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As a missionary, I am often asked about short-term mission trips: Are they harmful? Can they be better? Were we wrong when we were trying to help?

This kind of question is fairly new. Not so long ago, it was routine for American churches to send a bunch of teenagers to a poorer country to paint a church and play soccer with some local kids. But now many Christians are examining the power differentials in missions and asking -- quite appropriately -- whether short-term trips make theological, ethical, or practical sense.

Some even argue for doing away with short-term trips altogether, and they have a good point: If you were contacted by a wealthy Korean church that wanted to send a short-term mission trip to your church, what would you tell them? How would you feel if a dozen rich teenagers were to descend on your community and take pictures with the kids in your nursery? What kind of work would you assign to help them feel "useful"?

I'm not quite willing to say all short-term missions must go. Yet here at the end of another summer mission-trip season, I do want to offer a missionary's perspective on different kinds of short-term missions and how to make yours -- if you do them -- as functional and faithful as possible.

We'll start with the ugliest kind of mission trips: the ones that seem for all the world to be designed for Instagram. These trips are mutually exploitative. A church or ministry in the developing world wants wealthy foreigners to visit as a means of attracting local attention and secure overseas donations, and it does this by creating an experience that makes the visitors feel good about themselves.

This can include (but is hardly limited to) setting up opportunities to take pictures with cute kids living in poverty, creating some kind of make-work project for Western teenagers, or recruiting a bunch of people to claim they've given their lives to Christ so that visiting preachers can tally up a big score of "souls saved." These kinds of trips are becoming rarer as people on both sides of the arrangement become wiser to the damage they do, but they still happen.

To avoid a trip like this, consider questions like these: How much work will your visit be for the people receiving you? Will the visitors do anything truly useful, something locals couldn't do for themselves with sufficient funding? What will the long-term relationship be between visitors and the receiving ministry? How does the visitors' work connect to the broader vision of that ministry? Can that work be continued on an ongoing basis, or will it only make things harder for local people in the long run?

For example, consider medical missions, which is my field. It's relatively simple to do a few life-changing surgeries that don't require any follow-up and could not happen without out-of-town expertise; these trips are usually worthwhile. But trips in which visiting health professionals simply hand out medicine will generally have little long-term effect and may even discourage people from investing in their local health infrastructure.

Looking at long-term effects is particularly vital when we're thinking about dependency: Will a short-term trip make the host ministry more or less sustainable? This is a tricky question because different ministries have different needs. For example, most of us expect the pastors of our local churches to be dependent on tithes and offerings for their salaries, even if they take other work to supplement their income. On the other hand, campus ministers who go through Reformed University Fellowship, Cru, or InterVarsity will never be able to feed their families on the donations they collect from the college students to whom they minister. So some ministries can be financially self-sustaining, but many require ongoing funding from people other than those they serve.

Sometimes dependence is appropriate and even permanent, but sometimes it can become malignant. Think of nations that become so used to handouts from wealthier countries that they never build up their own economies. In the same way, something has gone awry if a hosting church learns to rely on foreign donations instead of asking its own congregants to feed local orphans -- or if it drops all evangelism projects because the American teenagers will arrive to do them soon enough.

Speaking of orphans, perhaps the single most problematic aspect of short-term missions is how they tend to engage with orphanages. Christian and secular voices alike have called for an end to orphanages because they are worse for children than family care or foster care -- this is why we no longer have orphanages in developed countries. Children in orphanages are often vulnerable to abuse, and many have one or more living parents who only relinquish their children to improve their chances at a decent education.

Orphanages are popular destinations for short-term trips because the emotional connection visitors form with orphans over a single, intense week often translates into ongoing financial support from afar. Churches should avoid these trips and instead help existing ministries transition to a different model.

So those are the bad trips. What are the good ones? Well, the best short-term mission will task visitors with doing something the receiving ministry can't do for itself while building that ministry's capacity to do more on its own in the future. A good mission trip like this should take place in the context of a long-term relationship between visitors and receivers. These trips are still a lot of work for the recipients to organize (especially when language barriers require hiring translators). But done right, the blessings last well after the visitors go home.

In my context of medical missions, this often looks like having doctors come to our hospital to see patients while teaching local health care professionals and bringing in specialized equipment. These visitors both meet immediate needs and pass their skills along to others to make a lasting impact.

Other ministries use a "training of trainers" model that equips local recipients with skills in church planting, discipleship, or evangelism. They're then encouraged to train others in turn, making further visits unnecessary.

Good trips can also be opportunities for the receiving teams to take a break from their usual workload, as visitors can shoulder or at least lighten their hospital or church responsibilities for a few weeks. Visitors could offer childcare or other services to allow clergy and other ministry workers to have rest or travel or conference time that wouldn't otherwise be feasible. Let the local pastor take a much-needed vacation.

Visitors can also multiply extant efforts. For instance, a church may already host trainings for local pastors, but a visiting team of teachers could allow them to work with a larger cohort. In the mission hospital where I work, we teach resuscitation skills to our trainees every year, and we're extremely blessed by the visitors who come during that time to help us teach and take over rounds at the hospital so we're free to focus on the courses.

We also appreciate thoughtful donations, from surgical equipment to comfort foods we can't get on the mission field. Some visitors do it all: After bringing us big bags of dried cranberries and chocolate chips, a husband operated at the hospital with our residents while his wife assisted with homeschooling the missionary kids and the visiting teens did a little soccer camp.

They will be less Instagram friendly, but good short-term trips can still serve the very understandable motives that drive the bad trips. They can still bring in funding for ministries in poor countries, still give visiting Christians -- especially young people -- a cross-cultural experience that may reshape their faith for a lifetime, still spark long-term missionary careers with a vision for lifelong service.

What differentiates the good from the bad is honesty and transparency about your self-interest in the trip andthe context of a long-term relationship between visitors and hosts.

So if you're going to another country to see firsthand the work of the ministry your church supports, don't feel as if you need to accomplish something. Just go and build that relationship. See the impact of your giving.

Or if you want your teenagers to see what poverty is really like and how Christians around the world worship God despite intense adversity, just admit that you want them to have that experience. It can be enormously valuable -- though you might not call it a mission trip.

Or if you're a student or intern who wants to shadow a professional to build your resume or explore what life is like on the mission field, be straightforward about that aim.

And if you're part of a receiving ministry, be upfront about how you want people to come so they can pray for you and give to your ministry after they leave. And if your ministry gets locals in the door because they want to gawk at foreigners, be honest with your visitors about how they help your ministry by serving as free advertising.

Short-term mission trips can be good -- if you're well prepared and wisely consider who benefits from the arrangement and how. And beyond this guidance, as you look toward next year's schedule at your church, know that there are many useful resources for best practices in short-term mission trips, especially for medical missions.

Even though my family already lives as missionaries overseas, when my kids are teenagers, I want to ensure they go on a trip. I want them to see some place more remote and difficult than where we live so they too can experience what Christian ministry looks like in a context different from ours. As the body of Christ in a time of rapid communication and transportation, we have more opportunities than ever to encourage and support one another across borders. And we have no excuse not to get it right.

Matthew Loftus lives with his family in Kenya, where he teaches and practices family medicine at a mission hospital. His book Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press.