Youth With A Mission Modesto...
...a ministry of YWAM International
We are a creative compassionate community of full-time YWAM workers and volunteers who seek to make friends with, and serve Jesus, the poor, the young, and churches. Understanding that God’s Kingdom is about right relationships (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”), we seek to make relationship the focal point of all we do.
There are several children we have been working with in Modesto for the last three years. We found them living in a motel room with various members of an extended family. They were not in school, had little or no supervision, malnourished, and surrounded by violence, prostitution, and drugs. We have been spending time with them for the last three years teaching them how to live. We have helped them to get back into school, and are teaching them basic communication and relational skills. We have seen dramatic change in behavior in some of the children, and others very gradual, but all the same, God is using us to affect change. One vision we have is to take the four to six of the oldest boys (12 and 13 yrs. old) into the wilderness for a week of hiking, backpacking, swimming, and outdoor education. We believe giving opportunity to these boys to experience something beyond hopeless- city-poverty life, can open their eyes to a brighter future. We believe a sense of leadership can be established in the hearts of these boys through having their strength tested against the wildness of nature. This will help them to understand the power they already have to cultivate change in their own lives and communities. We think in the truest sense, this is how we outsmart the often appealing competition of drugs and gangs. Our goals for this trip would be to teach basic outdoor skills, communicate/teach about our relationship with the earth, and how this relates to our relationship with God. Also, it would be great to equip them at the beginning of the week for releasing them to map out a day-hike and reach their own destination near the end of the week. We hope to have great times throughout the trip of team-building games and exercises, and personal achievement. We want them returning to Modesto with a greater sense of strength, leadership, and responsibility to each other and their community. We need to raise $3,000.00 for this trip. Please help us if you can. We are also going to put the boys to work with fund-raisers so they can play a part in planning this activity. Thank you.
A new openness
John 4:20
In the days of Jesus, Israel’s religious leaders sent out missionaries (Matt. 23:15), but their message to outsiders was something like this: Only if you follow our way can you be saved; only then can we accept you. The Samaritan woman had sensed this attitude among the surrounding peoples, and therefore she was surprised by Jesus’ openness to her.
We need to be careful not to impose our cultural traditions on others as a condition for knowing God. When large numbers of Western Dani people in Irian Jaya came to faith in Jesus Christ during the 1960s, the Western missionaries did not require them to sing Western hymns or wear Western clothes. Dani men typically wore only a gourd over their genitals. Ironically, when the Danis began evangelizing the Sawi and Asmat peoples, whose men wore nothing at all, they wanted to clothe them with gourds. They also wanted them to sing their Dani hymns.
Jesus told the Samaritan woman that old restrictions on worship would soon be ended. He once described himself as the good shepherd who had to bring sheep from many different sheep pens (other cultures) into one (multicultural) flock (see John 10:14-16). Jesus wanted disciples who would approach the sheep through himčthe gatečand not in their own way.
When you share the gospel with outsiders, what message do they hear from your behavior? More study: John 10:1-16; Acts 10:1ą11:19; Gal. 2:11-14; 6:12-15.
