Live stream recorded on the 23rd of August of 2024 at YWAM Harpenden Studios.
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** This is a personal blog and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth with A Mission.**
Tag: spheres
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Spheres and Domains
Live Stream recorded from 15/07/2022 at YWAM Harpenden Studios.
** This is a personal podcast and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
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A Providential Dinner Date
Photo by Lon Christensen on Unsplash
**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
In the mid-1970s Loren and Darlene Cunningham were invited to take a few days to stay in a cabin in the beautiful setting of the big Cimarron Valley in Western Colorado. Loren had been instrumental in helping my father to be given a property to steward as a YWAM centre, on which he then established a discipleship project for the many young people giving their lives to Jesus through YWAM teams in Southern California.
While Loren and Darlene were there, Loren was given a very clear word from God about the nature of the Kingdom of God, and how the Gospel message and the Christian values encompassed in it, should be a transforming power for good in all of society. He wrote down the ideas that God was putting in his spirit, and knew that it was a pivotal word, not just for him, but in due course for all of YWAM and, as it turned out, for the Body of Christ.
Later he was in touch with Bill and Vonette Bright, who, as it happened, were also taking a break in Colorado just a short drive away. Loren and Darlene were delighted to have the opportunity to deepen fellowship with the Brights, so Loren put his notes in his pocket, and they drove to a nearby valley to have dinner together.
Later in the evening just as Loren reached for the paper, Bill Bright began to tell him about how God had spoken to him regarding different parts of society and how the Gospel was relevant to all of them. He also had a list, and it was virtually identical to Loren’s list. They knew God was speaking to them, though at the time they didn’t have the language we use now. Loren recognised that these seven areas were the arenas in which our thinking is shaped. So for a time he called them the “mind-moulders”. Others called them “the mountains”, but more widely now in YWAM we call them the “spheres of society”. Both Bill and Loren agreed that there were seven spheres.
They are family, religion, education, economics, government, media and celebration (which includes the arts, entertainment and sports).
Historical Blindness
At that time, Protestant Christian faith, and especially Evangelicals, had been pushed out of the main public square and into the margins of public life. It was widely accepted that religion was a private matter and not a subject for public discourse. However, it was obvious to anyone who read a bit of American or Northern European history that Christian thinkers had articulated the biblical values that undergird the Western world of accountable government and personal freedom. But, it seems that a great blindness had settled on our nations and the values of biblical Christianity had been marginalised. By the 1970s it was clear that those values which had provided freedom and prosperity were being eroded and Christians, especially strongly Bible-believing Christians, had no voice.
A New, Global University
Within two or three years of Loren receiving that word about the seven spheres, it was clear that training in Youth With A Mission was spreading widely and at an exponential rate. Within that context, Loren Cunningham felt that God had spoken to him again, and that YWAM training was, at that stage, the beginnings of a global university. I was one of about 30 YWAM leaders from around the world who gathered for a strategy conference. There Loren asked the question “would you all please take a couple of hours, go away alone, and ask the Lord whether or not He wants us to have a university?” We all came back with the same answer: “yes”. Again we didn’t have all the terminology, so the Pacific and Asia Christian University began in Kona, Hawaii, where Loren and Darlene were just a couple of years into establishing a new YWAM centre.
As we took steps of obedience, reflected on the words God had spoken, and saw extraordinary growth, it became clear that God wanted to train more and more young people to serve in all spheres of society as ambassadors for the Kingdom of God. Personally, when I think back on that I can’t help but recall the Scripture “When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Lord will raise up a standard against him”. There was a flood of existential and experimental thinking with a new and entirely subjective approach to values; the idea that there is no such thing as truth was beginning to dominate our universities.
From One to More than 800 in Fifty Years
It seems amazing to me that it is nearly 50 years since that first word about the seven spheres was given to Loren. During that time, well over 1000 YWAM centres have been established, and training courses/schools in the University of the Nations are registered in more than 800 locations.
Though a lot of time has passed, it would still be too early to say that a new reformation has begun, but YWAM is not the only movement working towards the reformation of all seven spheres of society. Many churches and countless other ministries are focusing on one or more of the seven spheres. I am pleased to say that for the most part they understand that this is not about grabbing power, nor is it about the church dominating all seven spheres as it has in some periods of history. It‘s about public service. It’s about excellence in vocations, and it’s about creative communication of God’s ways. You might say it is all about maximizing influence for the common good. Though it is still early days, it now looks feasible, especially with the generation just emerging into adulthood, that we might see a revival of Christian values in all seven spheres of society. This would provide once again a more caring, compassionate, law-abiding, non-discriminatory, equal-opportunity environment in which all people can thrive.
