Yesterday saw the tragic loss of the house that has been a hub of ministry in St. Petersburg for the last number of years. The YWAM house has not only been a blessing to the YWAMers working their, but also to the kids, babushkas and other churches and organisations that they have worked with over the years.

No one was hurt in the fire, even though when the fire on the roof
started a kids club ministry was being held inside. The fire department
arrived 40 minutes after the call was put in, but by then it was too
late to save the house.

God provided the house miraculously for the ministry that God had
there. The Youth With A Mission team is confident that God will provide
a new place for ministry. The team is very grateful that no one was
hurt and that God still has more for them there.

They have three prayer requests during this time:

• Pray for strength and unity as a team
• Pray that God would speak and that they would have open hearts to hear
• Pray that something beautiful would be birthed out of the ashes

You can read more about the fire and the YWAM team here.

Donations to YWAM St. Petersburg

If you want to partner with YWAM in St. Petersburg, Russia and help
them with the reconstruction of their ministry house please send US
dollar cheques to:

YWAM Slavic Ministries
P.O. Box 4213
Salem, OR
97302
USA

Please make the cheque payable to “YWAM Slavic Ministries” and include
a separate note in the envelope stating that the donation is for the
“St.Petersburg fund”.

A few weeks ago, in the Dutch town of Zwolle, I attended the high profile trial of a gang of eleven alleged human traffickers, most of them Nigerians. The case had resulted from a Nigerian pastor (living in The Netherlands) breaking the voodoo curses that had caused the trafficked girls to remain silent. The girls had allegedly been smuggled from several Dutch asylum seeker centers and been forced by their traffickers into the sex industry. After pastor Moses Alagbe prayed with them, these young women opened up to him about what had happened; something the police had not been able to accomplish thus far.

As I sat listening to the witnesses, I reflected on another trial that
took place in 2008 in Brazil which had originally inspired my interest
for human rights. In the tribal areas, the children who were born
mentally or physically handicapped were simple left to die. The
Christians in Brazil (some of them YWAMers) were fighting on behalf of
a group that didn’t have the means to speak up for themselves – those
indigenous children. At the time, I was able to use my social studies
background and job as an assistant TV producer to help present the case
in the Dutch media. It was then that I realized that my background had
uniquely placed me to help people who do not have their own voice to be
heard.

It has been quite a journey since.  And, now, almost two
years later, we are launching of ‘Girl Alert’ at the YWAM Heidebeek
base in the Netherlands on November 20th, 2009 – the 50th anniversary
of World’s Children Day. Together with a growing team, we want to
empower the voice of girls around the world. The first topic we will be
promoting is equal access for boys and girls to primary schools. To
accomplish this, we are working closely with eight primary schools
facilitated by YWAM in Tanzania, Zambia, Mali and India, all located in
areas monitored by the UN due to a literacy gender inequality of 10 %
or more.  As you can imagine, providing education is considered a
crucial part in preventing girls from being trafficked.
Will you
pray with us as we pioneer this new project and will you join us by
signing up on our site – www.girlalert.org? Together we can be the
change!

Even when
Gorbachev began to open up the communist world to change with
Perestroika and Glasnost, at least one visiting speaker in our YWAM
schools warned that he was even more dangerous than Stalin because he
had lulled the West into a false sense of security.

But that’s all history now, and the fragility of communism is apparent to all who look back with the luxury of hindsight.

Heroes

Last
week, Mikhail Gorbachev turned up at the Brandenburg Gate along with
George Bush sr (with cane) and Helmut Kohl (in wheelchair). Bush was
full of praise for his former Soviet counterpart, saying that
historians would recognise ‘Mikhail’ for his rare vision and unfailing
commitment to reform and openness.  

Two years before the
unexpected events leading to the collapse of communism, Bush’s
predecessor, Ronald Reagan, standing by the Brandenburg Gate, had
famously challenged the Soviet Chairman, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this
Wall.”  

Bush acknowledged last week in Berlin that the historic
events had been set in motion not in Bonn, or Moscow or Washington but
rather “in the hearts and minds of the people who had too long been
deprived of their God-given rights”.

“The people were the heroes,” agreed Gorbachev, who, at 78, was clearly still the most vital of the trio.

(As
a reward to ‘the people’, U2 offered a free celebration concert in
Berlin last week, which-irony of ironies-was partly obscured to the
public by a wall, a ’safety measure’ erected by MTV. )

Faith

While
many explained the cause of the sudden collapse of communism to be
Reagan’s tough stance, and others to the internal weakness of the
Soviet system, it was refreshing and appropriate to hear tribute to the
role of the people.

Secular observers often have ignored the
role played by the Christian faith of many who dared to oppose
communist oppression. One exception is the widely-recognised
significance of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979. When a
million Catholics attended the open air mass in Warsaw, Lech Walesa’s
Solidarity movement received papal support and ‘people power’ was on
the rise..

Two years later, I had my own ‘epiphany’ in the
Polish capital while speaking at a student conference. Referring to the
statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, I suddenly saw   that communism, like
all the other empires,  was also destined to pass away; that only God’s
kingdom was unshakeable. The next morning at breakfast in the hotel,
Walesa and some  supporters entered to sit at the next table to me.
Despite my ‘revelation’, I didn’t dare think I could be looking at the
future president of a democratic Poland. That, of course, is all
history now.  

Across the border in communist Lithuania, a
battle had gone on between the authorities and the people for years
preceding those heady days in Warsaw. Crosses placed on a shrine on a
hill in memory of those who had died in exile in Siberia, were
regularly cleared away by police. Repeatedly new crosses would appear.
Finally, the people won, and today more than a million crosses still
stand on this hill, a reminder of this battle of faith (photo 2).

Lesson

I
have written Weekly Words about this and other stories, including the
prayer and peace movement in Leipzig and other East German cities
(photo 4); and the handful of parishioners in Timisoara whose vigil
outside their pastor’s house triggered the Romanian revolution (photo
6); (see www.ywam.eu/weeklyword/2009, 30mar, 6jul,10&17aug).

Other
events of ‘people-power’ not overtly faith-linked included a
border-to-border human chain in the Baltics (photo 3); and the
pan-European picnic with its unplanned ‘breakthrough’ in which hundreds
escaped across into the Austrian border (photo 5).

Yes, the people were the heroes, particularly the people of faith. Truly, the world had much to celebrate twenty years ago.

Today,
we should not forget the lesson of these world-changing events: that
nothing is permanent, except God’s Kingdom. And that means secularism’s
days are numbered too.

Till next week,

My three-day stay was not as accidental as Paul’s three-month layover
(Acts 28). Some time ago, I received an invitation to speak there at
the annual retreat of a Catholic charismatic community-very gracious,
in view of my own Baptist background.

When later I read that the YWAM sailing vessel, s/y Next Wave, would
also be in Malta at the same time, my anticipation doubled. In the
several years of her sailing and training ministry around Europe and
the Mediterranean, I had never been at the right place at the right
time.

Grasping my opportunity, I booked a flight a day early to spend time with the crew and students on board.

Half an hour after landing (as in Paul’s story, everyone on board my
craft also survived), I was on my way with Rob Clarke, the visiting
on-board DTS speaker,  towards St Paul’s Bay where the Next Wave was
anchored. As we negotiated the narrow streets down towards the port
dotted with curiously-shaped fishing boats, the white ketch with her
two tall masts and clipper bowsprit dominated the view of the bay.

Within minutes we were whisked out to the vessel in an inflatable
dinghy and clambered up the rope ladder to the deck, to be welcomed
aboard by the skipper, Lehman Franklin. Rob, who had sailed with the
vessel from Sicily, wasted no time in producing a pair of swimming
trunks. I found myself leaping from the deck into the sea after him and
swimming around the ship.

Underbelly

A chart in the main cabin traced the vessel’s voyages in the
Mediterranean Sea, resembling a map of Paul’s missionary journeys. Crew
and students shared with me stories of  port calls in the Black Sea,
Greece, Italy and Sicily. Many doors had opened with local churches
wherever they had gone. While ships are not new for us in YWAM, I was
impressed with how strategic the work of this ship was, steadily
probing Europe’s ‘underbelly’, the southern coastline where we have
been least active.

Standing on the deck, I could see a large statue of St Paul  on the
northern arm of the bay, marking the spot where tradition held the ship
to have been wrecked.   

I recalled reading somewhere an account about an American explorer* who
had concluded that St Paul’s Bay did not match the description in Acts.
He studied the clues from Luke, (a north-easterly wind, a sandy bay, a
reef, a place where the ‘waters meet’, an unrecognized coastline…).
With the help of the Maltese Navy and US Coastguard computers, he had
deduced the most likely site to be further south, at St Thomas Bay.

Hoping to launch a diving expedition to look for the four anchors cut
loose by the sailors in 90 feet of water (Acts 27:40), he discovered
that local divers had already found four metal stocks (crossbars)
exactly where he had predicted. Two, he was horrified to learn, had
been melted down for diving weights; a third’s whereabouts was unknown;
but a fourth was the possession of the widow of a diver who had died
over thirty years ago. It was now somewhere on display in a maritime
museum.

See-saw

The next day at the conference, I referred to Paul’s shipwreck to
introduce the chosen theme, Living as a people of hope, based on the
title of my book. Luke wrote (Acts 27:20): ‘we gave up all hope of
being saved’. Paul however, did not. He drew his hope not from
circumstances, but from the word God brought to him in the night that
everyone would be saved. Paul’s hope, his anchor, was grounded in God’s
person, purposes and promises-not his own circumstances.

For hope, I explained, was symbolised in Hebrews as an anchor, sure and
secure. Luke’s account of the shipwreck mentioned several anchors; a
sea anchor to stabilise the boat in the driving storm, and the four
stern anchors the sailors dropped as they realised they were nearing
land.

I mentioned in passing the report that four anchor stocks had
apparently been found in St Thomas’ Bay on the south-east coast, and a
few heads nodded in the audience.

Straight after my talk, a young woman introduced herself to me as
Elena. Her father, she said, was the diver who had found the metal
stock. ‘I know it very well,’ she said. ‘We used to see-saw on it!’

The next evening, Elena, her husband and my host couple demonstrated
the ‘unusual kindness’ of the Maltese, taking me to a candle-light
festival in Birgu, across the Grand Harbour from Valetta. Little has
changed in this city built by the Knights of St John since the Great
Siege in 1565, when the knights heroically repelled an overwhelming
Turkish naval force.

Strolling along a promenade still abuzz with people shortly before
midnight, we were surprised to discover the Maritime Museum was still
open for the festival! Elena rushed us inside and led us straight to
her father’s anchor stock on display, with several other similar
discoveries.

She posed for me beside a huge reconstructed wooden anchor of a first
century ship, complete with an identical metal crossbar, similar to
those which Paul’s sailors had cut adrift.

We’ll never know for sure if Elena’s father had found one of the very
anchors Luke wrote about. But it gave me a buzz to imagine such a
direct link with this dramatic Biblical event.

•see www.bobcornuke.com/content/pauls-shipwreck

Till next week,

These same
momentous twenty years have defined my term of office as director of
YWAM Europe, which will end at the close of this year.

When
Lynn Green, now YWAM’s International Chairman, asked me to consider
taking on the European leadership in 1988, I responded in jest, saying,
‘Yes, but on one condition.’

The condition was that he solve all the major problems in Europe first.

So
as summer of 1989 gave way to autumn, I began to notice major changes
happening: the border between Austria and Hungary was opened on
September 11;  two months later the Berlin Wall itself was the scene of
cheering, laughing, crying reunited Berliners from both sides. By the
end of the year, even the Romanian dictator Ceausescu had been ousted,
executed and buried.

I was very impressed, so wrote to Lynn to thank him for keeping his side of the bargain. I now had to keep mine.

Gold-Rush

What
a privilege to have been engaged in missions leadership in these two
world-shaking decades! With the doors wide open to Eastern Europe,
Russia and Central Asia, YWAM joined many other missions in responding
to the great curiosity and spiritual hunger of the post-Communists.
After nearly twenty years of undercover work by pioneers like Al and
Carolyn Akimoff, now we could operate openly on the streets, and set up
training centres from Krakow to Kamchutka.

Very quickly, the
scene began to resemble the wild gold-rush days, becoming crowded,
confused and competitive. Al cautioned against the short-term
mentality, urging us to think long-term, and to lay solid foundations.

We
began to reach out to other organisations and seek ways to share,
cooperate and partner. A core group of leaders from various
organisations began to meet regularly and we identified the need to
build networks of like ministries. Eventually Hope for Europe was born
as an umbrella to promote a climate of cooperation for renewal and
reformation in Europe.

Unfinished

That
of course is an unfinished job. I am not stopping because the task is
done. Neither am I tired, bored or discouraged. But twenty years is a
long time for anyone to stay in the same job. It’s time to make room
for younger leaders, fresh blood and new thinking.

Romkje and I
will remain YWAMers, overseeing Centrum ’s Heerenhof, the
multi-ministry centre in Heerde, close to the Heidebeek training
centre.

And we both hope to continue being active in Hope for
Europe for the foreseeable future, networking ministries in a spirit of
cooperation across the continent.

In fact, we are already preparing for a second pan-European congress, HOPE•II, to be held in Budapest in May 2011.

In
addition, we are sensing a new challenge to focus on the message of
hope; to network thinkers and doers across Europe, encouraging
‘thinkers to do more and doers to think more’. We plan to start a
Centre for European Studies, with courses, summer schools, think tanks
and study units, aiming to promote biblical perspectives on Europe’s
past, present and future.

Symposium

To
bring these twenty years to closure, and to explain something of our
aims for the next twenty years, we invite you to join us in Amsterdam
on Friday afternoon, December 11, for a symposium, open for all, to
explore what these twenty years might bring. A panel of specialists
from England, Switzerland and Holland will share their expectations of
the challenges and opportunities ahead.   

I will also share
some closing reflections on ‘Reason for hope’, and introduce the
concept of the centre, which we plan to call the Schuman Centre. I’ll
explain why on the 11th.

The symposium will be followed in the
evening by a reception primarily for YWAM staff and friends, where we
will present the European leadership team and pray for them as together
they take on the oversight of the work in Europe. I’ll send more
information about speakers and venue as soon as final details are
confirmed. Meanwhile, please note the date: December 11, 2-5pm,
Amsterdam.

Oh, and yes-I still plan to keeping writing Weekly Words!

Till next week,

That’s the view unpacked by Gerard Kelly in a creative and thought-provoking study on Daniel called ‘Stretch’ (Authentic Media).

At our annual Caleb Forum last weekend by Lake Thun in Switzerland, fifteen older YWAM couples met to encourage each other to ‘finish strongly’. We shared, prayed, laughed and cried together. And we read excerpts from Kelly’s book.

Until a few weeks ago, Gerard was pastor of Crossroads International Church in Amsterdam, which doubled under his colourful preaching style, sprinkled with poetic and artistic allusions.

Gerard is a wordsmith and writes like he talks. His chapters hang on a series of adjectives describing Daniel’s faith in exile-a faith both ’stretched and stretching’.   

Intrinsic  
Daniel’s faith was so fully internalised and deeply rooted, it shaped everything. It was not dependent on external conditions, outward symbols and familiar rituals. It could survive the journey into exile because it was portable. We need his type of carry-anywhere, intrinsic faith-in-exile in our mobile, shape-shifting world, suggests Kelly.

The church has suffered major losses in recent years, and has been moved from the centre to the margins of society; from majority culture to minority; from a privileged role to being one community among many in a plural society.

The mood for Daniel and his fellow Jews became the minor key. Yet minor keys are not by definition melancholic, Gerard explains. They can also express hope in the midst of lament.

Acoustic
Daniel’s faith was grounded in the art of listening. He engaged fully with the culture around him, taking on a pagan education and learning a pagan tongue. Yet he learnt the skill of ‘double listening’: to God and to the world. I’ve heard Gerard describe that elsewhere as being bi-textual.

The call of the prophet is double-edged, listening to God and the world in order to bring God’s Word into the world to change the world. For the whole earth is the Lord’s. Yes, Daniel and his friends were exiles in a foreign land, but even Babylon was God’s. Yes, they-like us today-were ‘resident aliens’. And we too look forward to when the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our God (Rev. 11: 15).   

Elastic
Like Daniel and his friends, we also need a faith that is stretched but not broken by the trials of life. Shadrach,  Meshach and Abednego told the king that God was able to save them in the fiery furnace, but that even if he didn’t, he was still the true God. Their faith was not destroyed by adversity. It was rooted in who God was, not who or where they were. It was rooted not so much in the power of God as in his goodness. It liberated them to love God for his person, not his performance. It embraced God in the familiar and unfamiliar, the easy and the hard.

Kenotic
We needed the dictionary definition at the start of the chapter for this one! Kenotic faith is expressed in servanthood and self-emptying. Daniel’s power contrasted with that of the kings-a power that came from knowing God, accessed through prayer, administered in weakness and maintained through trust This kind of power, ignored by historians, truly shapes history.

Poetic
Faith that opens the imagination to God’s beauty shaped the way Daniel communicated with the rulers he served. His dreams and visions expressed metaphor and mystery. Our times too resonate with metaphor and mystery.   

Eccentric
To be centred in another reality is the meaning of this kind of faith. Daniel listened to another drummer. He was rooted elsewhere. Living in creation, he was Creator-centred. This gave him courage that transformed kings.

Panoramic
Lastly, Daniel’s faith was panoramic, viewing the future in the light of God’s plan. Behind the events of his age, he knew the sovereign God was at work. Here was a key to finishing strongly, we read in the last verse of Daniel:

‘Go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.’
 
Till next week,

I also discovered I had been scheduled on the plenary programme, sandwiched between main speakers Tim Keller and Vishal Mangalwadi, to present reflections on Europe’s urban churches.

My first reflection was on the irony of travelling across the Atlantic to learn what God was doing in Amsterdam.

Stereotypes
I then shared some of the stereotypes many have about Europe-of empty and dying churches, a European Union with no room for God, a prodigal continent in pursuit of materialism and hedonistic pleasure.

Yes, Europe had indeed become a continent of spiritual pygmies, when compared to the dynamic, growing churches on other continents.

As often quoted, there were more spiritist healers in France than doctors, lawyers and priests combined. There were more members of the Assemblies of God in Brazil than all the evangelicals in Europe; and more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England and the US together. There were more believers in China than Germans in Germany. One church in Korea had a membership as large as the population of Amsterdam. (The evening before a Nigerian pastor had told us about his church that was a mile long and half a mile wide and seated one million!)

And now, of course, Europe was being flooded by Muslim migrants and was well on the way to becoming ‘Eurabia’.

Ah, but wait!  That’s not the full picture, I warned. It may be too soon to conclude that God had written Europe off.

Death… & Resurrection
Europe’s historic churches were perhaps in ruins, as historian Philip Jenkins concedes in his book, God’s Continent. But, as he hastens to add, there was still faith to be discovered among the ruins. Like a dying white dwarf star that shrinks in size but increases in intensity, so too as nominal believers have left the church in large numbers, those who remain or join were much more committed and genuine.  

Renewed interest in pilgrimages and spiritual retreats, and large turnouts of youth to Taizé and World Youth Days indicated renewed Christian faith in Europe. After all, Jenkins argues, Christianity is all about death and resurrection.

The history of the church reflected a pattern of decline and renewal, I said. It resembled more the fluctuations of the market on a busy day at the stock exchange, than the trajectory of a cannon ball disappearing over the horizon.

This was the moment to throw in the quote from Odon Vallet, cited in Jenkins’ book: if you are the type of person who likes to buy stocks and bonds, I’d buy Christianity; the price is low; it has to go up.

