The Good
Short-term teams can literally be life-changing. They provide a whole range of opportunities in terms of discovering God in fresh ways, becoming engaged in a deeper way with His big plan, developing relationships and becoming more like Jesus. You don’t get that from 2 weeks on a beach in Ibiza! There is also a cascade of very valuable benefits to both the sending and receiving church or churches. Let’s look at some of these.
1. A bigger vision of God
We all have the tendency to settle for a safe but restricted view of who God is based on what is familiar to us. Left to ourselves we flatten out our image of God and end up with a fixed view of God that’s easily transferable and eminently safe. All the colours on the canvas have dried, the frame is well and truly in place and our view of God hangs in its allotted place within the well-trodden corridor of our hearts and minds. Then God calls us to step out of the familiar and the safe, and takes us into unfamiliar, untrodden places.
Living for a few weeks in an unfamiliar culture forces us to see God in fresh ways. The familiar, framed view of God that we have grown so accustomed is challenged. It’s not that we add our own innovative ideas to who God is, but that we discover afresh aspects of who he has revealed Himself to be.
Crossing cultures is a means through which God unsettles some of our paradigms and leads us into a fresh appreciation of who He is. At a very basic level this may be the discovery that he is not the archetypal emotionally restrained Englishman. Perhaps he’s not as interested in neatness, privacy and punctuality as we’ve assumed. Even brief cross-cultural experiences can expose all sorts of deep and hidden assumptions that we’ve lived with including about God Himself. We can find that the God who has been predictably familiar can even at times turn out to be hardly recognisable. We see and discover God in fresh ways.
That is good!
2. A better view of ourselves
Cross-cultural experiences can be incredibly self-revealing. Other cultures often act as mirrors that help us identify things about ourselves and the cultural assumptions that we’ve adopted which would otherwise remain hidden. 
This can lead to gratitude as we begin to appreciate the ways in which the gospel has shaped the structures and transactions of our own culture and society. For instance, we enjoy a net of support in our own society, however imperfect, in contrast to many societies where no such net exists.
The flipside is that our individualism may become evident in contrast to who God calls us to be, exposed by a culture that doesn’t just talk about the value of community but lives it out. We receive overwhelming hospitality in contrast to our rather half-hearted attempts to work out what the Bible says about opening our homes to God’s family. We share in jubilant and sometimes tearful worship, making our own restrained expressions of excitement seem somewhat deficient. The challenges associated with being in unfamiliar situations can stimulate for personal growth.
That too is good.
Next time we will continue to explore some of the good features of short-term mission trips.