Concerned about the Safety of your Short-Term Mission Trip to Tijuana?

My wife is a big Tom Hanks fan, leading us to watch Road to Perdition a couple of nights back. The context of the movie revolves around the Irish mob in Depression-era Chicago. The film showed how the mafia owned the police, banks, businesses, and politicians. Halfway through the flick, I exclaimed, “This is exactly what’s going on in Tijuana right now!” Her response was, “Pues claro!” (a little tough to translate into english, but let’s just say it’s a strong “Of course!”)

Well, it was revealing to me at least. This is the problem with Tijuana: (Un)Organized crime is stronger than law enforcement. This includes their will, their firepower, and their pocketbook. Tijuana is the funnel for the worlds’ drug supply into the United States. This breeds a host of offshoot problems that affect every person on every level. There are rival drug cartels—sometimes one is in power and sometimes the other. And as witnessed in the movie, once Michael Sullivan (Hanks’s character) was “out of work,” he had no where to go, and nothing to do; no career to fall back on—yet very used to a large salary. This has occurred in Tijuana. The thugs that occasionally find themselves jobless, revert to new crimes in order to support the elite lifestyle that they’ve accustomed as a result of running drugs.

Missionaries go places with the clear understanding that they are giving up what’s normal, adapting to the new and unknown—both positive and negative. The locals must deal with injustices—and so must the missionary. It would be hypocritical and see-through if it were any other way.

A quote that Money Missions had posted a month ago by Dr. Larry Poston stated: “There are no closed countries if you do not expect to come back.” No doubt this is strong language and could be taken two ways. One, tough guy and two, biblical. The tough guy can be immediately discarded because one who shares the gospel in an inhospitable environment has absolutely nothing worldly to gain—be it material, prestige, or power. The response then is clearly biblical which is backed up by the actions of every apostle.

How does any of this fit into the title of this article? Clearly, short-term missionaries are subject to immediate adjustments—but to what extent and to what cost? I really don’t know. How far should a youth pastor push things? Good question. And where lies the red for the risk-management committee (and these do exist for short-term mission trips, by the way)? Tough pie graph to depict. What situations do the parents of a junior high girl permit? Beats me. None of these questions fit very nicely into Dr. Poston’s position.

But maybe that’s the point; a short-term mission trip is just that—you do expect to come back. With this in mind, all involved need to consider two important things: the goal of the trip and the team members involved—analyzing them separately and then together. Some groups should never cross the border, and then others are seemingly made for Tijuana. Whoever’s heading up the trip must decide if this “road to perdition” is passable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Short Term Missions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.