Are Short-Term Missions Trips Good or Bad? (Hat tip to John Divito)

Click here to read a very probing article about our motives for short-term missions (thanks to John Divito of The Reformed Baptist Thinker blog).

Treasuring The Word of God

A missionary in France told of a little French girl who became a believer. Although she had been blind from birth, she knew how to read Braille. Someone gave her the gospel of Mark in Braille, and she loved it so much that she eventually developed calluses on her fingers from reading it so often. Those calluses meant she no longer could read. 

Hoping to make her fingers more sensitive, she peeled the skin from the end of her fingers. But instead her fingers became permanently scarred. Believing she would never read again, she bent down to give the pages of God's Word a farewell kiss. As she did, she soon realized that her lips were more sensitive than her fingers. She then learned how to read God's Word with her lips.

Highly Questionable Methods

by Robert Reymond

“The problem in our day, which gives rise to highly questionable church growth methods, is twofold:

On the one hand, we are seeing a waning confidence in the message of the gospel. Even the evangelical church shows signs of losing confidence in the convincing and converting power of the gospel message. That is why increasing numbers of churches prefer sermons on family life and psychological health. We are being overtaken by what Os Guinness calls the managerial and therapeutic revolutions. The winning message, it seems, is the one that helps people to solve their temporal problems, improves their self-esteem and makes them feel good about themselves. In such a cultural climate, preaching on the law, sin and repentance, and the cross has all but disappeared, even in evangelical churches. The church has become “user friendly,” “consumer oriented,” and as a result evangelical churches are being inundated with “cheap grace” (Bonhoeffer). Today’s “gospel” is all too often a gospel without cost, without repentance, without commitment, without discipleship, and thus “another gospel” and accordingly no gospel at all, all traceable to the fact that this is how too many people today have come to believe that the church must be grown.

On the other hand, we are seeing a waning confidence in preaching as the means by which the gospel is to be spread. As a result, preaching is giving way in evangelical churches to multimedia presentations, drama, dance, “sharing times,” sermonettes, and “how to” devotionals. Preaching is being viewed increasingly as outdated and ineffective. Business techniques like telemarketing are now popular with the church growth movement. Churches so infected also look to the multiplication of programs to effect their growth. They sponsor conferences and seminars on every conceivable topic under the sun; they subdivide their congregations down into marrieds and singles, single parents and divorced, “thirty-something” and “twenty-something,” teens, unemployed, the child-abused and the chemically dependent, attempting to arrange programs for them all. And once a person joins such a church, conventional wisdom has it, the church and the minister must meet his every felt need. Accordingly, ministers have become managers, facilitators, and motivators—everything but heralds of the whole counsel of God—and this all because they have lost confidence in the preaching of God’s Word as the primary means for the growth of the church and the individual Christian.

What is the answer? A restored confidence in the Reformed doctrine of the sovereignty of God in salvation!”

— Robert L. Reymond, in A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith