Welcome to the Youth With A Mission News Show for December 2024. This month we hear about the earthquake that hit Vanuatu, another story from the YWAM Together Gathering, National Evangelization Day happens in Argentina, get an on the ground report from the Paris Olympic Outreach, hear what happened at Oceania Hui, get some year end reports, and more …
Thank you for downloading this, the 152 episode of the Youth With A Mission News Show Podcast, I’m your host, Bill Hutchison.
You can contact us, subscribe to future episodes, leave comments, and find links to all the stories we talk about on the show notes for this podcast at ywampodcast.com/152 …
Stories:
Vanuatu Earthquake
On December 17 Port Vila in Vanuatu was hit by a destructive earthquake. It affected some of YWAM’s centres there, and we have this report from our V2 Life location …
Hello Everyone,
As many of you would have heard by now, yesterday, Port Vila was hit by a shallow and therefore massively destructive 7.4 (or so) earthquake. Landslides and collapsed buldings have claimed lives. Hundreds have been injured. Critical infrastructure like water, electricity, phone networks and internet, but also roads and especially bridges are completely down or at least strongly compromised. One of our staff families is currently overseas and fine, our other staff family is well and staying on site. Our Australian volunteer family for the school is also safe staying off site. We have not been able to contact all of our local teachers yet. We have heard from most of our other YWAM staff that they are okay.
We appreciate everyone’s prayers for our YWAM community and for the people of Vanuatu. Pray for search and rescue to be guided to survivors still in the rubble. Pray for families that have lost loved ones or have loved ones injured at the hospital. Pray for the government. Pray for the children especially, as many of them suffer from accute PTSD since yesterday with ongoing aftershocks every hour since the initial violent tremor.
As our centre is outside town and the road to town leads over a bridge which has been damaged, we will stay out here for now unless there is an emergency. We are fortunate enough to be set up to live off grid, and therefore have clean water (although some parts are badly damaged), food, solar power (although some elements of the system are also badly damaged) and we have Starlink to connect to the internet. Our buildings seem to be structurally okay upon first inspection but more detailed assessments will have to be done. There is a lot of interior damage and breakage and a huge mess to clean up in just about every room of the centre.
As our community here in the valley has suffered little obvious damage, it will take some time until we can identify ways we can help those in need. Clean water might be one of the ways.
In terms of costly damage, we can already tell that our solar battery bank will need to be replaced as several positive and negative terminals connecting the individual cells have been torn out completely. There is also extensive damage to our water infrastructure such as tower, tanks, guttering, pipes, which will need repairs and parts. In addition there might be IT equipment and other office equipment that needs replacing.
If you want to help us recover from this natural disaster, you can do so by making a donation at https://v2life.org/donations/ . Choose “V2 LIFE” as the donation option or the Australian/USA tax deductible link at the top of the page.
As I mentioned in the last few episodes, there are many stories that came out of YWAM Together earlier this year. I will continue to share them on the YWAM News Show, so here is another …
We have more stories from that event, that we will be sharing with you in future episodes.
Argentina celebrated National Evangelization Day
At the initiative of Youth with a Mission (YWAM) and with the support of the Christian Alliance of Evangelical Churches of Argentina (ACIERA) and the Argentine Bible Society (SBA), among others, more than 400 cities across the country united to bring the message of hope in Jesus Christ to the streets of Argentina. As part of the effort, over 4,000 strategically located prayer tables were organized, where the Word of God was shared and prayers were offered for citizens who were open to embrace the gesture of love and faith.
While we shared a bit about what happened with the outreach at the Paris Olympics, YWAM Kona has put out this on the ground video about doing missions at the Olympics.
YWAM San Francisco Christmas Lunch
Christmas Day lunch at YWAM San Francisco for 200 people. Besides a great lunch each person received a backpack with socks, scarf, gloves, rain poncho, a Christmas card and the teachings of Jesus.
On Christmas Day, YWAM Tema shared over 100 Christmas meals and drinks on the streets in their city. They were thankful to bring the light of Jesus to their community.
This Christmas season we were able to bless the widows in our widows ministry with bags of food. Some of our staff went out to deliver the food and pray for / encourage these amazing women.
We also had our annual Christmas meals where thousands of people received a meal on Christmas Eve! We hope you all had a blessed Christmas with your friends and family. We are so thankful for the birth of our Savior. Thank you for all of your support and prayers this year!
We have had an incredibly busy week! We had our soccer tournament championship- which we won!! We had buckets of Joy where over 200 kids got to take home food for their families. One of the pictures is 3 ladies holding up a bag of food and an envelope. We asked our staff and security who stays to wait for their children to make sure they get home safe after kids church and we were told that these 3 ladies wait every single week consistently. In our meetings with the parents we always share that love and care and security starts in the home. We were able to bless them each with an extra bag of food and some money to help with Christmas. We encouraged them to keep holding their kids close and making the sacrifices so they know they are safe and cared for. It was such a blessing for us to see! We also had our Radikal youth group graduation! We had 67 youth graduate and we are so proud of them. Now, today we have Christmas meals being prepared for 3500+ people and tonight we have a final championship soccer game before some much needed rest! Merry Christmas everyone!!
Two of our School of Navigation and Seamanship graduates, Mateo and Luke, sailed from French Polynesia with one of our yacht owners, Dale. They were at sea for 22 days before reaching Newport Beach, California. YWAM Flotilla is celebrating the success of their safe arrival!
Here is another mini-documentary from YWAM Kona, this one about a refugee from war in South Sudan.
YWAM North America Member Care Training 2025
Here are 3 options happening with North America Member Care!
1) Member Care Basics Seminar at YWAM Nashville | 26 Jan – 1 Feb 2025 – 1 week seminar covering the basics of Member Care
2) Practical Intro to Member Care Online Course | 4 Mar – 8 May 2025 – Online teaching with self study weeks and a chance to apply in your context
3) Member Care Foundations Course at YWAM Kona | 1 – 21 Jun 2025 – A three week in depth course covering aspects of individual and corporate member care
