**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
Category: Celebration
-
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.
-
The Send (Brazil)
**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
A Youth movement of astonishing proportions is occurring around the world. At the moment, it is under the radar here in Europe, but I want to tell you about it and also to encourage you to pray that the young people of Europe will also engage with this very significant development.
Essentially, it consists of at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of committed Christian young people who really believe that they can change the world for the better. The most obvious manifestations of this movement are occurring in large events. Many know about Soul Survivor for example here in the UK but that is just one example.
A few months ago, there was a Missions called “The Send” in a stadium in Orlando with about 55 thousand people in attendance. The sense of God’s presence reported by all who were there was palpable and there were countless healings, young people committing themselves to Missions and astonishingly committing themselves to adopt a million children over the next several years! A commitment, which is linked to their deep concern over how many babies are killed in the womb.
The YWAMers and others who have formed a collation for “The Send” felt God saying they should go to Brazil next. While I was in the Middle East with some of them just a few days back, they opened registration for a stadium event in São Paulo. The stadium has a capacity of 65 thousand. In the first few hours the website was open that capacity was exceeded. Those who registered had to pay too, and still it was exceeded. They closed the registration site after 28 hours because nearly 125,000 had registered or tried to, only to find that all places were taken within the first few hours.
The Send Brazil (Trailer)
Whilst in the Middle East I met with some of the younger leaders who are organising event. They had just finished praying about what to do about their “problem”. As I write they are exploring the availability of two other large stadia in São Paulo. This Brazilian “The Send” will happen on February 8th and has already served to illustrate that a great Missions movement has arisen in Brazil. I am excited about that!
Word about “The Send” is spreading rapidly around the world. Now it’s not hard to imagine that a million new missionaries could be added to the “labourers in the harvest”. In our life-time, we could see the scriptures available to every home on earth. And the good news about the grace of God in Christ Jesus could be proclaimed to every person on earth!
Lynn Green.
-
Happy Birthday To Me!
**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
Join me in celebrating my 43rd birthday! I woke up this morning feeling so energetic and fit that I decided that is what I am—43 years old.
Never mind that I have some numbers and words written on a birth certificate that says I am in my 71st year. Those are just scribbles on paper. I choose to self-identify myself 43 because that is what I feel. I haven’t had any heart arrhythmia issues for 6 months, my energy levels are up and I feel great. I am really grateful for that, so I would like everybody to join in with me to celebrate my 43rd birthday.
You may think that I am just making a feeble joke here and perhaps I am. On the other hand I was thinking about the 69 year old who has been in the papers recently. He is taking legal action to get his original birth date changed so that he can legally be 49 on his tinder profile, because he is not attracting young enough women to his site. He figures if he is 49 then more younger women will read his profile. Good luck with that, Mister!
AM I JUST BEING SILLY?
The thing is, most people read that in the newspaper or online and they think it’s silly and dismiss it. But is it that easy?
Here is the big question: why do we not take that seriously, but we feel we must take it seriously when a person, who is male, self-identifies as female or a female identifying as male.
What is the reasonable basis for making a distinction? I am not trying to alienate anybody here; I just want to know how we, as a society based upon law, can make a distinction. Is it because one seems frivolous, superficial and self-interested but the other must be sincere? How can we know who is sincere and who is not. More importantly, how can the law decide that. How can society decide that? What is the basis?
I am really serious about this; it is an issue of great importance to those of us who live in Western democracies. Do we have any grounds for over-ruling feelings that are sincere and deeply held without doubt? Why do we feel we must take gender dysphoria seriously but not age dysphoria? On what basis do we think that?
I’M NOT INTENDING TO OFFEND
I know that writing about this is going to seem offensive for some people, but the trouble is we have been assuming feelings are more important than more objective reality for a long time. I can say that my birthday was assigned to me by the medical profession, so it’s only a date when they say I was born. Or I can say that my biological gender was assigned to me at birth. But actually both my date of birth and my sex are objective realities. There were many people who could witness that I was born a male on April 14, 1948.
Some people claim that the sex of a baby is often not clear, but that is not true. There may be one child in 5000 where gender is not clear at birth. Even then, the chromosomes are almost always clear one way or another. Gender, or more accurately sex, is not assigned at birth, it is observed.
IF I AM SUFFICIENTLY SINCERE, IS IT TRUE?
Let me hasten to say that I am not suggesting here that we don’t take it seriously and compassionately when a person feels their body sexual identity does not match their feelings about their gender. But neither can we simply agree that the greater truth will always be in their self-identity. This purely subjective approach to truth will not work for us. We won’t be able to live with it. If we decide that deeply-held beliefs trump observed reality, we will unleash chaos. Such an approach would require our courts to decide whether or not someone holds a particular belief about themselves deeply enough to let it take precedence over objective realities. And that would be entirely unworkable.
Many humanities courses in our Universities have promoted this subjective approach to truth for several decades and now we are experiencing consequences. It is based on the philosophical idea that objects cannot generate truth; truth “is in the eye of the beholder”. In other words, reality is what we perceive it to be. There is some truth in that, but by carrying that idea to the extreme we end up with an unlivable world. When each person decides what is true for themselves, nothing is true.
HOW CAN WE KNOW?
Is there a way out of this? Of course! There was a time when it was assumed that all truth came only by revelation, so art and philosophy centered round revelation from God. There is some truth in that too, but it is insufficient.
Then we gradually transitioned into a new epoch in which people decided that all reality has to be determined by the scientific method. That is, anything that is true must be verifiable by objective means: experiments must be possible and the resulting data will prove or disprove the proposed truth. That method is also insufficient. It can often tell us “what or how” but it cannot tell us “why”.
As a Biblical Christian, I believe in revelation and I also believe in the great value of the scientific method. When we put those two together, we have a means of knowing what is true. Human beings can still receive revelation from God. As the philosopher, Dr Francis Schaeffer said in the title of one of his books, “He is There and He is Not Silent”. We have also expanded our knowledge hugely over the past two centuries by using the scientific method. We put those two together and we have a basis for truth that we can live with.
TRUTH IS LIVEABLE
All philosophies for life, or presuppositions, have to be evaluated by living them. Post-modern, relativistic thinking leads to chaos. Religious tyranny springs from claims that all truth comes only by divine revelation. The scientific method alone provides no answers to the really big issues of life. We must regain confidence in the idea that there are universal truths and then live by them.
So am I 43? Well, on another day I might feel like I am 78, so I will just go with the numbers on my birth certificate. I’m nearer 71 than 70 and I’m just very grateful for the health and energy I am experiencing.
Lynn Green.
Lynn Green 