ywam – Protestia

Youth With a Mission (YWAM) founder Darlene Cunningham has shared that 11 of their missionaries were killed in a tragic bus accident in Tanzania last week, which also saw five others moderately injured and a man and a woman hospitalized in critical condition.

Participants in the “Executive Masters in Leadership” course, based at YWAM Arusha, Tanzania, took a field trip in two buses to Maasai land, where they observed our thriving community development program. They had a very good day together. On the return trip to Arusha, a truck that had lost its brakes smashed into our 2nd bus, literally crushing it from top to bottom. Eleven of our beloved friends were killed and eight others are severely wounded, battling for their lives. We have not seen a tragedy of this magnitude in all of YWAM’s history and we are all devastated.

While their full names and nationalities are being kept confidential, Cunningham confirmed that the men and women killed were “key YWAM leaders in the region – some leading flourishing YWAM bases; others giving leadership in the field of education and other spheres; others ministering in restricted-access locations where no one else would dare to go.”

With their motto “know God and make Him known,” YWAM is an interdenominational and non-profit organization comprising of 20,000 workers in hundreds of independent ministries operating from some 1,000 bases in over 180 countries, pioneering short-term missions with a heavy charismatic emphasis.

Loren Cunningham, the missionary founder of the global Christian missionary organization YWAM, passed away on October 6 at 88.

Founded in 1960, YWAM’s mission is to “know God and make Him known.” It is an interdenominational and non-profit organization that operates in over 180 countries, pioneering short-term missions with a heavy charismatic emphasis.

According to a press release about his death: “Loren was the first person in history to visit every nation, all dependent countries, and over 100 territories and islands, with the intention to share God’s love and help complete Christ’s Great Commission. Loren empowered youth to serve globally on short-term, unsalaried missions, revolutionizing missionary paradigms, which led to the moniker “The De-Regulator of Missions.”

While YWAM has had surprisingly few public scandals over the decades, it was not without its critics. Ministry Watch explains:

(It comprises of) some 20,000 workers in hundreds of independent ministries operating from some 1,000 bases in about 200 countries. Over the years, some four million people have been through YWAM’s 12-week Discipleship Training School, the first step in working with the organization, which pays no salaries.
But unlike other evangelical ministries and mission agencies, YWAM isn’t incorporated and lacks a central organization or headquarters. It has no president, board of directors, fundraising department, or annual reports. It has no communications team to gather and convey information to donors or the media, hence the frequent use of words like “some” in the paragraph above.

…YWAM is dynamic, but is it effective? No one knows, because YWAM’s non-structured structure takes opaqueness and inscrutability to new and unprecedented levels.
No one tracks all of the independent ministries. No one has solid numbers on how many ministries there are, how much money they raise, how many workers they support, what they do, or how successful they are at carrying out their missions. Parents and relatives even have difficulty tracking down loved ones working with YWAM

‘Loren is survived by his beloved wife, Darlene Joy Scratch-Cunningham; his daughter, Karen Joy Cunningham; his son, David Loren Cunningham (Judith Fitts-Cunningham); and three grandchildren, Madison Grace, Kenna Faith, and Liam Reed.’