By Angela Rice, Director of Short-term Missions

Short-term trips are intentional journeys to serve with a missionary and provide assistance in a project or ministry, serve the local church, share the gospel, build relationships, and foster cross-cultural understanding. More often than not, the person taking the trip is much more impacted than the ones they go to serve. God uses short-term trips to open the traveler’s heart and mind to different people groups, people who live and serve and worship differently than the traveler does.   

For BMA Global, short-term missions include Volunteer Student Missions, Baptist Medical Missions International, a shoebox trip, or a church trip. Short-term missions for us is a short-term trip with a long-term goal in mind. Through BMA Global short-term missions, our goal is to foster a love for missions in every person that visits our mission fields. We pray that during the mission and for many years after, the things that are learned stay with you, calling you to be a part of long-term missions in some way. We pray for long-term missionaries to be called from short term trips, and they are.  Most of our missionaries first felt called to missions on a short term trip.  If you ask a full-time missionary about how they were called into missions, many will tell you of a time when they served for a couple of weeks, and during that time, God began calling them to give their life fully to missions. But God does not call all of us to go; He calls some of us to send.  

Our missionaries in Romania are great examples of this. Bryan Risner stepped up as a youth pastor to serve as a VSM leader so that one of his students could go on a mission trip. God used that first trip to begin calling his family to Romania, and each year as he led the VSM trip to Romania, that calling became stronger to him and to his family. In 2017, The Risners moved to Romania accompanied by a short-term team.  Bryan and Pam have been faithfully serving the Lord in Romania now for seven years. They have helped with three church plants and are always looking for the next thing God has for them.  

The vision of BMA Global is to send missionaries to share God’s story, make disciples, and plant churches that multiply among the nations. So, short-term missions come alongside a missionary as a support system. With VSM, we usually go and do service projects, Vacation Bible Schools, and other things that will assist in bringing new people to the church to meet the pastor and the members serving in a community.  BMMI sets up a medical clinic, just for the purpose of making the missionary known in the community.  We want to open doors that will help our missionaries get to know more people.

If you would like to be involved in short-term missions, there are many ways to do that.

• First, pray. We would love for everyone to be praying over our teams that are traveling during the summer: we have nine VSM teams, a BMMI team, and several church teams. 
• Second, go. If you would like to go on a short-term trip, reach out to me at angela@bmaglobal.org and I will talk to you about what type of trip is best for you. I promise, you will not regret taking time to serve with our missionaries around the world. We have the very best! 

Lastly, support. If you would like to financially support short-term missions, you can do that at bmaglobal.org. Because of our generous supporters, we are able to provide short-term mission trips each year.