What Goes Unmeasured Gets Ignored

The other night I was out with some men from church at a local BBQ joint for a low-key 'guy's night out.' It just so happened that my friend Matt invited along his father-in-law who was visiting from California and currently works at Quicken, which runs the online website Mint.com.

One of the great things about using Mint is that it gives several different visual ways to look at your spending habits over different lengths of time. If most of your spending is input into Mint correctly it is pretty easy to figure out how much you spend on say Coffee month-to-month.

This functionality actually had a major impact on my tithing/giving a couple years ago when I looked at just what percentage of my spending it actually represented--in my mind I thought I was giving at least 10%, but being able to track it month-to-month for several years I saw that I was giving significantly less than 10%!

My theology was not matching my lifestyle--even though I affirmed that everything I had belonged to God, I was not living that way when it came to my wallet! This was especially challenging since at that time I was just beginning to serve as a support based missionary. How could I ask other people to give generously when I wasn't doing so myself!

Thankfully, God used this realization to help transform my giving habits--I realized that God had given me a lot of resources that I was wasting, and were better used in serving his Kingdom. 10% became the base-line of giving, and the lid was taken off to be more generous than I had ever been before with the resources the Lord had entrusted to me as his steward.

A couple days ago I was walking around a lake in Monroe with Pastor Jan Hettinga who has been mentoring me for the past year--he has challenged me several times to develop healthier habits with regards to my physical health (and spiritual health, because they are intertwined).

On the second lap around the lake he challenged me--"Weight yourself every day!" When we are consistently reminded of reality we are more likely to take seriously the changes we need to make. It is easier to eat that extra cupcake when I haven't looked at a scale in a couple of weeks.

This is true in many areas in life beyond just generosity and losing weight (both things that I am sure I am not alone in struggling with). What goes unmeasured generally gets ignored.

How much time have I been spending in prayer? How many people have I shared my testimony with over the past couple months? Is there any way to measure honoring one's mother and father (when was the last time I gave them a phone call, went out of my way to serve them?)

Recently I have wasted a lot of time playing an addictive video game--the game keeps track of how many hours it has been played. Frankly, I am a bit terrified to look how many hours I have spent on the game when I could have been doing something more productive!

I think deep down I am hoping to hear God say, "Well done, good and faithful servant," while at the same time ignoring ways that I can tangibly measure my spiritual health. Jesus is the only truly good and faithful servant, and it by his merit earned on the cross that we can stand before the throne without sin or shame--at the same time, there is some sense in that the bible teaches that we can do more for His Kingdom if we are intentional in the way we live in obedience to his commandments.

Being too presumptuous of the grace of God may be one of the biggest dangers facing the church today.

Radical Idea: The Short-Term Ministry Staycation

Spring is here, and that means summer is almost upon us. In Christian circles, that means camping trips, BBQs, church soft-ball leagues and low attendance on Sunday mornings as families take weekend trips out of town.

Another sign of the season is summer short-term ministry* trip fund-raising--just about now you will begin to see the usual flurry of bake sales, rummage sales and car-washes all with the goal of raising money for these trips. These ministry trips often consists of one or two dozen people traveling internationally for a week to do a service project or lead a VBS. Globally, this has turned into a billion dollar industry (it is a business) and some have advocated the broader use of the term 'Christian tourism' to describe this trend rather than short-term ministry.

Belize, popular Christian tourism location.

I don't want to go on a tirade against short-term ministry, although I would encourage the church to consider more deeply how it stewards its resources and determines its priorities. What I do want to do is offer an alternative vision, a radical new idea!
 
A popular term that has popped up over the past few years is 'staycation,' meaning, a vacation taken locally or at home. Vacations cost a lot of money, especially ones that include international travel. With the economic downturn, more people have been opting to take their vacations locally and explore what their own communities have to offer in the way of leisure activities.

For two years I had the opportunity to serve with a ministry that worked among refugees in Chicago, each year we would have several short-term teams visit and we would give them the opportunity to experience what life and ministry was like for us. We emphasized learning and understanding rather than doing.

We took these visitors to mosques and Hindu temples, took them down to Little India for a day and had them prayer walk while they explored--often they would exclaim that they had never prayed so much in their lives. Sometimes we were even able to arrange it so that they could do home-stays with some of the refugee families that we were working among.

Chicago's Little India--opportunities in your back yard.

Never once did I hear anyone complain that their trip to Chicago didn't live up to their expectations--more often than not, these visitors were surprised at the rich diversity around them and went home excited to about the possibility of reaching out in their own communities to their new neighbors.

This kind of trip, to an American city is significantly less costly than traveling overseas--and in the case of these teams, the impact on them Spiritually and practically was often more significant than international trips that they had previously taken, because it hit closer to home.

Here's where my radical idea comes in. Continue to have the bake sales and car washes, continue to have the young people in your church scrimp and save their money, continue to have them send out financial appeals to their friends and families. But instead of using the money on themselves, teach them the joy of giving. Consider using the tens of thousands of dollars your church raises for short-term ministry each year, and pick a long-term missionary to invest it in!

Here's the rub, this isn't a new idea--churches used to have their youth raise money for global missions. Most of the time these youth would never travel internationally, but they would save their pennies for missions. Instead, we've inculcated into today's youth the idea that church fund-raising is about them--they're not raising for the mission of God, but for their own summer experience.

I was recently at a church that was planning several short-term international ministry trips for their youth. Each youth would need to raise over two-thousand dollars. In total, this meant over fifty thousand dollars would be needed just for that summer's trips--they had been doing these trips for years! The congregation didn't blink an eye-lash at the expense. However, that same congregation couldn't find fifty-dollars a month in their budget to support a long-term missionary working among an unreached people group and turned me away at the door.

Very few churches take into account how much they spend on short-term ministry because it isn't a line item in their church budget. They depend on those in the church to raise the money. At the same time, they are often very wary of missionaries making direct appeals to their church members out of fears that it will diminish giving towards the church.

In some cases, this creates a funny paradigm where long-term missionaries have to vie for a small amount of financial support through official channels while short-term teams can make direct appeals to church members and circumvent official channels and accountability.

What would happen if the youth leader at the church advanced a radical new idea--rather than raising money for a short-term international trip this summer, raise the same amount of money and give it towards long-term missions.

The youth group could then spend a week ministering locally. In the process the youth members would be required to study an unreached people group and learn about the long-term missionary they were supporting. They could skype with the missionary(s) and pray for them. They may even have a banquet at the church where they partake in a meal inspired by the food of the people they are praying for.

This would be a great way to do a short-term summer staycation--have it be focused on prayer and education rather than some amorphous experience.

To be clear, I believe that short-term international ministry trips have value, when done right--but we need to be discerning both in how we use our resources and how best to disciple those in our churches--both the adults and the youth. Short-term ministry staycations may be one way that we can become more healthy in all of these areas.

* I advocate the use of the term short-term ministry rather than mission. Ministry means service, whereas mission, properly understood has a much narrower definition of making disciples cross-culturally. Going to another country and painting a wall doesn't count as mission work.