I'm going to admit it: I'm the son of a Missionary. A preacher, a firecracker, and someone who cares deeply about his Community.
I'm an Atheist. I have been since I was a teenager and I hold no love for the Church or Christianity.
Yet when this article appeared claiming that a organization that I grew up in was somehow, Fundamentalist, or Dominionist, I had to respond.
My father was born in Bogota, Colombia in the 1950s. His father was killed during La Violencia while returning home from his farm one evening. My Grandmother remarried and took the patriotic decision to form one of the first groups of the New Wave, a group of families transported to the Amazon to rebuild and repopulate Leticia; a city that had sparked the recent Peru-Colombian War.
During his time their my Grandfather built the main road that still stands today in the bustling little city of 45,000 while his wife and children tended to a farm out on the middle of the jungle. Life was not easy for them, eking out a life in the most dangerous of settings, without electricity or running water. But my family, my father with his 12 brothers and sisters, were, and are still considered, one of the founding families of the city.
Over the next several years, thanks to the drug trade and the important location of the city, bordering both Peru and Brazil and sitting right on the Amazon River, the city of Leticia grew. It grew largely thanks to the drug trade, and my family, everyone, including my father, at one time were involved with that drug trade. That drug trade bought electricity, it bought running water, it bough new roads, it bought people, and it bought progress.
But even then my father disliked the drug trade, for my father was a religious man. He wanted to be a Catholic Priest, for most of his family, and indeed most Colombians in that time were Catholic. But he didn't trust Catholicism, for the local Catholic Priest was a known pederast. So my father, influenced by his own father, who had converted to a Protestant form of Christianity, decided to become a missionary.
My father was one of the first members of Youth With a Mission in his country and gaining a VISA (a rare thing for a Colombian, even today) he traveled to Mexico and Later the USA working as a missionary. He was important in bringing in AID following the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake. He later met and married my mother in the USA.
My Father continued working throughout the USA and Mexico though the 80s and 90s before returning to Leticia, now a dilapidated and poor city in the late 90s. My father set up a ministry center there and begin to work amongst the communities and within the city, bringing in Medical Brigades, distributing health goods, and yes teaching the gospel.
You know, I don't really have a problem with what my father does, he's not a peddler, he's not pushing his religion in anyone's face. But I understand why some people would have a problem with his work, but that's not what this diary is about.
This diary is about YWAM, Youth With a Mission, a organization I grew up in.
Now YWAM is not perfect, no, it's certainly not perfect. It's quite decentralized in fact, meaning that there rarely is anyone in charge of all the bases around the world. Each one bares a certain amount of local responsibility.
Yes, the leaders do tend to share a conservative viewpoint on politics. But YWAM is not a political organization, it does not intend to over take politics and replace it with Christianity. Of course it seeks to have more Christians in office, they seek someone that truly represents them.
But YWAM is non denominational, it's not evangelical, not protestant, it's not even catholic. Everyone is accepted.
Yes some of it's form of teachings are controversial and have been abused, but any form of teaching can be abused, it doesn't matter how uncontroversial it is.
In closing, YWAM is filled with good people, even as a Atheist I can see that, attacking YWAM because it provided counseling to a politician during a time of infidelity is just wrong. I'm sorry.
I'm an Atheist Democrat, and I'm writing in the defense of Youth with a Mission.