Most of us have heard of YWAM (Youth with a Mission) and know it to be a large youth centred international organisation devoted to mission and evangelism. My knowledge of this group did not encourage me to want to look further into its story when I first heard about it a decade ago. Rumours of mistreatment of volunteer staff members were then circulating. One particular account did burrow into my memory. This was the story of a young idealistic volunteer who was working in India, but who became disillusioned with the treatment he was receiving at the hands of YWAM leaders. The response of the organisation was simply to abandon the volunteer. He had no money or other means of returning to his home, which I believe was in Australia.
I would normally hesitate before recounting a story heard a decade ago about an organisation which may be a hostile piece of gossip. I take the risk because although the story I heard may be just that, a rumour, it pales into triviality when set alongside the many other allegations against the group collected by Shanti Das in the Observer last weekend. The Observer story is in many ways a familiar one, especially for those of us who are familiar with safeguarding stories connected with control in some religious groups. These seem inevitably to focus on abuse, whether emotional, spiritual or sexual. The YWAM story appears, from the Observer account, to indicate what we can only describe as cultic exploitation. The abusers in YWAM, if such they are, seem to be concerned with establishing complete control over their victims. This enables them to obtain access to a gratification that such control provides. This pattern is common to the behaviour of cult leaders the world over.
I retell some of this Observer story of spiritual abuse to show how an ostensibly Christian organisation can put itself in the situation of using cult dynamics, while believing that it is doing God’s work. There are various danger signs in the Observer description of YWAM that together allow us to refer to it as cultic. When these danger signs are found in any Christian group, we must be on the alert and aware that we are entering potentially dangerous territory.
The first danger sign is the age issue. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in recruiting young people from the 18-30 age group to practise Christian evangelism and ministry. Young people in this age group have not yet settled into family life or careers and so are free to be recruited into a ‘gap-year’ experience as provided by YWAM. They also possess a great deal of idealism and capacity for self-sacrifice at this stage of their lives. Youthful health and vitality are also generally more tolerant of the less-than-ideal living conditions that are experienced in poorer parts of the world. But there is a shadow side to this boundless capacity for self-sacrifice and idealism. These same qualities, however honourable, make the individual potentially open to abuse and exploitation if there is any rottenness or corruption in the organisation. In short, where there is human sin there will be a potential for some of those in positions of power to take toxic advantage of those in their charge. A perennial issue for YWAM, as for any organisation with responsibility for groups of young people being prepared for ministry, is to be alert for this potential for abuse among the trainers. No amount of high-sounding Christian rhetoric can remove this possible evil, even in organisations dedicated to the highest of values. Only safeguarding vigilance and a realistic understanding of human nature will make such organisations consistently safe and free from the toxic effects of controlling abuse.
There are two salient factors that have allowed toxic abuse to find a home in YWAM’s method of operation. One is a practical issue brought about by geography. If you remove a group of young people to a centre in an alien unfamiliar culture and many miles from home, you inevitably increase a sense of vulnerability and dependency in these individuals. The greater the vulnerability, the more the dislocated youngster is likely to develop a potentially unhealthy dependence on leaders. A second method for creating a dependency on an organisation is by insisting on an adherence to an authoritarian understanding of scripture. In the case of YWAM and numerous similar organisations, the teaching will include a reactionary stance on all things to do with sexuality. There seems to be an unhealthy focus on compelling YWAM members in group ‘confession’ sessions to open up and admit any deviance from the conservative understanding of sexuality within their personal lives. It does not take much imagination to see such compulsory ‘confession’ as a weapon of control. Quite apart from what any of us think about the LGBTQ issue, it cannot be right to use the sexual preferences of an individual as a means of controlling them through the imposition of shame and guilt. This is what appears to have been a regular pattern in the YWAM group meetings.
The YWAM culture of coercion and control that the Observer article describes is very similar to the dynamics of a cult. It is one thing to teach and believe a set of attitudes about human sexuality. It is quite another to impose those beliefs on others using the tools of social shame and the threat of ostracism. This kind of compulsory groupthink is typical of cults. Whether or not my anecdote about the Australian young man abandoned in India by YWAM is literally true, it represents a sense of dread that a young person might feel when tempted to question those in authority. To describe YWAM as a cult is simply to indicate that within this group non-conformity is impossible. Such suppression of identity is, most of us would claim, a denial of an essential human freedom. The freedom to be a dissident is a fundamental human right. Maturity is gained through questioning and exploration, not through the surrender of one’s intellect to the dictates of an authoritarian conservative mind-set.
