One of the things that the YWAM International Chairman’s Team is working on is to improve the communication inside and outside YWAM. It is a part of the mandate to “heal the nevous system” of YWAM.
After a disussion I had with some other members of the YWAM ICT I setup a simple YWAM news site. The goal for the site is to help communicate what is happening around YWAM to anyone who is interested.
The site is built on Wordpress, a free open source CMS / blog engine. I used Google Feedburner to deliver the news via email because it was easy and free. There are many different free themes available for use with Wordpress, so I played around with a few and finally settled on the one that is currently running on the site.
To help with the functionality of the news site I added a few Wordpress plugins to it. Most are available for free (all the plugins I used were free) and are easy to install on the site. I’ll put a list of my current plugins, the template and the other resources used for the site at the end of this post.
Right now the site is really more of a prototype or proof of concept news site. Trying to gather stories by myself is a very time consuming job (hence why there is not too much up there). To really make the site or concept work would require either a lot more time on my part, or more people doing it. I would also want the site to do more than just aggrigate the news (Planet YWAM already does some of that), there needs to be some editorial work involved, and a simple script or plugin can not do that.
Have a look at the YWAM News site and tell me what you think.
Here is the list of resources, plugins and the template that I used:
I was watching this video of Seth Godin speaking about Tribes, and how they are and can be used to influence the world and create movements. It thought that it was a great talk, and a fantastic thing for us to think about for YWAM and how YWAM is, and can be a tribe.
Seth asked a few good questions, and made some good points, and I have a few of them below:
1. Who are you upsetting (if you aren’t upsetting someone you are not challenging the status quo)? 2. Who are you connecting? 3. Who are you leading?
He also made some good points about leaders within the tribe and what they do:
Tribe leaders challenge the status quo
They build a culture
They have curiosity about people inside and outside the crowd
They connect people
They are committed to the cause / tribe / people
YWAM has often been referred to as a tribe of people, and I reckon that Seth’s talk about it gives a great discussion point as we look at how we can as a mission continue to draw people to us who have a passion “To Know God and to Make Him Known”.
One of the exciting / challenging things that we experience serving in missions is God’s amazing provision. Since we are full time volunteers we rely fully on financial and practical gifts given to us by friends, family, churches and other organizations that believe in the work we do.
In the last week or so we have seen God provide for us in two rather unique ways…
A few friends of friends heard that we had just moved to Calgary from Australia and were setting up our house from scratch. They contacted us through our friend with offers to go through their surplus stuff and take all that we wanted! It was amazingly generous and we ended up with a van full of quality stuff to help set up our new home.
Through another friend we got invited to their church garage sale with a difference. The difference was that it was open to families in need, and everything was free! Wow! We filled the back of a pickup truck and my dad’s sedan with gear to help us out even more in setting up our house.
God is good…
We take posession of our house here in Calgary on Monday, June 1. The house is about 120 years newer than the one we left in Australia, and needs WAY less work done to it. I am looking forward to seeing how God continues to provide in His own unique way.
My Youth With A Mission - Discipleship Training School (YWAM DTS) was an amazing experience for me, and many of the stories live on and continue to have huge impacts on my life.
Everyone who has done a YWAM Discipleship Training School has walked away with their own unique stories. I thought that it would be fun to gather some of those stories stories together in a “YWAM DTS Blog Carnival“.
So how does the YWAM DTS Blog Carnival work?
To participate in this carnival all you need to do is write your DTS story on your own blog, with a link to this post. If you already have a story written then you can just add a link to this post and you can submit it. After you have written your story make a comment below on this post to let me know you have written it.
On July 1 2009, I will close submissions to the carnival and start to put all the posts together. I will be linking to all the stories that meet the criteria (true stories from your own YWAM DTS) in a final post and highlighting some of my personal favourites.
Your story can be about any aspect of your school; lectures, outreach, finance, etc. Here are some story ideas from my own YWAM DTS that instantly come to mind:
Falling off a cliff while running away from God’s conviction
Camping in the middle of nowhere and digging our own pit toilets
Getting high on paint fumes while painting an enclosed room in a Pastor’s house in Charters Towers
Getting left at the airport when we first arrived in Vanuatu, and no one noticing you were missing for a few hours
Getting forgotten for a second time while in Fiji, but this time at least knowing how to get to where we were meant to be
Three weeks of dysentery while on outreach
Being taught to dance in a small village in Vanuatu
Experiencing amazing hospitality while door knocking in an Indian neighbourhood in Fiji
Crashing a billy-cart while on outreach in the Sunshine Coast and driving over my passenger, breaking a few of his ribs
Those are some of my stories, but I would love to hear about some stories from your own school. If you don’t want to write them down, then how about recording it on YouTube or an audio file and putting them in a blog post? We can work with that as well.
So again, here are the steps to participate in the YWAM DTS blog carnival:
Write your YWAM DTS story on your own blog
Link to this post from your story
Leave a comment on this post with a link to your story
I will be closing submissions on the 1st of July, so do all the above before then
Stay tuned to this blog to find out about all the submitted stories
As we are selling or packing up everything we own I found some of our original video podcasts that we did way back in 2003. I was disappointed that I was unable to find the pilot episode, which Brad Davies and I produced in an afternoon, but here is the earliest one I could find.
YWAM Reef to Outback Internet News - 4th Edition - October 2003
Here are the stories that were covered back in October 2003:
YWAM School of Event Management (SEM)
October YWAM DTS (Discipleship Training School)
Discipleship Training School Camping Testimonies
Role of Intercession in YWAM
I remember making the Monthly Video Podcast was definitely a highlight of my month. We used to keep it short and small, usually under 5MB, as back in 2003 there was still a lot of people on dial-up.
In this episode, and all those before it I would have to write out the news and read it off the paper on my deck. I also thought that my glasses reflected the lights too much, so I always took them off.
Judging by me laughing while trying to start the show I reckon that it was probably David Couper doing the filming. I always had a hard time keeping a straight face when he was around.
