\n<\/p>\n
Loren Cunningham, the charismatic visionary who launched Youth With a Mission (YWAM) and mobilized millions of young people for short-term trips, died<\/a> on Friday morning. He was 88.<\/p>\n When he was only 20, Cunningham was praying and saw an image of a map, but the map was moving. Waves were crashing on the shores of every continent, receding, and then crashing again. The picture appeared to him like \u201ca mental movie,\u201d he would later say<\/a>, and as he looked closer, the waves were young people, \u201ckids my age and even younger,\u201d fulfilling the Great Commission to \u201cgo into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation\u201d (Mark 16:15).<\/p>\n The vision became the core idea for YWAM. The organization has called<\/a> it \u201ca God-initiated, destiny-defining, foundational covenant from God to birth a new missions movement.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Cunningham, it took him a few years to understand what he\u2019d seen. But it ultimately empowered him to \u201cderegulate\u201d missions, sending more people, more quickly, to more places where they could \u201cproclaim<\/a> the truth of God and display His love.\u201d<\/p>\n YWAM (pronounced WHY-wham) currently operates in more than 2,000 locations in nearly 200 nations. The organization stopped counting how many young people it sent on short-term missions in 2010, when the total number was around 4.5 million.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I like about the spirit of YWAM is being willing to charge hell with a squirt gun,\u201d Steve Douglass told<\/a> CT a few years before he died, when he was president of Campus Crusade for Christ International (now Cru).<\/p>\n Kris Vallotton, a senior leader at the prominent charismatic Bethel Church in Redding, California, said<\/a> on Friday that YWAM is \u201cprobably the greatest missionary organization in the history of the world.\u201d He called Cunningham \u201cone of the greatest heroes of faith in modern history.\u201d<\/p>\n Evangelist Franklin Graham offered a similar assessment.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat an incredible life this man lived,\u201d the president of Samaritan\u2019s Purse wrote<\/a> on social media. \u201cLoren allowed God to use him, and he was a force for the Gospel for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n Cunningham was born on June 30, 1935, in Taft, California, but in his first memories, he was in a tent somewhere in Arizona. He, his parents, and his older sister were making adobe bricks by hand to build a small Pentecostal church.<\/p>\n Tom and Jewell Cunningham were both ordained Assemblies of God ministers and both second-generation Pentecostal evangelists. Jewell learned to preach as a child traveling from brush arbor to brush arbor in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. When the couple first got married, they lived in their car while preaching on the streets of Tyler, Texas.<\/p>\n The couple taught their three children to sacrifice personal comfort for the sake of the gospel and to listen to God personally. In his later years, Loren Cunningham remembered<\/a> learning that the leading of the Spirit could be a matter of life or death. Once, his father was preaching on the street in a Southern California town when his mother suddenly said, \u201cWe have to go now. God said we have to go now!\u201d<\/p>\n As the family drove away, an earthquake shook the town<\/a> and a pile of bricks fell on the sidewalk where they had been standing.<\/p>\n \u201cIf God has something important to tell you,\u201d Jewell Cunningham said, \u201che will speak to you directly.\u201d<\/p>\n The young Cunningham first heard God when he was six and later recalled it was a regular, sometimes daily experience by the time he was nine. When he was 13, he received a call to ministry while praying in a brush arbor in Arkansas with several cousins. They prayed for several hours on a Monday night, and Cunningham felt like he\u2019d been touched by God.<\/p>\n \u201cGod just broke through and made the call very clear to me,\u201d he later said. \u201cI had no doubt in my mind I was called to preach.\u201d<\/p>\n To celebrate<\/a>, his mother took him to town and bought him new shoes, quoting Romans 10:15: \u201cHow beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel\u201d (KJV). Cunningham preached his first sermon at his uncle\u2019s church that Thursday.<\/p>\n He had his first experience with mission work when he was 18, traveling to Mexico over Easter with a group of young men to witness door to door and preach on the street in the predominantly Catholic country. Cunningham ended the trip in the hospital with dysentery, but considered it a success because 20 people had kneeled in the street to profess that Jesus Christ is Lord.<\/p>\n The next year, Cunningham attended Central Bible College, an Assemblies of God school in Springfield, Missouri. He and three other students formed a gospel quartet called The Liberators, and traveled the country singing and preaching. During a trip to the Caribbean in 1956, he had his vision of waves of young people a few days before his 21st birthday.