You’ve seen the photos. A group of Americans wearing matching shirts poses with a dozen grinning local kids. There’s a wall freshly painted, maybe a prayer circle, maybe someone holding a baby. Everyone looks happy. The caption says something like, “God moved in powerful ways.”
And then, just like that, the moment is over. The team flies home. The kids go back to their lives. And the questions start to creep in.
This article is part of a new 6-part series rethinking missions. Check back every Wednesday.
More than 1.5 million Americans go on short-term mission trips every year, spending close to $2 billion to do it. For many, it’s a rite of passage — a chance to serve, see the world and grow in their faith. But behind the Instagram memories and emotional testimonies, there’s a harder reality that’s not as easy to talk about: Are we actually helping? Or are we just passing through?
Michelle Acker Perez has seen both sides. She and her husband live in Guatemala, where they host short-term mission teams from the U.S. throughout the year.
Michelle grew up in California, where short-term trips were something like summer camp.
“Every summer I had the chance to go somewhere new and ‘help people,’” she said.
For her husband, who was born and raised in Guatemala, hosting teams was part of what his family did. It came with blessings — but it was also a lot of work.
“We’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly,” she said. “And we continue to feel this tension with every team we host. Do they do more harm than good? Do they perpetuate the cycle of poverty? Do they contribute to feelings of superiority? Or inferiority?”
She’s not the only one asking those questions. Over the last decade, a growing number of scholars, missionaries and church leaders have begun reevaluating the short-term missions model. Not because they’re against the idea of going — but because they’ve seen what happens when the going is done poorly.
When teams show up to paint walls that didn’t need painting. When new believers are left behind without a local church to walk with them. When the trip becomes more about the growth of the traveler than the good of the community.
“Developing countries don’t need short-term heroes,” Perez said. “They need long-term partners.”
The “hero complex” is one of the most common pitfalls of short-term missions. It’s the idea that your team is there to save, fix or teach, rather than listen, learn or serve. It’s subtle, but dangerous.
Because when mission trips become centered around what the visitors can accomplish in a week, the result is often surface-level impact at best — and spiritual tourism at worst.
And if your main takeaway from the trip is, “Wow, I’m so thankful for what I have,” that’s not growth. That’s a poverty comparison game.
“If you come home thinking they have so little and you have so much, you’ve missed the whole point,” Perez said. “You’re poor, too — maybe just hiding behind all your stuff.”
Poverty isn’t just physical. There’s spiritual poverty. Emotional poverty. Systemic poverty. And until we recognize our own brokenness, we can’t meaningfully engage with anyone else’s.
Instead, we risk reducing people to projects and turning communities into backdrops for our own personal transformation.
The harm isn’t always obvious at first. But it becomes clear in the aftermath. Local clinics struggle when American teams offer free care without coordinating with existing health systems. Local churches are sidelined when U.S. visitors take over ministry roles for a week, only to disappear. Even construction projects have gone wrong — homes built without community input, sometimes unlivable, sometimes never used.
Perez says that a lot of the problems stem from the approach.
“If painting a school is really needed, then do it with the community, not for them,” she said. “Doing things with people — not for people — should be the motto.”
That philosophy extends far beyond paint. Many teams arrive without any real understanding of the history of the country, the role of the American church in its politics, or what locals actually need. Even when the trip goes smoothly, there’s often no follow-up. The spiritual and relational drop-off is steep.
“You probably wrote letters and had car washes to raise money to go, right?” Perez said. “But then what? What if your church or youth group worked on matching every dollar you spent for your trip and sent that down to the place you served throughout the year?”
Because often, the issue isn’t the going. It’s the forgetting.
But even the most culturally sensitive trips still leave a question hanging in the air: Why are we still sending Americans around the world to do ministry that people are already doing in their own communities?
This is the deeper conversation happening in global missions circles right now, and it’s one that’s long overdue. Because what if the issue isn’t just how we do short-term missions — but whether we should be going at all?
For decades, the dominant model of missions has been built on sending. We fundraise, we train, we fly people in to preach, serve, build and baptize. But the assumption underneath it all is that the Western church has something other countries don’t. That what people in the Global South need most is us — our resources, our theology, our leadership.
But increasingly, that idea is being challenged by people on both sides of the equation.
“The global church isn’t waiting for us to arrive,” said John Addink, founder of There and Now and author of How I Lost $1,500,000 in Missions (And What I Learned From My Mistakes). “They’re already doing the work. Our job is to support, not supplant.”
In other words: They don’t need our bodies. They need our backing.
The shift is radical, especially for churches that have poured years into their missions programs. But it’s necessary. Because many local ministries in countries like Haiti, Kenya, India and Guatemala already understand their communities far better than an outsider ever could. They know the language, the history, the pain and the possibility.
And often, what they need isn’t an American college student to show up for a week — it’s consistent financial support, relational solidarity and spiritual encouragement to keep going.
“We work hard to fundraise for a one-week trip,” Perez said. “But what if we redirected that effort into supporting the people who are already here? The ones who stay long after the team flies home?”
That doesn’t mean giving blindly. It means doing the hard work of finding trustworthy, indigenous ministries already rooted in the places you care about, and asking them: What do you need? How can we serve you from a distance? How can we use our platform and privilege to amplify yours?
It’s less flashy than hopping on a plane. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the future of missions isn’t about moving people across borders — but breaking down the power dynamics that made us think they needed to be moved in the first place.
There are still reasons to go. But we need to ask why we’re going, and who actually benefits when we do.
If missions is about making disciples, equipping the church and building the kingdom — then maybe the most faithful thing we can do is stop making ourselves the center of the story.
Because the church isn’t American. It never was. And the Spirit of God has never been dependent on a passport.
