Mission Trips

Youth mission trips have become quite popular at St. Paul’s. Many events help fund these trips. No doubt, much good work is done on these trips, and they seems to be much appreciated by the kids who participate.

I have long asked myself, however, if it would not be better to have our youth doing work in the Pittsburgh area. Not only would this help build our own community. It would also be an eye-opener for St. Paul’s youth, who might find that, say, Wilkinsburg is rather different from Mt. Lebanon. Additionally, although a mission trip in Greater Pittsburgh would lack the glamor of a trip out of town, the funds expended on such an enterprise would go a lot further with fewer travel-related expenses to fund.

A Facebook friend posted an article about mission trips that echoes my concerns. it also suggests another advantage of mission projects close to home—such a project can continue beyond a single week in the summer. Here is a sample paragraph from “Rethinking the $3,000 Missions Trip”:

I believe in missions. I also believe in short-term mission trips. Yet the longer I work in the resource-poor inner city, the more frustrated I become with the amount of money God’s people spend on these brief trips. We seem so eager to spend thousands of dollars sending our people overseas for one week without stopping to ask, “Would some of this money be better invested in my own community?”

You can read the whole article here.