Preface:

I have no intentions or motives for writing this blog, other than for my own mental processing and reflection. I am in no way trying to defame, or diminish any person, organization, or someones personal beliefs. For the sake of privacy and my frequent mention of Youth With a Mission, I will keep my name and the base location anonymous. If you have interest in any more details of my experience over my 3-4 years with YWAM I would be happy to discuss that with you privately.

Prologue

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child: but when I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me“.

1 Corinthians 13:11

Over the last year or so, I have begun to consider, question, and doubt many things. This doubt was triggered by my exposure to Christian religious extremism. Knowing that the behavior of extremism was out of the ordinary, I began to doubt and question the behavior, coming to the conclusion that it was total nonsense. As I came to the realization that by asking simple questions about the nature of things leads to truth, I began to apply this on a greater scale…more specifically my entire life as follower of Christianity and believer of the super-natural. This lead me on a quest of learning and asking as many questions as I could, with the hopes that everything I’ve believed about myself and the world around me was in fact true.

It wasn’t.

Having come to this understanding, my life has been a spiral of craziness, discontent and slight depression, however it has now settled down. The truth is, I’ve now been totally liberated to the reality of how the universe truly is, and it’s far greater than the stories I’ve been told to believe.

The value and meaning of life hold much more weight than I could have ever imagined. The time we have with each other truly is precious, because as far as we can tell, this life is the only one we have.

The Beginning

I suppose I should start this off from my “conversion” experience, but I have been conditioned since birth to believe in and follow the Christian faith (protestant). I grew up attending an average Presbyterian church in suburban America and attended a private Christian school from Kindergarten through seventh grade. Throughout this time I always believed in God, partly because I had known no alternative and partly because it helped comfort me in an unhealthy home environment. By the time I hit eight grade, I was more or less forced to go on a mission trip to a poor rural part of America and do some charity work. During this trip, at night we were required to attend what were basically chapel meetings and worship. During one of these meetings, after a strong message full of emotional appeal I decided to take my faith more seriously (I would call this my conversion experience). After this experience, I wanted to do nothing else with my life except be the best Christian I could be. I religiously attended church every week (no pun intended), I began to read books about theology and study up on everything that I could, and eventually resolved to become a missionary. After I made this decision, nothing else mattered to me or held any weight in my life. Dissatisfied the mundane high school experience and a path toward college that i had no interest in, I dropped out of school to try and fulfill this ambition.

Youth With a Mission (YWAM)

Having no idea how one becomes a missionary, I talked with my sister who also just so happened to be a missionary. She had joined a missions organization called Youth With a Mission (abbreviated as YWAM), at the age of 18 and had been with them for about 8 years at the time. After speaking with her, I decided to take this same route. When I made this decision, I immediately dropped out of high school to join this organization (I was seventeen at the time). I applied for what is essentially the “basic training” of YWAM and it’s a five-six month school that everyone must do if you want to work with the organization, It’s called Discipleship Training School (DTS for short). DTS is split up into two phases, lecture phase and outreach phase. Lecture phase is three months and outreach is two. During lecture phase, the school leaders will have different teachers come and teach on different topics every week of their choosing, some topic examples would be hearing God’s voice, the Holy Spirit, father heart of God and some others. These weeks were very emotionally intense and in hindsight, quite manipulative and were almost a spiritual brainwash (although I do not believe the organization has bad intentions or ill-will of any kind). During lecture phase, we were all assigned a small group leader whom we had small group with a couple of times per week, as well as one-on-one meetings for an hour with that leader once per week.

(Just as a side note, I don’t think I ever mentioned this earlier, but YWAM is very pentecostal based, lots of “prophecy” , faith healings, speaking in tongues and all that jazz, which is what fundamentally led to my de-conversion but I’ll get to that in a bit)

After lecture phase ended, our school split off into a few separate outreach teams, going to different countries around the world.

The main point I’m trying to get at here, is that as an uninformed seventeen year old, the appeal of this lifestyle blinded me. After doing another school after DTS, I decided to apply for and join the staff of this particular YWAM base (they call their locations bases).

My Awakening

After joining staff, I was immediately put on a Discipleship Training School to work with. It didn’t take very long for things to start getting weird. The particular leaders I was under for that school were extremely pentecostal, one of them called themselves a prophet and had frequent outbursts of speaking in tongues, twitching and occasionally screaming and writhing under the supposed influence of the Holy Spirit. They often talked about wanting to experience the super-natural, yearning to see physical healings and gold dust fall from the ceiling like what happens at a particular church in Redding California, led by what I would now consider a con-artist. The teachers invited to teach in that particular DTS were mostly hyper-pentecostals focused on spiritual gifts and supposed manifestations of the Holy Spirit. It became very apparent, very quickly that I was the “skeptic” of these fundamentalist leanings of Christianity, often questioning the things that were being taught, specifically the extreme pentecostal elements. Eventually, like a great illuminating road to Damascus, I questioned the legitimacy of my faith completely. I ordered two books that I knew were written to help people think critically, by two authors who are often condemned in Christian circles, Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan. I ordered “The Magic of Reality”, by Dawkins, and “The Demon Haunted World”, by Sagan. It was like a blind fold was removed from my eyes, and within a few months I left the organization as an agnostic. However, I have never felt more cheated and robbed in my entire life. I left at the age of 21, after being there for around three years (I obviously cut out much of my experience there for the sake of time), I was a high school dropout, who had been living off the support of other peoples money, living in a fantasy world. I say living off of other people’s money, because to work for YWAM you have to raise your own funds and pay them to work for them…I have no idea how I missed obvious fraud there, I was seventeen. Thankfully, I went back to school, received a GED and am now on the path of studying Physics in college.

“As we began to indulge our curiosity, though, to explore, to learn how the Universe really is, we expelled ourselves from Eden. Angels with a flaming sword were set as sentries at the gates of Paradise to bar our return. The gardeners became exiles and wanderers. Occasionally we mourn that lost world, but that, it seems to me, is maudlin and sentimental. We could not happily have remained ignorant forever.”

– Carl Sagan