On Being In A Cult

I have never been good at keeping secrets. I’ve always been chronically sincere. If a friend plays me a song or serves me a dish I don’t like, they’ll know. I simply can’t keep the look on my face from giving me away. Honesty, for better or worse, has been my way of life. Yet, in one area I have learned the value of privacy that borders on secrecy. I’ve learned how to lie, to refuse to be branded with the sinister words “Ex-Cult Member.” 

For many people in my life, my past involvement with the organization YWAM (Youth With A Mission) is mostly a mystery. I’ve done my best to distance myself and move on from that part of my life which includes so much I wish to forget. Recently, YWAM Perth has entered the news and I’ve had to question my dedication to such secrecy. After years of only having conversations behind closed doors, only discussing the abuses and traumas with professionals and trusted friends, people are coming out publicly with their stories. I’ve decided to take the time to address my past involvement with the organization I now know to be a cult. 

YWAM professes to be a Christian Missions organization and boasts thousands of members, past and present, at campuses all over the world. My parents joined the campus in Perth, Western Australia when I was eleven. With it came adventures. I saw the world before I was a teenager. I moved homes, on average, every 9 months for the first 18 years of my life. I saw the 2009 New Years Fireworks in Sydney, Australia. Later, I was hospitalized for Typhus and I watched my sister get Malaria. I’ve slept on a lot of floors, in a lot of windowless rooms. I experienced a lifetime of shock, fear, wonder, joy, and adventure before I could legally drive a car. My parent’s choices to join YWAM are their own, and I hold no anger toward them. They support me in being who I am and using my voice the way I chose to. Still, if I could spare my childhood self from the reality of being indoctrinated into a cult, I would. I wish I didn’t know what it was like to be at war with my own mind. At YWAM, there was always something within me that needed to be purged, some darkness within my own soul that was preventing me from financial security, happiness, or the ability to “hear from God.” 

The West Australian published an article this month with the headline Youth With A Mission: Perth Christian group which housed rapist Jarryd Hayne ‘blamed sex assault victims.’ Recently, I took to social media to break my silence on YWAM and express my grief at YWAM Perth’s decision to admit now-convicted rapist Jarryd Hayne into their school amidst his trial. What I feel the need to address now is YWAM’s response to the accusation that they have placed blame on sexual assault survivors for their own assaults. 

Reading their response, published on July 4, opened old, haphazardly patched up wounds for me. Mostly, it impressed on me the ability of institutions, particularly religious ones, to lie and hide behind a set of dogma in the face of criticism. Even knowing what I do about YWAM’s abuses of power, I still, naively, expected better. Somewhere in my heart, I expected to see the leadership take responsibility, even if superficial, for the harm they’ve caused. 

Instead, the July 4th statement is a bold defense of YWAM Perth and a flat-out denial of responsibility for their injured staff and students. It is an attempt to save face in the wake of bad press. I’d be so bold as to say, it’s an attempt to protect the institution's unchecked cash flow. YWAM Perth needs churches to keep sending their young people overseas to do their training programs. I know from my time there that their goal has been, for a long time, to be “1000 strong” with on-campus members. It’s hard to recruit those kinds of numbers when people know that you’re an organization built on victim-blaming and rape apology, among other things. What I specifically want to address is the experience of Discipleship Training School (DTS) students at YWAM Perth. The DTS exists for the “benefit” of the students. It exists to break down and fundamentally change the students for their own “spiritual growth”, but it markets itself as an act of service by the students themselves. The idea for many young people is that they will take a gap year before college to see the world and do some good. The specific program that I did was predicated on anti-sex trafficking. We were there to make a difference, to fight a global tragedy. Instead, the DTS is a “school” wherein the students are denied all privacy, pushed to their emotional breaking point, and made to fall in line and follow a rigid schedule that leaves no room for questioning. 

At 17, I had already been indoctrinated in YWAM as an organization since I was 11. I didn't understand the breadth of what I was getting into by doing a DTS. I truly believed I was accepting donations toward what would have been a worthwhile service experience. I can say with confidence that I participated in and witnessed absolutely zero meaningful positive impact on any suffering person during this 6-month “mission.” I am grieved to think of the churches and individuals who contributed money to pay for my very expensive DTS. I wish I never saw a single donation. 

In an attempt to pull this cult-shaped splinter from my side once and for all, I want to address some specific quotes from YWAM Perth’s July 4th Response to the press:

It is among the central tenets of our faith that we must maintain a lifestyle that is founded on upholding biblical standards of conduct, including as to the obligation to spread God’s word, the covenant of marriage between man and woman, repentance, in forgiving those who do us wrong, respecting human dignity and abhorring any type of violence. The traditional values and beliefs we hold are well known.

I appreciate YWAM Perth finding a way to bring their stance on gay marriage to the forefront when it has nothing to do with the article itself. Points for transparency I guess. As a queer woman, I’ve long been familiar with the organization’s feelings about the LGBTQ+ community. It’s one of the first reasons I left forever. 

We undertake our mission (being evangelism, training and mercy mission) through various programmes, including the Discipleship Training School (DTS Programme) in Perth.

The DTS Programme and other programmes are conducted or supervised by experienced teachers who have had several years of experience and training in Christian missions.

This is where the misleading statements start. I had to laugh when I read “experienced teachers.” During my DTS I was subject to weekly counseling by a 19-year-old who, among other things, regularly encouraged me to distance myself from my friends back home in America, particularly those who were gay. She was a leader in my DTS. I don’t hold ill will against her, but I know from other people’s accounts that she continued to mishandle her position over the span of my 6-month DTS and was later promoted. This is just a small example of the trust placed on inexperienced people who are unqualified to provide advice, counsel, or leadership, spiritual or otherwise. 

