By Kamryn Sanderfer
Contributor
Trevecca Around the Globe (TAG) is gearing up for summer trips and working to educate students and leaders on best practices for short term mission work.
“We don’t want to go in with a white savior complex. I mean, that’s the biggest thing that I think of, we’re not there to save anyone,” said Reetu Height, director of Trevecca Around the Globe. “You’re not going to convince anyone into loving Jesus, but you are going to be their friend, and then eventually, you know, maybe that will happen.”
Height began rebuilding the TAG program in 2021 after moving back to America after spending time as a missionary in West Africa. Her objective for the program was to create a place of learning where students could be exposed to different cultures, to different people, and by learning how to receive their differences, better learn how to love others. This would be done through training, and then going on a service-led trip overseas, or in the US.
Though TAG is a part of Student Development in most other Nazarene schools, Trevecca made the intentional move to switch TAG to work with the School of Theology. Height said that this was to make sure that the students that are going out on the trips have the right perspective.
“The majority of short-term mission trips that I know about and hear about, reinforce kind of this almost colonialist view of what we’re supposed to be doing, that we’re going to colonize and to change the place where we’re going,” said Kathryn Mowry, professor of intercultural studies and Christian education. “I try to teach my students instead of thinking they’re arriving with God, to go and look for where God’s already at work…even if they’re not naming the name of God, who are the people in this community that are doing the things God cares about? That will teach us so much, because God doesn’t arrive when we do.”
Mowry developed the Intercultural Studies major at Trevecca with her knowledge from serving in missions for 11 years, and her PhD in intercultural studies. While she teaches students in the intercultural studies program and prepares them for the more long-term, international internships, Height guides students from any major who signed up for TAG through the short training process and through the trip itself.
Last year, Height led a TAG trip to Jordan for two weeks. The group consisted of only four students – one of which was Holden Payseur, a junior religion major student at the time.
“I remember sitting on top of this rooftop in Amman, on one of the first days, hearing the call to prayer from all these mosques that surrounded us; and it just hit me that I was on this rooftop in the Middle East. And you know, as an American…you always hear the Middle East in a very negative term,” said Payseur. “Then you just go throughout and it’s such a beautiful country, the people are the sweetest people you’ve ever met. And on top of it, you realize even though they’re half a world away, they’re people just the same as you and me.”
Though Height mainly tries to keep TAG trips more service-oriented, most of the time students still involve religious activities in their schedule and work with local churches and Christians. The trip to Jordan, though, looked much different than other TAG trips due to Jordan’s laws on evangelism.
“If you want to tell people about Jesus, you can’t do that publicly or you will go to jail. Some people would get killed,” said Jad Bqain, a native Jordanian and freshman at Trevecca this year.
Bqain is a Nazarene Christian himself and attends one of the 13 Nazarene churches in Jordan when he is home. Of the 11 million Jordanians in the country, less than 2% are Christian, the rest being Muslim. Though Bqain’s faith leaves him separated from the beliefs of the majority in his home country, his cultural understanding of how Americans are seen and received in Jordan gives unique insight into the sensitivity of sending mission trips into that area.
“Some people [in Jordan] have bad ideas about Americans, and some have good, depending on how they are influenced. Specifically, Muslim people may judge that [Americans] are bad people who are going to go to hell because of how they act, how they are open to each other, in terms of treating like, men and women together. America has the argument about gender expression right now going on, so that’s really affecting the Middle East,” said Bqain. “Some people think that because [Americans] have authority as a country, and power, they just kill innocents – especially because of what’s happening now between Israel and Gaza.”
Bqain highlights these sensitive cultural and political barriers and says how these common preconceived beliefs in Jordan about Westerners makes it even more dangerous for an American to go to his country and share the gospel.
“It would get into violence, trouble, and the government will not side with that American, they will side with the citizens. So yeah, I just don’t advise that,” said Bqain.
Trevecca had these issues in mind when developing plans for the trip to Jordan.
Most of the trip consisted of visiting people’s houses, sharing meals with them, spending time with refugees and hearing their stories, and learning more than anything, Height said. Coming back to America having learned about a different culture was the biggest priority of the trip.
“Trevecca made it very clear that you’re engaging somebody else’s story,” said Payseur. “You are just being a part of something that God is already doing in this part of the world, that it’s not on you to fix everything that’s wrong there in two weeks.”
A huge part of the training process for TAG students, and students in the intercultural studies major, is cultural training. Mowry said that in many mission organizations she knows of, people are sent out without that training. She emphasized the harm that can be done in a place when people go out to a place with a message, without cultural training first.
“They feel like there’s this agenda, like ‘I have this body of content and I need to go and give it to people’. And that agenda comes through louder than anything in the way that we enter the culture,” said Mowry. “People can tell automatically if you’ve arrived with an agenda, and that agenda is anything other than loving them deeply and listening and learning. We arrive with a message and that message we feel like is from some outside place where we are objectively right, and we are going to be able to judge their culture by that… And I don’t believe that that should ever be.”
The TAG program continues to emphasize a constant learning mindset for students who go through the program. The next trip will take students to Alaska this summer.