Friday 1 January 2021

Youth with a Passion (Part 1)

Notice:

Effective from 1st January Fri (2021), HOPE OF LIFE NEWS will be published out three times a month wherever there’re five weeks of the month. HOL will continue its’ twice a month publication in the months of four weeks as per normal. 

Article:

In its first 50 years, YWAM has deployed four million workers in 240 countries. Now it sets its sights on 152 remaining unreached people groups. Youth with A Mission (YWAM) is known more for its volunteer short-term mission trips and student discipleship than for humanitarian work.

Last July, monsoon rains pounded Pakistan and created an unprecedented crisis in the country, submerging one-fifth of its landmass under water, killing more than 2,000 people, and leaving 20 million injured or homeless and facing the threat of starvation and disease. Among the hundreds of faith-based, secular, and government relief groups that responded, one evangelical organization not usually recognized for emergency relief took quick action at the local and global level. In Karachi, the capital of Sindh Province, students enrolled in YWAM's Discipleship Training School and staff nationwide mobilized immediately.

Within two months, 10 short-term YWAM response teams were on the ground in Pakistan, distributing medicine and clothing and taking food packets by donkey to remote villages where other relief groups had few connections. After the flooding, Lis Cochrane, a former YWAM field leader for South Central Asia, worked her contacts in the United States. She convinced youth groups, college students, and business owners to contribute funds for 100,000 water filters, as requested by desperate Pakistani government officials.

“We're bringing a message that God loves them and we want to help them,” says the 48-year-old Swiss-American, who in 1985 was jailed in Nepal for preaching while on assignment with YWAM.

YWAM, launched half a century ago by Loren Cunningham in his parents' garage, is active in 180 nations, making it one of the world's most widely dispersed evangelical missions groups. YWAMers, as members call themselves, undertake an enormous range of ministries: caring for Chechen refugees living in Poland; rebuilding Burmese villages after Cyclone Nargis; sharing the gospel through sports at the FIFA World Cup in Cape Town; sheltering the children of prostitutes in Pune, India; and distributing Bibles in Patagonia on the southern tip of South America.

Steve Douglass, president of Campus Crusade for Christ International, calls Cunningham “a person who pursued the scope of the Great Commission and who embodies the Great Commission by going to every country in the world. I don't know anyone else who has done that.” Indeed, since its inception, YWAM has deployed more than four million people on outreach projects in 240 countries (some of which no longer exist as sovereign states).

YWAM's 50th anniversary celebrations had culminated at its headquarters in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, November 29 to December 4. Last year, Cunningham and his wife, Darlene, participated in 43 regional celebrations, including in Nepal and Mongolia, where Christians attempting outreach face significant legal and cultural barriers.

Voice In The Desert:

YWAM is facing new challenges in a leadership transition and in its ongoing mission of world evangelization. Last year, while Cunningham, 75, celebrated his 50 years of ministry with a capstone global tour, the ministry's top leaders chart the organization's next steps. The reserved Cunningham rarely consents to interviews. But in July he sat down for two days with Christianity Today in Kona, talking at length about YWAM's past, present, and future.

Cunningham's accomplishments cannot be grasped without considering the gamble he took four years into the ministry, and a dramatic incident that followed. Overseas missions in the 1960s were top-down and slow-to-innovate enterprises, and outreach across denominational boundaries was infrequent and problematic. But in 1964, Cunningham decided to leave the relatively safe cocoon of the Assemblies of God by opening YWAM to all denominations.

Denominational officials believed that Cunningham had proven himself with his idea of leading youth on short-term mission trips. They offered him a good salary, a desk job in the executive suite at headquarters in Missouri, and a small staff. But they told him he had to limit mission trips to once a month and involve only teens from the Pentecostal fellowship.

Instead, Cunningham resigned, unwilling to compromise on the vision he believed God had given him eight years earlier: millions of evangelistic young people from all denominations crashing like waves onto the shores of every continent. He struck out on his own with Darlene, then his wife of one year. They left the denominational headquarters in Missouri to drive to California to speak at a church. As Darlene drove the van across the Arizona desert, Loren drifted to sleep. Then a tire blew. The van rolled three times, throwing the couple from the vehicle.

‘'YWAM's goal is to focus on where we are not. We're intentionally trying to go to the least-reached areas, where medical needs, poverty, and illiteracy are the greatest.’ – David Joel Hamilton, vice president for strategic innovation

When Cunningham came to, he caught sight of his wife's limp body and rushed to cradle her. – He found no pulse. Blood and tears streamed down his face into Darlene's open, glassy eyes. He suddenly felt there never would be a greater time of testing. He says he clearly heard God ask, “Loren, do you still want to serve me?”

He wondered what he would have left to live for if his wife died, but he said, “Okay, God. Whatever it takes. I give you my life.” He then prayed for Darlene, and she started gasping for breath. She recovered fully.

Ever since, Cunningham has not lost a deep trust in God, which has sustained him through everything from flying in an airplane with no gas in a Togo jungle to simultaneous battles with hepatitis and malaria in Chad.

