Ready-to-Go Devotions for Mission and Service

By Mark Ray

Ready-to-Go Devotions for Mission and Service is a toolkit of daily devotionals for youth mission trips. The devotions in this book address every aspect of the mission experience, from leaving home and sleeping on the floor to dealing with language barriers and grumpy teammates. Each devotion includes a relevant Bible story, a commentary that connects that story to the mission experience, and a section that challenges the reader to take specific actions on the trip, back home, or both. The book includes devotions in preparation for, during, and after the mission trip or service project. The ready-to-go format allows the youth worker to quickly assemble a customized devotional journal for participants, matching each day’s selection to what’s likely to happen that day. The devotions could also be used in a group setting, which would allow the youth worker to pick devotions based on what has happened during the trip or event. Either way, the devotions point to the larger biblical and personal significance of mission trip or service project happenings .

What if you held a mission trip and nobody changed? It’s a haunting, daunting question, one that youth workers and researchers across America are beginning to ask. Short-term mission trips (STM) have exploded in popularity since the mid-1990s, thanks in part to the Internet, which makes connecting with mission agencies and mission recipients easier than ever. Sociologist Kurt Ver Beek estimates that the number of North American short-term missionaries grew from 125,000 in 1989 to as many as four million in 2003. Many of those short-termers are teenagers. According to Christianity Today, more than two million American teens enter the mission field every year. Pollster George Barna reports that 15 percent of U.S. Christian teens have done a short-term mission trip, while the National Study of Youth and Religion found that 29 percent of all teens had participated in a short-term mission trip or religious service project. Unfortunately, the impact of short-term mission trips may be short-term as well, both for those who go on mission trips and for those who receive mission teams. Ver Beek recently surveyed North Americans who worked in Honduras after a 1998 hurricane, as well as those who were served by them. He found that the North American work teams had “little or no lasting impact” on the communities they served and that missionaries reported only “a small, positive, lasting change” in their own lives.
The situation isn’t hopeless, however, according to Robert Priest, associate professor of
mission and intercultural studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. “In research with Ph.D. students at Trinity,” he wrote in Christianity Today, “I’ve been impressed that while STM may not always or automatically produce desired results, the right sorts of STM, carried out in the right sorts of ways, and accompanied by the right sorts of reflections, have potential for good.” Unfortunately, youth workers don’t always build “the right sorts of reflections” into their mission trips. At best, they allot time in the daily schedule for reflection or debriefing. At worst, they just hope and pray that their students will somehow be transformed by the mission experience. The existing literature isn’t much help. Books on mission-trip planning offer plenty of advice on selecting a mission agency, raising money, coordinating transportation, handling emergencies, entering closed countries, and re-entering the “normal” world, but they offer precious little advice on using the mission experience to impact the participants’ lives. The handful of available mission-focused devotional guides offer some assistance, but they typically take a one-size-fits-all approach. Usually presented as mission journals, these guides assume trips will be a certain length or include certain elements, such as dealing with non-English speakers. Ready-to-Go Devotions for Mission and Service fills the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426734991

Book preview

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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Managing Editor: Josh Tinley

Editor: Janie Wilkerson

Design Manager: Keely Moore

Production Editor: Susan Heinemann

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Introduction

What This Book Contains

How to Use This Book

Pre-Trip Devotions

Traveling Lightly

Here I Am

How Can I Understand?

All Things to All People

What's Your Story?

On-Trip Devotions

Getting Down Out of the Boat

Mutually Encouraged

Back in Egypt

Sold Into Slavery

Say What?

Keep the Home Fires Burning

Holy Interruptions

They Were All Encouraged

Be Strong and Courageous

Jesus Standard Time

Burning Bushes

Still, Small Voice

At the Lord's Feet

Twenty-Four Feet

Thanksgiving Is Our Dialect

If It Is From God

Poor Paul

Bigger Than Jesus

The Greatest

But There Is a God

Manna and Quail

Oh, Those Poor People

Mopping for Jesus

Names in the Book of Life

No Place to Lay His Head

Of Food and Freedom

Overflowing Grace

Post-Trip Devotions

I May Come to You With Joy

It Is the Lord!

Greetings

Reflected Glory

Angels Unawares

Pre-Service Devotions

The Least of My Family

Hearing the Call

Putting Feet to Our Faith

Jesus in Disguise

Wall Builders

Post-Service Devotions

Planting Seeds

They Named Him Obed

Good Seed and Bad Seed

For This Reason I Kneel

What Does the Lord Require?

Topical Index

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Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. —Matthew 28:19

As Christians, we're called to go and make disciples. As youth workers, we often answer that call through mission trips and work projects. We load our students into minivans, tour buses, and airplanes. We haul them to nearby cities, distant states, and countries halfway around the globe. We spend a day feeding the homeless, a weekend repairing houses, or a week running a Bible school. We apply bandages, soothe tempers, and treat homesickness with hugs.

And then we come home.

What have we accomplished? Perhaps we've helped a homeless man survive another day. Perhaps we've given an older adult a roof that doesn't leak. Perhaps we've taken the gospel to a child who has never heard about Jesus.

That's all great stuff (Great Commission stuff, in fact). But what about our students? Has the experience changed them? Have they received as much love as they've given? Have they become the disciples you set out to make?

HIGH HORSES AND HIGH ROLLERS

While on youth mission trips over the years, I've noticed a couple of phenomena.Some students (and many adults) have a knights-in-shining-armor attitude of pride and self-righteousness. They swoop into the mission field on their noble steeds, do some good work, and gallop off into the sunset. Their armor shields them from the people they're serving and keeps the Holy Spirit from entering their hearts.

And then there's the Vegas attitude—you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Many students are happy to go without showers for a couple of days, love on little kids, and even shed a few tears; but once they get back home, back to reality they revert to their pre-trip, business-as-usual selves.

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We're as much to blame as the students are for this attitude. If we don't get students off their high horses, we've missed a chance to help them let God transform their lives. If they don't bring home more than just dirty laundry, we've failed to fully live out the Great Commission.

CAPTURING THE MOMENTS

We can't script life-changing moments, of course. We can't decide that on at 1:17 P.M.—right between lunch and our afternoon work project—our students will finally get it. The Holy Spirit just doesn't stick human schedules.

But we don't need to create those moments; we just need to capture them they happen. We need to build into our mission trips and service opportunities for students (and chaperones) to reflect on what they're experiencing.

That's the point of this book. In the following pages, you'll find dozens of devotions that relate to specific issues: spiritual baggage, language host families, schedule changes, homesickness, differences in culture, lack of sleep, and so on. Each devotion ties together Scripture, the mission or service experience, and back home.