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.
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