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Coming home from a short-term mission trip?
Good trip followup (debriefing during the trip and upon reentry) enables participants to cement life changes as well as nourishing their ongoing growth and sharpening commitment to Christ and His vision for the world.
The effects of reentry stress include loneliness, feeling out-of-place, detachment, confusion, frustration and even anger.
Reflecting on this case study may help you survive the re-entry. Or, if you have friends coming home from a trip, it may help you do some quality debriefing with them.
Case study: Coming home from Poland
Originally written by Angel Leigh Grant, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
I had expected my short term mission experience in Poland to be wonderful. And it was! It was one of the best things I have ever done. What I did not expect was the difficult return to life on campus.
I spent five weeks in Poland with an InterVarsity short term missions program. Three of those weeks were in Wisla, a village in the mountains near the Czech border. Our “cultural exchange camp” included thirty Polish university students. They were very excited about the chance to study English with native speakers and to learn about life in America.
We each had two or three Polish roommates. Almost immediately, several began asking questions about God. Others were fascinated by the worship times to which we invited them on Sunday nights. They often wanted to continue praising God after our worship had officially ended. They even initiated some impromptu worship on other nights of the week!
“I am intrigued by you Americans,” my Polish roommate Anna told me. “There's something special about your faith. I can feel it when you are singing.”
Several Bible studies started up in Poland as well. “My roommates were the ones who initiated the Bible study,” said Jeanna Leigh Allen, my prayer partner. “I don't know about at your school, but at UMPI [University of Maine at Presque Isle], no one would ever say to me, Hey, do you want to get together and read the Bible?”
“I was floored by what God did there,” another teammate, Amy Sparks, a senior at Milligan College in Tennessee, said to me. “I never thought that the Poles would be so eager to listen and to learn.”
The openness of the Polish students made returning to campus difficult for me. Back at school, everyone -- me included -- has their own agenda. No one has time to sit and talk like we did in Wisla.
As school started, I found myself wondering if I was selfish because of all the time I spent sitting in classes. It felt as if I was studying just for my own sake. I couldn't see how the path I was on was going to benefit anyone else. I wanted to be back in Wisla with the teammates I had grown to love dearly. I wanted to be back there sharing God's love with people who were willing to learn about Him.
When I returned to the States, almost everything I saw reminded me of something that had happened in Poland. I needed to talk about my experience, but I didn't feel the other Christians I knew could understand because they hadn't been there. I feared that people were tired of hearing me talk about my trip.
I came home wanting God to do wonderful things on my campus. Still, I wasn't ready to throw myself into any campus group because leaving Poland was hard. The truth is, I hadn't wanted to come home at all.
In Poland, I saw God's Holy Spirit work miraculously in ways I'd never seen before. Back home in my everyday routine, that wasn't the case. For one thing, I could often get through a day at school without talking to God. In Poland, the things I saw God doing drove me to my knees many times each day. Those differences caused me to struggle in my relationship with God.
Talking to my teammates from the trip helped tremendously in the readjusting process. I discovered that all of us had experienced similar emotions and difficulties. As we came back to the States, we all felt that we had changed somehow. We were not the same people who had left our home country five weeks earlier.
Time and prayer have helped me to re-enter life at school. Still, I wonder if I could have better prepared myself for the re-entry. What could I have handled differently? How can I use my summer experience to be even more effective as a witness on my campus and as an encouragement to other Christians?Originally published in Student Leadership Journal © InterVarsity Fellowship. Adapted and used by permission.
What do you struggle with?
Jill Fischer, summer study abroad coordinator at Northwestern College (Orange City, Iowa) has identified five issues that students at her school struggle with as they return home from extended mission trips:
- Attitudes toward wealth, consumption and stewardship
- Gender roles in other parts of the world
- The ways our individual choices as well as the policies of our government affect the world
- Christianity in other cultures and around the world
- Issues of justice, including what it means to "pursue justice" as a Christian
 | A volunteer's reflections on reentry after a year in Bulgaria [ read more ] |
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Howard Culbertson, Southern Nazarene University, 6729 NW 39th, Bethany, OK 73008 | Phone: 405-491-6693 - Fax: 491-6658
Copyright © 1999, 2001 - Last Updated: February 14, 2008 | URL: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/reentry.htm