Three Tips for Before and After

I often find myself allowing my mind to wonder back to my several years on staff with YouthWorks as summer staff. Memories flood my mind of impacting moments of watching students engage with God, communities and each other and interacting with a beautifully diverse set of ministry partners, community kids and community partners.

Standing out from the crowd memories is the consistent memory of two things that happened every week. Every week a bus full of teenagers arrived with their leaders and each week they left. The moment that I had with them was this tiny interval of time. This minuscule margin of a teenager’s life was put into the hands of the YouthWorks mission trip experience and yet we hear time and time again that it was within this tiny context that God begins working in the lives of teenagers (and adults) in new ways.

It’s at this point where you may expect me to start writing about the transformative power of YouthWorks mission trips or how encountering a culture that is different than ours is a unique and powerful experience. These things are true. However, what we (and other researchers) have seen time and time again is that a mission trip’s transformative potential lies less in what happens during the actual trip, and more in what happens before and after the trip.

The work that youth leaders do with teenagers is absolutely invaluable. I hope that anytime you communicate with anyone from YouthWorks or read anything that we write you are hearing that. We want to be youth leaders biggest cheerleaders! In that spirit, here are 3 things any youth leader can do before and after a mission trip that will truly leverage the trip to its maximum potential:

1. Practice Talking to One Another: This seems silly, right? But I mean it, practice talking to one another. This might mean spending a week of youth group discussing a series of questions or having intentional interactions during your pre-trip meeting times. Maybe this means throwing a story telling party after the trip where students have the opportunity to really open up about what they experienced. Whatever your chosen context is, practice talking together.
2. When Possible, Involve Parents: Some parents are probably just excited that their teenager gets the opportunity to go on a trip like this (and lets be honest… get out of the house) and might not fully understand what is going to happen. Other parents might morn that such a transformational experience will be happening outside of the home. Whatever your situation, make sure that parents understand what is going to happen on the trip, as well as what happened after the trip. It might be helpful to have students write a letter to their parents on the last night of the trip or host an event for students and their parents can discuss what they learnt on their trip.
3. Pray: This is my last point but most certainly not least. Don’t just pray for the communities you’re visiting or for the students while they are on the trip (you should do that too!) but pray that God would open their hearts before the trip and that God’s vision would guide them. Pray that they would continue to be formed after the trip and that the mission trip would not serve as a standalone event but as a catalyst towards spiritual growth.

Each person’s experience on a mission trip is unique and obviously all students react in unique ways. Hopefully these three tips will help the impact of your next mission trip spread far beyond the physical location of the trip.

Ben Capps blogs and helps develop training and programming materials for YouthWorks. Ben lives in South Minneapolis with his wife Bekah and daughter Margot and spends a lot of time with emerging adults. His lifelong goal is to rid the world of boring music, lack luster coffee and shirts that are not made of flannel.