When I became a youth pastor, I knew I wanted to treat mission trips differently. I knew missions were more complicated than just going on a trip, doing service work for some poor people, telling people about Jesus, and going home. Rather, there was an opportunity for something genuinely sacred to happen.
This past Wednesday morning, nine youths and five adults from BMPC departed the Philadelphia Airport to go to Peru for the Youth Ministry's Summer Mission Trip with Joining Hands Peru. This trip is my last with our youth before I depart for Washington to become a solo pastor in the Pacific Northwest. So, perhaps understandably, I've put some pressure on myself for this mission trip to be, well, everything.
As a teenager, I went on dozens of mission trips to places as close as Kentucky and as far off as Belize. I helped build houses, ramps, and fences. I led Vacation Bible Camp in bad Spanish and painted a pink fence pink. I toured beautiful places, traveled in a boat to see pyramids, and sang worship songs around a campfire.
Sometimes, the trips were transformative, and sometimes, they were something to pad my college resume. Almost every time, it was me serving a community I saw as "needy," understanding my coming to serve in their community as me being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, bringing others the Gospel.
I thought I was Jesus, serving the impoverished when, really, the people I encountered were Jesus, and I was, more likely than not, another rich young ruler searching for their own selfish salvation.
I chewed on this question for years, wondering if I was participating in, at best, religious tourism and, at worst, harmful colonial white saviorism, with an added flavor of American exceptionalism, where the White Americans always knew better than the local people of color.
In undergrad at Rhodes College, where I majored in Religious Studies, I wrote my senior thesis on the experience of "Mission Trips as Rite of Passage Ritual." Mission trip participants first undergo separation from their everyday lives, followed by initiation or transformation in this liminal-other space where something happens. All of this was concluded by a return to normal, but as some new and different person, forever changed by the experience.
While I respect my 22-year-old self's attempt to justify her own experience of mission trips and understand what she went through on them, I can't help but realize that that interpretation of mission is solely around the people who go on the mission trip, leaving aside entirely the question of the people we are supposedly "serving."
While we're in Peru, we'll engage in service with Peruvian teenagers in La Oroya and Callao, working on reforestation, painting murals over graffiti, and participating in a beach clean-up. I have an inkling that working with these Peruvian teenagers will dramatically alter the experience of our teenagers. It's hard to see someone your exact age, interested in the same things you are, as an "other." Writing them off as needy and you as non-needy is much more challenging. And, if God acts like I think God does, it’ll be a mutually transformative experience for us and the folks with whom we’ll work. I hope our youth see how, while life is different for people in Peru, much more connects us than divides us. And that God looks at each of us, Peruvian or US American, with a smile and a plan for each of our lives, full of glorious purpose and hope.
I pray this trip to Peru is transformative. I hope it is a rite of passage where we enter that liminal space where we are all between what we were and not quite what we will be because of our experience in Peru. While there, we will work with Joining Hands Peru, a mission partner of BMPC, with whom we have built and are continuing to build a fruitful and faithful relationship. Jed Koball, a mission co-worker of the PCUSA, will lead us. Jed came to BMPC in the fall of 2023 to share his work among the incredible people of Peru, who are fighting daily to save themselves from the disasters of climate change instigated by greed.
While in Peru, our group will daily delve into the call stories of scripture—from the call of the Apostles to the call of Mary—learning together how scripture teaches us that we are called to participate in God's salvific action in the world, bringing about justice, freedom, and peace to everyone and everything, including the planet entrusted to our care.
I covet your prayers for the next 10 days that we are abroad. I ask you to pray for each of our youth and adults that this experience might transform us more into the people God created us to be. I can't wait to see and share how God works in us, on us, and in and through the people we encounter on this mission trip to Peru with these amazing young people.
