Nothing feels better than a cold drink after a long day of painting and roofing. I'm talking to my new friend, Bapit, one of the older kids in the orphanage we are visiting in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Bapit and I enjoy our cold mandarin orange drinks as we talk about life in the United States.

He thanks me for coming to help and says, "It must be nice in America where there are no poor people." I look at him, surprised by his comments and say to him, "That's not true at all. There are plenty of people who need help back home." It's after I say this to him that Bapit looks at me, confused and trying to process this information. After thinking on this for a second, he responds, "Oh. I thought everyone from America was rich. That's why Americans come here to help."

Short-term mission trips are a huge phenomenon in today's churches. The latest statistics show that more than three million people go on a short-term mission trip during the course of a year, but this fad has not grown without its detractors. It's easy to get critical when you hear about the exotic and foreign locations that end up being the destinations of so many short-term trips.

This brings us back to Bapit and his perception of Americans. Why is it so easy to ignore the need at home and go gallivanting across the world?

Building Structures or Relationships?

When we think of short-term mission trips, we think of going to a specific location for a week to pour our all into a community. All of our time and energy is focused on how we can build relationships and help people. After giving everything we've got for a week, we go back home and talk about how those experiences changed us; then, we brainstorm about which cool places we could go to following year.

This model of short-term missions pushes missionaries to lend aid to an area for a week and then vanish from that area's radar for the rest of time. There must be a way to fix this, a way to achieve long-term impact with short-term missions.

Imagine a new paradigm for the short-term mission trip. What if instead of a short-term mission trip being an opportunity to see a new part of the world, we thought about short-term missions as a way to maintain growing relationships? What if instead of viewing short-term missions as a one-week commitment, we viewed them as ongoing, lifetime commitments?

It all harkens back to this question: Why do we need to go somewhere new every time for a short-term mission trip?

The way that we shift this paradigm is by making a commitment to one specific community. Just because a short-term trip lasts for a small, finite time does not mean that our commitment to those people needs to be short and finite, as well. Become invested in a community. The impact that could be created by this shift in short-term mission trips is enormous.

This kind of commitment is hard and is the main reason we do not see ministries and churches gravitating toward this model. When you do a short-term mission trip, many of the details and plans are handled by the organization putting it together. If you were to be responsible for putting it together yourself, that suddenly means a lot more work.