Moving Students from Faith to Lives of Service to Social Action

One of my favorite things to do when training a group of students for a mission trip is to share embarrassing moments from past trips. It loosens up the group and teaches subtle lessons at the same time. Here are three of my favorites:

• During a work trip to Tijuana, which included a couple of native speakers serving as interpreters, a girl once asked me, "How do you say taco in Spanish?"

• After explicitly, repeatedly, adamantly explaining to our group in Guatemala that no one could eat from street vendors during a visit into town, one of our boys did just that, purchasing and eating three pieces of cotton candy. I spent the entire next day assisting him to the baño.

• While on a mission trip in a village, I sat on a homemade ladder to avoid sitting in mud. The ladder broke and a nail punctured my backside. I asked one of the students to see how badly I was injured. Thankfully, she still speaks to me.

I share this to make the point that it is easy to focus on the foibles of missions efforts and highlight various cultural no-no's. Yet, in the midst of pressures to plan lock-ins, winter camps and Sunday School lessons, we often throw together a service project at the last minute. While we actually may pull it off, we often are left imagining how much more the youth could have gained from those experiences—or whether they really learned anything.

It is so important to spend strategic time to prepare well. Here I will share how I systematically trained teenagers over several years to serve in order to shape their understanding of ministry, compassion and crossing cultures. I also will share testimonies of how those formative experiences helped shape students' studies in college and their vocations afterward.

Invest

During 15 years of service at one church, I was responsible for three groups: fifth and sixth graders, junior high (seventh and eighth graders) and high school. Because I knew I would have a chance to invest several years, I decided to follow a piece of Stephen Covey's advice in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Begin with the end in mind. What did I want our students to learn by the time they graduated? I focused on three goals:

• Stewardship: Building on Luke 12:48, I wanted them to understand that "to whom much has been given, much more will be required." Because they live in America, have access to education and sleep in their own beds each night, they are those "to whom much has been given."

• Lifestyle: Ideally, we do not "do" ministry; it should be a way of life. We learn this most effectively when ministry occurs in the midst of our daily lives. Thus, I did not want to focus our service projects solely on out-of-town experiences.