<\/p>\n \u201cGod speaks in your language,\u201d he would jokingly tell<\/a> televangelist Pat Robertson in 2022, \u201cand I was a surfer as a teenager in California and I saw these waves.\u201d<\/p>\n Cunningham initially thought that maybe the vision meant he should be involved in teaching or teacher training. He graduated from Central in 1957 with degrees in Bible and Christian education and went to the University of Southern California for a master\u2019s in education.<\/p>\n As Cunningham worked on a thesis about Bible schools, however, he became disillusioned. He looked at 72 institutions around the world and found that few, if any, were having a significant impact on world evangelization. The majority of graduates were not even going into ministry\u2014much less becoming the kind of missionaries who could carry the gospel to the ends of the earth.<\/p>\n At the same time, Cunningham started doing youth ministry with the Assemblies of God in Southern California, where his father was now an assistant superintendent with a focus on church planting and missions. But Cunningham became disillusioned with that too.<\/p>\n \u201cThe young people were all so bright and eager,\u201d he told<\/a> Charisma <\/em>magazine in 1985. \u201cBut I had to admit that most of the activities I planned for them were empty. They missed the heart of the young people because they had no challenge. That\u2019s what we all long for, especially in our teens and early 20s. The big challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n Cunningham found he was good at firing up young people and convincing them to do bold things for the gospel, but then there was nothing for them to do. The Assemblies of God said if they wanted to be missionaries, they needed to go to school and get about seven years of education and training.<\/p>\n \u201cBy which time,\u201d Cunningham complained, \u201cmost would have forgotten their fiery zeal.\u201d<\/p>\n He started experimenting with short-term missions, taking about 100 young Pentecostals to Hawaii over spring break in 1960. There were challenges\u2014many of the young people treated the trip like spring break\u2014but Cunningham became convinced this was the new model for global evangelism. Young people would get fired up and go on short trips, paying their own way or raising their own funds, and telling everyone in the world about Jesus.<\/p>\n That summer, Cunningham took a trip to scout sites where young missionaries might go. He went to Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Scandinavia, and Great Britain. He started making big plans for 1961.<\/p>\n The leadership of the Assemblies of God, however, thought his plans were too big. The denomination offered to put him on salary to launch a youth missions program, but they wanted to start more modestly.<\/p>\n As Cunningham later recalled the conversation, he was told, \u201cYou can continue with your vision, Loren, but you\u2019ll be taking out a more manageable number\u2014say 10 or 20 young people a year.\u201d<\/p>\n He protested that his vision was \u201cmuch, much bigger than 20 people a year and very much larger than any one denomination.\u201d Remembering what his parents taught him about hearing from God personally, Cunningham decided to leave the Assemblies of God and go out on his own. YWAM was officially incorporated in the state of California in February 1961.<\/p>\n In the first few years, however, YWAM did not manage to get 20 young people per year to go on short-term missions\u2014or even 10.<\/p>\n When Cunningham met a young woman named Darlene Scratch in 1962, the struggling missionary organization was sending out about five annually. But Scratch, who had herself dreamed of cross-cultural ministry after her uncle was imprisoned for missionary work in Communist China, saw some ways to implement the YWAM vision practically. Cunningham married her the following year and declared her, ever after, the co-founder.<\/p>\n \u201cThere never would have been anything lasting without Darlene,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 1964, she arranged a \u201cSummer of Service\u201d in the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. Nearly 150<\/a> young American Christians signed up. When they returned to the US in time for school in the fall, they reported thousands of conversions and some miraculous healings.<\/p>\n YWAM then organized trips to Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. And then, in 1966, they had 90 people on 17 teams in the Caribbean and another 25 in five large postal trucks driving through Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras. All of the missionaries were young, raised their own funds, and didn\u2019t let training requirements dampen their zeal.<\/p>\n There were, of course, numerous challenges and many basic mistakes in those early years. More than one vehicle got stuck in the mud on an impassable road. One early flyer misspelled Christ<\/em>, inviting young people to spend their summer representing \u201cChist.\u201d<\/a> The YWAMers learned to trust God, pray, and figure it out.<\/p>\n And reports of the challenges actually drew more young people.