Your optimal short-term missions opportunity will align with as many possible of following short-term trip quality benchmarks as possible:

• The trip offers excellent pre-field, on-field, and post-field training.
• Those with whom the short-termers will work on the field have actively requested short-termers to come. The trip has not been forced upon field workers by a mission agency’s home office.
• The trip will perform ministry that as much as possible directly contributes to fostering church planting movements.
• The trip works among as least-reached people as possible.
• Where a national local church exists, the trip seeks to serve and accomplish ministry through the local church.
• The trip will neither foster financial dependence on the field, nor introduce ministries that cannot be duplicated or sustained by the national church.
• The trip will not replace employment opportunities for local nationals.
• The trip’s cost aligns as economically as possible with the trip’s purpose. For example, if the trip seeks generally to evangelize Yemenis, this can be accomplished in Dearborn, MI. If the trip seeks to provide upgraded IT capacity for a technology training school in Yemen, run by missionaries, the trip must occur in Yemen.