Be The Fruit

Inefficient Missions

by Bill Blair on 11/10/08 at 5:40 am

I came across a Wall Street Journal article yesterday that calls into question the effectiveness of short-term mission trips.  The essence of the article questions the economics of short-term mission trips citing one person who described one mission trip to Honduras where teams spent $30,000 to build a home that could have been built by the locals for $2,000.  You can read the article here (HT: Dave Ainsworth). 

The article brought a couple things to mind for me.  First, it brings me back to something I heard at a conference last year from an economist who was giving advice and a critique of the service projects churches engage in.  His assessment was that it appeared that often times such projects were more focused on looking good on the website or church bulletin than actually making a real helpful impact in the service they engage in.  As I recall the assessment did not attack motives, but called people to really think about if they can effective.  The speaker gave an example of a food bank that was running at an average cost of over $100 per meal given out.  His advice, get rid of the food bank and send the people to a restaurant.

The other thing this brought to my mind was a church I passed by yesterday.  The church has a very rickety building in need of some repairs.  Some time ago, I passed by this church and I saw a very high-class church bus from Memphis parked at this church.  As I went by I noticed that the people were painting the church.  Great news right?  Well, apparently somebody forgot to bring a ladder so the church was painted up to about 6 feet off the ground and no higher.  So what was once just rickety now is rickety and two-tone.  I have often wondered what the Memphis church people said about their mission work when they returned.  Do you think they took pictures of the two-tone church they left?

All this is to say that I think the article raises some good questions that we should raise every time we seek to help people with our time and resources.  The good question is, “Can we actually help and be effective?”