Growth
through Innovation:
Miriam Adeney, professor of world
Christian studies and author of Kingdom Without Borders: The Untold Story of
Global Christianity, says YWAM is “doing the whole gamut of witness,
discipling, and serving the poor and oppressed, especially in doing integrated
holistic community development.” For example, in Colombia, Enith Diaz
started YWAM Medellin 15 years ago to provide shelter and basic health care to
displaced families. Since then, the outreach has grown to provide grief
counseling, agricultural training, and public health programs. During a recent
clinic in a village, the medical team treated 1,000 people in four days.
David Joel Hamilton, vice
president for strategic innovation at Kona, says YWAM works in three main
areas: evangelism, training, and mercy ministries. These are built around Mark
16:15 and Matthew 28:18-20, with the goals of personal redemption and social
transformation. The more groundbreaking the ministry, the better, says
Hamilton, who has been with YWAM for 33 years. Leaders focus on what they call
the seven spheres of society: the family, economics, government, religion,
education, media, and “celebration,” which includes’ the arts, entertainment,
and sports.
Media arts and production have
grown rapidly. On the Kona campus, Cunningham’s 39-year-old son, David, runs
the Global Virtual Studio film institute, which can link to 100 locations using
high-definition video.
David has been a film director on
Hollywood movies for Disney and 20th Century Fox. But he also networks with
YWAM graduates and interns to produce independent nonprofit projects. One film
focused on rebuilding efforts in Haiti, another on changing laws in Brazil that
tolerate infanticide among remote tribes. A synchronized editing process allows
a film to be made with volunteer talent for a fraction of the cost of a
traditionally produced feature film.
Virginia native Morgan Perry
joined YWAM directly out of high school for a three-month program as a first
step to studying filmmaking in Los Angeles or New York. Instead, she graduated
from University of the Nations in September after working in an orphanage in
Thailand and studying photography in Switzerland.
As a class project, the
articulate and poised Perry took the lead in publishing Sex + Money, a book
about students' efforts to assist victims of sex trafficking in 20 nations.
Following that, Perry has been producing a feature-length documentary, visiting
25 states and conducting 70 interviews with victims, federal agents, and
lawmakers. By January she hopes to embark on a cross-country distribution tour.
“I'm doing what I always dreamed
of doing, but it happened when I was still in school,” says Perry, who has been
interviewed as a sex trafficking expert by CNN. “YWAM took me around the
world.”
Surviving
Controversy:
From its earliest years, YWAM has
been linked to controversy. Gregory Robertson, who served on YWAM's staff from
1973 to 1979 in Germany and California, says he experienced abusive and manipulative
shepherding tactics. Some students and staff who disagreed with overseers were
viewed as rebellious against God or demon-possessed, Robertson says.
In December 2007, cult
allegations surfaced. At a YWAM facility in Arvada, Colorado, Matthew Murray,
who had attended discipleship training there, shot and killed two YWAM
volunteers. In the intense media spotlight, an anonymous source was quoted who
likened YWAM training to “cult mind-controlling techniques.”
With a volunteer force topping
20,000 – and more than 50 percent non-Western – one of YWAM's greatest ongoing
challenges is discipleship training.
At an international gathering in
the late 1970s, Cunningham says, YWAM leaders repented of a “spirit of
religious controversy” for trying to win arguments. He has refused to
debate critics ever since.
“Of course we are not a cult,”
says YWAM international chairman Lynn Green. “Talk to our many friends – Campus
Crusade, Wycliffe, Operation Mobilization – about our credibility."
YWAM has been branded as
heretical for some of its teachings. Author and Cornwall Alliance founder Cal
Beisner has criticized the group for promoting moral government theology—the
belief that God doesn't know what choices humans will make.
Cunningham says, “We have never
denied the infinite knowledge of God.”
What perturbs detractors, such as
parachurch ministry watchdog Rick A. Ross, is YWAM's decentralized structure,
which he and others claim leads to a lack of accountability in finances and
theology. Finances and legal structures are handled at the local level at 1,400
bases. Local boards usually include pastors.
“We don't dictate how to finance
something in Mozambique or Mali,” Cunningham says. “They have to make their own
decisions.”
Others see YWAM’s decentralized
structure – marked by having no headquarters – as shrewd stewardship for
avoiding a layer of salaried bureaucracy. Funds given to YWAM must be
designated for a specific worker, campus, or project.
YWAM cultivates team leadership
even at the highest levels. Dawson, a New Zealander, has been international
president since 2001. He is considered a presiding elder of the seven-member
Global Leadership Team (which includes Loren and Darlene) rather than a primary
director of a legal entity. The ad hoc network is held together by relational,
not legal, dynamics, Dawson says.
