David Dose is the founder and president of Fort Sherman Academy, a provider of crisis support services for mission organizations and churches. Round Trip Missions talked to David about the need for short-term mission teams to prepare thoroughly, and how to react when the unthinkable happens.

Jesus told his disciples not to prepare anything for the road, just strike out. Is it even right to think about safety in the first place?

I do get that question sometimes. I usually ask the person, “Have you gotten yourself a book on the language?” They say “yes.” So they’re not relying on Jesus to make them multilingual right away. They’re going to learn and prepare to communicate effectively. It’s the same thing with safety and security training. You need to do what you can to be prepared.

When you go on a short-term mission trip, you’ve spent all that money raising support and buying airline tickets. You don’t want to expend all that effort just to go just to get turned around at the airport because you said the wrong thing in Customs. What about all the people who contributed money to send you? What happened to their investment because you failed to stop and seek out some simple training? We need to rely on God, but he also expects us to use our brains and the resources at our disposal.

What safety issues do leaders of short-term missions trips commonly overlook?

They often fail to see safety as an area that requires training. I’ve gone on short-term missions and I’ve trained more than 16,000 missionaries. I’m always amazed at how we’ll spend years developing our call to missions, and we’ll spend months, or at least weeks, studying language and culture and what we’re going to do when we get there. But I could have all the theology and all the heart in the world, but if I get turned around at the airport or I get robbed on day one and come home all the other training I’ve done is useless. We see a lot of groups who carefully prepare and study all the other skills they’re going to need—language and cross-cultural things—but they don’t often look at security. I understand that they don’t want to get hung up on how scary it is, but you owe it to your supporters, and I think you owe it to the Lord as a steward of the resources you’ve been given.

In your training videos, you address some pretty harrowing contingencies such as hostage situations and government detentions. Are these things that the average STM team really needs to think about?

I work with approximately 90 Christian sending organizations. We have about 16,000 graduates from our courses. Based on my research about twenty percent of the people who go out on a trip had some sort of a contingency. Of course that covers a range of incidents, everything from flood to car wreck to home invasion, to car jacking or kidnapping or jailing. Of that twenty percent, the majority would have been car wrecks or severe illness that disrupted their trip. Number two would be crime, and hijack or kidnap. But the fastest growing is incidents that are politically motivated.

Is that because of growing anti-American sentiment?

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author

David Dose is the founder and president of Fort Sherman Academy, the largest private provider of faith-based security & survival training, as well as crisis support services for missions and churches in the US. Fort Sherman Academy has developed a video security training curriculum available at Safe Travel Solutions.

David is a former history and English teacher, law enforcement reserve officer, Department of Defense specialized survival instructor & curriculum development specialist, and church youth director. Fort Sherman Academy has trained over 16,000 students from various organizations; short-term church teams, long-term career missionaries, NGO staff and government personnel. To date, 68 of those alumni have since faced the ultimate test of their training - a kidnapping, home invasion, carjacking or illegal detention by an unfriendly government. As of today, 67 are alive and free.