Bringing Your Summer Mission Trip Home

June 19, 2019

With summer in full swing, there are opportunities for fun at every turn. Family vacations, beach trips, kids camps, lazy pool days, family reunions – the list goes on and on. But for many, it’s also the time for service, with mission trips overseas and/or in nearby cities and towns.

These mission trips lay the groundwork for a great personal spiritual journey and serve as a powerful catalyst to take church members outside their natural environment and expose them to the local and global realities of the communities where people are in great need.

Have members of your church taken a mission trip this summer? If so, have you shared your experience with your church and the surrounding community? Your ministry or mission trip can have an even greater impact when you share your experiences. Here are a few tips from YouthWorks about how to bring your trip home with you:

    • Plan a church gathering where you tell about the meaningful memories from your trip from the front of the room. You might incorporate some of the ideas below in your sharing.
    • Rather than a play-by-play of what happened, write about a significant event on your mission trip. How did you feel? What did you learn?
    • Write a collection of moments, perhaps posting on social media or maybe simply writing on small slips of paper. Make each memory really short – perhaps just a sentence beginning with “That moment when…” Over 30 days, write 30 memories, then compile them all in one place. OR you might do this with your entire group, each person writing a couple memories.
    • Draw, paint, design or create something that does less telling and more showing. Share what that it means with the people around you.
    • Create a slideshow and share it in person or on social media.

However, you choose to share, remember it’s important to keep in mind that licensing is required to legally webcast Internet song performances of copyrighted music. While you are free to contact each individual song owner for each song used, many ministry leaders find this to be a time-consuming process. CCS’s WORSHIPcast Online Streaming License is a one-stop blanket license that gives you a simple way to be copyright compliant and includes more than 25 million songs from ASCAP, BMI and SESAC catalogs.

This also holds true for making CDs or DVDs. Just make sure you secure the appropriate licensing to legally use third-party copyrights. Unless a song is in the Public Domain, you must secure a synchronization license to include it in your video, or a mechanical license for CD or MP3 recordings. In addition, if you use someone else’s sound recording, you must secure a master synchronization license. In both cases, you may contact the copyright holder directly for licensing. You can download CCS’s FREE “Copyright Checklist” Fact Sheet for detailed information on how to get these licenses.

About Christian Copyright Solutions: CCS’s quest is to help churches and Christian ministries “do music right.”  CCS is an expert on church music copyrights and our primary focus is providing licensing and clear educational resources to churches, as well as representation, administration and advocacy for copyright owners. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The information contained herein is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice or a substitute for legal counsel.

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