The Observer article is, for a change, not a narrative about sexual abuse and exploitation. It does, however, lay bare the vulnerability of idealistic young people to harm. These, in the name of Christian ideals, sacrifice an important stage in their lives to a cultic group. At best they can extract some positive learning out of their experience, and this may include some insight about the power of groups to take over control of young lives. At worst, there may be a completely messed up set of values in the head, which puts a permanent block on the ability to understand sexuality and healthy human relationships. If even half the claims of control in the Observer are true, it represents the imposition of an enormous burden on a substantial cohort of young people at a vulnerable stage in their lives. If such damage is routinely happening at YWAM, we might ask which other branches of the church are treating young people with the same recklessness and potential damage to their lives. Abuse is not just about sex and finance. It is often about damage to trust and the ability to make healthy meaningful relationships with God and with others. To damage that ability is to create real and lasting harm.
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Thanks. An excellent read. Do some evangelical cult leaders give the impression Matthew 28:18 relates to them, or to their organisation? There are no innocent bystanders in evangelical cults. Abusive leaders should be challenged by other leaders, or by pupils-students. But evangelical cults run on a carrot and stick tactic: “Step out of line, or blow the whistle on obscene bullying, and you will be next….”
When I was involved in the charismatic movement there were rumours of coercive practices in YWAM, including people being ordered who to date or who not to date. But I never saw or heard of any actual evidence. It seems, sadly, that some at least of the rumours were right.
I saw some dreadful charismatic-evangelical behaviour get nonchalantly covered up by celebrated Anglican leaders. There was wanton contempt for UK law or church rules, combined with a blasphemous contempt for biblical principles of justice. Could the UK Anglican Church be reduced to one Diocese [Down and Out Diocese] led by Bishop Clay-foot?
Thanks. A good commentary on the article in the Observer. When I was a teenager and considering a Gap Year with a Christian organisation, a YWAM DTS was one I considered. The church I attended was a safe space, in my memory, from abuse and cultic style tactics. However, they would have supported me if I had gone with YWAM. It’s worrying that these organisations can recruit people from ordinary, safe local institutions.
My partner is a Cambridge educated professor. I am a retired NHS medic. During New Wine training, senior leaders attempted what we felt was an attempt to coerce us into getting married. Marriage coercion, of adults in their 50’s, is outrageous!
My partner has psoriatic arthritis, and we decided a long time ago that sex and reproduction were not the best direction for us. Bishops and Archbishops, plus senior New Wine leaders, seem to have limited respect for Church rules, national anti-discrimination law or biblical principles of natural justice.
We felt accused of ‘living in sin’, and I was told my presence would ‘defile a pulpit’. A fellow student called me late one evening, and told me a course tutor was boasting behind my back about plans to block me from ever receiving any parish placements following successful completion of the New Wine course.
The scale of crisis, within Anglicanism and associated para-Church groups, is far greater than most church members ever realise. Heaven help juvenile or child victims of evangelical bullies and abusers.
My partner and I felt our relationship and peace of mind was wickedly threatened by evangelical bullies. Mercifully, a senior non-conformist minister got wind of what was happening.
The minister advised how we were victims of ‘unlawful’ abuse, and needed to urgently escape the local diocese. The senior cleric advised me to insist on getting commissioned as an evangelist, after completing a training programme costing around £2400.
The senior minister told me-in very plain terms-to immediately escape the bullies by leaving the local diocese after commissioning. They advised me to disregard any pledges made to evangelical bullies under duress.
I suspect that there is way more Anglican bullying and abuse which has not been uncovered as yet. A number of terrified or anxious witnesses have approached me with allegations of child abuse, rape, student abuse. The Observer YWAM report is welcome!
Thank you, James – I’m sorry to read about your experience.
In my experience of relatively recent CofE safeguarding, the Church has become relatively confident in tackling contemporary allegations of sexual abuse as the lines there are generally clear, and I’d like to think that few people today (especially in a mainstream Christian denomination) would seek to defend such behaviour.
However, I think that there is still a dangerous perception that abuse must be overtly physical / sexual. Bring forward allegations of psychological / emotional abuse (also recognised as forms of abuse in law) and the confidence dissipates. What some might like to defend as being ‘robust’ teaching or discipline may actually be legally questionable, and the CofE seems to show little appetite for straying into that territory, let alone tackling it.
Yes! Agree entirely with you. Dioceses and Bishops virtue signal with ‘Diocesan Safeguarding’. But sexual abuse, maltreatment or neglect of children and VA’s (vulnerable adults), would probably almost inevitably get reported these days by concerned bystanders one might imagine. Several years back the wider public became intensely aware of child sexual abuse and the longstanding harm it does. Anglican congregations now need to have a similar mindset on bullying and harassment of everyday adults. Indeed-it’s a controversial slant-but are the laity failing to protect each other and hold abusive leaders to account? A simple formula has been applied to adult victims, witnesses or whistleblowers: label them all “troublemakers” and be happy they “moved on”. Is a lack of effective local congregation empowerment embedded in token lay roles, so that absolute power is effectively placed into the hands of vicars and bishops, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The full-blooded defence, against introduction of independent safeguarding, tells a real and glaring story..
