In a conversation last night, a friend recounted to me an experience he had had while stationed somewhere in Southeast Asia many years ago. Near the town where he lived there was a river that was little better than an open sewer; the city’s pipes emptied directly into the slow-moving sludge. Children from the town would sit in small boats beneath the bridge, holding out butterfly nets and calling to the pedestrians passing overhead to throw down change for them to catch. Typically, the soldiers would gently toss the coins into the nets, making sure the children could catch them. Once in a while, however, some soldiers would purposefully toss the coins into the water, with the sole purpose of watching with amusement as the children dived into the filthy water to find the coins.
This sad anecdote caused me to reflect on the possible effects that witnessing poverty has on the privileged onlooker, and made me question an assumption I had that all encounters with poverty, no matter how limited, could not fail to have a positive effect. Time and again I have heard it said (and said it myself) that if only our young people could just see with their own eyes what true poverty looks like, then they would not struggle so much with the idolatry that runs rampant in our society. At the risk of sound crass, a week in a suburb of Mexico city is often touted as a lifelong cure for materialism and greed.
Certainly, in many people, coming face to face with poverty can potentially have a lasting, positive effect on that person’s outlook on life. Certainly, some part of a person must be altered by witnessing true poverty. But it is also remarkable how soon the comforts of life crowd in and smother the short-lived appreciation for convenience and comfort (not to mention good health and peace of mind) that might result from having witnessed poverty. It is important to recognize that all sorts of ugliness can arise out of an interaction with poverty, the worst of which being the cruelty exhibited by the soldiers on the bridge.
Exposure to poverty can be good, but if it is not met with grace, humility and love, it can just as easily lead to great evil. While I thankfully have never witnessed Christians responding with outright cruelty to the poor on missions trips, I have witnessed (and have seen in my own heart) pride, contempt, and ambivalence toward the suffering. When people from privileged contexts find themselves ministering in impoverished contexts, how can they protect their hearts from this type of reaction?
First, I wonder if mere visual exposure to poverty is simply not enough. To see poverty is one thing; to experience it, another thing altogether. There has to be some degree of entering into a person’s pain and suffering, not just an observance of that suffering. This, of course, is difficult to achieve in short-term missions. One short-term ministry that I believe comes close to this is the Soles 4 Souls ministry, which provides new shoes to the poor. Participants in the ministry not only give pairs of shoes away, but they also literally wash the feet of those to whom they are giving the shoes. In this small way, they are able to enter in to the suffering of the people they serve in a way similar to how Christ entered into the poverty around Him during His earthly ministry.
I believe that our assumptions concerning short-term missions work must be challenged in many ways in order not only better to serve the communities with whom we wish to share Christ’s love, but also to protect our own hearts from self-service and pride. This brings me to yet another danger in short-term missions, which is when we market short-term missions to both teens and their parents as an experience that will change the teens, as if this were the primary purpose of the work in the first place. Perhaps the best way to alter this perspective is to keep the focus on the community being served, putting much thought and care into how best to serve them in humility and with love, and leaving the rest up to God.
¡En camino! 