Drew in Contemplation

If you consider Thomasville First United Methodist Church your home church, you know that next week me and 9 others will be traveling to Rwanda for a short-term mission trip. TFUMC has a long history (close to 17 years) with some people there and make an annual trip to continue those relationships. Since I came on staff here, I've been assisting the team in training activities. Most of these trainings have been centered around cross-cultural awareness because, as you probably know, when you go into another culture it's important to recognize that the way you think, communicate and perceive the "good life" might be different from those you are visiting. When stepping into another culture it's important to be a learner. One aspect I wanted to highlight for the team was how money is dealt with in Rwanda and surrounding countries. How money is handled here in the US and in many parts of African is very different. I wanted to learn more about this and so I int...

I think it’s about time that I write the follow up post to my Short-Term Missions blog back in March. In the first blog, I talked primarily about the Savior Complex. The Savior Complex is the idea that we as Americans/Westerners are the ones who are to “save” those in poverty, as if we have all the answers. As much as we might have good ideas and the know how to help those in poverty, the Savior Complex creates an “Us” and “Them” mentality, which, in my mind, is heretical according to the overall teaching in Scripture. Simply put, this teaching in Scripture is we’re all created in the image of God and everyone (regardless of income, education and culture) is need of a Savior, which should cause us to embody a radical sense of equality in cross-cultural Christian work. Christians are called to humbleness because, at the very core of our faith is the reality, Christ did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. Humanity was in an unrecoverable mess without the intervention of...

“[…] The most important thing you can do if you want to be helpful to poor people is to start dealing with your own stuff.”-Bryant Meyers, author of Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development Something that's been on my mind for the last 6 years has been the complexity of short-term mission trips. As many of you know, my wife and I worked for a short-term mission organization here in the US called "Center for Student Missions" (CSM) from 2012-2014. CSM specializes in inner-city mission trips for youth groups and helps to supply volunteers to organizations that rely mostly on volunteer efforts.   Additionally, both of us were part of short-term groups to different countries in Africa and we interfaced many times with short-term teams while living in Zambia from 2014-2018. However, as much as we loved our experience working with short-term mission groups, they always left us wondering about their effectiveness and if short-term missi...