Posted on 11/26/2004 10:09:12 PM PST by Fijifour
I was in Maui at YWAM in 1988 and 1989, as was my husband, and both of us were under the leadership of the Bauers and Mark Okazaki.
We found them to be loving, mature and compassionate in their leadership styles. Cindy certainly did not mollycoddle the staff and students, but I never witnessed any manipulation or abuse.
Cindy and Tom were loving and loyal and truly wanted to meet the needs of the students.
I was considered “least likely to succeed,” in the DTS and to be honest, considered a bit of a rebel. However, every concern I brought up was dealt with in a loving manner. I completed the DTS and served on staff in the kitchen prior to transferring to Kona for the health Care Schools. I met and married my husband and we began our life as missionaries in 1989.
However, in 2000, while we were working independently from YWAM as missionaries, the counrty we work in underwent a coup and my family went to Kona to wait it out.
The KONA base had changed tremendously since our time there in 1989.
It was a big business. Accountability in areas like the high cost students pay for airfare to outreaches was the first warning we had that something was amiss.
While working in one of the offices, I was shocked at the huge prices YWAM was paying for airfare! I called travel agents and found tickets at half the cost, but when I emailed Dave Boyd & Matt Rawlins about it, I was basically told to keep out of it. Having spent 15 years traveling the world both for recreation and business, I was well aware of the huge commissions and discounts travel agents and airlines are willing to offer an organization as large and traveled as YWAM and U of N are. So while it was pitiful, I wasn't surprised that they didn't want me to pursue hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings to the students!
When I emailed Mr. Boyd, numerous times regarding the blatant US Justice Department and Immigration violations regarding visas and entry permits, that numerous international students were involved in, I was again hush-hushed and treated like a sweet little missionary who should just do my job.
There IS a very real problem in YWAM at present, and numerous people are sensing it. It is so hard for many of us because most of us count our early YWAM experiences as pivotal in our lives and because we are bonded in Christ with them.
When an organization like YWAM becomes elitist, and in my opinion, it has, and begins establishing Trusts and Property Management divisions, we should grow alarmed.
Here are some areas to pray about it. And this IS KEY! It is fine to print all this stuff online and expose false teachings, but first we must ask God to search our own hearts and then pray for leaders in YWAM.
1. Paternalistic Racism. This is where YWAM promotes indigenous people into leadership based solely on the fact that they are indigenous. Christian brothers and sisters like Kalafi Moala, Frank Naia, Beryl Wilson and Sosene are prime examples of this. It is fine to encourage, but leadership requires maturity and a sound walk.
For years, the YWAM FIJI base was exclusively an indgenous female hierarchy, with single females running the show. Sexual infidelity among staff, including leaders, was rampant. Children were conceived out of wedlock to a number of leaders and staff during this matriarchal reign and anyone who questioned the “leadings” of the leaders was branded as having a demon, being in a state of sin, a rebel or a misfit..
Married couples were counseled by single women! It is no wonder the land the Vuniasi base sits on is now fallow and there has been no growth on that base for many years. They are simply hosting overseas teams but doing little themselves. Yaqona and alcohol abuse have been a problem with the staff. Outer islands are unreached unless a staff member comes from the area. There is often no food on the base, and staff live on less than $50.00 Fiji Dollars per month! All the while, visiting leaders tell them, “Pray, Brother, Pray. If this is of God, you will receive the funds.” And off the leader goes in his rented, air-condiitoned rental car!
In Kona, indigenous staff receive extra care and counseling and financial help. Scholarships are given to minorities and Westerners are expected to “foot the bills,” for these students and staff. It is always an unspoken command, but there nonetheless. Then, they return home, usually in obedience to leadership, because they don’t have the star quality to be the “poster girl or boy” for a “Target Nation,” and are forgotten. This is dangerous at best. It is political correctness at its worst.
2. Financial Accountability: Men like Dave Boyd should make us nervous. Financial planning is fine. Using U of N and YWAM funds and properties for condos and investment purposes and establishing Trusts is NOT the mandate of YWAM. These guys are “in the counting room, counting out the money,” while staff and students sit around the world praying in funds for teaching materials and making do with used, donated materials and expired food items.. The staff and students in countries like India and Burkina Faso are giving up 2 meals a day to purchase necessary medicines and pay for daily living requirements, while the Kona staff are eating strawberries and pastry and smoked salmon! Entire families are housed in 1-room flats in Family Housing, while single leaders live in beautiful staff apartments.
