Interesting. The video obviously exaggerates – but not by much.

Love this! Thanks for putting me on to this fellow. He’s like a prophet to the current generation.

At the church my parents now attend in St. Cloud, MN, there is a sign at the entrance/exit to the parking lot. As you enter the lot, the sign welcomes you to the church. However, as you leave the lot, the opposite side of the sign reads, ” You are now entering the mission field”. It’s a nice reminder that you don’t have to go overseas to enter “the mission field”……

This reminded me of Luther’s frequent comments about people in his time going on pilgrimages and such in order to do what they imagined to be good works, while paying no heed whatsoever to the Ten Commandments or their vocations.

“This dude, is, like, I mean, really way chill, man. Like, totally cool. Hear what I’m sayin’, dude?”

This kid really is funny. I looked at some of the other clips, as well. Lots of excellent satire. No doubt, he’s really bright, with excellent writers. (And, if he thinks up the scripts himself, he’s unusually gifted.)

Thanks for the laughs, Pastor!

“If you want to go on a missions trip for the experience, that’s fine…”

I have traveled to visit a foreign partner church three times. In fact, on my last trip (about 8 months ago), the Passport Control Officer looked at the multiple entry visa stamps and said, “You come here quite a bit. What brings you here so often?” (I don’t think 3 times in 5 years is all that frequent, but it pretty much is the sum total of my foreign travel.)

Some of my parishioners have raised some of the same concerns expressed in this video – although I’ve never requested money to go on these trips. (Some generous family/friends did make contributions, but it was unsolicited.) My response is that “one and done” mission trips are glorified vacations, and rightly critiqued by this video, but the experience of building a relationship with a foreign partner church so that you can be their voice here in the US and prompt others to “raise funds and send it to them over there” can be a wise investment with quite a return.

One fabulous result of these trips was being able to make connections between CPH and the foreign partner church so that the “Growing in Christ” curriculum could be translated for their use. My next project (if the LWML grant comes through) is working on VBS materials. VBS is something completely new to the partner church, so this last trip we took over some experienced volunteers to help conduct their first ever VBS. Seeing the materials that had been donated/translated already (those lovely Pandas from Group!), I thought, “We can do better than this!” That’s the kind of thing that comes from being in the trenches, even if it is only for a week. (We also helped with a construction project, so it was more work than just running a VBS.)

Thanks for the best double entendre I’ve heard in some time; “OMG, you’re doing awesome things for God.” The young man in the video seems to be summoning up his inner Ashton Kutcher. A sainted brother pastor (who had been a missionary for many years) called these trips ‘sweaty vacations.’

The video appears to caricature mission trips, emphasizing the potential abuses that are possible in ant enterprise involving sinful human beings. Perhaps some tempering based on the 8th commandment and Luther’s explanation is in order.

Excuse me “anY enterprise”

Try inserting liturgical worship for mission trip in this video and see how that fits.

@Stony
Stony, there actually is a video from the same “Messy Mondays” source that talks about what it calls the “three kinds of worship” that fits what you are talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOGlSQlMUSA

@Stony
Okay, I’ll bite; “if you have liturgical worship people will think you’re the best person who ever lived.” Nope, I don’t think that, never have. Neither do I think that those who go on short term mission trips think that of themselves. Quite the opposite, I’ve met many people who have come back home humbled by their experience.

@Rahn Hasbargen
Thanks for the link, these Messy Mondays vids remind me of a ’60′s protest song, lots of keen idealistic observations and complaints but short on answers. Unfortunately I didn’t have any video equipment readily avaiable when I was this man’s age, otherwise I think I’d have a cache of similar rants.