Discipleship School:

With a volunteer force topping 20,000 – and more than 50 percent non-Western – one of YWAM's greatest ongoing challenges is discipleship training. Each volunteer regardless of nationality, race, denomination, or age must attend a six-month Discipleship Training School (DTS).

One of these schools is located in Kona, on Hawaii's Big Island. University of the Nations sits on 110 acres encompassed by palm trees on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Mynas squawk loudly at sunrise. Geckos dart across the sidewalks. A cruise ship is docked in the harbor below. Often classes are held outdoors in the temperate climate.

Since 1969, the number of YWAM participants has grown at an annual rate of about 13 percent. Each of the 50 flagpoles at the Kona fountain entrance has a different flag, representing the nationalities of students on campus. About 1,100 short-term missionaries are sent out from the campus each year, and 60 of them go on to become long-term missionaries.

Students study the Bible, learn about cross-cultural missions, and pray. Cunningham, who still spends most of his time teaching, leads classes at Kona. “Loren is a superb raconteur who can leave young minds spellbound in rapt attention,” says Don Stephens, who served as an YWAM senior leader for three decades. Cunningham teaches students to seek God’s voice and then obey, even if resources aren’t visibly present. For decades he has taught that if a leader and student pray about a situation and hear from the Holy Spirit, a consensus will be evident. In this way, for four decades Cunningham has been teaching what leaders Francis Chan, Reggie McNeal, and David Platt stress today.

Students view Cunningham as an approachable patriarch – a tidier version of Will Geer as Grandpa Walton. Unassuming, soft-spoken, and whimsical, he is a man whom 20-year-olds are comfortable approaching for hugs. University of the Nations offers more than the six-month discipleship’ training course, and its academic ministry reaches beyond Hawaii. The university has 500 campuses in 138 locations. Those earning ‘bachelor’s or master's degrees in everything from counseling to linguistics must study on at least two continents. The university uses the modular approach, offering intensive focus on a topic followed by hands-on experience in the field. Instructors are volunteers and experts in their fields, and have included author and journalist David Aikman. (The university has not sought accreditation in the U.S.)

Early Difficulties:

Some YWAM leaders describe Darlene, who, like her husband, is the child of an Assemblies of God pastor, as the translator of the vision. The enthusiastic, feisty, and energetic 71-year-old preaches and teaches leadership development around the world and has a knack for spotting talent.

According to Darlene, the most difficult period in YWAM's history started in 1973, when the ministry was forced to forfeit $100,000 that had been deposited on a ship. Leaders had planned to use the money for ministry. Cunningham says the episode was a costly lesson in the importance of integrity and honesty, and the dangers of being overconfident and self-reliant. “We had taken the Lord's glory and put it on a vessel,” Cunningham says, choking up in recalling the confession and repentance that followed.

By 1978, YWAM inaugurated Mercy Ministries, which developed a fleet of ships serving as floating hospitals to provide food, medical supplies, and dental care. Stephens, who took a trip with YWAM to the Bahamas at age 18 in 1964, oversaw the process of turning a former luxury liner into YWAM's first hospital ship 32 years ago. Mercy Ships functioned as an independent entity under YWAM until it split off in 2002, when YWAM directors sensed it had grown too large.

That lack of possessiveness has earned Cunningham respect among mission agencies, most of which have YWAM alumni in their ranks. “We train up some and they go elsewhere,” Cunningham says. "YWAM is like a bridge: easy to get on and easy to get off. It's not to be a cul-de-sac to trap people."

Sometimes the opposite occurs when a smaller ministry comes under YWAM's umbrella. Melody Green brought Last Days Ministries under that umbrella after the death of her singer-songwriter husband, Keith, in a 1982 plane crash. “YWAM is my tribe,” Green, 64, says. “These are the people who have walked with me through life.”

In the early years, Cunningham endured criticism that “thrill-seeking” Western youth and unqualified nationals interfered with the work of career missionaries trained in the West. “In 1960, the whole missions movement was based on a white man going to non-white people,” Cunningham says. He recalls being privately rebuked by a veteran American missionary serving in Nigeria in 1961 because Cunningham had told a group of Nigerian nationals that they too could be missionaries.

At the time, short-term missions seemed outside the box, but Cunningham believed that Jesus implemented the technique by sending out disciples on brief excursions. Mission leaders in the early 1960s also told Cunningham that young missionaries should be paid by their sending organization so they could be held accountable, something they felt young people especially needed. Cunningham insisted that youth needed to raise their own support, noting’ that “Joseph, Daniel, David, and John Mark were all teenagers.”

No one in YWAM – including Cunningham is paid. Each YWAM employee raises his or her own funds, and some have left lucrative careers to serve on staff. Cunningham, who draws Social Security, is backed by 15 donor couples and says he lives on less than six figures. Cunningham signed over to the mission the royalties from his 1984 book,“Is That Really You, God?” which recounts the early years of YWAM and has been published in 115 languages.

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 the responses of welfare organizations to take a quick action of rescue efforts at the local level of Singapore sending her medical teams out into nations around world from various agencies of organizations on a global front being recognized as first world class medical team in South-East Asia. Do pray for Christians in medical teams to convey the message to people that God loves them as they offer to help them out.

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