Fresh Expressions
Among the signs of resurrection were the fresh expressions of church emerging  all over the continent, resembling new shoots stemming out of the trunk of an old tree that had lost its branches. The church planting movement in Amsterdam was one example of the new coming out of the old. Cells, house groups, simple churches, churches in pubs, groups for new age seekers and Alpha groups were further expressions, I proposed.

Migration in Europe was not all about Islam, I continued. Half of all the immigrants entering the EU were already church members. Less than a third were Muslim.

Migrants were bringing colour and vitality to Europe’s urban churches, often creating megachurches as in Kiev (where an African pastors Europe’s largest church) or in London where four of the biggest ten churches are African-led. Many churches were engaging with urban social issues. University research had shown, for example, that in Rotterdam church-based social services saved the city €130 million annually.

Examples of city-wide expressions of unity among Christians of all confessions, from Vienna, Stockholm and Berlin, helped convince at least some of my audience of 300 delegates from global cities that God was not finished with Europe yet.

People from literally every continent thanked me over the following days for giving them fresh hope for Europe.

Till next week,

The Empire State Building was appropriately floodlit in orange, and later in the red-white-and-blue of the Dutch flag. A range of cultural events and exhibitions was held in lower Manhattan, some attended by Crown Prince Willem-Alexander. Classic Dutch sailing boats sailed out on to the Hudson River and around the Statue of Liberty, giving New Yorkers a rare flashback to the pioneering days.

The second commemoration, on Friday, was the eight anniversary of 9/11, the day that transformed the city’s skyline in 2001.

Flags everywhere were at half-mast, in memory of the three thousand crushed in the rubble of the twin towers before a live global television audience.

Nick Savoca, director of YWAM New York, was forty miles away on Long Island at the YWAM training centre when word came through of the first phase of the tragedy. Like millions of others around the world, he and his staff were watching in helpless horror when the second plane struck.

Staff members began crying and praying, not knowing what would come next. Nick went to his office and began receiving a stream of emails from other YWAM centres offering to send relief teams.

Confused
Nick and his staff asked God together how they should get involved. They felt God say, ‘through prayer’. Yes, of course they would pray, but how practically could they serve? Through prayer, came the answer again. The people of New York were hurting, confused, disorientated, grieving, shocked and fearful. They needed people to pray with, people who would pray for them.

Quickly Nick realised what they should do. Since 1992, he and his staff had been setting up prayer stations around the city, with portable tables for literature, and bright red banners and aprons for the workers, each with ‘Prayer Station’ in bold white letters. If you need gas, explains Nick, you go to a gas station. So why not a prayer station?

Nick and his colleagues had developed a regular ritual of travelling to downtown Manhattan, setting up stations in up to a dozen locations, and being available to pray for passers-by. Right from the start people had responded positively, even lining up for prayer.

As we travelled together out from the city to Long Island this weekend, Nick shared story after story of healings and transformed lives after prayer at a station. Many had asked for prayer for employment, returning the very next day reporting great excitement that they had found a job after months of looking. One woman was on her way home to commit suicide when her life was changed for ever after receiving prayer.

‘Tell us more about this God of yours,’ was the common response after people had experience answered prayer, said Nick. A Muslim imam, carrying a large Koran, had even agreed to prayer for his wife to find a job. The next day the imam sought the prayer team out to thank them for answered prayer.

After 9/11, Nick realised the trauma would last for months, and he and his team would need commit for at least a year of regular presence downtown. The smell of the carnage hung over the downtown area for months, he said. People didn’t come for answers, just support, and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to be prayed for for a few minutes.

Peter Jennings of ABC television sent a camera crew to report nation-wide on these ‘Christians whom some accuse of exploiting a disaster to spread their religion’. After three hours of following up passers-by who had received prayer, they found none with complaints of any manipulation, but many with compliments and appreciation.

Over the year following 9/11, Nick reported, some 50,000 people had been prayed for. And three thousand had become believers-about the same number killed in the Twin Towers tragedy.

Till next week,