**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
Author: Lynn Green
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50th Celebrations in Lausanne
**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
Marti and I are preparing to go to Lausanne for the 50th anniversary YWAM training at the former Hotel Golf. Very personal memories come flooding back as I think about it. But they are also memories of the beginnings of a movement that would change the world.
August in 1969, is when I arrived and was told to join a few others in a prayer walk/search for a place to have our School of Evangelism. At the time, we were camping in the back yard of a small house Loren and Dar had rented. I didn’t expect to be camping when I decided to embark upon a year of training with YWAM. But Loren and Darlene Cunningham were just continuing their adventure of obeying God. He had said to start a training school in Switzerland, and they had obeyed by doing what they could. They rented a house in the area they felt was the right one, just up the hill a couple of miles from Lausanne; then they invited all the incoming students and returning teams to join them in the adventure of seeking God and obeying.
Francis_Shaeffer_Lecture ©YWAM archive.We found the hotel all boarded up; Loren approached the lady who owned it and she agreed to rent it to YWAM for a couple of weeks for the teams returning from summer outreaches. We all joined in the adventure of opening the old hotel up, cleaning it thoroughly and celebrating God’s provision for us. Later the owner agreed to rent it to us for another period of three months for our lecture phase of the school.
©YWAM archive.In that first SOE in Lausanne, an initial summer of outreach was followed by three months of language courses in Spain or France or Germany. As a result, the lecture phase of three months began just after Christmas. The outreach was challenging, the months of learning German was helpful but faded with time and little use, but the lecture phase was transformational! I went into that first quarter of 1970 as an immature and unstable young Christian. I came out with a well-grounded faith that would be a firm foundation for life.
There was much more to that experience than a personal transformation. I had no idea that a momentous movement had begun. The concept of short-term training with outreach experience woven in, would lead to explosive growth in the number of missionaries.
What a privilege to be in at the beginning!
Lynn Green.
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A Talented Life Lived to the Full
My Dad, Charlie Green, passed peacefully into eternity yesterday, August 17, just three days short of his 96th birthday. Appropriately, my daily Bible reading included Proverbs 10:27 “Fear of the Lord lengthens one’s life, but the years of the wicked are cut short.”
The One who “forms us in the womb” gave Dad an astonishing range of abilities:
he would quote long passages of poetry,
used a vocabulary that had those of us around him reaching for a dictionary,
started firing a boiler at a tomato-processing plant in his early teens,
was a chemist in a uranium-processing plant,
ran a munitions assembly line at night during WWII while attending Bible College,
was a watch maker,
qualified as a master electrician and master gas-fitter,
played the steel guitar and baritone horn,
started and ran his own construction business for over 20 years.
The hardest part of that 20-year period was when the local electricians’ union boss thought the union should have more say in the management of the business. Dad clearly thought otherwise and was never reticent to say what he thought. He had 45 employees at the time and, on the orders of the union boss, some of them began to sabotage his company. They destroyed or stole tools, they worked slow, they put sugar in the gas tanks of his pickup trucks, destroying engines. Those actions put him deep into debt, but he refused to declare bankruptcy. Rather, he found other sources of revenue—but it meant more work. He and Mom ran a laundromat and a string of hot-drink machines. I remember many nights where I was either with Mom, helping to clean and mop the laundromat or with Dad helping to service the drinks machines. The steady stream of quarters mounted up and all the debts were paid. Meanwhile he streamlined the business and entered a period of greater prosperity.
While running the business, he moved the family to a 30-acre farm where we had fruit trees, grew sweet corn, melons, tomatoes, beans and other vegetables, kept milk-cows, a couple of horses, sheep, chickens and turkeys. He wanted to teach his kids to work—and eventually he succeeded. My Dad and Mom paid their biggest compliment when they said of anyone, “He/She is a good worker!”
At the point when the business was most prosperous, my sister, Deyon, and I attended a YWAM School of Evangelism near Lausanne, Switzerland. When we visited home after that SOE, Dad and Mom saw the changes in our lives and were hungry for what God had done in our lives. Dad put the business on hold and the two of them attended the SOE in Switzerland in 1976.
Not long after that school, the Lord worked miraculously for Dad and Mom to start YWAM in Western Colorado and acquire a large, high mountain property for training young people. He closed the businesses and for years they worked in tandem with street outreach teams in Hollywood. When a young person, usually a run-away, gave their lives to Christ, they were given the opportunity to go to YWAM, Cimarron, Colorado. There, Dad and Mom would teach them life skills with a strong focus on character development. Hundreds of young people developed disciplined, fruitful lives. They could learn to cook, bake, cut timber and run a lumber mill, drive heavy equipment, maintain a hydro-electric plant, mine coal, raise their vegetables, fish for part of their protein and hunt deer and elk for the rest. They didn’t have to pay to stay at the camp because Dad and Mom had made it self-sustaining.
