How can you prepare for a short-term missions trip? What are the hazards to avoid and the opportunities to embrace? Veteran trip leaders Mack and Leeann Stiles offer practical advice, hard-won lessons, and hilarious stories to help you know what to expect as you get ready to see God in action in new ways.

Everything you need to know to plan a successful short-term missions trip from an authoritative source. Packed with comprehensive, down-to-earth, practical information.

Going on a short-term missions trip can be a life-transforming experience, but it can also involve weeks of physical and spiritual challenges. In this revised and expanded ten-week course, you will find a concise summary of crosscultural principles, help in facing spiritual warfare, tips on avoiding a tourist mentality, spiritual preparation through individual or group Bible study, and discussion and reflection questions.

When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation with over 300,000 copies in print. This stand-alone resource applies the principles of that book specifically to short-term missions. Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions: Participant’s Guide aims to train and debrief team members, preparing them to do short-term missions as effectively as possible. To do this, it provides practical examples and guidelines for team members, and it creates interaction and reflection opportunities through questions and journaling. With eight units, six of which are built around free online video content, this book equips teams to avoid harming materially poor communities and to translate their experience into lasting and mutual engagement with missions and poverty alleviation. In conjunction with the separately available Leader’s Guide, it is an ideal resource for churches, Christian colleges, mission agencies, and missionaries.

David Forward helps prepare leaders and members of the team for their experience as volunteers for the cause of Christ.

Brian Howell provides an anthropology of short-term mission (STM) among American Christians. Providing a history of STM along with an ethnographic case study of a trip to the Dominican Republic, Howell argues that the movement is sustained by a uniquely Christian travel narrative that borrows from the anthropology of tourism and pilgrimage.

With more than 450,000 copies in print, When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation. Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good. But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself. Focusing on both North American and Majority World contexts, When Helping Hurts provides proven strategies for effective poverty alleviation, catalyzing the idea that sustainable change comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out.

Short-term mission trips are great ways to impact the kingdom. Yet they can lack effectiveness because of mistakes or naiveté on the part of participants. In this insightful and timely book, David A. Livermore calls us to serve with our eyes open to global and cultural realities so we can become more effective cross-cultural ministers. Serving with Eyes Wide Open is a must-have book for anyone doing a short-term mission or service project, whether domestic or overseas. Foreword by Paul Borthwick.

Equipped for Adventure is a guide for churches wanting to establish a short-term missions ministry. This book is unique in that it goes beyond simply equipping the individual for short-term missions by helping the church develop a short-term missions ministry. After briefly discussing philosophies and considerations for developing a missional ministry, the author provides detailed steps for planning, participating, and following up on mission trips. Since there are more details to international travel, the author primarily focuses on international missions trips.

Effective Engagement in Short-term Missions represents the single most ambitious effort to date to understand and improve upon patterns of ministry in STM. In six sections, the authors explore topics such as the links between STM and older patterns of long-term missions; engagement with people of other cultures; international partnerships; specialized ministries such as medical missions; legal and financial liabilities; and last but not least, the impact of STM on participants. The goal of this book is to improve the ways in which STM is carried out and to improve the understandings needed on the part of all who engage in the ministry. In short, this book attempts to provide a knowledge base for those who provide leadership within the short term missions movement. Youth pastors, mission pastors, lay leaders, college and seminary students, and missiologists will all find information that is helpful and relevant to their concerns.