Short-Term Mission
A short-term mission team is a group of Christ-followers sent by a church or organization to a mission project, church, or other legitimate site. The purpose of a short-term mission team is to see ministry happen with the national leaders or missionaries, within the hearts of team members, and even back home in the sending church/organization. A short-term mission team also works as a catalyst for cross-cultural partnership, discipleship, and leadership development.
Gateway seeks to equip churches and organizations to do short-term mission well in the context of best practices and excellent missiology.
Goal of Short-Term Mission—Sister-Church Partnership
Short-term mission has been with us for at least thirty years, with millions of go-ers involved each year, yet one of its biggest ‘short’comings (pun intended) is contained in its name: short-term mission. One of the main characteristics of a missional lifestyle is the importance of relationships. To live out a missional life – at home, in your neighborhood or community – is to live out a life of long-term, integral relationships.
Short-term mission, most often, is built around the idea of bringing a group of individuals to an international location with the hope of accomplishing a stated project in a relatively short amount of time and getting back home. By its very nature, short-term mission actually works against the missional lifestyle principle of building long-term, integral relationships. These mission experiences are built around projects first and foremost, with relationships, particularly long-term relationships, coming in a distant second. At Gateway, we seek to address this disparity in two types of trainings that we offer:
- Sister-Church Partnership Orientation
- ‘Best Practices’ Workshop for Short-Term Mission Leaders Training
You can learn more about these trainings here.
Pursuing a Healthy Sister-Church Partnership
When looking at Jesus’s words in Acts 1:8 (“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth”), one can see throughout this progression that churches were founded, developed, and continued in relationship to each other, even as ‘the ends of the earth’ approached. Long-term relationships between the churches of the first century became the key to an emerging network of congregations across the known world.
We seek to continue that networking/expansion on the basis of those same types of long-term relationships. The context for a global missional lifestyle is to be found not in independent single church efforts (short-term mission and otherwise) here and there in the world but in partnering in each other’s communities and networks globally for the long-term.
Defined in this way, sister-church partnerships, with their intended focus on long-term relationships first and foremost, present churches with a consistent way to apply missional living on a global scale. If you are a pastor or a church leader who is passionate about giving your church opportunities to live missionally in your own community, think about how a relationship-based approach would look lived out in your community.
At Gateway, the pursuit of a healthy sister-church partnership is essential in both of the trainings that we offer:
- Sister-Church Partnership Orientation
- ‘Best Practices’ Workshop for Short-Term Mission Leaders Training
You can learn more about these trainings here.