Dad and Mom were both pilots and for years Dad had a Cessna Centurion, six-seater airplane. When the camp was well established, he was approached and offered a job by the founders of a large company. He flew to work four days a week and built up an electrical department of over 200 employees at their industrial company. The income he earned was used to keep developing the YWAM camp. Dad and Mom continued working and living in the Cimarron valley, running the general store that was part of the YWAM base until they were in their late 70s and early 80s. Then Mom had a fall on icy snow and broke her wrist and they had to move to lower elevation.
They had a house built for them back in our home town of Grand Junction where they lived happily for several years before declining health and strength required them to move to assisted living and then into a room in a complex that has 24-hour nursing care. We would not have expected Mom to outlive Dad, but she has. She is 93 and her abilities to perceive and communicate are increasingly limited. They have been inseparably together for many years, (they celebrated their 75th anniversary in June this year) so we don’t expect Mom to survive much longer without Dad at her side.
A week ago, I was about to set out on a 100-mile high-altitude hike on the Continental Divide Trail in Colorado, when I received news that my Dad had taken a fall and broken his hip. He had had good balance and mobility until very recently, so I knew this was likely to mark the beginning of the end of his life. My two dear sisters, Deyon and Charlotte, contacted me and encouraged me to continue with the planned hike. My friend of 65 years, Doug Sparks, and I completed our hike a week later and the day after I returned home, Dad slipped away.
I sit here with tears of gratitude and loss welling up.
Anyone reading this might think that this dynamic couple had no time to be parents or to have friends. But we were surrounded by friends. Four or five families would often meet at Church on Sunday morning and decide to have a picnic dinner in the mountains around our town. Each family would have prepared their dinner “to go”, just in case. The parents and kids were all close friends and have remained so.
When the business and financial pressures were the greatest, Dad still almost always took Wednesday afternoons off in the summer so our family and the other families could go water-skiing together. They also took us skiing in the winter. Dad and Mom very rarely missed one of my football games or wrestling matches. Dad wasn’t very good at verbalizing his love, but he said it in so many ways that we could not miss it. In later years he became softer and much more ready to hug any and all of us and tell us how much we meant to him.
As I read over this summary, all too brief for a life so well lived, I feel not just gratitude and loss, but a sober reflection on Luke 12:48, “When someone has been given much, much will be required.”
A memorial service will be held at Canyon View Vineyard Church, Sunday September 8th, 2 p.m.
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The Dead are Raised and the Chinese are One
Photo by Alan Cabello from Pexels
**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
Some of our experiences this past month
I would like to recount one extra story to you and then the remainder of this report can be about our unprecedented meetings in Hong Kong. Marti and I were at a youth prayer event in East Sussex for a day and met a man I had heard of but never met. Dennis was mentored by my dear friend, Guenther Krallmann, who lived with us at Highfield Oval for many years. Dennis’s story of recent events was amongst the most encouraging we have heard.
He was on a trip abroad with a group when he began to feel very unwell and steadily weaker. He went to a doctor and after tests was told he had a ruptured appendix and would not be able to fly home the next day as scheduled. Though that was the diagnosis, he felt strongly that he should fly home anyway.
Three days later he was back in London and feeling weaker, so was taken to A and E. He is the pastor of a praying church of about a thousand people in North London and the congregation were in prayer for his healing, but he declined and died. He was certified dead, but the praying church cried out to God that they would not accept his death—that he MUST live! As they redoubled their prayer, his body roused, he took a deep breath and shouted,
“I will not die, I will live!”
The shocked hospital staff opened his abdomen, cleaned up the infection as best they could and put him in an induced coma for five days. When he regained consciousness, he was surprised and a little embarrassed to hear himself preaching. As the hours passed, he discovered that he had preached a lot during the five days and that hospital staff and patients had been deeply impacted.
He went on to tell me how so many of the people in his part of London were aware of his illness and now know the whole story. But, he explained, “The thing I like the most is talking to the poor and marginalized on the streets where I am not known. That is where God is moving the most!” I am looking forward to more fellowship with Dennis.
Hong Kong
Our week in Hong Kong started in the same vein. We met a humble evangelist (I’ll call him Ahmed) working in some of the most closed countries in the Middle East. He trained as a priest, but it was just a job to him until he met Jesus and was filled with the Holy Spirit and power. He had to flee his country on the sub-continent because powerful people were seeking to kill him. Life was very difficult for an exile in M.E. countries where the Christian faith cannot be freely proclaimed.
At 2 a.m. one morning his phone rang and a man on the other end demanded, “Who are you!” Ahmed, confused, asked the same question of his caller. Eventually, the man explained that he was in a state of desperation and had suddenly seen a telephone number written in lights on the ceiling above his bed, so he called the number. The caller demanded that Ahmed should come to him immediately, but Ahmed had no car and no way of getting there, so the man sent his driver the next morning. That was the first of many miracles that opened a door to the most influential families in the region and many members of those families have become followers of Jesus. They have even given him a large piece of property so he can train more people to be like him.
