Mission trips push teenagers physically, socially, and emotionally, as they do intense work the likes of which many of them have never attempted with people they may have never met, and all of it far away from home, which, for some younger teenagers, is a big challenge.

Yet mission trips also push teenagers intellectually and theologically by confronting them with people whose stories challenge childhood assumptions. We leaders from their churches have precious little control over this, and we’re doing this assumption-challenging work at the same time.

This becomes a question of scale for me. We clearly can’t expect the 12th graders indignation about urban homelessness and “systems of oppression” to scale down to the incoming 9th grader who is just completely disoriented by meeting people who live on the streets for the first time. Neither can we expect the nuanced view a 40 year-old pastor has worked out on it to scale down to that railing 12th grader.

Everybody feels this challenge differently, and nobody on the mission trip, from the youngest youth to the oldest adult, arrives at a final resolution of the challenge.

That’s why I still go.

Cultivating a community of diversity is hard. It takes specific leadership skills I don’t have enough of yet, and I want to know what those skills are and how to acquire them.

Inviting people into a group where they are the minority (ethnic, gender, age), for example, requires careful attention to the smallest of details in order to minimize the likelihood that the minority group feels singled out and less important than everyone else. Because if that happens, the ship is sunk even before it’s left the harbor.

I think cultivating and leading teams of diverse individuals is quickly becoming an essential skill set for innovative church leadership, and I’m pretty aware that I don’t have that skill set in abundance. How to get it?

Maybe Facebook’s diversity training videos, now public, would be a good place to start?

Last August I returned from a youth mission trip and declared that I would no longer ban cell phones on these trips. I said,

Negotiating the role of our phones is a terrific community-building opportunity on mission trips, indeed, in all of our youth ministry gatherings, because it gets at our expectations of attention and presence from one another. Inviting students to both articulate and enforce their own expectations of one another in this regard is a better practice, I’m convinced, than issuing a unilateral ban.

Well, I’ve just returned from this year’s trip, and I’m ready to make another declaration: that was a mistake, but not for any reason I anticipated.

This year we allowed students to bring their devices, and we articulated clear expectations of one another in terms of when they would be used, namely during free time and commuting. And while leaders wasted truckloads of energy policing off-limits use on work sites and during meal times, the truly negative consequence of allowing phones on this trip found expression within the allowed guidelines, and it did more damage to “community building” than any failure to be present has ever done.

In a word, it was gossip. Cell phones allow for unchecked gossip to spread like wildfire through cliques within a group completely outside the attention of the rest of the group or any of the adult leaders.

danah boyd has been arguing for years that there is no difference between online and offline interactions among teenagers. If someone is harassed by their schoolmates on Facebook, that harassment becomes a live issue when school is in session, and vice versa.

So on a mission trip where students are allowed to use Snapchat and to text one another during free time, interactions on those platforms are making an impact on their interactions around the lunch table and while working, and the impact isn’t good. Because it’s not like they’re texting each other Bible verses or encouraging words about the day’s work. Instead, it’s all drama.

There’s almost zero accountability here, too, since these interactions can be limited to a small intended audience. It’s a different problem than the one where certain kids need repeatedly told to put their phones away. And to my mind, it’s far more destructive.

How did I not see this?

The last days of the mission trip are a cascade of upset stomachs, foot injuries, and headaches. Oh, and homesickness.

These things are not in the leader’s plans, so they can be met with annoyance rather than compassion. But these youth have worked HARD for four days now, slept precious little–and that on a linoleum floor–, and subsisted mostly on peanut butter and cold cereal. That makes people sick.

For sure, being teenagers, they’re mostly not helping themselves in the way they’re devouring any snack food in sight and pounding sodas before bedtime. “I told you so” isn’t helpful though.

Grace needs to abound from leaders to youth on these last days of the mission trip. Because on that occasion when the youth leader is suffering or sick, who do you think will show them Grace and compassion.

In my experience, it’s the youth.

Level 1. Youth relate to their peers on the mission trip, the ones they already know and the ones they’re only just meeting. They laugh, they flirt, they argue.

Level 2. Youth relate to their youth leader as the one making decisions, encouraging them, and asking them hard questions.

Level 3. Youth relate to the youth leaders of other churches, not their own. This level doesn’t exist on every trip, but where it does it expands the community of adults who are caring for and working with teenagers, and that is an unqualified good. It also models collaborative leadership.

Level 4. Youth relate to the staff and volunteers of the organization hosting them. DOOR. Borderlinks. The Life Church of Walker, Louisiana. Here is where the context of youths’ service gets provided. Here also is the model of a saint who is serving here day in, day out, and who can share stories of suffering and redemption in that place.

In some cases, the organization employs college students and other young adults as leaders of youth on mission trips. Four of the six trips I have led have done this, and it’s a great source of mentoring for teenagers by people who are working through the phase of life that is on deck for teenagers. However, this practice is also often a source of conflict between the group leadership, who can be inexperienced with the decision making style and moral absolutism of young adulthood, and the host organization, whose mission is to empower those same Young adults.

Note, some of these organizations, like DOOR, primarily exist to connect teenagers to work at local agencies like food pantries and homeless shelters. The staff and volunteers at these local agencies thicken this level of relationship and often provide a less filtered version of life and struggle and grace in that place. Some of our youth spent the day with a formerly homeless musician who coached them through talking with the clientele of a drop-in café for people who live on the streets. The wisdom, the color, of this level is invaluable.

Level 5. The youth relate to the people they are there to serve. Without this level it’s not a mission trip. Here is where the greatest transformation can occur, as assumptions about things like poverty and race and even religion buckle beneath the weight of an honest-to-God relationship, however brief.

