Communication Technologies & the Missioner

Previously, I spoke at length about communication technologies and how they are impacting mission through their mediating affect on planning and relationship development. There are other ways, however, in which communication technologies present a challenge for short-term missioners. Email, cell phones, and blogs have created a social expectation. As we prepare to leave home, families want to know when they’ll hear from us. We’ve learned to feel safer by having our cell phone with us, and often on, while away from home. Our friends post to their Facebook pages while on trips and maintain blogs about their experiences away from home, creating the expectation that we will do likewise. Our churches have given us funding, participated in various fundraising events, and commissioned us to go forth and serve in the world. Understandably, they want to hear from us, and want to feel like they are a part of what we are doing as we engage in mission.

But, from my perspective, this environment of expectation, in which those at home expect that we’ll be using communication technologies to maintain regular contact with them during our trip, presents a myriad of problems for short-term missioners. One of the ways in which we learn and are “transformed” through mission, is by letting ourselves be vulnerable in a new context and by being open to transformative experiences and what many often refer to as encounters with Christ. My experience has led me to believe that this happens when we are “intentional” about our experience, leaving our social and cultural expectations behind and stepping out of our comfort zones. We do this working side by side with new friends, through community worship both amongst ourselves and in community with other brothers and sisters in Christ, through evening chats with our travel companions and through group process. In these experiences we discover, sometimes in emotionally painful ways, things about ourselves and others. We learn from one another. We learn that someone we might not have liked before we left has something new to offer us, causing us to begin thinking differently about others. We often learn that as a group we might be better able to make sense of a difficult experience than we could on our own. As we listen to, and share with, each other we move deeper into our understanding of what is happening to us and among us, and we begin to experience a transformation. Our world view is altered; our sense of who we may have thought of as “the other” is different; our understanding of the Body of Christ changes; our understanding of God’s mission in the world changes; in short, we are transformed.

A challenge arises when communication technologies truncate and impact social processes. When you’re in your host country, if you have spent several hours before a group meeting exchanging messages (email and text) with your friends back home, and talking with your family, you’re unlikely to feel the need to process with the group when the time comes. Essentially, you’ve already done your processing or have dealt with something that was emotionally troublesome. Many of the issues that get resolved in group process are the kinds of things that initially surface as problems … transportation that didn’t show up, dealing with a person who is consistently disruptive, addressing health challenges, and so forth. Not only are the opportunities for a group discussion limited or potentially lost, but bonding between group members is also constrained by your limited engagement in group discussion.

A major concern for those in leadership is that problems that might easily get worked out by the group can get blown out of proportion at home as they are relayed to individuals who have no context for understanding the issues. For example, you may have a transportation snafu in that word failed to reach your driver that you needed to be picked up in a certain location at a certain time. Subsequently, you’re team becomes temporarily stranded someplace for a short period of time. In that time, a text message or call to home by one of the participants could set off alarm bells for family members thinking either that you’re literally stranded some place that could potentially be unsafe and/or word starts circulating around the church community that you’re a poor mission organizer, because you failed to arrange for adequate local transportation. Most of us learned the telephone game as children, passing a message down the line and then hearing how much it changed from the original message when it was first conveyed. Depending on who conveys the message and to whom it gets conveyed, it can take on any number of meanings in a short period of time. [Keep in mind that news travels at lightening speed these days!]

The previous example demonstrates the ways in which rapid communication can be problematic for a team, a host, and the sending community. In other circumstances, such as inter-personal conflict among team members, the relief valve of instant access to someone outside of the group enables individuals to avoid confrontation, dealing with a problem outside of the group that could, and probably should, be addressed internally. In this situation, the inter-personal issue may fester for the entire trip, constraining the overall experience for everyone.

Other technologies present yet other challenges. When people become focused on posting pictures for friends and family on photo sharing or social networking sites while they are on mission, their intentionality, their engagement in, and commitment to, the experience, becomes more voyeuristic and more reflective of a vacation (or what I often derogatorily refer to as misio-tourism) than a mission experience. When we step away from intentionally engaging in an experience, our mindset becomes more about finding and conveying photo opportunities and relaying stories than allowing ourselves to experience the moment and fully live into the experience.

My advice to team leaders is to have a serious discussion with your team about technology and your expectations. I would discuss the issue of managing expectations at home, so that people can share with their friends, family and church community what the group has discussed and what they should and shouldn’t expect while you’re on mission. After discussing issues such as email access, blogging and cell phone usage, one suggestion might be to write a technology covenant that states clearly the group’s expectations for technology use on the trip. Ideally, you might want to consider asking people to leave their cell phones at home, or agree to turn them off while in your host country. Hopefully, you’ve been using the months preceding your trip to begin forming as a group in your preparatory meetings. You might consider highlighting some of the ways in which you’ve come together as a group thus far, address some of the ways in which the team might function and process as a group while on mission, and then use the opportunity to explain the ways in which cell phone usage can be problematic. Keep in mind, though, that when you challenge people to consider a covenant to limit or refrain from cell phone usage while on mission, you’re guaranteed to experience resistance due to current cultural norms and social behavior. But if you explain the ins and outs of group process, from your perspective, and assure people of the benefits of committing to a no cell phone policy, it may be easier for people to appreciate your hope for a cellular moratorium. If you still experience resistance, you might add that a mission trip is more like a spiritual retreat than a work project or vacation. Any spiritual retreat I’ve been on, or have known about, has included a requirement that cellular and computer technologies be turned off and only used in the unlikely event of an emergency.