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to sleep on the floors, eat food that\u2019s different, suffer hot and sticky climates, and be surrounded by mosquitoes,\u201d Cunningham told them. \u201cYou\u2019re going to come up emotionally drained and spiritually attacked. But it\u2019s part of growing us up in the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n By 1968, YWAM had 30 full-time staff and 1,200 short-term missionaries. The organization decided a little training would be helpful and launched a school in a hotel in Switzerland. The first teachers included Cunningham\u2019s parents, evangelical apologist Francis Schaeffer, mechanical engineer and lay theologian Harry Conn, and the Scottish evangelist Duncan Campbell.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not a Bible school,\u201d Cunningham explained<\/a>, \u201cbut a laboratory for evangelism.\u201d<\/p>\n YWAM launched more schools, ultimately operating University of the Nations in more than 600<\/a> locations. One leader said they were the \u201cwave machine\u201d producing the waves of young people that Cunningham had seen in his vision. The schools offer evangelism training but also degrees<\/a> in sports and fitness, science and technology, education, communication, and art.<\/p>\n Cunningham said he had a revelation about seven classrooms, each corresponding to the seven spheres of society<\/a> that Christians needed to impact to bring about change.<\/p>\n He went to tell his friend, Cru founder Bill Bright, about this revelation in 1975. But before he could say anything, Bright announced he\u2019d had a revelation<\/a> and produced a basically identical list of seven spheres. A few weeks later, Cunningham heard Schaeffer make a very similar argument about taking dominion for Christ over these seven different areas: family, religion, education, media, art, economics, and government.<\/p>\n The idea was later popularized by Bethel pastor Bill Johnson and others as the \u201cSeven Mountain Mandate.\u201d It became the theological basis<\/a> for many American charismatics to embrace Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Cunningham, however, did not get involved in politics. He saw the seven spheres as a framework for evangelism and \u201cGreat Commission strategies.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time Cunningham turned 50 in 1985, YWAM was sending out more than 15,000 young people on short-term trips every year. The ministry operated in 1,100 locations in 170 nations. And yet the visionary leader was convinced, as he wrote in his first book, that those young people were \u201conly a fraction of a fraction of what was needed\u201d and that \u201cthe laborers were still few, very few.\u201d<\/p>\n He continued to focus on growing, expanding, and innovating.<\/p>\n YWAM has faced criticism for the way it treated the \u201cwaves\u201d of young people. In the 1980s, veteran staff member Gregory Robertson said the ministry was abusive and manipulative. People who disagreed with leadership were told they were rebelling against God or even demon possessed, he claimed.<\/p>\n More recently, former YWAMers have posted videos<\/a> on social media claiming they were spiritually abused.<\/p>\n \u201cThese things happen at every single base,\u201d one woman said. \u201cTheir ability to \u2018hear God\u2019s voice\u2019 always trumps your own connection to the Holy Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n YWAM did not formally respond to the accusations, but a leader in the UK said some young leaders probably did act inappropriately.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s going to happen when we\u2019re committed to the call of mobilizing young people into all the world,\u201d the leader said<\/a> at the time. \u201cThey\u2019re going to make some of the mistakes that I made when I was 18 and 19 and 20 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n He also noted that abuse happens in many contexts, and argued YWAM\u2019s track record was better than most.<\/p>\n The ministry\u2019s decentralized model leaves oversight in local hands. Complaints did not go to Cunningham, as he didn\u2019t manage training or on-the-ground operations, but focused on the big picture. His job, as he saw it, was to open the floodgates of potential missionaries.<\/p>\n In 1999, Cunningham traveled to Libya and became the first missionary to go to every nation in the world, as well as 150 islands and territories.<\/p>\n When COVID-19 and then cancer restricted his travel in the last few years of his life, Cunningham started using Zoom to speak with people on every continent. He spoke often of the need for more Bible translations in more languages, and urged<\/a> people to \u201clive \u2018full on\u2019 for Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a great life,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019d say to anyone \u2026 have a purpose. Have a call. Make sure that you are doing it for God and His purposes. He is love and you must show His love.\u201d<\/p>\n Cunningham is survived by his wife Darlene and their children Karen and David. A memorial service is planned in Hawaii on November 4.<\/p>\nHearing from God<\/h5>\n
The failure of Bible schools<\/h5>\n
Darlene Cunningham implements the vision<\/h5>\n
A laboratory for evangelism<\/h5>\n
Accusations of spiritual abuse<\/h5>\n