Youth for Christ: It’s a Young World

NEWS

Youth for Christ International has gone a long way since its founding in 1945 with Billy Graham as its first fulltime staff evangelist.

Into thirty-eight other countries, to be exact. And negotiations are under way to establish YFC ministries in twelve additional countries soon, reported YFC president Sam Wolgemuth at last month’s annual staff convention in New York—the largest such meeting in YFC history. Nearly 800 staffers and 100 wives from various nations, predominantly the United States, gathered for training, updating, and swapping of notes.

Old-timers remarked about the striking youthfulness of the majority of staffers, many of them sporting long hair, mustaches, and mod apparel. They reflected YFC’s apparently successful attempt to keep abreast of the times. As one speaker noted. 52 per cent of the world is under 25. Indeed, more than half of Hong Kong’s four million population are teen-agers, many of them still in the city’s 315 high schools, declared Daniel Ee, YFC’s man in Hong Kong.

YFC’s overseas work is almost as old as its domestic operations, and relies heavily on national leadership. Nationals have been in charge for the last thirteen of YFC’s twenty-five years of work in northern India. Director Gaston Singh is assisted by a full-time staff of forty. There are YFC Campus Life clubs in 116 high schools, and each club has about 150 members, says Singh. Additionally, there are clubs for older, Western-oriented youths in twenty cities. Two-thirds of the budget is raised within India, he adds.

Indians established YFC in West Pakistan in 1964 and more recently in Nepal. Witness and training teams travel regularly into Burma; up to 4,000 have turned out for rallies. In 1965 one hundred young Ceylonese received YFC training in India, then returned home and set up a thriving ministry that is today self-supporting and led by thirty staffers.

Australia, another early YFC target, has twelve full-time and fifty part-time workers. They sponsor two dozen rallies, including YFC’s biggest worldwide: a Melbourne rally that consistently attracts thousands.

YFCers in Holland recently bought an old barge and turned it into a floating coffeehouse to reach young people in towns along the many canals.

Arab YFC witness teams based in Lebanon have carried the Gospel to Syria and Jordan and even as far as Afghanistan. Beirut YFCers have banded together with other Christian groups in an alliance known as Ichthus and next month will mount a citywide outreach campaign.

In 1968 an international YFC council was formed on a “one nation, one vote” basis, thus “cutting our umbilical cord to the U. S.,” says Jim Wilson, executive director of the Geneva-based council. The well-liked Wolgemuth, however, was elected international president at both the 1968 meeting in Jamaica and last year’s triennial on Cyprus. He also heads U. S. YFC.

One Way, Brother

Bob Ross of Pilgrim Publications in Pasadena, Texas, came across this photo of a long-haired 19-year-old youth with uplifted index finger. The youth is not one of the contemporary Jesus people flashing the “one way” sign but famous preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon in 1854 when he was pastor of New Park Street Chapel in London.

Some budget and staff ties to the U. S. remain unbroken, and other forms of cooperation exist. The Michigan YFC unit and its counterpart in France have sort of adopted each other. Last year Michigan sent Freeway, a music-witness team, to France for three months. The team rapped and performed in high schools, averaging three a day, reportedly the first evangelical group to gain such success.

YFC “Teen Teams”—forty-eight so far—have been traveling abroad since 1961. A racially-mixed team known as the Vital Union, led by staffers Bruce and Mitzie Barton, recently returned from a four-month tour in northern Europe. The team held forth in high schools by day, in churches and rallies by night, sometimes sparking chain reactions.

The student body president of the Narvik, Norway, high school received Christ in a team meeting, says Mrs. Barton. He led six others to Christ within two months, formed a singing group, and is now touring in Sweden.

Germany, however, was something else, she says. Many students the team rapped with in religion and English classes were Marxists who criticized the Americans. “We had to keep telling them we were representing a person—Jesus—not the church, Christianity, or America,” she explains.

The integrated teams are chosen on the basis of ability and Christian commitment. Rules of conduct are tough: no dating, conform to local customs and eating habits, keep cameras out of sight, write home often. Pay is $25 per week, and members must raise their own support. The Vital Union’s trip cost each member about $1,800 in expenses.

Meanwhile, things continue to hum on the home front. There are 1,000 full-time workers, 2,500 part-timers, clubs in 2,000 schools, an award-winning magazine (65,000 circulation), and a budget of $2 million. Top-rated music teams, complete with rock repertoire, reach 500,000 students a year each. Increasingly, emphasis is more on persons and less on rallies and programs, with extensive involvement with delinquents and ghetto youngsters.

Perhaps YFC’s biggest headache is organizational. Power is vested at the local level in autonomous boards, sometimes resulting in policy clashes—and setbacks. Older hands around YFC tend to hold out for autonomy, but the young are pressing for centralization, claiming it will help the cause of progress. Insiders predict the young will win their way. Several veteran staffers quit this month over the issue.

Top News

In the annual Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) poll, members rated “emergence of the Jesus people” as the top religion news story of 1971.

The next four choices, in order: defeat of the congressional prayer amendment; the U. S. Supreme Court decision banning direct aid to parochial schools by several states; the synod of Catholic bishops at Rome; and use of religious themes in music and drama (Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell for instance).

Experts reviewing 1971 religious events on the CBS “Year in Religion” television show concurred. They said that a “yearning for religious values” by young people keynoted the year’s religious news, and that it would continue.

Trinity’S Red Ink Evaporating

There are signs that Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and its undergraduate counterpart Trinity College, both in Deerfield, Illinois, will survive an acute financial crisis that has caused a lot of floor-pacing by school officials for months. The crisis was brought on in part by rapid expansion over the past few years, according to a Trinity financial officer. To make matters worse, he says, President Nixon announced his tighter economic policy on the day before the kickoff of a Trinity fund drive.

There were other reasons too, say insiders. The schools, related to the Evangelical Free Church (EFC), have attracted many non-EFC students, and certain segments of the EFC membership complained about having to subsidize the competition, in effect. Also, there was a backlash against the mildly radical People’s Christian Coalition, a small unofficial campus group that recently published a controversial newspaper, the Post American.

Facing a projected deficit of nearly $1 million for the current academic year, and feeling that his denomination did not recognize the severity of the crisis, Trinity president Harry L. Evans resigned early in the fall quarter. His move jolted the EFC’s governing boards into a series of huddles. Under the leadership of EFC president Arnold T. Olson they resolved to keep the schools open, to prod the churches to fulfill lagging pledges of support, and to seek other funding. Evans withdrew his resignation.

Early this month seminary dean Kenneth S. Kantzer reported in an interview that more than half the money needed to erase the deficit has already come in, with the academic year less than half over.

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