But Daugherty wasn't there to raise anybody's living standards. Her mission was to experience life in a community of Hispanic farmworkers and let herself be changed for the better.

"A modern understanding of the ministry of Jesus (recognizes) it's not about doing things for other people," she says. "It's about giving them the means to help themselves and … to really experience their struggles, so that I'm not just someone going off and saying, 'I know all the answers to all of your problems.' Because that's never the case."

Call it reverse mission, or mission through immersion. Either way, an alternative is emerging to conventional notions of what mission entails. Instead of the idea of mission as outreach to bless the less fortunate with faith or provide relief, in the immersion paradigm, missionaries go to accept hospitality, show gratitude, listen and return home with bigger hearts and broader perspectives.

Why so much hatred?

The concept, though hardly the norm in mission fields, is gaining popularity. Nearly all of the nation's 28 Jesuit colleges and universities offer at least one immersion trip. International Partners in Mission, a Cleveland non-profit, has responded to demand by adding more than two dozen immersion trips since 2003, when it offered just two. In some cases, corporations are sending teams of workers on immersion trips instead of retreats or service projects in order to ignite creative thinking.

"After 9/11, many people wonder why there is so much conflict in the world and so much hatred, which sometimes feels directed at the United States," says Joseph Cistone, CEO of the Cleveland group. "Folks often want to go and present another aspect of U.S. culture, or present the United States in a different way, and engage directly in relationships with people."

Immersion-style mission is evolving as a niche within the growing field of short-term missions, which invite Christians to put faith into action for a few days or weeks in an unfamiliar setting. About 1.6 million Americans took part in a short-term mission trip abroad in 2005, according to a Princeton University survey, and domestic trips are even more popular.

As immersion gains a small but passionate following, it's also stirring discussion among mission experts. At issue is whether the approach models what Christians are supposed to do when they engage strangers on Jesus' behalf, or if it leaves out essential components that make mission distinct from tourism.

A question of humility

For Dana Robert, co-director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University, immersion recovers key elements of the missionary experience that tend to get overlooked in most short-term trips. She notes how missionaries in prior generations spent months in cultural and linguistic training before they'd reach out to another people. Today, she says, many short-term missionaries need a refresher in the meaning and merit of humility, and immersion provides one.

"It makes sense that this (immersion) corrective would say, 'Maybe Americans should stop making a god out of their own activism and should recognize they need to listen as a starting point for making some kind of contribution,' " Robert says.

Others aren't sure trips are truly missions when participants don't aspire to witness to the Gospel. Monte Cox, director of the Center for World Missions at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., says his days spent hoeing and listening to workers in Kenyan cotton fields in the 1980s helped him be a more effective church planter there. He also acknowledges a need for today's short-term missionaries to establish better relationships by taking time to learn about their hosts.

But in his view, God calls Christians to do more than listen in the mission field. "These days, virtually everything qualifies as mission," Cox says. "Mission is more focused than simply breathing, or breathing while you live among another people. … It ceases to be mission if there is no intention to speak the truth that we go to tell."

A more hands-off approach

Instead of swinging shovels or teaching Bible school, participants in immersion trips often spend their days talking with local authorities, touring villages and hanging out in social settings.

For College of the Holy Cross senior Meg Grogan, mission trips to Kenya in 2006 and 2007 involved such adventures as sleeping in a schoolhouse under a mosquito net, playing with schoolchildren and teaching villagers the hokeypokey. Back on campus in Worcester, Mass., she has organized two fundraising events for a Kenyan school for girls. The trips, she says, have left her "more relaxed, more grateful, more at peace with who I am." And she believes Kenyans have benefited, too.

"I've seen people (on trips) hit the roadblock and say, 'What am I doing here? I'm not building a school. I'm not building a well. How am I helping?' But just to change the way Americans are perceived and the way people with money are perceived is, for these children, a greater benefit."

Enlarge By Bob Riha Jr., USA TODAY Loyola Marymount senior Melissa Daugherty, center, and Andrea Parson, right, stayed a short time with Lupe Ramirez in her trailer in Arvin, Calif. Daugherty reflects on the experience: "I'm not just someone going off and saying, 'I know all the answers to all of your problems.' Because that's never the case."

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