EMQ » April–June 2019 » Volume 55 Issue 2
By Cory Trenda
IVP Books, 2018
Downers Grove, IL
135 pages
ISBN: 978-0830841455
USD $14.00
Reviewed by Dennis J. Horton, associate professor of religion and director of ministry guidance, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
Love them or hate them, short-term mission trips have become a prominent and seemingly permanent fixture in the strategy to minister across cultures. Many churches, denominational agencies, and Christian universities now send out teams of short-term missionaries, resulting in an annual flow of approximately two million U.S. Christians across international borders. While team members have an abundance of resources available for advice about trip preparation, few resources address the post-trip measures necessary for participants to make lasting changes in their lives. In fact, most groups—if they have any post-trip gatherings—only meet one time after they return home and thereby miss out on a critical learning opportunity to make these trips much more meaningful. For this reason, a significant number of crosscultural travelers demonstrate little, if any, change in their long-term attitudes and actions. Cory Trenda, a veteran trip leader and a senior director for World Vision, wrote his book, After the Trip, to help the participants move from an experience to a transformed lifestyle.
The work consists of seven highly readable chapters, covering a number of helpful topics. Trenda first explains how to identify, record, and share the most valuable part of the trip: the significant encounters with those in the host community. By learning to share properly about these life-changing encounters, the mission trip participants provide “picture-window stories” that become emblematic of the trip itself. Reflecting on these encounters can become the motivation for changing perceptions, actions, feelings, and attitudes. The author also shares other strategies for transformation such as reading Scripture through the eyes of the poor and learning how to use gratitude as a means to become more generous. He explains how intentional presence and vulnerability with those in the host community enable the mission traveler to build stronger friendships across cultures and maintain those connections with the people and their struggles after returning home. In this way, the mission trip participants can become “an effective voice for the voiceless within [their] sphere of influence” (80). All of the author’s recommendations serve as worthwhile practices to bring about lasting change. The ultimate goal is for the team members to be transformed, to become truly crosscultural.
Trenda’s work certainly helps fill the gap in post-trip resources. All short-term mission trip participants should read this book. While it would benefit those who are planning to participate in a trip by fostering a better understanding of how they should approach their upcoming journey, the author intends for these short-term missionaries to work through the chapters after they have returned home. Trenda includes discussion questions at the end of the book for each chapter to facilitate group reflection. By studying the chapters together with the team members for six or seven weeks after returning, mission trip leaders would create significant opportunities for the participants to appropriately process their experiences and incorporate lessons learned into their daily living.
For Further Reading
Corbett, Steve and Brian Fikkert. Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term
Missions.
Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014.
Dearborn, Tim. Short-term Missions Workbook: From Mission Tourists to Global Citizens. Revised and expanded ed. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2018.
Powell, Kara E. and Brad M. Griffin. Deep Justice Journeys: 50 Activities to Move from Mission Trips to Missional Living. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009.
