What I Get Out of Mission Trips

From Sunday, June 15 through Friday, June 20, eight young people, three other adults, and I, all from Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, participated in a Group Workcamps Foundation Week of Hope mission trip. We were in Grand Rapids, Michigan, part of a group sixty-eight youth and adults from four different churches, three different faith backgrounds, and three states.

I talked a little bit about the experience in my sermon of last Sunday.

This is the second year for me to participate in Group's mission trip program. (Last year, I was part of a similar retinue from the parish I previously served as pastor, Friendship Lutheran Church in the Cincinnati area.) Group splits up the members of youth groups, affording participants to meet and work with people from other Christian faith traditions. (And, probably not coincidentally, avoiding the tensions that inevitably arise when people who know one another well spend too much time together in a six-day period!)

Among the projects and programs with which the people at our workcamp dealt last week were: Mel Trotter Ministries, a Grand Rapids organization that works with the homeless, alcoholic, and drug-dependent; the Potter's House school in the inner city; an agency that recycles computers; a day care center; and the homes of elderly folks incapable of doing some maintenance work on their homes and yards.

Our six-hour work days were bracketed by learning and worship times in mornings and evenings and devotions during lunch breaks at our various work sites.

We also had a lot of fun...and, with 5am wake-ups and 11pm lights-out, did without much sleep. (I'm still recovering from that! During twenty-four years as a pastor, I've learned that all youth activities ultimately, are sleep deprivation experiments.)

I was proud of the people from Saint Matthew, who worked hard, laughed a lot, and, based on the incredible things they said during our nightly devotion times, grew in their faith in Christ from the experience of serving others.

Of course, the question that often gets asked is, "Why go away to serve? Can't you serve others in Jesus' Name right in your community?"

The answer is that, absolutely, we can serve others here in our community. And we should and do.

But, sometimes, it takes a trip away to get our attention, to remind us of Christ's call to love our neighbors in very practical ways, to give us a template for service that we carry with us into our daily lives back home.

Among the adult participants from Saint Matthew in the mission trip was Becky. Like me, Becky spent her days sorting shoes, clothes, and hard goods for Mel Trotter Ministries. We became acquainted with staffers there who had rehabbed from alcohol and drug dependencies. Jesus Christ had gotten them to the point of recovery and with Christ's help, they were living day to day in new ways. It was, as Becky told the rest of us during worship back here at Saint Matthew on Sunday, "humbling."

To be humble, as someone has said, is not to think less of one's self, it's to think less about one's self. When we're humbled, we're liberated from navel-gazing. Confident in God's grace for and acceptance of us, we're free to live more fully as human beings, as members of the human family.

We live in a world in which we're constantly prompted to look out for number one. It's the widespread acceptance of this selfish ethos that lay behind so much of the war and misery that exist in our world.

The sense of gratification I felt last week as I sorted crate after crate of donated shoes, some of which would be sold to support a ministry that might transform the life of a homeless person, can't be described. Our trip to Grand Rapids reminded me that Jesus' call to servanthood is a call to the greatest nobility we can experience as human beings, the nobility that comes to those who dare to love God and love neighbor.

Will I go on another mission trip? If I have the opportunity, you bet I will. And if it reminds me to serve the other fifty-one weeks of the year, it will be a trip well worth taking!

[The picture above was taken during my participation in a mission trip last year. Then, we went to Canandaigua, New York, and I spent the week working with nursing home residents.]