Missions trips are a wonderful way to get out of your box and experience the world. If you have never taken a missions trip, now is the time to begin praying and thinking about it. 

Ask your minister about taking a missions trip. Show him this information on HICM. Contact us at HICM for more information about how you can get involved in a missions trip. HICM can work with your church to help organize a missions trip for you or provide a trip for your group to attend. Either way, we are here to help you and your church or organization grow in the area of missions.
 

Why Go On A Missions Trip?
 

Missions trips will enlighten you to the realities of life in a world not like your own. 
 

When you travel to a foreign country, you will experience sights, sounds, and smells that are different than what you are used to back home. You will learn things about cultures and people groups that you could not learn in a classroom or a church auditorium at home.

You will be enlightened to the way time is viewed and used in another country. You will gain fresh insights into different perspectives and values of other people groups. You will see how other people learn to be creative in order to accomplish things without the equipment, machines, and gadgets that you take for granted back home. 
You will experience new foods, strange foods, and interesting foods and realize that you can eat things that you did not dream of ever eating while growing up in America. You will find out how other people get around their villages, towns, and cities, often using methods of transport that you are not accustomed to using. 

You will discover the difficulty of going to a country where you do not understand the signs, billboards, labels, radio announcers, TV programs, or the people in general. You will find out what it is like to sit in a Sunday School class or church service and not understand the words of the testimonies, hymns, lessons, or messages.

You will experience the way the others view you as an American, or even as a Christian. You will realize that these brothers and sisters in Christ are a part of the same family of God that you are and be amazed at how much you will be able to communicate with each other just because you have a bond in Christ, and a commonality in eternal purposes and goals. 

Missions trips will cause you to be more excited about sharing Jesus in your local church and community back home.

You will find yourself reevaluating your own ministries in your local church and community. You will seek to find ways to do more for Christ right where you are. No doubt, you will begin to think of ways to implement at home certain missionary strategies and methods that were employed on the foreign field.

Your new excitement in the area of missions and evangelism in your own church will be a catalyst for your friends to get more involved as well. 

Missions trips will challenge you to be more effective in the way you support the cause of missions worldwide.

You will begin to think of things that are truly needed, and you can send to them, things that would be helpful to their ministries, or a blessing to their families. You will begin to be more frugal in order to be able to send more financial support or gifts to the field.

Missions trips will help you to become more grateful for the many blessings God has given you at home, in your local church, and in your home country.

When you arrive back home, you will thank God even for some of the simple everyday things that you have taken for granted for so long. Maybe it’s clean drinking water out of the faucet at home. A shower, a bathtub. Food in your cupboards or the restaurants you frequent. The low price of gasoline. Transportation. Heating, air-conditioning… Returning to the soil of the USA you will find things to thank God for, things that you never took the time to thank God for before. It is amazing how our eyes are opened to the conveniences and comforts of life at home, once we have traveled in “The Third World.”

Missions trips will stretch your faith.

For many Christians the amount of money needed for a missions trip can be daunting. You may wonder how you will ever come up with the needed funds for a missions trip. 

Your faith will also be stretched after arriving on the mission field. You will be asked to do things you have never done before, go places you have never gone before, do things publicly that you have never done publicly before, and put things in your mouth that you have never put in your mouth before. The nationals will put you in situations in which you have never been before, like trying to communicate with you in broken English that you still do not understand. You will have to learn how to greet people in their country the way they greet people, rather than the way you are used to greeting people in the USA. That may mean with a hug, some kind of touch besides a handshake, or even a kiss, or two, or three.

Just remember, God’s grace is always sufficient, and God is still sovereign and in control even on what is “the foreign mission field” to you.