Read an Excerpt
Sticky Faith Service Guide
Moving Students from Mission Trips to Missional Living
By Kara Powell, Brad M. Griffin ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2016 Kara E. Powell and Brad M. Griffin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-52420-5
CHAPTER 1
INITIAL STEPS
GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR SERVICE TRIP OR LOCAL PROJECT
YOUR SUMMER MISSION TRIP TO MEXICO is four months away. Your Saturday breakfast for families who are homeless is four weeks away. Your talk on the importance of service is four days away.
This book is for you.
If you're like most youth workers, you want your students to get a taste of service that leaves them hungering for more. Because you know service changes people, your ministry calendar offers a buffet of opportunities — a short-term mission trip here and a half-day convalescent home visit there. But if you're honest with yourself, you sometimes wonder if your students are feasting on all God offers or merely scraping up the crumbs.
You're not alone. About one-third of US congregations sponsor international mission trips each year, sending over 1.6 million churchgoers overseas. But does the impact of these trips stick? Recent research suggests service trips and experiences might not produce the spiritual and relational "bang" we expect — at least not in the long term. Consider these research findings:
* The explosive growth in the number of short-term mission trips among both young people and adults has not been accompanied by similarly explosive growth in the number of career missionaries.
* Participating in a service trip does not seem to reduce participants' tendencies toward materialism.
* It's not clear whether participation in service trips causes participants to give more money to alleviate poverty once life returns to "normal."
* Fewer local congregations and their individual attendees are serving the poor. One study found that those who reported having participated in "any human service projects in the past twelve months" declined around 8 percent over the past half decade.
ARE WE MAKING A DIFFERENCE?
Given the mandate throughout Scripture to care for the poor, believers' commitment to serving people in impoverished communities is admirable. And on some level, largely thanks to the work of global development nongovernmental organizations, extreme poverty around the world is decreasing. Over the past three decades, the percentage of people in the developing world living on less than $1.25 a day has dropped by 25 percent. While that's something to celebrate, there are still 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty.
Even more powerful than these statistics are the real faces, names, and stories of those who are impacted by poverty. Giving our young people a chance to interact with real people and real challenges is part of what is so powerful about short-term service trips. But most service trips away from home — whether domestic or international — also tend to create an aura of what's been called mission tourism. We want to see and experience local culture, but we can easily romanticize the poor and make them objects for our own growth or, worse, the targets of consumer experiences that make us feel like "good Christians." Research suggests that our trips could be far more helpful if we focused less on "doing" and more on listening and building relationships, and stepped up our intentionality in what happens post-trip.
Experts Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert critique the majority of short-term work as being too focused on "crisis relief" types of projects in communities where what's really needed is help with rehabilitation or community development. North American congregations are often too impatient and controlling to enter into the messier relationships and processes that help without hurting. Along the same lines, urban ministry veteran Robert Lupton notes, "Our memory is short when recovery is long. We respond with immediacy to desperate circumstances but often are unable to shift from crisis relief to the more complex work of long-term development." Sadly, short-term teams may not be willing to listen to local voices when more thoughtful rebuilding strategies are needed.
We also tend to create work where work isn't needed. Lupton notes some of the more grievous examples from short-term missions teams: "like the wall built on an orphanage soccer field in Brazil that had to be torn down after visitors left. Or the church in Mexico that was painted six times during one summer by six different mission groups. Or the church in Ecuador built by volunteers that was never used as a church because the community had no need for it."
Why do things like this happen? If we are really honest, many of us do service trips not because of their benefits for those we serve but because we believe they transform our students. While that's understandable, it makes us all the more likely to unintentionally exploit the poor for the sake of our own spiritual growth, which is an injustice in itself.
