A look at the early history of three Mennonite short-term service programs

Short-term mission trips were a part of my growing up. When I was young, I lived in southeastern Kentucky, where my parents were program coordinators for Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia. As part of their duties they oversaw the Sharing with Appalachian People program, which provided opportunities for Christian youth groups to experience service and do emergency housing repair for the local community. Later, as a high school youth, I went on several weeklong service trips. After enrolling at Goshen (Ind.) College, I stayed involved in short-term service programs. I spent the summer of 2006 working as a carpenter for the SWAP program in Elkhorn, W.Va., and the following summer I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity in the Dominican Republic, helping host volunteer groups that came from the United States and Canada to do construction work for one or two weeks.

These experiences have been instrumental in my faith development and have helped me define what it means to be a Mennonite. In the summer of 2008, when Bob Yoder, our campus pastor, asked me to research an aspect of the history of youth ministry in the Mennonite church, I decided to look at several Mennonite short-term service programs. Eventually I focused on SWAP, Group Venture and Denver Opportunities for Outreach and Reflection (DOOR).

Short-term missions in general have experienced incredible growth since the early 1980s. Participation in short-term missions grew from 25,000 people in 1980 to 1.6 million in 2006. There are many positive reasons for doing these trips. They are great cross-cultural educational experiences. Youth who participate in these programs are more likely to do voluntary service in the future, and youth who continue to do service work more firmly bond to their faith community.

Still, many critics have spoken out against short-term mission programs. Jim Dekker, co-director of the Center for Youth Ministry Studies at North Park Theological Seminary, warns that youth groups can exploit local communities by acting like “tourists in a zoo.” Others warn that without proper education beforehand, participants may act in culturally insensitive and harmful ways on service trips. Similarly, the educational benefits these trips provide may be overstated. They’re so short that without follow up education they are not likely to create lasting change in participants, and at their worst they can reinforce harmful ethnocentric ideas. Even if they do provide good educational experiences, many suggest that these programs aren’t ethical because they are generally geared to provide positive developmental experiences to middle- or upper-class youth without doing empowering service work for needy communities.

Thankfully, SWAP, DOOR and Group Venture avoided doing serious harm to host communities. Hosting communities had agencies in all three programs, and SWAP, DOOR and Group Venture worked alongside local service agencies instead of taking over. At the same time they all had orientation materials that helped groups relate to local individuals in sensitive ways, and while no comprehensive surveys have been conducted, interviews and archival records suggest that youth participants left such programs with fewer stereotypical ideas about poverty and a desire to serve for a longer period of time in the future.

Yet critics are right to complain that programs like SWAP, DOOR and Group Venture are geared to provide positive experiences for middle-class youth and not to do ideal service work. Mennonite leaders started these programs primarily as a means to educate Mennonite youth about service. A survey of Mennonite youth at the 1983 Bethlehem Youth Convention revealed that only 10 percent of the youth there planned on participating in Mennonite voluntary service programs, while only 7 percent wanted to become missionaries, teachers or pastors in the Mennonite church. At the same time, non-Mennonite short-term programs grew in the 1980s and threatened a distinctly Mennonite understanding of mission. Responding to these pressures Mennonite service agencies created SWAP, DOOR and Group Venture in 1985 and 1986 to provide hands-on service experiences to educate youth about service. In other words, physical service work was a means to educate youth, not a primary goal.

That’s not to say the work youth did in these trips was irrelevant. Without being willing to humbly offer their gifts in service, participants would have exploited local communities. Moreover, participants did useful work. In fact, host communities in Appalachia desperately needed the emergency housing-repair services that SWAP participants provided.

Still, because youth were unskilled and came for only a week at a time, they rarely did ideal service work. These programs were clearly important educational tools, encouraging youth to mobilize their time and resources to serve selflessly and lift up those on the margins of society, but we must remember that these programs were valuable primarily as educational tools, not as models for service.

This means that we need to be careful about how we participate in these programs. For starters, we shouldn’t emphasize doing at the expense of learning. This starts with adult leaders. Ironically, throughout my research I found that when problems occurred, they generally came from youth leaders who had rigid ideas about what service was and were intent on carrying it out. Leaders and youth need to participate humbly, serving as they are asked and being prepared to learn in the process.

Furthermore, if we as participants focus so much on doing that we forget about learning, we promote an unhealthy service model. While working in soup kitchens or food pantries and painting buildings is important work that needs to get done, bringing in youth from outside the community is hardly an empowering way to address these issues. Ideally, we should help local communities address those problems on their own. In the end, if participants think service means traveling out of state one week during the summer to help out a stranger, then these programs have failed. Church communities need to help youth continue to build on the lessons they have begun to learn through short-term service experiences by challenging youth to serve on a long-term basis in their local communities.

Finally, we must be careful that short-term service programs do not detract from empowering service work. It’s relatively easy to justify the amount of money that SWAP, DOOR and Group Venture participants spent because program and travel costs were low, but it’s much harder to justify spending thousands of dollars on an international week- or two-week service trip. That money could hire many local workers who could work much more efficiently than youth volunteers. Educating Mennonite youth about service is a valuable endeavor, but we must avoid investing so much money in these programs that we take resources away from more effective forms of service.

Ultimately, these short-term programs are not going to go away, despite their critics. In an ideal world we would all commit to a lifestyle of service without ever needing short-term, hands-on experiences to help us live that way. But for many of us, it’s a week-long summer mission trip that starts us down that path. And short-term service programs can be a valuable part of Mennonite Church USA’s youth ministry, as long as we understand they are primarily valuable for their ability to encourage youth to use their time, resources and skills in more ideal forms of service in the future.

Matt Harms works with Mennonite Central Committee in Bosnia-Herzegovina and is a member of Akron (Pa.) Mennonite Church. He wrote this as a student at Goshen (Ind.) College.