Mission Trip Debacle

I submitted this for Kurt Johnson’s upcoming ministry book.  I don’t believe it was taken as I never heard back from them.  The assignment was for every youth minister to share about an experience entitled, “I hate it when that happens”.  My submission centers around a mission trip that went wrong.  Here is what I wrote.  I hope you laugh a little while you read it.

I drove out of the parking lot with a ton of excitement and lots of expectations of a great mission trip ahead.  This was my first mission trip that I planned myself and I was determined to prove that I could plan a good trip and that lives would be eternally impacted.  Even though our group was smaller than years past, I definitely thought that this was going to be a trip that we would talk about for years. We still talk about it, but unfortunately not in the way I had thought.

Our trip started in Tennessee for a two-day training that preceded our actual mission work in Atlanta.  My excitement and expectations quickly took a u-turn as soon as we drove into the training facility.  The training facility looked more like a cult compound than anything else.  It was fenced in with trailers all over and a big warehouse building.  As soon as we drove in, I got the eerie feeling that I was going to meet a David Koresh type figure.  Although that did not happen, our time in Tennessee just continued to get weirder by the moment.

I knew that the organization I choose to link up with was a little bit more charismatic than our Church was used to, but I thought our group could handle it. After all, I had been exposed to some very charismatic churches in the past and it did not affect me one way or another – and I’m a pretty conservative guy. However, as soon as our training meetings started with dancing, jumping around and speaking in tongues, I began to see the horror on my students faces and I knew we had a problem.  Students were immediately on their phones calling parents begging them to send in a S.W.A.T. team to break us out. Although I settled everyone down, things at the “compound” came to an ultimate climax when the organization did a reenactment of the trial and death of Christ.  Not only did it look real (bravo for doing an excellent job), but they literally tied a man up on the cross in an open field as the final scene. It was more than a little weird.  In hindsight, I wished I had a camera with me; I could have made serious cash from a tabloid with some of those pictures.

After we finished our training, we went to Atlanta to begin our mission experience.  When we got to Atlanta, I was hoping that things would improve. How worse could it get?  Things improved a little, but the mission work we did was ill-prepared, not well thought out and lasted for just about 4 hours a day.  In addition, our lodging accommodations weren’t exactly “roughing it”.  We got to stay in a plush youth house of a local church that was equipped with Cable TV, video games, a security booth (yes really) and a coffee house environment.  The youth house was bigger than my current church size!  We were not roughing it in the least bit.

To cap this mission trip off, on our 10 hour return trip, our van’s AC stopped working so we had to drive windows down most of the time in some very hot weather.

Needless to say, I hate it when these things happen.

The Lesson Learned for me during this trip was to thoroughly do my homework on picking an organization that works for my group.  It is good to stretch my students, but had I picked a better organization that lined up more with my ministry philosophy, this trip could have easily stretched them while giving them a great experience at the same time.  This trip did neither and I learned a lot from it.  Thankfully we have found an organization and area that fits our purposes quite well now.

So what about you all?  Have you had a mission trip experience that was a debacle?  It is fun to look at these things now and kinda laugh them off a bit, but they can also be very frustrating.  TAKE A MINUTE and share about an experience that you had on a mission trip that didn’t turn out so well.  AND, what was the lesson(s) learned from it so we can all learn from each other?