Sincere leaders like Faye Williams, YWAM’s latest “prophetess” and who has a strong following among many of YWAM’s islanders, teaches students to “fore-go all” and then goes home to her cozy Hawaii condo overlooking Kona Bay. Up in family housing is a single mom with four kids, all crammed into a studio apartment! This is not to attack Faye, who has worked sincerely and with great compassion in the pacific for many years, but it is a statement that reflects the total lack of awareness leadership has as to the problems and concerns of the real world outside the safe confines of The U of N campus and other YWAM bases worldwide.
YWAM says this is to teach students to give up their rights. But then, when you become a leader, you don’t have to anymore? It is important to state that these individuals are NOT evil, or our enemies, but our brothers and sisters in Christ who have simply gotten caught up in the leadership hoopla and their 15 minutes of YWAM fame. The fact that students are required to purchase and read these leader’s books is no small coincidence. It was horrifying to see the idol worship of keynote YWAM speakers! Visitors like Joy Dawson and Floyd McClung get the base in a titter. Special meals and rooms are prepared. Leaders build them up and “market” their books and testimonies. Students are granted special privileges to eat a meal with these spiritual giants.
Yet, who are these guys really, other than typical YWAMers.. There are multitudes of men and women like them all over the world, serving faithfully, in difficult environments. How are these men and women, who spent, maybe a short time in overseas missions, qualified to teach us? Where are the Appreciation Dinners and Special Offerings for people like Joan Petersen who has laboured in a shack in Burkina Faso for 16 years, with little financial support? Surely, while the Floyd’s and Williams have been faithfully encouraging and teaching the students from their safe homes in Europe and America, there are hundreds if not thousands of YWAMers who have laboured for years in shacks and villages, and who have REAL experiences and lessons to share with students! Do we really need these guys who have been safe at headquarters all these years, telling us how to live and work in foreign fields?
3. Families in Ywam..are treated almost as if they are a necessary evil. Housed in tiny flats, no privacy for the husband and wife, in the worst housing on the Kona Base, families are NOT cherished or given opportunities to grow as families. IN SPITE OF THE FACT that YWAM KONA offers Family Ministry Training! Staff are expected to work for no pay, full-time, doing jobs that would earn them nice little salaries on the outside, while all the time, YWAM is operating and charging students and staff hefty staff fees and standard tuition!!! Unless you are in the Family Ministry or Counseling schools, there are no counseling services available for families or wounded-in-action missionaries. Children of staff are often left to wander, unattended all over the campus, creating major problems while their parents struggle to meet their work-duty assignments.. This is yet another area for concern and prayer. 4. YWAM takes its students from The World into a cloistered environment for the first 3 months. They then go on a short-term outreach and many feel “called” to the country they visit. These faithful then head out into “missions” without proper funding or leadership. Many become a burden to the very people they went to “help.” If the student is “called” to a YWAM base, where they again live in a cloistered community, they usually make it at least a year. But of they actually go out and pioneer and live on the cutting edge of missions (YWAM terms) as YWAM encourages them to do, there is NO SUPPORT or leadership for them. We learned this from experience after spending thousands of dollars to attend Schools of Frontier Missions, Health Care Schools and serving as staff. When we arrived at our destination, newly married and still baby Christians, we were told that the female leadership had “heard from God” and that we were to serve as DTS leaders instead of establishing the much-needed Health Care Program we had worked so hard on and had approved. We prayerfully declined and ended up establishing a rural health care and education project in a remote village, where we laboured and struggled for 10 years without even one response from The Kona Health Care Leadership, which we wrote to monthly, nor from any of the SOFM staff. In fact, the ONLY LEADERS who maintained contact with us were The Bauers and Danny Lehmann, who sent encouraging letters and cards and teachings, and once, Danny even took us out for the best curry we have ever eaten! We lived, isolated and alone with three children, on $400.00 a month in a shack, and today there is a flourishing ministry. Yet when we returned to Kona, after 13 years of uninterrupted front-line missions, as graduates of the schools, and as respected ministers in our target nation,, who were nonetheless broken and wounded and battle-scarred and in need of encouragement, we were never even asked to meet with the leadership of those schools, much less asked to share our experiences, trials and victories with either staff or students. We returned to Kona after our home and clinic had been stormed by rebels and taken. We were homeless and penniless and later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome. However, Kona offered nothing other than a tiny flat for all of us to live in and yes it was an affordable rental amount in the form of staff fees, and immediate full-time unpaid employment. My husband went to work as Security head 2 days after we arrived and I began my duties 4 days later. I did ask my leadership for counseling and was referred to a woman who had taken the Addictive Behaviour School, but she wanted only to discuss addictions, and having lived on less than $400 a month, in an isolated village, with 3 kids and a ministry to support, I didn’t have any… My leader was a fine and loving woman, who modeled Christ to me on a day-to-day basis. However, she did not have the authority or knowledge to really understand how serious the immigration violations were, nor how rampant they had become. Numerous phone-calls to Matt Rawlins and Dave Boyd went unanswered, or were brushed aside when they deemed to bless our hot little office, with an “encouraging little word” thrown at me.
