Youth Specialties

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this post, click here to read WHY Short-Term Mission Trips in Student Ministry. In that post, we covered why it’s important to do short-term mission trips in Student Ministry. But how do we plan a trip, especially if we don’t have a large budget? What if I told you, we do three high school mission trips every year on a budget of $500 total? It can be done! It may take a little work, but the payout is well worth it.

1. Do you want to go through an organization or plan it yourself?

There are many positives and negatives to planning your own mission trip or going through an organization that plans it all for you. If you decide to go through an organization, you may be tied to only the dates that the organization offers. The positives of going through an organization are that the details of the trip are planned for you and the elements of the trip are most likely top-notch due to the professionalism and staff of the organization. Negatives of going through an organization could be pricing – typically mission trips are a lot pricier through organizations due to all they have to pay for, including staffing. Another negative could be the lack of flexibility – dates and locations are set, schedules are set, not much room for wiggle. If you do decide to plan your own mission trip, know that it will take more work, but ultimately will be your own experience at a much lower cost. The rest of this post will pertain more to planning your own trip without going through an organization that plans the trip for you.

2. When do you want your trip to be?

The next thing you need to do is figure out when is the best time to do a mission trip. Traditionally, student mission trips are taken during the summer, but they don’t have to be. Maybe the summer is the best time for your students, but maybe it’s not. Spring Break could be a great time to do one, especially if you live in a town with one school district or if all of your school districts are on the same Spring Break. The upsides to a spring mission trip are, you don’t crowd the summer, you space out your big trips (assuming you do summer camp), and you don’t overprice the summer. I actually do our mission trips over Spring Break, even though we have many school districts on different breaks. While I realize it may not be convenient for everyone who is not on break, we still try to make it work for them, knowing that, for us, spreading out huge trips during the year is more effective than piling them all up in the summer. When is the most effective time of the year to focus on a mission trip?

3. How long do you want your trip to be?

There’s no right answer to this. Some trips may be better being a week long, some may be better being 4 days. I think it depends on where you go. For our out-of-country mission trip, we go for 8 days to get the fullest experience possible. For our in-country trips, they are 4 days and within a 5-hour drive. This helps students who are not on Spring Break miss only 2 or 3 days of school max. We have learned that we can accomplish everything we want to accomplish and experience what we want to experience in that amount of time, and it still is a life-changing trip.

4. Where do you want to go?

This question will also answer the questions of who do you want to go, and how much do you want it to cost. Obviously, the further the trip and the longer the trip, the more it will cost. We take our Seniors overseas, which is more expensive due to flights and the length of the trip, but for everyone else, we try to give them the best missions experience at the lowest cost possible. So, when deciding where to go, I want to be able to get there within a half a day, so we can use the other half for whatever we want. We have narrowed our cities within 5 hours to Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago and Kansas City. Some great experiences can be had, and some great work can be done in big cities like this. There are typically a lot of options.

5. What do you want to do?

What do you want your students to experience? For me, I usually want our students to get a good mix of both hard work and relational work. Knowing that we have almost 3 full days in a city, I decide how much of hard work vs. relational work I want them to experience. You may want all hard, grunt work, or you may want all relational work. One of the things I also want to do during a trip is experience the city. We typically carve out a few hours to be tourists. Eat, shop, whatever!

6. Call a church in the area to partner with.

The thing about short-term mission trips is, you swoop in and swoop out with little lasting impact. But if you can find a church in the area you’re going to in order to partner with, there can be lasting impact! Local churches already have relationships with local ministries and organizations. Plus local churches are a great place to call base camp for your group. Sleep on the floor in classrooms and have a place to gather and regroup during the week.

7. Call local organizations to partner with.

Whether it’s through a local church or local organizations, begin to piece together your schedule by finding places to serve. For example, you could serve one organization for the entirety of your trip, or you could serve two different places each day. Monday could be a Food Bank in the morning and an after-school day care in the afternoon. You could do a homeless shelter in the morning and a disaster relief organization in the afternoon. It definitely takes more leg work on your end to plan a trip like this, but once you’ve done it, it becomes easier to do it year after year.