A nasty man did horrible things to everybody’s hands as we tried to get in the doorway he blocked, and I complained. Years after I left, chiefly because this was such an obstacle, someone mentioned, “we got rid of George in the end” (I don’t know how long after) (and instead of affirming me at the time).
I made nice suggestions about the poor performance of an “amplifying pastor” who seriously ruined the music and singing, also numbing most minds. I didn’t even get looked at blankly. He is still at it, last time I dropped by (his wife asserted his position with the puzzled new vicar).
In some quarters the Selwyn Hughes-style “welcome” or the “anointed rock concert” are held as sacred as the paddles and canes and manipulating and grandiosity (and I don’t mean old time humble anglocatholics: the churchmanship war is a fake.) Then yet another “emergent” road show rolls through and most parishioners don’t see the contrast from what should be.).
Some of us are regarded as not with “it” whereas exactly such are the ones with our feet most on the ground.
Many years ago, as a very young and naive student I was drawn into a local house church group, based very much around Watchman Nee’s ‘Normal Christian Church Life’, (which none of us realised was going to turn cultic) built around the dominating personality of one, later two particular leaders. One was a decent, godly fellow who meant well, but had (like, and possibly due to Nee) very fixed ideas about what the church should be. The other fellow, well, angels in shining lights come to mind. He eventually supplanted the first fellow, and then the fat really hit the fan but, thank God, by then I’d been thrown out for insubordination. As it turned out, it was a good thing I was insubordinate.
My wife had active experience of OM, rather than YWAM, and a now closed local fundamentalist Bible college – both of whom laid down the law about sexual relationships – when you could marry (before or after your time with them, but certainly not when with them, for example) The Bible college had some other dominating ideas about control and authority too.
The late Brother Andrew mentions something similar about his Bible college in ‘God’s Smuggler’ – under the guise of training people to be aware of other’s needs, you couldn’t ask someone to pass the salt, for example, but wait until they realised you needed it.
It seems the whole organised evangelical has a liking for control and coercion, sometimes innocent and well meaning, and at other times not. From my experience, it is alright until the leader who is worthy of trust is replaced by someone who isn’t – by which time it is too late. What is the matter with us?
(A missive from my vicar this morning suggests that the CofE is now imposing even more checks and self declarations on volunteers for any form of church duty, in the name of ‘safeguarding’. And we already have lack of staffing number problems. Is this going to create even more?)
PS I mentioned this to my wife, who commented that all organisations have to have rules, and they need to be strict. The complaints, she suspects, come from those who don’t like the discipline.
If only it was that simple!
Try telling that to the victims of Pilavachi, Smyth, Fletcher and other Anglican abusers. Kangaroo court justice has seen clay-footed bishops allow innocent people to be vilified, victims voices to be silenced, and serial villains to get their crimes covered up. Your wife might enjoy page 37 of Private Eye April 4-17 2025. ‘Sent to Coventry’ is a very informative article about Anglicanism’s disgraceful performance. Slack discipline with serious villains, and punishment of “troublemakers” (victims, witnesses, whistleblowers) has been the order of the day for a very long time. Rules do apply to the Anglican Church. These are shaped by national law and biblical standards of justice. Bishops, when not following trails of abuse evidence, arguably fall into blasphemous contempt for what the OT and NT teach: 2 or 3 witnesses according to Deuteronomy and St Paul. Is this even further alluded to by Our Lord? Anglican Bishops are the party who hate discipline, and the results are plain to see in the Church decay all around us.
The problem with the ‘2 or 3 witnesses’ principle is that sexual abuse is rarely carried out with an audience. I suppose you could argue that if two or three complainants tell similar stories that would qualify – but what of teh solitary rape victim? Are they never to get justice?
Has the so-called ‘burden of criminal proof’ protected countless Anglican bullies and abusers? Our tradition has repeatedly protected bullies and abusers, leaving victims hurt and frustrated.
Part of the problem is the dramatic shock victims experience, and the confident or nonchalant supremacy (or authority) of some Bishops and their teams.
Two out of five adults in my New Wine training group felt falsely accused of serious sexual misconduct in foul language. Horrified observers included a professor and a senior teacher.
An ex-moderator from a non-conformist Church intervened and told the victims to escape the local Anglican diocese. All four victims, who felt accused of adultery or extramarital sex, were mystified.
We could hardly believe what was happening. But the last few years have exposed the scale of Anglican bullying, especially in the evangelical wing of out denomination.
Maybe we could amalgamate every UK Anglican Diocese into the Diocese of Down and Out, and fix for a Bishop called Clay-foot to be the overseer.
Clay-footed leadership has not ended and continues to endanger innocent Anglicans. Is recruitment practice also woeful, with networks of people fixing things up for friends, and ill-treating or excluding Anglicans they dislike?
