students who don’t know how to listen to what God may be saying in a given ministry setting are going to fall back on something trite and memorized like “The Four Spiritual Laws.”  That’s not to disparage the importance of memorizing a gospel presentation, but we must recognize how invaluable a listening ear is in any ministry setting.

Setting up and leading the project:

We look for groups to decide where they want to go in the fall, begin selecting their groups by February and prepare their groups in the spring.  In most cases it is better to leave the setup and project leadership up to a short-term mission agency.  Youth leaders are hired to disciple students not take care of administrative details.  That is their calling.  Too many people fail to achieve their destiny in life by failing to focus on their calling.

The most important factor to look for in your project leader is their experience.  

• Check to see if they have successfully led projects similar to the one you selected for your team.
• If they’re rookies, check out their skills and other unrelated experience that would benefit the group.  
• Are they organized?  Do they have good people skills?  Do they know how to seek and follow the Lord’s guidance?

Following up on the project:

Debriefing brings truth to light.  If you begin with the premise that a key mission trip objective is to produce spiritual growth, then you have to ask yourself, “How does spiritual growth occur?”  I’ve seen that it occurs when the lies we’ve embraced are repudiated.  For example, it’s common to see students say, “I realized how blessed we are in comparison with people overseas.  I’ll never complain again.”  Perhaps subconsciously, before going on the project they believed the lie that there should be no limits to their list of wants.  The process of debriefing extracts this lie from the realm of the unconscious and exposes it to truth, thus bringing spiritual reality into focus.  

The best projects will encompass not only regular debriefing each day, but will involve at least a day’s debrief at the end of the project to ensure that participants are given the chance to wrestle through how they’re going to change their lives back home.  After returning home, accountability is imperative if changes are to stick.

• Allow the students to continue to model what they have learned with others who were not ready for this trip.
• Give the members of the team to share with everyone in their church the experiences and lessons that were learned.
• Have each team member mentor someone in the community so that they will continue to improve their own unique gifts.

The role and result of the short term mission trip is to spread the wings of the participants in helping serve the Lord by helping others.  By utilizing these tips, you will create an experience that builds minds, hearts, and souls of our youth today.