THE GOOD NEWS IS ALL THE BETTER
As we come to terms with the bad news that our service is less transformative than we would hope, we become more eager for tools that help us make a deeper impact on our students and our world. We have been addressing this need for the past decade at the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI). A few years back, our FYI team collaborated with David Livermore of the Cultural Intelligence Center and Terry Linhart of Bethel College (Indiana) to convene two summits with short-term mission and youth ministry experts. Building on our exploration of deep theological and sociological questions of the role of justice in our faith and ministry practices, we set out to answer tough questions like these:
* How do we move service beyond spiritual tourism?
* How can our service work be part of God's kingdom justice?
* What are the most important theological threads that should weave their way through our service?
* How does service contribute to teenagers' identity development?
* What does it look like to transform rhetoric into true reciprocal partnership with those we're serving?
With the help of some sharp minds and a lot of prayer, we wrestled with those questions and tried to pin down at least a few answers. Those answers were translated into a host of learning activities that were field-tested by youth leaders and their students across the country and originally published as Deep Justice Journeys.
What's more, we simultaneously have been working for nearly a decade on a research initiative that morphed into a movement called Sticky Faith (see stickyfaith.org for a summary of Sticky Faith and hundreds of free resources). We explored why one out of every two youth group graduates walks away from faith after high school, and what families and congregations can do to turn that tide. One of our discoveries is that service — both locally and away from home — is correlated with lasting faith in young people.
Here's more good news: the students in our study told us they want to serve even more. We asked graduating high school seniors what they wished they'd had more of in youth group. Of the thirteen options we provided, their second and third top choices were mission trips and service projects (time for deep conversation was first).
Along a similar vein, 60 percent of the seniors we surveyed were motivated to come to youth group because of the ways youth group has helped them learn to serve.
In the midst of students' desire to serve, we also found that that desire is more likely to become a reality when service hits close to home. It needs to be in the home literally — as we invite parents to exemplify by encouraging and participating with their own kids in righting wrongs around them. It needs to hit close to home thematically — as we help teenagers understand how particular injustices relate to their lives. It needs to hit home personally — as we expose young people to real individuals who have been oppressed, thereby giving injustice a face and a name. And our acts of compassion need to hit home relationally — as we help them serve others in partnership with their friends.
As gang worker Father Gregory Boyle writes, "Serving others is good. It's a start. But it's just the hallway that leads to the Grand Ballroom." That grand ballroom is one where we see others as our brothers and sisters and work side by side for kingdom purposes. And that's the ballroom we want to lead our students into when we plan out our long-term service and mission strategy.
Based on our work with churches implementing Sticky Faith and Deep Justice principles over the past several years, we revised the book you have in your hands and also redeveloped a parallel student journal.
THE MODEL IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT
As we researched what helps service stick, one theme repeatedly emerged everywhere we looked: We need to do a better job of walking with students before, during, and after their mission experience.
Let's be honest. Our "preparation" before the usual short-term mission trip often consists of M&Ms: money and medical releases. Our "ref lection" during the trip boils down to a few minutes of prayer requests before our team tumbles into bed exhausted. And our "debrief" after we get home is little more than organizing the media show and the testimonies to share in "big church." While these steps are good, they're not enough for the kind of impact we hope for.
If we want greater transformation, we need a completely different time frame for our service. Perhaps instead of viewing a weekend trip to work with homeless people in the inner city as a three-day commitment, we need to view it as a three-month process. Instead of looking at a week in the Dominican Republic as seven days, we need to think of it as a seven-month journey. Instead of thinking of service as discrete chunks of time we slide in and around the rest of what we do in youth ministry, it's time to revise our schedule to give service a more organic ebb and flow.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL THAT TIME?
So what do we do with those extra weeks before and after our service experience? And how do we squeeze every ounce of impact out of the time we spend doing this important work?
The many hands and brains that have poured into this curriculum recommend an experiential education framework originally proposed by Laura Joplin and later modified and tested by Terry Linhart on youth ministry trips.