5. The waste of funds is staggering, with little accountability. University of the Nations and Kona YWAM is a big business, and while there is no shame in that, YWAM and it’s leaders need to stop with the non-profit stuff and admit publicly that the onus is now on making Kona a viable financial enterprise..that the days of living in tents and sharing our resources are over…unless you happen to be a “Christian of color”. Staff should be paid commensurate salaries, and housing should be tailored to meet the needs of families. 6. International Affairs need to be handled in a legally responsible manner, with international students made aware of, and required to adhere to the US Immigration policies in place. Fund-raisers and offerings for international students are in direct violation of those individuals visas. 7. Foreign staff are also often in extreme violation of Immigration laws, leaving and entering the country on YWAM letterhead, fundraising and even working illegally.
8. Another area of concern is the aspect of staff remaining on the base, as un-paid volunteers for decades. There are numerous single women, in particular, who seem to have found a safe-haven, who have been in Kona for 15 and 20 years, living on “missionary support” from folks back home! These women are NOT MISSIONARIES, but secretaries and P.A.’s and clerks, JUST LIKE their supporters. Every so often they go on outreaches, but they live and work just as normal Americans. In fact, I would be willing to bet that it has been years since many of them have even shared Christ with a lost person! 9. Lastly, and we believe the most alarming aspect of Kona, is its marketing of the gospel, a sort of mushing it up with non-Biblical stuff to make it more palatable…more marketable, even to the point of holding “Dances” to send the DTS students off to “spiritual battlefields” like Uttar Pradesh, Thailand and Indonesia!
What army in the world readies its soldiers for battle by throwing them a late-night party complete with Brittany Spears and M&M music to dance to? When I contacted the leaders in Kona with my concerns about the dress, behaviour and music being played in the courts surrounding Family Housing back in 2000, Matt Rawlins treated me with extreme condescension…and mistaking my U of N courses, as my only education, tried to double-talk and impress me with his humanistic interpretation of the word holiness. Again, the elitist mentality. Not surprising in light of the fact that his local-born wife, Celia, who was in charge of hospitality at that time, was spending money like crazy on strawberries and ice-sculptures for lunches! Yeah, I know God wants to bless us…but COME ON! Here we were, back from the extremes of the missionfield, to find our leaders stuffing themselves on smoked salmon and iced imported strawberries! “Where is the love?” We were definitely no longer stylish enough for the new leadership in Kona. Lots of gold jewelry, expensive outfits and cars! Beautifully decorated staff housing as long as you were on the A List.
I entered YWAM at 30 years of age, with 2 degrees and a respected career that had taken me around the world. I put it all aside and worked in the kitchen, and did landscaping. I volunteered, on purpose, for the jobs no one wanted. I did the program. Not because I was desperate and needy, but because at that time, the teachings were Biblically sound.
Fore-going my formal education and 4th generation social position, (and it would surprise people like Celia and Matt and Dave to know just how educated I was when I entered YWAM,) my husband and I entered missions really believing what we had been taught by folks like Mark Okazaki and The Bauers and Frank Uddo and John Enyart. We spent our honeymoon in India trying to locate the supposed SOFM work we had been pressured into volunteering for. There was no SOFM at the time operating there in spite of what we had been told.
We arranged to start a ministry without YWAM.. Let me say here that GOD HAS BEEN FAITHFUL!
It is important to keep a Godly mind when remembering these events. Bitterness can creep in. This is one way growing numbers of YWAM leaders avoid the issues. They make it an issue of rebellion or pride or bitterness, when in reality, they refuse to walk in the very teachings they espouse!
YWAM and The University of The Nations should not, if it still is, be considered a non-profit organization. Nor should the colleges, if they remain as they are, ever be granted accreditation.
Leaders like Matt and Celia, Floyd McClung, and Dave Boyd, should be required to spend at least 1 year, every 5 years, in foreign service, in a developing nation, as staff, and as volunteers, NOT AS LEADERS! This would perhaps, prohibit the elitist, social-climbing qualities these leaders so obviously displayed while we were there.
