Dear ALOS Family, Last month I shared a post I wrote two years ago after my oldest niece went on her first outside-of-the-US mission trip. If you have strong feelings about the efficacy of short-term mission trips and have not read my first post, please read it. I used to be much clearer on my […]
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Editorial note: A Life Overseas is a place to share stories and have conversations about cross-cultural missions and international living. In this space we avoid personal attacks. The following piece is a critique of ideas currently being circulated among the missions crowd. It is not a personal attack on anyone whose words are quoted here, […]
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Got your t-shirts printed? Your passport up to date? Crowd-funding page all set? It’s almost time to go! The Short Term Mission season is almost upon us, and very soon swarms of teams will converge on poor communities around the world. They are ready to paint orphanages and hand out tracts in a language they don’t […]
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Consider this the Table of Contents for a book on missions, cross-cultural living, grief, TCKs, MKs, missiology, common pitfalls, transition, short-term missions, relating to senders, and a whole lot more. I figured it was time to compile our most-read posts and present them to you, organized by topic. So here they are, 85 of our […]
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Dear Missionary who hosts summer teams, I write this letter to you with egg on my face. Many moons ago I spent a summer in China teaching English for six weeks to English teachers from around Anhui Province. Because it was “long enough to form meaningful relationships,” I maintained an interiorly superior attitude that many […]
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I can still remember the random thoughts that shot through my head during my first couple of weeks as an adult long-term missionary. Wait, what? There’s nothing planned for us today? So what are we supposed to do? Hey, when is someone going to take us souvenir shopping? I was really looking forward to that! […]
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“Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he’s seen The Killing Fields on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he’s seen City of Angels on video.” ― Pico Iyer Years ago at a dinner party in Egypt, our English host was waxing wise about China. […]
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In our twelve years as missionaries, we’ve seen some doozies of short-term teams. The first team we witnessed up close (which was a large group of fully-grown adults) thought it would be funny to see how many days each of them could go without showering. Of course, they had a perfectly good shower available to […]
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Today’s guest post comes from Craig Greenfield, whose new book Subversive Jesus: an adventure in justice, mercy and faithfulness in a broken world is out this month. Subversive Jesus is the story of one family’s experiment in putting the most counter-cultural teachings of Christ into practice. When Jesus says invite the poor for a meal, Craig […]
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Partnering directly with poor churches is a promising way to do mission for affluent churches. Skip the middleman and Go Direct is the mantra of this internet age. I personally like the idea of this approach because of the possibility it holds for real, long-term, mutual relationships to emerge between rich and poor. But if you’ve […]
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Yesterday I discussed the Mess of Short Term Missions. Today, I’m going to offer ten ways to do a short term mission trip well. These ideas are for anyone leading or going on a short term mission trip — or for anyone who’s trying to decide whether or not to go on a particular trip. […]
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(yep, that’s me on a short term missions trip trying to hold babies–guilty as charged) Needless to say, there has been a ton of debate around the topic of how to do short term missions trips well, and it’s a sensitive issue. I’ve read countless articles and heated debates on blogs, both lauding and criticizing short […]
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