I remember standing up in front of the church after every trip and listening to teenagers give basically the same testimony every time (and I participated in it as well).
“It changed my life.”
“I’ve never experienced God like that.”
“You should have seen how God was at work.”
A lot of people cried. Somebody always said they were never going to complain about their own life again after seeing what other people’s living conditions are.
They’d show the slideshow – kids’ faces, a wall that was built, someone handing a child a Bible – and the room would celebrate and the offering for next year’s trip would come in strong.
It took me years to notice that everyone shared almost the exact same testimony every single year, no matter which trip they went on. It is almost like we’d all been handed the same script before we ever got on stage.
And we kind of had been. We just didn’t know it.
a script nobody wrote on purpose
Nobody actually sat down and scripted any of it (I don’t think at least). It just happened, trip after trip, the same way the lock-in and the camp and the youth room did created culture…
People learned what the church wanted to hear, and they gave it to them. They learned that “they had nothing and were happier than us” gets nods and tears, so they said it, whether or not we’d actually spent enough time to know if it was true. They learned that a wall they half-built and a local team finished after they left still counted, on the video, as “what they built.” they learned that a photo of a kid’s face, taken without really knowing his name, was worth more in the recap video than whether any longer term change would happen in that kid’s life or not.
No one set out to do this on purpose. It was just teenagers doing exactly what they were “trained” by the culture around them to do. It’s the same reason the youth pastor and the church started to measure how a good trip was by how good the recap Sunday went over.
In the end, the trip wasn’t really about the place they went or the people they saw.
It was about what they’d come home and say.
“big church” takes the same trip, just bigger
I’ve now watched this same strategy show up in adult mission trips, church-wide disaster response, and local service initiatives – similar testimonies, similar Sunday recaps, similar slideshows and videos – for year after year after year now…
A hurricane hits somewhere, and a church sends a team, and the team comes home with a video.
A trip to build houses in foreign countries turns into content for the fall sermon series on generosity.
The fundraising message is almost always the same. It says “they need us,” whether or not it’s actually true, because “they need us” raises more money than “we’re going to learn how little we understand and how little short-term trips do to impact long-term change.”
Sadly, no one grew out of the youth-trip script. Instead, they scaled it up and gave it better production value.
And underneath the production and the marketing, the same quiet assumption survived: We are the ones with something to give, they are the ones with a need, and the trip exists to let us feel that gap close for one week and chalk it up to doing the Lord’s work.
the cost nobody put in the recap video
One problem with the youth-trip script is that it never realistically evaluated if the impact actually outweighed the cost.
It never had room to say a team of well-meaning teenagers with no construction experience can build something a local contractor would’ve built better, cheaper, and while employing someone from the community who actually needed the work.
It never had room to say the orphanage we visited exists, in part, because Western churches will pay to visit orphanages, and some children get kept in them longer than necessary because a family with means can’t compete with the steady flow of American short-term teams and their donations.
It never had room to say the “relationship” we built over four days was, for the family or the church we visited, one relationship among dozens of teams that came through that same week, that same month, that same year – and for us, it was the whole story we told for the next twelve.
Have we treated the poor as a means to an end for our own feelings of spiritual achievement?
Have we called something “missions” when it mostly serves our desires more than their needs?
Have we created an experience to make us feel like better Christians that actually costs the people we help rather than serves them?
not anti-mission trip
I want to be careful here, same as every post in this series. I’m not arguing to cancel missions trips.
Going somewhere unfamiliar, meeting people whose lives look nothing like yours, having your assumptions about the world quietly rearranged. These are genuinely good things and I don’t want to talk anyone out of it.
The problem is not actually the trip or experience itself. The problem is when we build the mission entirely around what the missionary gets out of it, but just dress it up in language about what the missionary is giving.
Real mission work asks a harder question first: What does this community actually need, and are we the right people to give it, in the right amount, in the right way?
Sometimes the most faithful thing a wealthy church can do is fund a local pastor and local ministry who already knows the community and will be there for the long term, instead of flying in forty people to build what locals could’ve built for a fifth of the cost and would have allowed them to provide for their families.
That’s a much less exciting slideshow. But it’s a much more Biblical missions plan.
everything this series has been trying to say
I still believe in going on mission trips. I still believe in planning fun events for teenagers where you also include sharing the Gospel. I still believe in worship nights, and prayer initiatives, and leadership pipelines, and all sorts of things about the modern American Church that I also critique.
I started this series remembering the youth room, with its own paint colors and furniture. I’ve spent six more posts reminiscing about a lock-in strategy that never ended, mountaintop experiences we keep trying to hold on to, churches sorting people into groups just like them, stages that promote charisma over character, a weekend that slowly became the entire discipleship plan, and missions that benefits the givers more than the receivers.
Every single one of these things started as something good – a real solution to a real problem – but then turned into a permanent church culture I doubt anybody chose on purpose.
Many have built a spiritual life that measures itself by the story it gets told after the spiritual high – the life-changing worship service, the mountaintop weekend, the small group gathering, the compelling preacher, the trip no one wanted to come home from.
Every one of these aspects of church life became optimized for the moment instead of the lifetime. Every one of them ultimately focused on a feeling more than a life changed.
“Big church, same games.”
That’s what I’ve been trying to say for seven posts.
My generation didn’t leave youth group when we grew up. We just kept changing rooms until the whole church was one big youth room, dressed in better production and run by people who never learned any other way.
can it actually be different
I don’t have a simple solution to hand you at the end of this series. Offering one would be doing the exact thing this series has been critiquing anyways: turning the Christian life into a product you can package and sell in six easy steps.
It felt like the right way to end it was to get us looking outward, at our “missions trips,” at how the world actually experiences us and what our impact actually is or isn’t. The only way forward is to be honest about what currently exists.
And I do know what it would look like to actually change course. I’ve written two books about it (shameless plug, go check out my 2-book series on American Christianity on Amazon: https://a.co/d/09fFVvBf)
I can list some things that definitely need to change if we want things to be different.
We need to start measuring maturity instead of attendance. We need to form leaders with decades of pastoral habits, not via stages. We need to have groups where the sixty-year-old and the sixteen-year-old, the person who votes like you and the person who doesn’t, sit across from each other on purpose and are formed into the likeness of Christ together. We need to plan missions around what the world actually needs instead of what makes a good reel on social media. We need to start valuing what faith looks like for an everyday believer on an ordinary Wednesday more than any single Sunday, camp, trip, or moment we could manufacture ever.
Sure, none of that fits nicely on a flyer and none of it fills a room fast. It’s slower, and smaller, and it will definitely never trend.
But I think it’s also the only version of Christianity that has ever actually produced disciples that look more like Jesus than the culture they live in…
That’s the kind of Church I want to help build. Not one that just looks like an adult version of a youth group. But one where we all finally grow up…and start looking like Jesus…
This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. Start at the beginning of this series by reading “The Church Became Youth Group.”
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