Lord, have mercy on us!
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Time Bombs – In Education
**This is a personal website and reflects my thoughts and convictions. It does not represent any official position held by Youth With A Mission.**
Do you ever read something that contains a new thought, and then that thought begins to trigger little time bombs in your mind? That is, it continues to set off other new thoughts over the following days and weeks. Obviously that happens to me or I would not be mentioning it!
EDUCATION FOR THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
I read a statement which claimed that our current format for schools and education is the product of the industrial revolution. Leaders of formative industries needed to find a way to free adults from the responsibilities of caring for and educating their children so they could work in factories. So education, as we know it, developed as a by-product of the drive for economic growth and wealth creation. Most of the workers producing this wealth were parents working long days while their children were in school.
This cultural shift resulted in new and highly valued freedoms. Boys were no longer destined to stay in the trade of their fathers and girls began a path to more opportunity than ever before. I am grateful for all the wealth created; it has resulted in many benefits—better health, housing, food, literacy, democratic processes—the list could get very long.
PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
However, this must have some implications for how we think about education. I for one have long felt that the primary responsible for educating, training, developing children lies with parents and yet our current arrangement places that responsibility firmly in the hands of professional educators. They are the ones who have our children for the majority of their waking hours. Our cultural and financial expectations push us to turn our children over to others at a very young age. We rarely know those “others” well enough to be confident about what they are teaching and whether or not they will model the values held by the parents. They in turn have been shaped by professional educators and the content of what they teach is usually mandated by government policy and educational specialist in the sphere of government. Is this a healthy thing?
DESTRUCTIVE EDUCATION
Most Christian parents on either side of the Atlantic over recent years will have been concerned about several aspects of the education of their children. Recently, we have seen the shift towards sex education including redefining marriage, gender fluidity, normalising transgender medical procedures, etc. These subjects are important. However, equally or more important is the teaching of such foundational subjects as English literature, History and Science with a studied absence of any reference to God or any higher authority. Our children usually absorb the idea that human intellect is the highest authority and that morals and values are relative and evolving. Understandably, most Christian parents harbour some level of concern that the nature of their children’s education, if it is provided by State schools, does not build any sort of foundation of faith and is almost always actively destructive to Christian faith and behaviour.
WHERE ARE THE NEW MODELS?
At the same time, and paradoxically, the Christian community has a growing confidence in the intellectual integrity and consistency of their faith. Yet we have little or no opportunities to impart that confidence to our children. We are simply too busy to do that, and so out of practical necessity, we accept that professional educators will shape our children and to a great extent their beliefs. I conclude that we have to “swim against the tide” and develop more ways to educate our children in the beauty of our faith. We were created to “love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength”. Without concerted, God-centred education, our children will not be likely to obey this, “the greatest of all commandments”.
WHAT ARE WE MULTIPLYING?
These thoughts have led me to think again about how we help less developed nations. Christian missionaries and workers are often on the frontline of providing assistance, technology and finance to nations and peoples who are less developed. One of our assumptions is that they need schools like our schools. Many Christians have committed themselves to developing education systems in poorer nations. I have been to some of those schools and they can be wonderful. The teachers are trained in the best of education principles but are also spurred on in their spiritual growth and their Christ-centred living. But are we possibly imparting a system that is too vulnerable to follow the path of our developed nations? Should we be looking at ways to engaged parents more in the process of developing their children? Is the accepted format for education with at least five long days a week spent in school the best we can do? Is the system itself somehow flawed?
TAKING EDUCATION BACK FROM GOVERNMENT
I am convinced that centralised, national governments are not the appropriate authority for overseeing education. We will probably always want and need professional educators, but they should be directly accountable to parents. We will have to work out more ways to develop good standards and oversight without abdicating our God-given, parental mandate. There are some workable models in developed nations so we are not starting from scratch.
I don’t have any complete answers at this point, but I think change often begins with asking the best questions. Maybe you have some questions to go along with mine. Than after thinking about the questions we might start finding some steps towards a better approach to education, one that does not so thoroughly drive a wedge between parents and children. We are suffering because of this separation which may not always be caused by education, but there is certainly an educational contribution to it.
IT IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY
If we continue to pray the prayer the Lord taught us, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done…” then perhaps He has some new ways for us to think about how His kingdom comes in the education and development of our children.
Lynn Green.
Lynn Green 