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Youth With A Mission

Peter Hocken

Youth With a Mission (YWAM) is one of the largest Christian missionary agencies in the world. Founded in 1960 by a Pentecostal pastor, Loren Cunningham,' YWAM aims to train young Christians as effective evangelists. While not insisting on its staff being baptized in the Holy Spirit, YWAM has overall retained a Pentecostal/Charismatic character as it spread to all the continents of the globe. This report focuses on YWAM's developing response to currents of spiritual renewal in the Roman Catholic Church. From its inception, YWAM aimed to be interdenominational, not exclusively Pentecostal, but certainly Protestant and Evangelical.2 Like other Evangelical Protestant missionary bodies, YWAM workers took for granted that Roman Catholics were simply candidates for who, when converted, would leave the Church of Rome and join an Evangelical church. The major catalyst for rethinking this policy was the rise of the Charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church. The impetus came from Europe, especially from Austria and Poland.3 In 1975, a young staff member of YWAM-Austria, Bruce Clewett, was introduced by the Lutheran Mary Sisters of Darmstadt, Germany, to a Benedictine monk at Seckau, near Graz in Austria. This association led to the first YWAM outreach to Catholics the following year at Seckau. Clewett discussed this development with Al Akimoff, director of YWAM's Slavic Missions. Up to that point, YWAM's work in Poland had been with Pentecostals, Baptists, Brethren and Lutherans, all of them very small bodies in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation. Until 1976, the YWAM workers in Poland had no contact with committed Roman Catholics, although they knew that Campus Crusade were collaborating with the Polish Catholic movement known as Oasis, renamed the . Light-Life movement in 1976.4 Following his discussion with Clewett, Akimoff sensed a potential to work with converted Catholics. A young

' At this time, Loren Cunningham was a minister of the Assemblies of God. 2 Itwas this wider vision that set Cunningham at odds with the Assemblies of God in YWAM's early years, and caused him to lose his ministerial accreditation with the denomination for 15 years. There had already been more limited collaboration in Spain, Switzerland and Germany.4 On the Light-Life movement, see Grazyna Sikorska, Light and Life: Renewal in Poland (: Collins Fount Paperbacks, and Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1989). On their collaboration with Campus Crusade and YWAM, and subsequent accusations of Protestant "infiltration," see Sikorska, Light and Life, 70-72 and Dariusz Cupial "Renewal Among Catholics in Poland," PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 16 (Fall 1994): 227-231. 266

Dutchman, Evert Veldhuizen,s was asked to go to Poland and make contact with renewed Catholics. After some meetings with Fr. Franciszek Blachnicki, the founder of Light-Life, some collaboration followed in 1977-79, though much less than Veldhuizen had hoped, due to other demands on YWAM. This new door of opportunity confronted Clewett, staunchly Evangelical in his theology, with the question: "Is it possible to be a bom again, Bible believing disciple of rejecting all moral compromise and still be a committed Roman Catholic?" Only if he could say "Yes" to this question would it be possible to collaborate with Roman Catholics and help the Catholics they evangelized to come to a vital faith in Jesus Christ within their own Catholic Church. Clewett wrestled before the Lord with this question for two years, and spent long hours studying Catholic documents, teaching and history. As he became convinced that it was possible to sustain a vital Christian experience within the Catholic Church, he knew he had a call to help bring this renewal in faith to Roman Catholics. As YWAM-Austria began some small forms of collaboration with Catholic Charismatics, Clewett shared his vision with fellow national leaders in YWAM, and was asked to prepare a paper on this topic for their international leadership. Between 1982 and 1984, different versions of the paper were discussed by several YWAM leaders. In 1984, at Desert Hot Springs, California, the paper "Guidelines for Youth With A Mission's Relationship to the Traditional Churches" was presented to the international leadership. The paper is characteristic of YWAM, which is above all an energetic and zealous body of believers committed to the 6 practical tasks of evangelism and discipleship training.6 The 1984 paper does not spend long on theological issues. It acknowledges that "God is at work in all Christian traditions-including the so-called 'traditional churches' TCs," and quickly addresses practical matters. Thus, the second page of the ten-page document already addresses the problem of what to do with TC members who have made a personal commitment to the Lord but who do not "belong to a spiritually strong parish" which "is often the Other paragraphs make practical suggestions and recommendations, including the following:

Evert Veldhuizen is currently pastor of the Baptist Church in Tours, France, and working on a doctoral thesis on Charismatic Renewal among Evangelicals in France. 6 YWAM began with the goal of sending out young evangelists, but after a few years Cunningham saw that the training of new disciples was fundamental, and in 1967 the first YWAM discipleship training school was formed. 7 "Guidelines for Youth With A Mission's Relationship to the Traditional Churches," (1984), 1-2.