(And if you read this Celia, ask YOURSELF if you are willing to pack away all those LibertyHouse Dresses and shoes and wear rags and have your kids covered in lice while feeding them rice and beans?)
The royal mentality of some of those folks is mind boggling and makes one want to scream, "HEY! You're not wearing that golden crown yet!"
Another issue is that sexual sin in Kona needs to be dealt with decisively, period. Alcohol consumption at social gatherings is becoming more and more prevalent, and while I enjoy a good Pinot Noir with the rest of you, I find it sad that most of the social events we were invited to by staff and leaders, which were held off campus, did include kegs of beer and rather bad bottles of wine in copious amounts. Students were often present at these affairs, so we stopped going. It made us feel like Adam and Eve in the bushes.
Financial accountability in small areas like turning off lights, campus vehicle abuse, not wasting water and not wasting the tons of bread they do, are all areas that need to be addressed.
The bread thing was a major issue for many of us! At every meal where bread (or tortillas) was served, loaves of bread (and bags of tortillas) were wasted. Staff and students would rip the bags open and grab a handful, often tearing and shredding the bread below, or tossing the ends back in to the heap. By the time 700 people had done this, there was enough scrap to feed the multitude all over again. Yet day after day, leadership were off in their private lunch-meetings at The Kona Inn or Sheraton, unaware that the people of God were squandering The King’s Warehouses. And 1 mile up the road, lived 30 homeless people who were squatting in the hills, sleeping in blankets in the open air and begging for a meal at 7-11! Made me crazy. I can now tell the world that the entire time I was there, I was feeding a number of those families meals my family and I would fore-go, and often, my kids would scrounge thru the rubbish for perfectly edible food that others had thrown away and we would fix it up and take it to those squatters who cried and thanked us each time. AND YES CELIA! I EVEN TOOK THEM YOUR SPECIAL STRAWBERRIES and Asparagus Quiches!
I read “Walter Thomas” statement on Maui Ywam..and am surprised…but then, others will read my experiences and be surprised.
The Bauers were wonderful, caring people, who lived just like the students and often in worse conditions. I find it surprising that Mr. Thomas says they stole money to buy a car, since my family gave them two fabulous vehicles, and they donated one of those to the base and the other to a newly-married staff couple!!
It appears that YWAM has tried to deflect their own sin and their own inadequacies as leaders onto the Bauers. If there were abuse problems, it was up to YWAM leaders like Dave Boyd, who spoke at our DTS graduation, and Frank Naia to deal with them. Regardless, The Bauers have been involved in a powerful and established youth ministry in Honolulu for many years now, while U of N is still operating with men and women like the Rawlins and Boyd’s at the helm!
I owe, and the people of Thailand and India owe, and my children and their children owe The Bauers a tremendous debt for the love, discipline, encouragement and training they sacrificially gave us during those years they served in YWAM MAUI. When people comment on how well behaved our children are, I say a quiet prayer for my parents and The Bauers who modeled such profound parenting principles to me.
Young YWAMers need to be taught about people like the Bauers. My eldest daughter once remarked that she was disappointed that not one of the BIG CHEESE speakers she heard in Kona ever inspired her as much as one phone-call with Cindy Bauer did.
The Boyd’s and Rawlins and Norments and McClungs can have their positions of power and grandeur. It is the foot-soldiers who take the shrapnel-hits and mortar fire, and it is the foot-soldiers, not the well-dressed and well-fed captains of industry, who will march forth into the great and coming Final Battle and who will win the war.
To young YWAMers and “wanna-be-missionaries” I say, look to God not man for guidance.
What is a "YWAM"?
Whoa. I have a cousin in YWAM. I had heard that she had had some problems, but now I'm concerned.
Youth With a Mission.
Thanks. That little tidbit makes it ever so much easier to read and understand
this post.
Most of the time you hear it pronounced "Y-WAM". They've been around a long time. A young relative has been traveling with them a couple of years, going all over the world. She's been sick some, though, and I think I heard she might be coming home, or was home. Hope so.
Are they essentially a good bunch of folks, or are they a scam? I don't know enough about them to post an intelligent comment, really.
I enjoyed the program we were in for some years. However, some of your concerns are justified.
I just got finished reading your YWAM posting. I know it's pretty old, but when I saw you were at the Maui base 88-89 it caught my interest. I was there 87-88, so I guess you must have come to the school right after mine, but I was wondering if we could chat a little. I, too was a rebel who was labeled "unlikely to finish" --- but I did and while I certainly wouldn't send my own daughter, I am glad for the experience of Maui, Kona and Fiji.
Let me know if we can type sometime.
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