8. Put together your schedule and logistics.

Once you have pieced together where you’re serving, free time, etc., you can make a master schedule. Some logistics to think about: where will all your meals come from? We will typically take care of all of their breakfasts and lunches, but have them pay for their dinners. The day we arrive, a couple of leaders will hit up a grocery store to shop for breakfast and lunch food. It’s amazing how many people you can feed from a store for not very much money! For dinners, we will typically go out somewhere and enjoy a meal. The great thing about going through organizations and staying at churches is, it keeps your costs down. Aside from donations, your main costs are for transportation and meals. We can easily do a 4-day mission trip to Chicago for $150/person. If you would like a breakdown of how much we budget for a trip like this and for all the things we spend money on, let me know!

Our ministry takes three simultaneous trips during Spring Break. There is a Freshman trip to a rural Children’s Home, a Sophomore/Junior trip to a large city, and a Senior trip to Haiti. Once the week is over, we have a Reflection Night where all teams come together to celebrate and share testimonies of what God did during Mission Week. Contact me if you want more info on how we do these trips!

What are some mission trips you’ve taken? Do you typically go through organizations or plan them out yourself?

NICK BALLARD is the High School Pastor at Harvester Christian Church in St. Charles, MO, which is outside of St. Louis. Nick has been in full-time student ministry since 2005. He’s been married since 2004, and a father since 2011. Nick loves student ministry, the local church, and believes that God has big plans for this generation of teenagers! You can connect with Nick on Twitter or his website, studentministrylife.com.

This post was previously published by studentministrylife.com.

My cross-cultural experience in St. Paul, Minnesota began when our seminary class on Cross-Cultural Communication in Mission met up with Pastor Jim Bear Jacobs, and I heard him greet us in his tribal language. He is a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, an American Indian tribe located in central Wisconsin. But on this day, he was teaching us about the Dakota people and the little-known historical details about the early days of the state of Minnesota. The historical connections and the perceptions that Native Americans might have about white people are based on the history between those people groups.

Racism and Multicultural Churches

Jim Bear is an educator, but he also serves as a parish pastor at Church of All Nations, along with Senior Pastor Jin Kim, who is from South Korea. As I observed the cultural diversity in the staff of the multicultural Church of All Nations, I was sure that such a diverse church would be a little bit challenging to have in my country, the Dominican Republic. In my country, we do not have the issue of “white supremacy,” yet we still face racism in different formats.

As our class visited with some of the staff members at Church of All Nations, one of us raised the question, “Would it be hard for a white person to start a multicultural church?” Jim Bear said yes, it would be hard. If he sees a white pastor trying to lead a multicultural church, he will always question the motivation of this minister and be skeptical about that pastor’s interest in other ethnicities. Pastor Kim agreed and explained further about the challenges of racialization and how western imperialism has encouraged the divisions among us.

Being a Jesus Follower

In addition to these challenges, I also learned from Pastor Kim a few ideas like: “Why live for status? Let’s put our lives on the line for Jesus. I do not want to live my life stupid.” As he said this he was talking about how many pastors are working and living only to keep their status quo. Their life and ministry are more focused on the “right doctrine” rather than Jesus and his words. Pastor Kim was not opposed to holding a theological belief, yet he said that the words of John Wesley, Martin Luther or John Calvin are not greater that the word of God. Before any denominational preference, there is the greatest message: the message of Jesus Christ; and we, the seminarian students are called to be witnesses of this to the world. I was very impacted by the seriousness with which Pastor Kim explained what it means to be a Jesus-follower.

The words of John Wesley, Martin Luther or John Calvin are not greater that the Word of God.
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Family and Ministry

Pastor Kim said his greatest joy is to be able to “do family” in the midst of his busy days of teaching the Word of God and taking care of his other responsibilities as a Pastor. In addition to being the founding pastor of Church of All Nations, he is also the founder of Underground Seminary. During all of this, he takes the time to be with his wife and children. His son is a junior and his daughter is graduating from high school. His wife is also from a Korean family, yet she was born in the States. Something that I noticed was that when Mr. Kim introduced himself he said, “Hi I am Jin Kim, but here people call me Pastor Kim.” This was in response to his Korean background and their formal culture. Any American Pastor would not put much emphasis on their title because American culture is more egalitarian. Reflecting on his words that day, I too consider myself to be a family man. One of my prayers to the Lord is that once I enter into ministry and have my own family I would like to keep a great balance between family and ministry.

