Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions: Participant's Guide

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.

Good intentions are not enough.

We need a different framework for thinking about poverty. Rather than simply defining it as a lack of material things, we need to get to the very roots of the issue: broken relationships with God, self, others, and the rest of creation.

What does that mean for a short-term mission trip to a low-income community?

Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions: Participant’s Guide aims to train and debrief team members, preparing them to do short-term missions without doing long-term harm. It takes the core ideas from When Helping Hurts and applies them to short-term missions, provides practical examples and guidelines for team members, and creates interaction and reflection 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 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.