Toxic Missions: Follow the Money

Jonna and I have been reading the book “Helping without Hurting in Short-Term Missions.” and let me just say it’s been an eye opening and hard experience. In the podcast we started a new series called Toxic Missions and for the next several episodes we’ll be looking at some ways that short term trips have actually done a lot of harm to the communities we claim to serve. This post we talk about money and look at the facts and statistics for the financial cost of short-term trips.

Let’s start with the totals. Every year about $2 Billion dollars are spent on missions. That’s a lottt of money. One billion dollars is one thousand million dollars. To put this into perspective one million seconds is 11 days, one billion seconds is 32 YEARS. So that’s the scale of what we’re talking about, it’s a tons of money. I think it’s important to put here that many people see this number and think about all the good it does. The fact that people are willing to put money behind missions and be generous in this capacity is a good thing. We still need to talk about what the best ways to spend this money is and why budgeting is important. It also needs to be talked about that sometimes the money spent on sending a whole team might be better used in another way and not going overseas can be just as helpful as going.

Money utilized for a church group to go on a mission trip could help the organization in that country more than the teams themselves. I found this interesting. A big part of me is thankful that I haven’t been a part of a ton of “traditional” STMTS but rather have stayed longer and been in smaller teams. Maybe that’s why God didn’t provide us with large teams before now. We’ve always thought that one week trips are too short. By the time you’re over the jetlag you get sent right back home and it’s exhausting. It is saving you money to stay longer because you get more out of the use of that flight over the pond. It’s more beneficial to every one of our connections overseas to stay longer. Every one of our contacts have mentioned that they need people to help them, and have always requested a trip of at least 2 weeks--nothing less.

Some places could use money more than they could people, and since I love to physically be in those places I’m blessed that our contacts still need people.

This being said, the planning and organizing of a trip can be more burdensome than it’s worth--which to us at The Nations Call means we need to make sure we can help with as much of that as possible. We never want to be a burden on anyone--so we will do as much as we can to make sure we are self reliant.

On the lines of financially planning a trip, most of the money spent by STM teams goes to things like Airfare, (which takes a massive chunk) other transportation, food costs, and many other things. I would hazard a guess that many pastors and long term missionaries don’t see any of the money spent on STM’s, they only see the physical labor that those teams are willing to do.

I know for a fact that Raul doesn’t see much. I spent $1,000 on the STMT with an organization and when Raul asked, he was shocked… I know that it is $70 for a 7 day trip for food and stay in Draganesti. I think they get anywhere between $150-$300 for ministry costs alone. So being generous let's say it was $300 for ministry costs--that’s a total of at most $370 for the trip… but I don’t know where the rest of the $630 goes at all. And when we planned trips I had calculated the breakdown of $140 for 14 days, $100 for each leader so that we could have our trips paid for, $100 for emergencies, and a $25 shirt; I had also included insurance, ministry costs, and other necessary needs and it was $800 for two weeks. That's still less than the $1,000 for one week and it's doubled. Yes, people do need to get paid, you're paying for the organization, the marketing, etc. But they didn't pay for their leaders to go. I just want the receipts for where my money went.

This is not to bash other organizations, that’s why in our podcast and blog we don’t name names. We do want to point out that stewardship of funds and clarity in where they go is extremely important. Ask for the financial breakdown of the trip you go on, find out if the long term missionaries are getting support from the trip, maybe even do some extra support raising to help keep them on the field. We’re all in this together and we have to treat the money that goes into missions as a God given resource… because it is.

If you would like to study more into missions, we highly recommend reading the book: Helping without Hurting in Short-Term Missions.

Also, the authors assume that you have read Helping Without Hurting first. Which is also beyond helpful.

There's another super helpful Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence, which is also great for those involved in church and church leadership.

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Here's the Podcast version. It's the same theme but it's not transcribed so there are various conversations we have on the blog vs on the podcast.