After graduating from Trinity Western University’s education program, Heather Lewis decided to spend a year in Jos, Nigeria teaching at Hillcrest Academy, a school affiliated with SIM (Serving In Mission.) Lewis is among the thousands of young Christians who spend their vacation or longer serving overseas in short-term (two weeks to a year) mission.

These students recognize the biblical call to act on their faith in the global village as well as their local neighbourhoods and churches.

"I see a link between spiritual darkness and physical poverty," says Lewis. "I don’t mean physical poverty as a lack of things but poverty of spirit-a lack of relationship with Christ."

Youth are involved in a host of occupations that don’t fit the conventional definition of mission-teaching English as a Second Language, church-focused drama workshops, accounting training, web design, videography and medical work. Although short-term mission trips for youth are not new, long-standing mission and relief and development organizations continue to add short-term programs.

For example, five years ago, World Vision started short-term work trips through Destination Life Change. This year, roughly 200 volunteers of all ages will work in Romania, Guatemala, Mexico and Costa Rica. The cost of a trip ranges from $2,000 to $4,000.

"People don’t get to see beyond the world they know in Halifax or Vancouver," says Philip Maher, senior communications manager for World Vision. "That’s what spectacular about this-people get to go to a World Vision-assisted community and see what’s going on."

Canadian Baptist Ministries has added the "Route" program that partners young Canadians with churches in countries such as Bolivia and Brazil.

"The impact of short-term trips is what happens when youth come home," says Patterson. "(Youth) will be the missionaries of tomorrow and are the church today."

From 1998 to 2001, more than 3,000 Canadians made short-term missionary trips to other countries, according to the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s (EFC) global mission roundtable. At the same time, agencies have had 20 per cent fewer long-term recruits. Of the Canadians who are long-term missionaries today, 85 per cent had their first international cross-cultural experience through a short-term trip.

However, some mission leaders have expressed concerns with how short-term trips are done. Bob Morris, director of the TIM Centre at Tyndale College and Seminary, says some worry that the majority who make short-term trips, as many as 90 per cent, are not given cross-cultural preparation.

In a half-hour workshops for people preparing to be career missionaries, Morris says the centre tries to help them understand how transformative the experience is for youth, something they can lose sight of given the turn over of short-termers they’ll assist.

The EFC has created a "Code of Best Practice For Short-Term Mission" for agencies who want a standard guideline (www.globalmission.org). Churches that coordinate their own trips, however, may or may not consider these points.

Canadian pastors see definite benefits to integrating short-term trips into ministry. Beyond being soul-crafting experiences, they help youth to see their own faith and culture from a non-Western perspective. David Payne, pastor of Community Bible Church in Aurora, says short-term trips make a lasting contribution to his congregation’s "vitality and ministry locally."

While some might argue that money is best spent on supporting long-term missionaries or giving to relief and development, Payne says the experience can convince young people to become missionaries.

David Skene, a leader with the Kitchener branch of Youth With A Mission, says the group is building short-term teams with a mix of Christian and non-Christian youth. He says the trips give them a different look at Christianity than worship experiences at home.

"[On the trips] we look at issues of justice," says Skene. "How we do things here in the developed world impacts the developing world."

Skene says many who make short-term trips will not become missionaries but he believes their understanding of a developing country, and their relationship with God, will be radically altered.

In the 18 months that Corrie Wedel of Toronto volunteered as a teacher at Bingham Academy, a boarding school for missionary kids in Ethiopia, her students challenged her faith.

"Some of my students were amazing encouragers," recalls Wedel. "I was startled that I was impacting their lives. They were coming to know God better through me. It didn’t even seem like I was doing much or deliberately trying. God was working through me to speak to their hearts."

Wedel says the experience also helped her to see her own culture in a new light.

"I used to think of starving children in the desert when I thought about Ethiopia," says Wedel. "It seemed like the problems of hunger and poverty were somehow solved after the big celebrity drive in the 1980s, but street children are still starving in Addis Ababa."

Katrina Krueger of Delta, B.C. spent several months doing health care work in Jos, Nigeria and says the experience helped build her appreciation of the complexity of mission.

"We know that our mission trip really doesn’t put us that far down the line in terms of what we might go through one day for God-it’s just the beginning," says Krueger.