Potential participants are made aware of our core values and beliefs before they are admitted to the DTS Programme.

In that regard, before undertaking the DTS Programme, participants are provided with access to details as to the nature, contents and purpose of the DTS Programme through our website, the registration process (and the information provided in the course of that process) and communications with our school leaders.

I was not made aware before my DTS that I would be compelled to spend 18 hours in a windowless room confessing to every “sin” I had ever committed and listening to 30 others not only do the same but also recount every trauma inflicted upon them in their past. I had no clue that I would see girls compelled to list the names of every person they had ever had sexual contact with. I cried so much that day that the skin on my eyes peeled for days after. I was told that the peeling was a beautiful metaphor for shedding the past, for forgiveness. It felt like a punch in the gut. 

I did not know before my DTS that I would be encouraged to distance myself from my family and friends, and to cut ties with “nonbelievers.” I didn’t know that I was to have the “spirit of homosexuality” prayed out of my body. I didn’t know that I would be encouraged to fast from hobbies, friends, and food and to give up things that I enjoyed so that my time could be spent exclusively in prayer and service. I didn’t know that I would be told my financial struggles were a direct result of not fasting enough, that suffering must mean there was something in my life for which I needed to repent, needed to cleanse myself from. 

I didn't expect that after I was groped by a stranger in the street in front of my fellow students, my experience would be mocked, laughed at, but never directly addressed. I would never be asked if I was ok. I didn’t know that later that day I would be asked with a group of fifteen other women to take time to “honor the men” on our team. 

I didn’t know how quietly I would sit, waiting to hear a voice, a word from God, a sign that I was good enough to be a part of his world. I didn’t know how hard I would look for signs, for cosmic clues. I didn’t know that I would be asked again and again why I wasn’t hearing from him. What was I hiding? What unconfessed sin was festering within me, building a wall between myself and true “freedom in Christ”? I was taught to look at myself with the discerning eye, with medical precision, parsing for sin at every turn. 

I had no idea the amount of self-censoring, criticism, and shame that I would carry with me as a result of the YWAM Perth foundational six-month training program. I didn’t know that I would one day join a Facebook group of close to a thousand members who had all suffered abuse under YWAM globally. I had no idea the shocking and disturbing stories I would read, and relate to.  

The feedback we received from our participants has been overwhelmingly positive.

We consider that this reflects the fact that vast majority of our participants appreciate and become involved with our programmes because they share, and believe in, our core Christian values and beliefs.

It’s hard to expect negative feedback from people you’ve brainwashed. YWAM’s statement subtly devalues all critics of YWAM Perth as simply being “unbelievers,” who ultimately cannot be taken seriously. This is a common pattern I witnessed. 

We unequivocally would like to state that the experience of some of our participants and staff, as related to us, is not reflective of our values or our beliefs. 

We sincerely regret and apologise to those of our staff and participants who may have been affected by any shortcomings in ensuring that the values and beliefs that we share have been adequately and properly communicated and implemented on the ground.

Please note language such as “may have,” “shortcomings,” “adequate.” Anyone who’s ever read a celebrity’s Instagram-notes-app-apology will recognize this kind of deflective and shallow posturing.

They place blame on individuals who improperly implemented the YWAM-way on the ground instead of taking responsibility as an organization or recognizing that the failure could be values and beliefs themselves.

We never blame the participant for any sins that he or she confesses to. We never blame the participant for any sexual or other abuse he or she may have suffered.

This just isn’t true.

We accept that things can always be done better.

This is the sentence that inspired me to put these thoughts down on the page. I have to laugh at the thought of the leadership board patting themselves on the back for the radical bravery of admitting “things can always be done better.” The passivity in that, the shoulder slump of “nobody’s perfect.” The language is such a bold-faced refusal to change, to accept responsibility, and to admit failure. I can see the entire board shrugging their shoulders in half-hearted unison as if to say “we will never change, no matter how much bad press we get, no matter how many people come forward, we know we’re doing God’s will.” Ultimately, the greatest lesson I’ve taken away from my past with YWAM is to never trust an organization or individual that professes to know the will of God. 

I would love the Christian communities that I grew up in to grapple with the reality of what it means to enact “God’s will” as a global mission, and how that often means sending hoards of mostly white, European people into other countries, mostly made up of People of Color, to “evangelize” and make converts. I would like to see everyone who’s ever participated in a short-term mission trip to investigate the damage caused by traveling abroad, befriending children, often poor, influencing them to make spiritual commitments they’re too young to understand, and then getting on a plane and leaving them forever. All white people need to understand the White Savior Industrial Complex. 

I am very tired, but I’m only beginning to put my personal experience into words. It may take me the rest of my life to unpack my 6-month DTS in Perth, let alone my seven-year association with YWAM as a whole. I would love to talk about other stuff in therapy sometime this decade. Putting my thoughts on paper, choosing not to hide behind the shame of having been associated with this group, has been incredibly healing for me, but it has been exhausting. 

To put it plainly, if it looks like a cult, smells like a cult, and keeps telling you it’s NOT A CULT, it probably is...a cult. It seems naïve to expect my words will have an impact. I can only hope this message reaches a few parents and churches considering encouraging their youth to join YWAM. Ultimately, I have written this for myself. It feels like my first exhale after six years of bated breath.