Ahmed pastors a church of several hundred now. One night he received a phone call from a desperate member of his church who was in a morgue. A friend of his was very ill, had died and was taken to the morgue, but this man had a deep faith that, even though a death certificate had been issued and he was holding a copy of it, his friend was not meant to die. Ahmed was still waking up and didn’t know what to do, but heard himself saying, “Lay your phone on your friend!” He began to pray and rebuke the spirit of death. After a short time, the friend who had died began to shrug her shoulders. She went on to regain full health and is alive today. That was one of three people recently resurrected. (This report would be a lot longer if I told the details of those stories.)
There is no doubt that “the harvest is ripe” in some parts of the world that we used to think were the hardest to reach. The work of the Holy Spirit, often in signs and wonders cuts right through all the usual arguments and objections to the Good News.
Mainly about the Chinese
After a couple of days of preliminary meetings, we moved to the Asia World-Expo centre near the HK airport and were joined by nearly 10,000 Chinese. The great majority were from the mainland, but others were from Chinese majority and Chinese minority nations around East Asia. The cultures, political views and values vary a lot between these nations and the tensions between Hong Kong and China was particularly acute. (We were near or passing through demonstrations at both locations but never felt at risk.)
Oneness
The theme was around the prayer of Jesus in John 17, that we may be one as He and the Father are one. I was so deeply impressed that the political differences could be openly discussed but without any heart division. The mainland Chinese could explain that political dissent and demonstrations would never enter their minds. Their approach to the Kingdom of God does not include political action. After very honest discussions, they simply committed themselves to stand together, though that might mean arrest or even death. It’s one thing to be prepared to suffer for our own convictions, but something much deeper to be prepared to suffer for convictions we do not share. They have a deep understanding of the importance of oneness. Those of us from Western nations were deeply challenged, as we so often are by the Chinese.
I was WRONG
That brings me to my confession. In 2012, an American with the reputation of a prophet conducted a prophetic act at the same Expo centre. He gave Chinese leaders a very large decorative key and proclaimed that the anointing for leadership was passing from American hands to Chinese hands. When I watched a recording of that, I was unhappy. There were a several reasons for my reaction, but my main thought was about nationalism.
Christian leadership has often been skewed by nationalism. In fact, we were at the Expo again in 2013 to offer our apology and express remorse for British nationalism which led to the opium wars of the 19th century. The loyalty of some missionaries to the British Empire damaged the purity of the gospel for two centuries. I have seen damage done all over the world when British, or Dutch, or French or American nationalism and superiority were packaged with the Good News.
To view that ceremony of apology and the emotional responses of Chinese people (video bellow)
There is no doubt that Chinese nationalism is generally on the rise. It is very common to hear Chinese people say that they used to be ashamed of being Chinese, but now they are proud of their growing power and achievements. But for the past six years we have been in close fellowship with many senior leaders of Chinese church networks—some of which number in the millions. We love and admire and joyfully submit to their extraordinary love, gentleness and power in the Holy Spirit.
Yes, I believe an anointing for global leadership in the Body of Christ is on the Chinese. But it is not the kind of leadership that some Western nations have exercised. These are humble servant leaders who are easy to underestimate. They often don’t lead from the front, they lead in prayer and spiritual authority. They do not push themselves forward, but they eagerly serve when needed.
Oneness Equals Authority
There were no guest speakers to draw the crowds to this event and there were few plans for the sessions. We met for three and four-hour sessions to worship and see what God would do. We expected that He would bring about deeper unity in the global Chinese family and that’s exactly what happened. It occurred through brokenness, worship, celebration, weeping, joy and bold proclamations.
From the Scriptures, especially John 17 and Ephesians 1-3, we know that we are meant to have great authority on the earth, but we also know there are conditions. The foremost condition, and the hardest one, is that we might be one. Anyone who has lived the Christian life for very long knows that the oneness of John 17 is impossible in human terms. Now we have witnessed that the Holy Spirit can impart that oneness, doing what is not possible for human beings.
Help Needed!
From the beginning of the events in Hong Kong, some of us Brits and other Europeans felt that we wanted to ask the Chinese to come and help us. By the end of the event, we were desperate for their help. When I expressed that need to one of the senior leaders whom I know best, she beamed her welcoming smile back to me and said;
“We have wanted to do that for a long time!”
Where to from here?
There were about 20 Brits in the Hong Kong meetings and we are not the kind of leaders who can announce a meeting and get everyone to come. How do we proceed? We are asking God to show us. What we do know is that God is not finished with Britain, the rest of Europe or other Western nations. He wants to do a redemptive work in our nations too. Join us in prayer that we will move in unison with the will and purposes of God!
Lynn Green.
Lynn Green 