Are Short-Term Missions Good Stewardship?
excerpt from ChristianityToday.com

Just how big is short-term missions (STM)? As a grass-roots, decentralized movement, its scope is difficult to determine. And yet your own estimate of between 1 million and 4 million North American short-term missionaries every year may well be a conservative estimate. The sociologist Christian Smith, based on national random survey data, reports that 29 percent of all 13- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. have "gone on a religious missions team or religious service project," with 10 percent having gone on such trips three or more times. That is, his data indicates that far more than 2 million 13- to 17-year-olds go on such trips every year.

This is an enormous phenomenon, and yet it has largely escaped the attention of scholars. Most of the 50 "dissertations" which Abram Honig referred to in his Christianity Today article, were master's theses or D.Min. projects, with but a few Ph.D. dissertations. Senior scholars have not made this central to their own research. Probably no other dimension of American religious life is so extensive while being so little studied or understood by scholars.

Discussion: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/127/22.0.html