**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: Current Events
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In The Image of Ceasar
Photo by Konstantin Olsen 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.**
Youth With A Mission is active in almost every nation. I am astonished at the growth we have seen in the last 50 years, and the pace of growth continues to increase because there are now around 800 training centres in YWAM and each of those is training more people to “go into all the world and preach the gospel”. Through the obedience of Loren and Darlene Cunningham, YWAM has been multiplying multipliers for five decades. That is a strategy planned by God!
In many of those nations, it is not possible to register YWAM legally because there is no provision for Christian ministries to exist. That creates several difficulties: Whose name goes on bank accounts or financial transactions? If property is rented who rents it? If a property is purchased, who owns it? What about other ministry assets such as cars or office equipment or sound equipment? How do you create a public identity? Finding good answers is not easy.
We tend to think it is much easier in the nations where Christian ministries can create non-profit, or charitable, legal entities for that ministry. But the dangers in these nations are also great.
In 1971, Loren asked Marti and me to pray about going to the United Kingdom to get YWAM established. Reona Peterson (now Joly) had been working part-time as a teacher, praying and getting to know people for the previous nine months, but YWAM was not yet a legal entity . With Loren’s advice and Reona’s help, we set up a Limited Company and then gained charitable status. Some of the people to whom Reona introduced us were willing to serve on our board and we got underway. All we had to do was submit verified accounts to Company House and the Charity Commissioners annually. Our board meetings were prayerful and mostly about supporting the work of the growing number of YWAMers in the UK.
How things have changed! And there are reasons for the changes. Some charities have been “shell organisations” set up for the purpose of obtaining visas for non-residents who would not otherwise qualify to immigrate. Some other charities were found to have employees or volunteers who abused children or vulnerable adults. Other companies or charities were facades of respectability but were really sending funds to terrorist groups. Still others engaged in party political activities and that’s not allowed. Some failed to keep their properties to good standards and put people at risk, or they engaged in high-risk adventures without taking essential safety precautions.
All these things resulted in legislation and regulations, which then changed the way our board operates and the way it relates to the YWAM volunteers. Now we must be sure we have a Risk Register”, we must be sure there is a team overseeing all our people who need, or have, visas. Government has put regulations in place to be sure that they “work” enough and get enough time off and holidays. Our accounts must be subject to a very expensive annual audit by authorised auditors. We must have legal advice on many of the matters that come to our attention. We must assure that all YWAM volunteers have attended an annual day of Safe-guarding Training and are complying with what they learned. A vast number of rules and regulations are embedded in the legislation on these subjects, so much so that I doubt that any charity is always fully compliant.
The board members of any charity or company are ultimately responsible for making sure that the workers are operating with full knowledge of the law and in compliance. That means that many people who would have been delighted to serve on our board now have second thoughts, and I don’t blame them. It also means that the nature of our board meetings has completely changed. We have so many statutory obligations that there is less time for prayer, less time to hear the good reports and less time to get to know the YWAMers.
We are being moulded into the shape of government—the image of Caesar. When Jesus was confronted by Pharisees trying to catch him in a mistake, they presented him with a coin of the type that was used for the temple tax. Then they asked him a question, “Should we pay the temple tax?” Most of the religious leaders resented the way the Roman Empire had meddled in their religious affairs and, even though they had a massive, impressive temple built by a Roman ruler, they chafed at the idea that they had to pay a tax to worship.
Jesus avoided their trap by asking whose image was on the coin, to which they replied, “Caesars.” Then he said, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God”.
Thankfully, the governments of developed Western nations are not demanding outright worship, but they are imposing their values on Christian ministries. We must put prayerful thought into how we respond to the growing bureaucracy.
People who serve in government are tasked with fixing problems, but the only tool available to them is law-making, and yet most of the problems come from wrong behaviour by individuals. Law can’t provide a remedy for sin.
The vision that God gave to Loren Cunningham resulted in the “de-regulation of missions.” Churches and denominations required so many qualifications for missionaries that it commonly took more than six years to get ready to go to another country or people group. Loren and Darlene took young people overseas after a week, or less, of orientation. There were other similar movements just getting underway at the same time and the results have been spectacular. Through YWAM alone, millions of people have had a short-term missionary experience.
Now many more traditional churches and organisations have created short-term opportunities. The world of missions has been thoroughly de-regulated! But now it is being tied up in red-tape again, but this time by government.
YWAM has always consisted of people doing ministry rather than having loads of office staff running a top-heavy organisation, and that is still largely the case. But thanks to the avalanche of regulations, we cannot function without people looking after our visa processes, our safe-guarding, our risk management etc. For now, those compliance demands can be met by people who are often in other ministry but work part-time in compliance. Thank God for them! But where is all this going?
Governments are inescapably bureaucratic, and we all know that governments just keep growing bigger, with more complexity and greater costs. Their regulations are forcing ministries to look more and more like government departments. The first step towards any solution is identifying the problem and that is the purpose of this article. There are no comprehensive solutions to this problem, but there are ways we can moderate the affect of government pressure. We must continually examine the growing demands, think through their purposes and aim to meet them, but without getting tied up by the letter of the law.
The most important response, though, is to recognise the problem, pray for wisdom and do everything we can to resist the pressure to conform to the image of Caesar.
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.
Lynn Green 