Mental Illness

Pastor Kim said that his biggest challenge is working with mentally ill people. What did he mean by “mentally ill people?” He continued, “Humans are incredibly social, but our culture of workaholics keep people busy and alone to the point that people start believing that life is all about work,” said Pastor Kim. He considers humans to be high maintenance animals; we need each other’s company. I would like to pursue this topic of mental illness a little bit more. I am passionate about the human brain and since I am in this country I should be aware of the conversations in the marketplace regarding mental illness. As a pastor, I will be exposed to many people with mental illness and I will need to provide an answer based on the Scriptures. Sometimes I will need to make a recommendation to a specialist and I need to distinguish when I should do that.

Church Size and Outreach

Pastor Kim knows the names of all his members and he is always interested in knowing the nature of their marriages. He made this comment to support his thesis that mega churches are not needed and there is not biblical support for this model. He said that in his church, because of their size, they can have deeper conversations and develop a deeper sense of fellowship than if they had many people. The Church of All Nation has nearly 250 people attending.

“Witness about Jesus Christ is better than outreach,” argued Pastor Kim. This was the answer he gave when he was asked what their outreach plan is. He said that they do not have one. Jim Bear added that they do not do outreach in the conventional sense of the word. Instead, they witness about Jesus’ life to people and connect with the community by hosting events in their church that respond to the felt needs of their community.

Advocating for those in the Margins

My thoughts went back to earlier in the day, when Jim Bear was speaking to us from the top of the historic Pilot Knob Hill, overlooking the city of St. Paul. We were standing between two cemeteries: to our right was an old cemetery for Native Americans with a long history of desecration, and to our left was a cemetery for white Americans. To our right, we saw an open field of prairie grasses and wildflowers; to our left, we saw a typical American cemetery with gravestones and green grass. Jim Bear spoke of those who were buried in the Indian burial ground as people who lived on the margins, and said that as Christ-followers, we should listen to their voice. “This is the voice, the voice of those living on the margin. Listen to the voices that are coming from the marginal side” he said as we stood in between these two cemeteries. Pastor Jim Bear insisted that we should listen and advocate for those who are in the margins.

As one who is anticipating a future in ministry, that week I was praying that the Lord would lead me where he wants me to go. This teaching that I was now hearing seemed to be God saying to me, “Go to those who are in the margins of this American society and preach to them the Gospel of my Son Jesus Christ.” I still do not know what it looks like, yet I have a good beginning.

Fellowship

One of the benefits from this experience was getting to know my classmates. We drove for 6 hours, and it allowed us to share memories from seminary and engage in theological debates. I won’t forget this day because we spent a long time together driving and also eating in two ethnic restaurants. The two places where we ate were really good. I am not very curious about food. I like to default to what I know, but this trip stretched me. It was good to expose my senses to Mediterranean food. Sometimes I think that there is nothing better than my rice, chicken and red beans I used to eat in my country, but this experience sparked my gastronomic curiosity. Perhaps one day soon, I will try more varieties of food.

Moreover, I was able to meet two pastors who are in the same line of church planting that one day I would like to undertake. It was good to make these connections. Also, I learned about the cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and the origins of the state of Minnesota. Pastor Kim challenged me to live a life that will have an eternal impact on people’s lives. He helped me to see the seriousness of being a Christian. Pastor Kim said “Put your life on the line for Jesus” and he meant it. I pray that the Lord will give me boldness to proclaim his message to everyone I encounter. I want to take the task of being a pastor as seriously as I can, and if my life needs to be on the line, so be it.

Erick Ben. Sede is an international student enrolls in the Master in Divinity Program at Lutheran Brethren Seminary LBS in Fergus Falls, MN. Erick is going to begin his senior year at Seminary this upcoming fall 2017, upon graduation on spring 2018, he is envisioning becoming a Church Planter in a major city across North America.