I cannot see any easy fix for the ‘solitary’ rape question you flag up. Traumatic as that is, the victim’s word is against the perpetrator’s. But a serial perpetrator should always face a proper inquiry or investigation.
I know exactly what you mean, James. In other circles its known as looking out for your mates…… and evangelicals in particular have the gall to criticize the Freemasons. Someone said to me, many years ago, that we shouldn’t wash the church’s dirty linen in public, which, as I rightly replied, meant that the dirty linen never actually gets washed.
My good lady does have a point, that organisations do need to have rules regarding conduct etc – taken as read. The problem is, that in any such group, particularly self governing ones such as YWAM or the CofE (yes, I nearly said ‘closed shops’) the individuals who apply those rules can all too easily turn them to their abusive advantage, and also then erect a suitably defensive barrier against criticism. To use an old phrase, who then can we trust to police the police?
Its interesting to note that these groups all have or had very strict behaviour codes, rather akin to Mr Smythe at Iwern, and that in the case of OM, YWAM and my wife’s college came after a wartime era when people had been regimented whether they liked it or not. The rules were accepted the more readily back then, largely because those they affected came from a Christian culture which already stressed submission to ‘higher authority’. (indeed, a pastor I know admitted he came close to being expelled from my wife’s college for challenging their rules!) This is the eternal problem of the religious right, with its divinely authorised and male orientated pyramid structure.
(I haven’t read Private Eye, other than the covers, for some 50 years! And someone writing on Thinking Anglicans doesn’t like it at all, presumably for being disrespectful to Mr Welby. The religious right can’t cope with either satire or criticism – remember Adrian Plass being banned by one chain of Christian bookshops for poking fun at the foibles of the evangelical church?)
Thanks, John, your reflections are interesting. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ is what I once heard. Did John Smyth QC perhaps exponentially overplay this old British practice? Welby’s approach to forgiving the monster is crazy, and it was even crazier to say it publicly. Anglicans cringe at Church abuse cover ups and financial frauds. An accountant friend laments failure to do basic double checking. Dress and dickie bow religion is dying, and good riddance to it. if ageing Anglican cringe, heaven knows how mainstream middle aged or younger people see us.
That could well be answered in one word – irrelevant!
Part of the problem is the entrenched ‘deference culture’ within the CofE, although it has parallels in conservative evangelical free churches. Remember the forgotten beatitude which got omitted from the Gospels? “Thou shalt not rock the boat”
Rowan Williams: “The Anglican Church has bought very deeply into status,” Williams said. “It’s one of the most ambiguous elements in the whole of that culture. There’s something profoundly — I’ll say it — anti-Christian in all of that. It’s about guarding position, about fencing yourself in”
Not much has changed since he said this. Clericalism rules. and anyone who dares to say they dislike it is silenced, or else evicted as “a troublemaker”.
Guardian-‘Archbishop attacks church’s obsession with status’-carried this remark from Rowan Williams in 2002: “The Anglican Church has bought very deeply into status,” he said. “It’s one of the most ambiguous elements in the whole of that culture – the concern with titles, concern with the little differentiations.”
“And there have to be points where that gets challenged. There’s something profoundly anti-Christian in all of that. It’s about guarding position, about fencing yourself in. And that’s not quite what the Gospel is.”
Is ‘clericalism’ the greatest crisis facing the Anglican Church?
Is Anglicanism now also a cult? Latterly, I have emailed the lead safeguarding Bishop, Joanne Grenfell. I have a reply saying to phone 999 if I have acute concerns!
Should Joanne Grenfell have a more personalised and easily memorable phone contact no: 666
I’ve not called in recently. But just to wish everyone a happy and blessed Easter.
My heart is close to YWAM. In 2001 and 2004 I did two 6 month schools. One in France and one in America. Prior to that in 1994 I did a two week youth mission with YWAM and another one a year later.
I love YWAM. My experience was overwhelmingly positive.
My biggest concern with YWAM Is the influence of Bethal and Bill Johnson. Although I am very charismatic at heart I fear the kind of hyper charismania and all the baggage that comes with that.
But due to the international nature of YWAM, it’s hard to pin something on one group of leaders and expand that out to the organisation as a whole. Each and every yeam centre around the world operates with a high degree of autonomy.
The exit rate from lots of charismatic-evangelical groups is very high. Many abused, bullied or exploited victims ask each other one question: why did we stay so long?
Might there be much more to be heard about ill-treatment of people within New Wine?
I too, long for the genuine oldtime, sane, solid charismatic / pentecostal to come back. What we need is grass roots and not grass skirts!
I adore a yearly reading of Acts. Odd how the Church thrived when meeting in private homes!
The New Testament Church had no Pilavachi figures armed with microphones bewitching young people at gigantic conferences.
Prayer beats hysteria and manipulation!