A question from an OSCAR user has prompted this discussion:
We would like to know whether there are any recent studies or data on the correlation between those who go on ‘short-term’ (2 week to 3 month) mission trips and those that go on to serve long-term overseas?
Is anyone aware of any studies that look at whether short-term leads to long-term – and if so any idea of percentages? We would be most interested in UK data but info from the States would also probably be helpful.
Replies
The best piece of work I've seen on this is Short-term Mission in the context of missions inc., written by Scott Moreau and published in "Effective engagement in Short-term Mission" (Priest et al. 2008). It was a statistical study, in which Moreau analysed large amounts of (North American) data. He concludes:
“No direct correlation can be drawn between the massive increase in STM and long-term sending. It is tempting to infer that without STM, long term commitments would not have held steady, but that cannot be supported by the data collected”
Another one worth reading is Priest, who, along with his students Dischinger, Rasmussen and Brown published a study in Missiology: an international review XXXIV (2006). It was titled “Researching the Short-term Mission Movement”. In that study, they found that STM increases a participant's interest in serving LT but doesn't result in any actual increase in LT recruitment, which they subsequently attribute to the availability of finances.
"“Our research either supports or is compatible with the widely accepted claim that STM participation increases interest in career missionary service...But if so, why has the explosive growth of STM not been accompanied by any growth in the number of career missionaries...We found no statistically significant difference in missions giving between those who had participated in STM and those who had not”
For a more favourable view, you have to go back to last century and the popular papers written by Peterson & Peterson (1991) "Is short term mission really worht the time and money?" and McDonough and Peterson (1999) "Can short-term Misison Really Create Long-term Career Missionaries?" Their conclusions were very positive, but their methodology has been subsequently called into question.
In response to Jim's comment RE Missiology, their two special editions on STM were 34.4 (2006) and 41.2 (2013). EMQ have pulled all their STM articles together nicely in a book called Engaging the Church. I've got copies of all the articles if anyone is interested.
I'm not aware of any studies. The problem with researching it is that if you ask those who've been in mission longer than 10 yrs I think Jim Harries is right, the vast majority would have done some kind of short term mission first, as part of their journey into seeking the way forward. The difficult thing would be trying to follow up with a survey all those who do short term mission in any given year, to discover after one year what effect they feel it had on them; and then again after two years to see which of them have gone on or are planning to go on into longer term mission. It wouldn't be impossible to do such a survey, in fact all you'd need is someone from each short term missions department in the major organisations that offer those opportunities to administer the same agreed survey.
That research has been done in the USA.
This is probably the edition on short term, and here is the reference to one article that came out in it.
Priest, Robert, J., and Priest, Joseph Paul, 2008, ‘”They see Everything and Understand Nothing”: shorter term mission and service learning. 53-73 Missiology: an international review, XXXVI, 1, January 2008.
From memory - stm wasn't a good way of recruiting long term. In other words, despite the incredible testimony of many people coming back from a st exposure, statistically stm did not produce long-term missionaries.
Missiology (ASM) had an edition on short-term mission, I think maybe 7 or so years ago. I've just had a quick look on the web, and couldn't find their archives. EMS one year looked at stm; I think it might have been 2007. Of course most of their data is American.
I wonder about the question in another sense. How can one tell if short-term leads to long term? Years ago, I think, missionaries would do up to 5 years of training and preparation before leaving for the field. Few would do that these days - they'd go instead on a stm at least as part of their training. I guess often that's really 'compulsory'; do mission agencies still offer 'life' or 'career' missionary contracts without any stm options? In that sense everyone has to be an stm before they become a long-term missionary, even if they entered stm knowing they would be long-term?