‘Having a kid on the mission field is much better than not having a kid,’ says Carl Tinnion, national leader for Youth with a Mission (YWAM) England. Carl has been taking teenagers abroad on mission trips for 15 years – so when he and his wife had their first child 12 years ago, it felt natural to take her with them. When she was 18 months old, they went to Poland (with eight teenagers) to work in a day orphanage for three weeks.
‘Children open up doors for relationship,’ Tinnion says. ‘It humanises you rather than being seen as missionaries with an agenda, you are seen as a human being with a real family. Taking children with you gives you a discussion point and a means of meeting people.’
Tinnion’s points make logical sense. So why is it that more of us aren’t taking children abroad on mission? Youth and children’s missioner Helena Kittle says that often, it is our underlying values – which we may have inherited and perhaps haven’t even given much thought to – that cause us to shy away from the idea. ‘We need to ask ourselves what we really believe about the faith of children,’ she says. ‘What do I believe children can contribute? What difference can they make?’
Fear is also a preventative factor. ‘Fear of risks to health and safety, fear of the unknown and fear of what others will think all commonly disempower parents’, Kittle says. And of course, there are often practical factors that put parents off: cost implications, travel plans to be made and uncertainty about where a family wanting to engage in mission should even start.
Families who’ve taken the plunge
Talk to parents who have taken a risk and been on mission with their children, and you hear another story, however. Last summer, Michael and Tina English took their three children (aged nine, 13 and 15) on a week-long Tearfund Transform trip to work in South African township Mpophomeni. They went with two other families, and followed their Transform week with a family holiday. Tina English explains that they had concerns before they left. Their son would be the only boy among the eight children on the trip, and they were nervous about what their accommodation, food and the township itself, would be like.
‘It all worked out really well,’ says English, whose highlight of the trip was ‘working on the house and garden of a family where the mum had died of Aids. The widowed father and his three children lived in a very basic wooden hut. We built the vegetable garden from scratch. It was very rewarding and something all the children could be involved in. We have since been sent photos of the vegetable garden in full bloom, so we feel we made a long-term impact.’
She also recalls: ‘It was very cold on a number of days, something we had not expected, especially as the only heating was a single bar electric fire. But it drew us together as a team. All three families would huddle up under blankets in the evenings and play games. We all commented on how this is what church should be like – doing life together.
‘Also, when we were cold, the children would say, “But what about poor Mr R and his three children in that wooden hut?” It brought home the harsh reality of the lives of people less fortunate than us.’
Last year, Tim Huband and his four children (aged eight, 12, 17 and 19) went to the Philippines to visit the child that they sponsor through CompasssionUK. Their sponsored child Erwin is one of eight children; he and his family live in two rooms in a small fishing community.
The Hubands spent a week meeting Erwin’s family, visiting the local CompassionUK project and spending time with Christians from local churches. They were able to give a Erwin’s family a gift to help his father purchase some tools for his carpentry business. ‘I wanted to form a bond between us and Erwin’s family; I don’t want this to be just about my sponsorship, but about my family connecting with Erwin’s family for the future,’ says Tim. ‘If every Western family had to be twinned with a family somewhere in the world who are impoverished, it would make an enormous difference.’
Experiences like this solidify faith in children
Risks mean results
So do we need to reconsider our approach to taking children on mission? ‘Sometimes our children’s work is genteel and full of nice Bible stories,’ says Tinnion. ‘But I do think that children can cope with a lot more, which can enable their faith to become strong. Experiences like this solidify faith in children. They help children learn how to pray out loud and how to pray for the sick. Children are capable and they can hear from God. Allowing our children to walk through these processes with us strengthens their faith, but strengthens our own faith as an adult as well.’
Tinnion also says that a short-term trip can help you reassess what mission means for your local environment. ‘It affects your home life because you’re never the same after those experiences. You’re left challenged and sharpened; reflecting on, “What’s my weakness, how am I doing in God’s mission?”’
Another, perhaps less risky, way to help children engage in mission to the poor is through child sponsorship. This can be done as an individual family, but church children’s groups also can sponsor a child together. ‘Compassion UK child sponsorship is such a positive way to engage children in helping those living in poverty,’ says Kate Sharma, media manager at Compassion UK. ‘From a really early age children can see God using them to make a real and lasting difference in his world.’ And of course, the potential is there to one day visit your sponsored child, or children, as the Huband family have done.
Kittle says that the risks we take in exposing children to a changing world are worth it. ‘We broaden their world-view as we step out. Mission for children is educational and formational, and increases their confidence, emotionally, socially and spiritually. They see the nature and character of God up close and personal, and understand his heart for people. They learn that different isn’t wrong; being British is not the only way.’
‘If I’m speaking at a conference abroad, we often go as a family. We’ve taken the children to Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand and around Europe.
It brought home the harsh reality of the lives of people less fortunate than us
A few years ago, we started to think that it would be good to design a family outreach trip – rather than it being something that my wife and I do, that we tag the kids onto. We wanted to create something centred around the children.
