What I had been up to over the last year...

On May 25th, I spoke at my home church in Alberta about YWAM Vancouver's 2010 Project (Olympic/Paralympic outreach). I wanted to post a summary of what I said here: 

What is YWAM?
If you are not familiar, Youth With A Mission is an international, interdenominational Christian missions organization, which endeavours to know God and make Him known. This year is its 50th anniversary, having started in 1960, and is made up of over 1000 locations in more than 150 nations with approximately 16,000 staff. I have been serving with YWAM full-time for almost four years.

YWAM Vancouver's 2010 Project
YWAM Vancouver had been intently preparing for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games well before its arrival. We were part of a network of churches and ministries under an umbrella organization called More Than Gold. Our hope was to host a large outreach with volunteers from around the world coming to serve in our city during February and March. There were four of us on the 2010 Project team who were in charge of YWAM’s involvement in the outreach. My primary role was to serve as registrar, meaning I processed applications and fees for all our volunteers. It was my responsibility to sort out all the details of who was coming, when they were coming, for how long, and any special requests or needs they had.

Overall we saw 169 adults, 10 children, and 7 short-term staff answer the call. Their ages ranged from infancy to over 60, originating from 16 different countries from all continents except Antarctica. On top of our YWAM volunteers, More Than Gold worked with 900 missions teams volunteers and 2000-3000 local volunteers over the duration of the Games. If you add it all up, that's approximately 4000 people!
 
Since YWAM Vancouver does not actually have a facility in the city, we housed all our volunteers at local churches in the area. They served in numerous different outreaches during their stay in the city including:

• Warming Stations: We partnered with The Salvation Army and TransLink to serve hot chocolate at major public transit stations in the city.
• Prayer Stations: Pioneered by YWAM, this ministry simply involved wearing a bright red apron that says “Prayer Changes Things” and standing on a street corner offering to pray for people.
• Sex Trafficking Awareness: We held prayer vigils covering all facets of this daunting issue. We also partnered with a campaign called “Buying Sex is Not a Sport,” taking a stand against and raising awareness about the prevalence of sex trafficking during world sporting events.
• The Burn: Hosted by a local church, our volunteers participated in 27 hours (7pm to 10 pm the next day) of continuous prayer and worship for the city.
• We were also involved in serving at local drop-in centres and food service outreach, free Christian concerts at a church downtown, and balloon-sculpting and face-painting for children.

Through all of this, hundreds of people were prayed for, thousands of cups of hot chocolate were handed out, and people received a glimpse of Jesus. In YWAM Vancouver’s focus area of Commercial Drive – an area of the city in which we have been praying since the early 1990’s – we saw people open up to the idea of prayer and communicating with God. It used to be an area quite hostile to any Christian activity. We hope to build on this momentum and have plans to continue in a few of these ministries as much as possible. There are many stories but rather than retype them here, please visit our blog at www.ywamvancouver.com/prayer to read them.