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:

1. Tribe leaders challenge the status quo
2. They build a culture
3. They have curiosity about people inside and outside the crowd
4. They connect people
5. 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”.

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:

1. Write your YWAM DTS story on your own blog
2. Link to this post from your story
3. Leave a comment on this post with a link to your story
4. I will be closing submissions on the 1st of July, so do all the above before then
5. 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.

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Wikipedia defines the Third Place as:

A term used … to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. (source)

The “first place” is defined as your home, the “second place” as your place of work or school, and the “third place” is the informal meeting places that are in between the first and second place. The place where you meet with your friends for social occasions.

Starbucks has tried to position itself as the “Third Place” in peoples lives around the world, and in many regards they have been quite successful at it. Starbucks is the place where people go to hang out, relax, read a book, browse the Internet and of course, and grab a coffee. It’s the stopping point between work and home.

Let’s take another example…

Think of the Television series Friends. Their “Third Pace” was a coffee shop called The Central Perk. It is where, besides the home, most of their interaction with their friends takes place.

Now, imagine if YWAM could position itself as the “Third Place” in the communities they minister into.

I was privileged to spend most of the first 11 – years of my time in YWAM at Reef to Outback in Townsville, Australia. One of the things that I saw develop over my time there was it slowly becoming a “Third Place” to some of the youth in the city.

You would see the young kids hanging around the YWAM base after school, sometimes with the YWAM staff, and sometimes just hanging out with each other. But to them, Reef to Outback had become a place for them to just come, relax and chill out.

This was a fantastic privilege for us at YWAM – Reef to Outback. It gave us input into the lives of these kids that otherwise would definitely not exist. Reef to Outback has become these kid’s “Third Place”, and as they spend time there the ethos of YWAM, and who the staff are, can’t help but rub off onto the kids.

So, what are you doing to make your YWAM ministry into a “Third Place” for those you are called to minister to?

Or even, do you want your ministry to be a “Third Place”, is it relevant for what God’s called you to?

photo credit: Youth With A Mission-International