Level 5 also poses the greatest risk of damage done to the people we set out to serve. If youth aren’t properly prepared, their perfectly appropriate fear and insecurity can produce hurt and even offense. Leadership of mission trips is most critical here, to model interactions of mutuality and dignity.

Level 6. Youth relate to God, who called them to this journey, who has been with them every day, and who will be with them when they go home, although hopefully in a richer way. This level infuses all the others, and, like level 5, is required for the experience to be a “mission” trip.

Leaders aid in this level by holding space for worship, prayer, silence, solitude, and reflection. I routinely feel like the work required of leaders in level 6 is the most difficult.

Almost everything about a mission trip stretches youth toward growth, which is why I continue to find value in them. They stretch me too.

Sleeping on a floor stretches one’s ability to endure discomfort, just as sitting with a homeless person and listening to their story stretches one’s understanding of success and one’s assumptions about their own future.

Sharing simple meals tugs at one’s stomach, while trying to lead a class of 30 swearing fourth graders pulls one’s patience to near breaking.

Words like “solidarity” stretch your notions of help and service and make you wonder how you might need to change in order to justify your time spent doing things “for” the needy.

Here’s the thing, though. Comfort is relative. The teenager who volunteers at a food bank today may be receiving food bank donations back home. Many youth on mission trips know all too well how needy people live; they don’t require a trip to an inner city in another state to show them hunger or abuse or isolation.

Yet they show a remarkable ability to endure mission trip-type strain and to grow beneath your nose, moving in every challenge toward a vision of the just and the good and toward a future where they are the agents who bring that about.

Thank God for the strain and the stretch.

11 teams of five fanned out across the Mile High City yesterday on foot, bus, and train to pull weeds, play with children, clean sheds, serve food, and set to work on just about anything else they were asked to do.

One day down. Three to go.

The public transit piece of this experience has already proved very significant to our learning. I sat on a west Denver bus yesterday afternoon with four youth from Southern California who had never ridden public transit. One student is certain that nobody back home where he lives takes the bus. I live there. I ride the bus.

Riders piled on as the bus made its way downtown. A man boarded with a woman in a wheelchair and two small children and sat next to one of our youth. He then began to curse without ceasing. The youth sat frozen.

A woman shouted updates about her sobriety and her upcoming court date into her phone for the whole bus to hear. Our youth looked straight ahead.

A car cut off our bus, and our driver honked and honked and honked in retribution. At the next stoplight, she swore at the driver. Youth’s mouths open.

Wherever you live, you should get on the bus and see who’s there and what you might learn.

Yesterday our work trip team travelled by plane to Denver. Kids arrived at LAX at 5:30 am and spent the day comporting themselves like champs. Flight? Champs. Bus ride? Champs. Walk into downtown? Champs. Project orientation? Champs. Bedtime? Well, you can’t win ’em all.

I have been insisting for three months that nobody check a bag on our flight, an insistence almost completely honored by youth and adult leaders who crammed six days worth of clothes, a sleeping bag, pillow, mat, and toiletries into carry-on bags and backpacks. I desperately wanted to avoid checking on 51 suitcases.

I was wrong to insist on that. Check in was smooth as butter (kudos, Southwest), but our glut of carry-ons made boarding a nightmare. Poetically, my bag couldn’t fit and had to be checked.

So we’re underway, and I’ve already learned an important Mission trip lesson: don’t fear the checked bag.

You know what though? My fellow leaders and our youth we’re exceedingly gracious.

Leader makes us do something unnecessarily taxing and then is shown definitively to have been wrong, but we don’t give him a word of grief about it?

Check.

The binder for liability waivers has gaping holes in it that we’re patching with trust that teenagers will bring those forms with them to one of the busiest airports in the world at 5:30 in the morning.

Me: “Pack for a week, including a sleeping bag, pillow, and towel, using only a carry-on suitcase and backpack. No checked luggage. It can be done.” But if it can’t, what watery chaos promises to descend upon us?

The breakup of 44 youth from seven different churches into smaller working groups must meet specific criteria. Joey and Sarah do NOT get along, and Steven won’t do any work if he’s not with Brian.

The instructions for meeting the charter bus at our arrival airport are hieroglyphics.

18 pizzas await for dinner hours after our arrival, half pepperoni, half tomato. They will murder me for this. Drinks as yet unplanned.

The carrot we’re dangling is a trip to the amusement park on the final day. The blade hiding in that carrot is that we must walk a mile to get there.

Short term mission trips are either exercises in self-congratulation and colonialism or transformative experiences for teens that open them up to long-term relationships and vocational direction.

A group in our church is working through this tool for exploring a new worshiping community (“new worshiping community” is what we used to call “new church development”). It wants to ground any exploration of a new worshiping community in the identity of the people discerning it–their experience of God and the way they talk about who Jesus is for them–because those will be the foundation of whatever is being built. For many of us in mainlineish churches, this is a high, high hurdle right out of the gate.

Even with all of the requisite qualifications implied in the prepositional phrase “for me,” and even when taking every precaution to avoid being coercive, many of us get stuck trying to articulate our personal experience of God’s love and our sense of who Jesus is.

It is almost baked into the DNA of mainline American Christianity to take seriously the demands of a pluralistic environment and to respect the views of others by not pushing our private religious convictions in a public space. This is a great strength; mainline Christians are, as a rule, highly committed to activities like interfaith dialogue and community service for their own sake and without any expectation of conversion.

But I wonder if we haven’t set up a false choice between engaging the public sphere respectfully and talking about our faith. I wonder if we haven’t uncritically accepted a relegation of religion to the private sphere of our lives to the point that we simply don’t know how to talk about it outside the walls of our church–and very often not inside those walls either.

How do we fix this? Who do you know who does this well? How do you talk to people about Jesus when you’re not at church?

Or do you?