After the shootings at YWAM in Colorado there was a lot of healing that needed to occur. The YWAM base rallied together to seek God and find what He wanted to see happen next …
A new documentary, “Jeasusfreaks”, has been produced based on the YWAM DTS (Discipleship Training School) that happened at YWAM Colorado shortly after the shooting. The school had 45 students, all snowboarders between the ages of 17 – 25. The school leader, John Murphy, documented the school and all that happened on it.
All sorts of issues and topics are tackled during the school by the staff and students. You can check out the free trailer for the documentary here.
Don and Deyon Stephens, the founders of Mercy Ships, which was birthed out of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), were honoured with a humanitarian of the year award given by The Variety Club in London.
Mercy Ships was launched as a ministry of Youth With A Mission in 1978 and has since come away from YWAM to form their own separate organisation. In the last 30-years Mercy Ships has completed over 560 port visits in 53 developing and 17 developed nations, treating over a quarter of a million people in that time.
Since Mercy Ships launched out of YWAM a new ministry within YWAM called Marine Reach has taken up the banner as the ship ministry for Youth With A Mission. Marine Reach has a focus on smaller, more versatile ships that can stop at ports and communities that larger ships are unable to serve.
You can read more about the humanitarian away given to Mercy Ships here.
YWAMers from around the world are meeting together in Jinja, Uganda this week for “Communication, Research and Information Technology” (CRIT – have to love those YWAM acronyms) consultations.
CRIT is one of the tools that has been developed to help to restore and build communication within the mission and also from the mission to the rest of the world. That is what I am currently looking at helping with working the YWAM International Chairman’s Team so I have a huge interest in what’s happening there. I also have a few friends there right now, and hope to get to a YWAM CRIT consultation some year, but probably not less than a month after moving to a new country …
The Youth With A Mission Knowledge Base already has over 450 different documents geared to help YWAMers to work better together and to not continually be reinventing the wheel. In two weeks time they are planning to hold a “sprint” meetings in Brussels to grow the knowledge base even more. To participate in the meetings you don’t even have to be there, you can participate from anywhere in the world.
YWAMKB.net has been described as an encyclopaedia for YWAM and a great resource for all things to do with starting a ministry in YWAM, running a conference, finding conference notes and more. I’ve been trying to encourage others to add their manuals and documents for YWAM Ministry to the site for years, and the sprint meetings can be a great time to look at doing that.
Some of the latest articles on the site are:
Learn how to start a YWAM Ship ministry
Quality Leadership in YWAM
A discussion on “What is a YWAM base?”
You can read more about the sprint meetings here, and check out the YWAM Knowledge Base here.
The guys over at photogenX have recently published a book called “Sex + Money: A Global Search for Human Worth”. The book is about the global slave trade and was put together by a team of YWAM students from eight different nations. They travelled through 20 different nations and collected the photographs and stories from the trip and made it into this book.
You can read more about the project and find out how to get a copy of “Sex + Money: A Global Search for Human Worth” here.
