“All those who want to go to Ecuador to mainly build houses, please raise your hands. OK!
All those who have raised their hands, please stay home!
Now, those of you who want to mainly listen and learn from the faith and culture of Ecuadorans, join my immersion trip.”
This is how veteran Comboni Missionary Father Joe Bragotti typically began his first information night for a mission trip.
Not long into my job as director of the mission office of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, I received a call from a reporter at our Catholic newspaper.
“Mike,” she said, “I’m not going to write any more mission trip stories.”
When I asked her why, she told me: “I’m tired of these groups who call me nearly every year when they return from the Caribbean and Central America. They always want their photo in the paper explaining how wonderful they are.
“Their attitude seems to be, ‘If it weren’t for us generous white American mission groups, these poor backward people would be in worse shape.’ ”
She added, “Mike, I’ve had it. No more of these stories.”
I vowed that day to change what mission trips had become.
I am convinced mission offices, parishes, and schools across the United States need to stop funding and sending harmful, arrogant, and poorly trained short-term mission groups.
I don’t believe mission trip leaders are bad intentioned, and I know many of them sincerely want to help, but we need to eliminate this colonialist style of expedition based on a pre-Vatican II “heroic” model of mission.
This approach came from a time when some Europeans and North Americans believed they had a sacrificial duty to “bring civilization and God” to the so-called “pagans” who supposedly needed Western culture to be fulfilled human beings.
This heroic mentality hangs on today as many Christians in the West are either unaware of, or wish to ignore, the racism and white privilege that unconsciously determines how we approach other cultures with our hopes and goals for “those poor people down there.”
Frequently we don’t even realize our “we know better” attitudes.
According to Robert Priest, who has studied short-term mission, every year about 2 million North American Christians are involved in these trips at a price tag of perhaps a few billion dollars annually.
Many service projects do not empower those served, do not engender healthy cross-cultural relationships, do not improve local quality of life, do not relieve poverty, do not change lives of the participants, and do not increase support for long-term mission.
That’s a lot of money and resources, and we need to ask if these trips are really the most responsible way to spend precious mission donations.
Mike Haasl, a friend and fellow former Maryknoll lay missioner, notes that in order not to offend the incoming volunteers, people in some cultures want to be kind and will say yes to the outsiders’ projects and plans.
Haasl recounts that one of his parish members visited a Nicaraguan village and decided to purchase cows for the community.
Later they learned only one person there knew how to raise cows, and he lived outside of town.
The cows all went to him, and the community project died.
Similarly, a group of American high school students who had traveled to an orphanage in Tanzania to help build a library was so inept at laying bricks that each night the men in the village had to take down the structurally unsound bricks and re-lay them so that in the morning the students would be unaware of their own failure.
And a recent study found that it cost $30,000 for U.S. mission trip volunteers to build a house in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch, while local Christian organizations built nearly the same house for only $2,000.
In his book Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (HarperOne), Robert B. Lupton cites many other examples of the “make-work” nature of short-term mission trips.
Among them are a church in Mexico that was painted six times during one summer by six different mission groups and a wall built on an orphanage field in Brazil that had to be torn down after the visitors left.
Lupton concludes that many service projects do not empower those served, do not engender healthy cross-cultural relationships, do not improve local quality of life, do not relieve poverty, do not change lives of the participants, and do not increase support for long-term mission.
But they do weaken those served, foster dishonest relationships, erode recipients’ work ethic, and deepen dependency. Continue reading
- Mike Gable is the mission office director for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
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