THE STICKY FAITH SERVICE MODEL
STEP 1. BEFORE: Framing
A successful service or mission experience starts when we help students frame the sometimes mind-blowing and other times menial experiences that await them. Getting ready for a mission experience involves much more than just helping them raise money, learn a drama, or know what to pack. Research indicates that our job as youth workers is to facilitate a series of gatherings and events that prepare students emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and relationally for what lies ahead. If we don't, we're cheating them out of all God has for them.
During this framing time, you might want to nudge your students to start journaling about their thoughts and feelings as they think about what lies ahead, and the Sticky Faith Service Guide Student Journal is designed to help you do just that.
Admittedly, getting students to show up for pre-work can be a challenge. It might require a major paradigm shift for your ministry since students and families aren't used to doing much "pre-work" for church-based projects. Hopefully the activities in this book can help with that framing, but don't be surprised if buy-in doesn't happen right away. Note that you will likely need to do a fair amount of framing for the adults participating in the experience as well, so they can lead the way in modeling trip preparation.
STEP 2. DURING: Experience and Reflection
The main component in students' learning during their actual service is the cycle of experience and reflection. In this ongoing feedback loop, you and your students are placed in situations and activities that purposefully stretch you. Maybe you'll use new skill muscles in a cross-cultural setting unfamiliar to you. Or your group will get tired, cranky, and hungry — and the glue that has united your team up to this point will start to dissolve.
Whatever young people are experiencing, they are constantly assigning meaning. Though they may be unconscious of it, your teenagers are continually engaged in a highly personal, ongoing "conversation" in their own minds about who they are in relation to themselves, others, and God.
The barrage of experiences on a typical service adventure comes so fast and furious that participants often feel as if they're sprinting through a museum, only barely viewing its masterpieces out of the corners of their eyes. As leaders, our job is to give space for both students and adults to catch their breath and ask questions that help decipher the deep meaning behind their observations, thoughts, and feelings.
If you are serving with students who struggle to process their feelings and experiences (can anyone say "middle school boys"?), then your first attempts to help young people reflect on their experiences may get just a few bites of conversation. Answers may range from "I don't know" to "What he said." That's okay. Sometimes it takes months — or years — to get to the point where students are able to truly join in the ref lection. In the meantime, we have the opportunity to model patient listening and simply being there with them. Further, adults who model their own meaning-making process help young people participate in it more fully when they're ready.
STEP 3. AFTER: Debrief
At the end of your trip, as your students' minds and your ministry's minivans are starting to head home, you've now entered the third step: debrief. Maybe it's the last day of your trip as you take a bit of time to relax and have fun. Or perhaps it's when you hit a coffee shop together right after you've visited patients at the local children's hospital. Either way, the goal is to gather your team together just after the "work" is completed to start thinking about the even harder work of long-term change.
STEP 4. AFTER: Ongoing Transformation
For our short-term work to translate into impact that sticks over the long haul, we need more than just one touch point following our service. If most youth groups lack an effective pre-service framing time, even more have difficulty facilitating proper ongoing transformation. Two realities fight against effective learning transfer. First, most of the significant growth in a service experience takes place in an environment very different from the home communities of students. Second, the students themselves don't know how to translate the learning to their own lives. That's why we need to help them connect the dots between having lunch with a homeless man in Detroit and having lunch with a new kid in their school cafeteria one month later.
THROUGH IT ALL: SUPPORT AND FEEDBACK
Right about now, this is probably sounding like a lot of work. You're right. But it's not work you should do alone. In order to facilitate the experience-and-ref lection cycle, our students need to be surrounded by walls of support and feedback. While these two expressions of care are vital throughout the process, their importance peaks during the time you're actually serving. Support and feedback are such sticky factors that we've devoted chapter 2 of this book to helping you develop this philosophy and a great support structure.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sticky Faith Service Guide by Kara Powell, Brad M. Griffin. Copyright © 2016 Kara E. Powell and Brad M. Griffin. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
