The Role of Short-Term Mission Teams in the New Centers of Global Christianity

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected in El Salvador and South Africa over a four-year period, this article uses a social constructionist approach to describe two types of interaction between short-term mission teams and their hosts. First, hosts encounter the flow of teams as foreign social products. Once they internalize this new part of their social reality, hosts seek to recruit and control teams. They also mimic the practice of short-term missions, sending their own teams to remote locations. Second, hosts interact directly with visitors, engaging in world-building activities that create transnational religious ties. Short-term missions thus make residents of the new centers of Christianity more mobile in Christianity's global civil society and increase the number of ties between Christians across borders. These findings have implications for the scholarly debate about how to conceptualize Global Christianity; they also broaden the scope of the emerging discourse on short-term missions.

The Gift Economy of Direct Transnational Civic Action: How Reciprocity and Inequality Are Managed in Religious “Partnerships”

“…Like with large financial donations, this mode of reception reaffirmed the partnership ideal by emphasizing STM travelers’ participation in a project guided by the foreign host community. Foreign hosts, though, “are cognizant of the potential pitfalls involved” (Offutt :802). One of the Salvadoran pastors related a typical pitfall of unskilled volunteer labor: “We wanted them to help with construction, but they didn't do anything [useful], because they didn't really know how to help.”…”

“…It offered an affordable way for existing organizations to engage foreign populations (Howell ), particularly through a focus on local, social projects (Hefferan ). STM trips can provide localized relief, strengthen foreign organizations’ social programs, organize transnational elite religious networks, and affect U.S. travelers’ domestic civic and religious behaviors after travel is over (Bakker ; Beyerlein, Adler, and Trinitapoli ; DeTemple ; Hefferan ; Howell ; Offutt , ; Priest et al. ; Trinitapoli and Vaisey ; Wuthnow ).…”

“…However, STM‐generated financial capital can undermine local economies, trips can overload foreign organizations’ capacities, and few travelers may develop a critical understanding of global poverty (Hefferan ; Howell ; Ver Beek ). Furthermore, foreign partner organizations are concerned with cultural insensitivity and linguistic problems, which leads them to channel evangelizing activity by travelers through their own local programs (DeTemple ; Howell ; Offutt ). STM trips have both positive and negative impacts on U.S. travelers and foreign hosts, but little is known about the way inequality is managed to produce shared action and how this shapes the resulting transnational relationship.…”

“…Despite the increasing face‐to‐face character of transnational civic engagement like STM travel, relatively little research has addressed how the relationships between travelers to foreign places and members of the foreign community interact with issues of material inequality, spatial separation, and cultural difference, all of which may constrain shared action and weaken emergent transnational solidarity (Bandy ; Boltanksi [1993]; Bornstein ; Offutt ; Stirrat and Henkel ). Theoretically, these obstacles should make civic action difficult or unpalatable to participants by disrupting common focus, reifying inequality, and introducing unmet reciprocity obligations (Clark ; Hutnyk ; Kinney ; Lichterman and Eliasoph ; Stirrat and Henkel ; Vandevelde ).…”

“…The missional orientation to “the world” among evangelical Protestant churches (Howell ; Offutt ) and a growth in transnational brokering organizations (McCleary and Barro ; Wuthnow ) produce different rates of STM travel by religious tradition.…”