Return tickets can lead to attenuated relationships. A friend's church recently sent a second short-term team to serve alongside Christians in a small, materially poor town in Central America they had visited the previous summer. They were overwhelmed, and taken aback, when their hosts tearfully told them on the last night of their visit, "We have had American Christians visit us before. But none of them ever returned. We thought that God had forgotten us."

Even the shortest cross-cultural mission trip is fraught with opportunities for God to make himself known, and with the real potential that we will unwittingly misrepresent him. The shorter the journey, in some ways, the greater the stakes—since we will all too easily ignore both the blessings and the blunders.

From short-term trips to long-term transformation

That's why we decided to produce ROUND TRIP—to provide a training resource for a new kind of short-term missions. The new round-trip missions are as much about receiving as giving. They are as much about learning as teaching. They are as much about what happens after we get home as what happens during the time we are there, and as much about lasting friendships as snapshots of brief meetings.

The good news is that more and more churches want exactly this kind of short-term missions. The trips themselves may be short, but we want their effects to be lasting: producing lasting friendships, lasting transformation in our own lives, and lasting benefits to the people we visit.

So we went looking for some pioneers—churches, like the one I visited in Nairobi, that were developing a very different kind of short-term missions. They were planning their trips carefully to build long-term partnerships rather than just provide one-off experiences. They were sending not just high-school students but senior pastors. They were making it possible for the less affluent partners to make return trips of their own to the United States, so that mission was no longer unidirectional but truly "round trip." The result in each case was lasting results, in both locations.

ROUND TRIP tells the story of two such trips—one from Chapel Hill Bible Church in North Carolina, the other from Mavuno Downtown in Kenya—weaving documentary footage together with commentary from some of the world's foremost experts on mission and cross-cultural relationships, and providing all the practical basics that team leaders need to make sure their teams are ready to go.

We've carefully prepared leader's and participant's guides so that you can prepare your short-term team for an adventure in faith, friendship, service, and learning that will continue long after you and your team have gotten off the plane back home. They'll help your team to understand that no mission worth undertaking is really "short-term." Round trip missions are one way God can launch a lifelong process of transformation—far away and at home.

Adapted from "Unexpected Global Lessons," Christianity Today, December 2007.

From our store

The Round Trip DVD and Curriculum: This documentary and five-sessions curriculum will help your team prepare for your trip, navigate the challenges of cross-cultural relationships and team dynamics, and return with lasting relationships and personal transformation.

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