A few people in the church we attended – St Paul’s Holgate, in York – were interested. They had the normal anxieties that parents have: what if it goes wrong, what if the children get sick? We were also concerned… what was it like to take children abroad who had never been on outreach before?
The family who came with us on our first trip, a year ago, also had three kids. So we were four adults and six children.
Before we left we did fundraisers in the church… the children baked cakes and sold them at church, washed cars and we organised a table-top sale. We also held a fundraising banquet and the children waited at it. We wanted them to see God provide the money, but also to be proactive in fundraising; we see it as a discipleship process. These trips aren’t just about the trips themselves, it’s about the ‘pre’ and ‘post’ as well.
Before we left we met to pray as a team. We talked about the country, the food, what we were going to be doing and tackled any questions. We taught the children a bit of language; there was a big build-up to going.
The outreach trip took place in Romania, where we worked with a YWAM base in Medias. The team there work with the Roma gypsy community, who in Romania are at the bottom of the social pile. We ran educational classes for the children (particularly on dental hygiene – and we took lots of toothbrushes with us) and played football with the local kids. We also ran kids parties, showing our children that these kids had never been to a party before, or had things that might be fun in their lives or affirmed them in their identities. We took lots of English style party things with us: balloons, jelly and ice cream and English party games. This was received amazingly by the local children. We got our kids to run the games themselves; so it was peer led.
We wanted to help the children reflect on the experience while we were there, and so at the end of each day we’d talk about what they’d done that day, what they’d learnt and what they felt God was teaching them. They wrote journals and we made a video afterwards and shared feedback in our church.
‘Our two girls were 15 months and three years old when we left for Sri Lanka. We didn’t know how long we’d be there; we were moving there indefinitely to work in a poor part of Columbo where Mohan could use his skills as a doctor.
I was concerned about leaving behind our family support network, and the children missing out on building these relationships. We missed friends too. I was worried about the girls getting ill; drinking unclean water, being bitten by mosquitos. I was also concerned about being unable to get back to England, as the Tamil Tigers and the government were at war at the time – sometimes you worry irrationally.
Adoption was something we had always wondered about, and when we had been in Sri Lanka for a few years we started praying about it. One day our daughter Rebekah said to us, ‘You know sometimes children don’t have daddies and mummies, why don’t we get one of those?’ We began to give adoption serious consideration.
Because Mohan has both a British and a Sri Lankan passport, we could adopt through the Sri Lankan system. We were concerned that we would be expected to make bribes as part of the process, and right at the beginning we agreed together and before God that we wouldn’t do so. Another prayer was that if we were offered a child we would instantly fall in love with him or her no matter what. We didn’t want to put a child through an experience of rejection.
When we saw Nathan we fell in love with him instantly. Nathan is from a different cultural background to Mohan. Our adopting him broke down a cultural barrier, because traditionally there has been hostility between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.
As a nuclear family in mission you’re more dependent on one another as you don’t have extended family to lean on, so I believe we became stronger as a family through our years in Sri Lanka. It was such a privilege for our girls to have experienced another culture and another lifestyle, and I believe that it has broadened their world-view. I’m hoping that they’re more tolerant and less prejudiced today because of it. We really had to trust God for all that we needed when we were there – we were living by faith – and I hope that has influenced the way that we trust him now. We have all gained a greater understanding of how much he loves other people; people that are different to us.
If we hadn’t gone to Sri Lanka, we might not have adopted Nathan. We can definitely look back and see how God has had his hand on the plan of our lives.’
Considering taking children on mission?
If you are considering taking your own children, or those you work with, abroad on mission, what do you need to take into account? ‘You have to really think through the boundaries, and how much you expose your children to; it’s got to be more managed than a trip with teens or adults,’ Tinnion says. ‘You want to design an experience that envisions children for the big picture of missions. You want it to stretch their experience and sufficiently encourage them out of their comfort zone, but not put them off. It’s got to be really thought through. It helped that we went to a YWAM base, where there was an infrastructure and a place that was used to Westerners.’
• Families should talk though the idea together, including children from the start
• Consider how far you want to travel, costs, access to health services and vaccinations
• Look for a balance of fun, cultural education and space for children to pray and reflect
• Take into account what the kids are already good at. It is important they feel that their contribution to the team is valid
• Always fit the trip around the children; not around the other way around.
A range of charities organise mission trips suitable for children and families
• Tearfund’s Transform family trips run for one to two weeks in the Easter and summer holidays and are suitable for those with children aged seven (or year two) upwards. The trips enable your family to walk in the shoes of a local family and experience life from a different perspective. tearfund.org/go/family
• YWAM tailor make trips for families with children of allages. ywamengland.org
• CompassionUK run a child sponsorship scheme and can help arrange for sponsors to visit their sponsored children CompassionUK.org
Carl Tinnion’s children are now 12, nine and six. Two years ago, they felt inspired to launch family outreach trips with YWAM.
When Sarah and Mohan Seevaratnam’s two daughters were toddlers, the family moved to Sri Lanka, where they lived for seven years as missionaries with WEC International. They returned to the UK with a new family member…