“Accountability comes from
intimacy, not organizational structure,” says Dawson, 58. The international
board holds the line on vision and values, but has no decision-making power on
spending or allocation of resources. Local pastors and business leaders create
accountability pressure in rare cases of sexual or financial misdeeds.
“If something goes wrong with us
locally, local people will step in and correct and even rebuke – the people
bearing the YWAM name,” Dawson says. “That corrective mechanism has proven to
be very powerful.”
But starting in 2010, those
corrective mechanisms are undergoing a new test in a Swedish courtroom.
According to state allegations, former Western Europe YWAM leaders Kristian
Westergard and Erik Spruyt were key players in Nordic Capital Investments, a
firm that allegedly defrauded Christian investors, including YWAM volunteers,
through a Ponzi scheme involving tens of millions of dollars. The verdict in
Sweden is due before year's end. Other investigations in the Netherlands and
Austria are under way.
Green told CT, “They preyed on
people in the Christian community. Some people of Youth With a Mission were
victims of that. It's a regrettable thing.”
On October 28, 2010 in Uppsala
District Court, Sweden, Kristian Westergard, founder of YWAM Sweden, was
convicted of gross criminal fraud. The judge sentenced him to four years in
prison for his activities with Nordic Capital Investments. He is appealing this
conviction and has denied defrauding investors.
Spruyt testified in court, but
was not a defendant in this court proceeding. Under oath, he said in 1995 he
hosted Westergard at Le Rucher, a French conference center near Geneva,
Switzerland, where 50 ministry leaders learned of Nordic Capital during a
ministry consultation.
Reaching
the Unengaged
These days, Cunningham is most
excited about fulfilling the Great Commission. A decade ago, YWAM, Campus
Crusade, and eight other ministries convened an informal association known as
Table 71, named after the place where they first gathered at the Amsterdam 2000
evangelism conference. Table 71 members are devoted to bringing the gospel to
hundreds of “unreached, unengaged people groups.”
Indeed, YWAM has segmented the
world into 4,000 geopolitical units based on evenly distributed populations. “Our goal is to focus on where we are not,” Hamilton says. “We're
intentionally trying to go to the least-reached areas, where medical needs,
poverty, and illiteracy are the greatest.”
YWAM likewise is involved in
another Great Commission-fulfilling movement, Call2All. The networking movement
was spearheaded by Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright but now is led by YWAM's
Mark Anderson. Only three years ago, Cunningham says, 639 unengaged, unreached
people groups (each with a population of 100,000 or more) existed. That number
has been reduced to 152, says Cunningham, thanks to 4,000 Call2All missionaries
planting 14,000 churches in the past three years.
YWAM is able to enter countries
closed to evangelists and pastors because students simultaneously work as
preschool teachers and physicians, among other professions.
Cunningham's 65-year-old sister,
Janice Rogers, lives at the base in Lindale, Texas, and is co-author of his
five books. She says her brother's influence cannot be taken for granted.
"When the first generation of leaders is gone, when there is realignment,
we have to make sure we don't move away from the Word of the Lord,” Rogers
says.
“What I like about the spirit of
YWAM is being willing to charge hell with a squirt gun, that go-for-it
mentality,” Douglass says. “When there is so much to criticize in this age,
[Cunningham] stands out as someone who is an encourager.”
Geoff Tunnicliffe, international
director of the World Evangelical Alliance, notes that it is commonplace now
for career missionaries to have short-term missions experience first. “YWAM has
given opportunities for ministry to people who would not have been given the
same opportunity in many other organizations,” says Tunnicliffe. “They have
brought together people from many denominations.”
YWAMers might have a Lutheran
bent in Norway, a Presbyterian emphasis in South Korea, and Anglican
sensibilities in England, and the ranks include Baptists and Catholics, Calvinists
and Arminians, charismatics and anti-charismatics.
George O. Wood, general
superintendent of the Assemblies of God, notes that few if any denominations
would have approved of Cunningham's unconventional approach 50 years ago. But
in hindsight, that risk-taking and innovation has proved to be a global
blessing, he says.
“We could have profited greatly
by a different decision being made in the 1960s,” says Wood, 69. “In the
providence of God, when the door didn't open for the Assemblies of God to embrace
the program, Loren took it inter-denominationally.
“That was a good move.”
Profile
Background:
John W. Kennedy is a CT
contributing editor based in Springfield, Missouri, and news editor of Today's
Pentecostal Evangel, the weekly magazine of the Assemblies of God.
Prayer Response to this featured article:
Do
pray for Christian missionaries to bring the gospel to the Unreached People
Groups through evangelism, training, and mercy ministries. Do pray for
Christian missionaries win souls for the Lord, they would fulfill the goals of
personal redemption and social transformation through sharing of the gospel.