Help us do what?

For years I worked on the frontlines of homelessness in the urban South. It was good work, and one of the honors of my life that I got to do it. It was also exhausting and led to burnout and PTSD. I’m finally writing about that time, after years of silence on the subject, as a way of processing it all. You can read more of these stories here. – HH

After more than a decade of running a Christian ministry that was a destination for young people on mission trips, I came to dread young people on mission trips.

Don’t get me wrong – I love young people. I love how curious they are, and how motivated and open they are, and it is an awesome time to shape and mold their opinions. I could name a dozen folks whose lives were forever changed because of mission trips. I know people who now run nonprofits and do good work because their eyes were opened on mission trips.  If I’m honest, it was really the mission trips themselves I came to hate.

I know all the arguments for them: They inspire young people to see Christianity as something you do, not just believe. It provides an influx of labor for understaffed nonprofits and ministries. It provides employment security for youth ministers (we don’t say that part out loud). No doubt the lovers of mission trips will fill the comments with justifications for them.

But I also know all the ways they are broken, especially if you are running the receiving agency. Because you suddenly have an influx of 25 teens, your staff of 5 is now overwhelmed creating work for them to do. And it must be work that is not dangerous, and that they can do unsupervised, and it can’t make them uncomfortable or push their boundaries too much. It also cannot require skill, or at least not much.

It has to have a teaching component, but not be controversial, and meanwhile, your staff of five still has their work to do that they would be doing if they were not here. And you will get money because they are here, and you need that money, and if you make them happy, they will come back and give you more money. So, you must spend a lot of energy catering to their feelings, instead of, you know, actually serving the people your org exists to serve.

It was not at all uncommon for a church group that would come to work with us from out of town for a week to have a trip budget of $20,000 (and this was pre-pandemic dollars). We might, after a week of intense effort, get a donation of $1500 on the back end, along with whatever work got done along the way that was not just stuff we made up to keep them happy.

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I know a guy who ran a school in Mexico, and most of their funding came from young people on mission trips. But while their capacity really called for 3-4 groups a year,  their funding requirements called for more like 14 or 15. So in the spring, groups painted the outside of the school one color. In the summer, they painted the inside a different color.

The next year, they reversed the colors. Rinse, lather, repeat. The school did not need painting, but the bills needed paying, and while it would have been a much better use of funds to just cut a check for the cost of the mission trip to the school, instead, the school got painted every year – sometimes twice a year.

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Meanwhile, you must make sure that you are not confused with someone who is running a zoo. At their worst, mission trips can be voyeuristic – as if these teens came from Akron to see poor people in their natural environment. The easiest thing in the world to do is to create a “mission experience” for folks from out of town that posits all the ways the economically poor are “objects of mission” rather than human beings made in the image of God. But just because it’s easy does not mean it should be done. It should, in fact, never be done.

Say it with me: The poor are not extras in a movie about you.

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You also have no real idea what these people coming into town to “love on” (ick!) your people are really like. Do you trust them with the people you care about and serve? What if they are transphobic? What if their theology is misogynistic? What if they try to start “sharing the gospel” with your Muslim participants?

You must let them have access to vulnerable people you care deeply about, and who see you as safe, but you are not sure if these people are trustworthy. Especially after you caught that one group trying to cast the demon of queerness out of a guy. They were not happy when they went home early.

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But the thing I hated most about them was the way they infantilized the people they came to help. In their desire to help (as defined by them) they tended to strip away the agency and choice and dignity of the very people they came to serve.

One day I was in my office on the phone with a youth pastor from another state, discussing their plans around an upcoming mission trip that included a few days of working with us. The youth pastor kept saying his kids really wanted to “help the homeless”. He said it so much it grated on my last damned nerve.

It must have shown in my voice, because one of the guests at our day shelter, an unhoused man everyone called Cowboy, had been walking by my open office doorway and stuck his head in the doorway as I let out a loud sigh of frustration after hanging up the phone.

“You OK, Pastor Hugh?

I assured him I was. “Just frustrated at church people.”

“Oh.” he said. “What happened?”

“It’s not a big deal. Just some well meaning folks who want to ‘help the homeless’ “ I said, making air quotes as I said it.

“They do?” he asked. “That’s cool, I guess.”

He paused for a second, staring off into space.

It was my turn.

“You OK, Cowboy?” I asked.

He chuckled.

“Oh yeah, man. I’m fine. I was just wondering – that church that wants to help the homeless – well, help us do what, exactly?