You are an entryway, not a dead end
You are about to embark on your first (or maybe your fifth) short term trip. You will pray, prepare, go, and invest yourself in a gospel cause for the Great Commission. You will be changed, and by God’s grace, you will be a change-agent. But then you will return, as all short-term teams do. And you will share with family, friends, and churches of all that God did in you and through you.
This trip, though short, will most probably have long-term impact on you. Or we hope it does. You will have relied on God in new ways, seen new glimpses of need in our world, been humbled over the lostness of least-reached places, seen the poverty of peoples, witnessed trials of the church, and watched the power of God seek and save the lost in a faraway land. But how can we translate this experience back to those who were not there with us?
Usually, everything about the short term experience is centered on the actual trip. But this trip will come and go in the blink of an eye. You will undoubtedly throw yourself into serving a missionary and his or her ministry among a people. And you will do it for one, maybe two, weeks. Then you will come back, and most likely will never return. Not because you don’t care to, but you may never have an opportunity to do so. This might be your only chance. How do you really make it count?
I would like to propose that you make the short term experience count, not by lessening the excitement of the trip, but by increasing your vision and excitement for the pre-trip and post-trip weeks. Though the actual trip might have the greatest impact on you, the pre-trip and post-trip weeks might actually have the most lasting impact on the world through your one-on-one support relationships. Only up to two weeks of your short-term experience will be spent overseas, but you will spend about eight weeks preparing for your trip and at least two weeks after your return downloading and debriefing with others. How will the lion’s share of this time be spent? SUPPORT-RAISING or FUNDRAISING. Yes, this is the very subject that probably scares you the most or perhaps almost kept you from committing to a trip in the first place.
Support-raising is not our nemesis, but actually a process we can use to leverage the whole ten week period for the kingdom. Without it, the short term trip could be truncated to a one-to-two week experience. With it we can magnify our experience by exposing others to the world of missions they otherwise would have gone without.
You see, support-raising is a part of funding your short-term trip, but it also imparts long-term vision at the same time. For example, you will spend eight weeks writing letters, making contacts, texting, calling, and meeting with a host of people you think would be interested in supporting your trip. How are you entering these meetings? Are you thinking about yourself and your one-to-two weeks abroad? Or are you using this opportunity to also inform, inspire, and invite others into a short term opportunity for the future? I want you to consider this support-raising process as a process for not only yourself, but for your supporters. You may not even need funds, but they need exposure and vision for the world; so take the opportunity to go raise some supporters even if you don’t think you need them. Support-raising, like most of life, is not about us, it’s about all of us. We do things, not just for ourselves, but for others.
Think about the entire short-term process as a means and an end. It’s an end to get a team of partners to pray and give to send you abroad. But it’s also a means of providing supporters with an opportunity to become exposed to and aware of how they could also become a goer in the not-too-distant future. Viewing your potential donors as possible prayer warriors and senders (and maybe even goers) for the future is what it means to fund your short-term trip with long-term vision. You will have up to two weeks to do ministry abroad on your trip, but don’t shortchange your supporters by not motivating and mobilizing them in the ten weeks that surround your trip. Depending upon how many supporters you have and how many groups, families, or churches you share with upon your return, you could inspire hundreds by your going. You might see people saved when you go, but how many do you end up sending when you return? You may never go again, but you ought to make it goal to send others in your place for the future (or at least prepare them to continue to send others for many years to come). Viewed in this light, you are not just a short-term missionary, but a long-term mobilizer. Short-term missionaries can be a punch of adrenaline to individuals who would never have considered praying or sending missionaries before. In fact, part of every missionary’s job is to mobilize others.
This book is inviting you to view your support-raising process as a means of mobilizing the greater church into its role in the Great Commission. It may mean that your donors only contribute by supporting you or others, but it could also mean that they catch the vision themselves and become world Christians who gives their whole lives to reaching the whole world with the whole gospel. Your trip is not just providing you the opportunity to raise money, but to raise goers, senders, funders, and mobilizers for the world Christian movement via your trip. If you are only raising financial contributors then your support-raising process will probably reflect that. If, however, you are looking to raise world Christians, then your support-raising process should reflect that aim. This book is inviting you to have a broader perspective and implement a different process because support-raising is not just about money, but about mobilizing the church with long-term vision.
The goal of this booklet is to encourage you to view your support-raising process as integral to your short-term trip. It’s necessary for you and it’s most probably a need for your potential donor. Your contacting them and inviting them to be a part of your trip might be the only opportunity they ever have to know a missionary (even a short-termer) in their life. If it weren’t for you they may not be informed of the needs in a different part of the world, may not intercede for the world’s neediest peoples, and might forgo investing their money in some of the most rewarding and eternal ways. Your trip will be significant for you, but unless you invite, inform, and inspire others to be a part of it and challenge them to follow in your path upon your return, it will hardly be significant for them. God will change the world abroad, but He might use you more at home than abroad to do so.
Reflection
1) How has this initial section challenged your understanding of support-raising?
2) If the support process is not just about money, but really about mobilizing the church with awareness and action towards Great Commission living, how might the process look different than you might have first thought?