Re: Young Life?
Posted by:
shocked
()
Date: March 20, 2013 04:00AM
Thank God I found this site............I am a 54 year old woman and my father was a YL leader for years. I finally had the courage today to search the internet to see if anyone had abusive experiences from this organization. I was sexually abused by my dad, who was a leader, for years. If I can have any impact on helping anyone else who has suffered from sexual abuse through this organization by speaking "my truth", then I am happy to disclose whatever is necessary. Please respond if you were a victim of abuse. thanks
Re: Young Life?
Posted by:
bikeguy57
()
Date: April 01, 2018 05:46AM
I was part of young life in 80s Yes it is a cult I am still wondering how I got suck into it.The social life was great.It was easy to get suck into.
Re: Young Life?
Posted by:
watersheds
()
Date: October 23, 2021 02:19AM
Wanted to revive this discussion, if you'll indulge my tale.
My experience in Young Life left me so confused it took me years to unpack, and even when the #DoBetterYoungLife movement started, it took nearly a year for me to find out about it. I had removed myself from the Young Life or evangelical sphere that thoroughly.
Once upon a time though, I was deeply involved. I went to Club as a teenager in the early aughts. I had “given myself to the Lord” maybe a year or so earlier, and was in my early days attending a Foursquare church’s youth group when their group disbanded and was taken over, essentially, by Young Life. So it wasn’t like Young Life brought me to Christ, but it cemented the relationship. I was part of a core group of youth that sort of seed-sprouted YL in my city, and then region. I became so dedicated after a week at camp, that I re-dedicated my life to Christ, and expressed dismay to one of my leaders that I wasn’t sure I would be able to sustain the relationship. That there were a lot of situational circumstances at home that I felt would preclude my being a Christian, that I could “backslide” and it would all be for nothing.
My leader suggested that I become a WyldLife leader, in addition to Campaigners. So when I got home, I applied and was accepted and trained. I spent roughly three or four years as a leader working with middle schoolers, and helped start a Club in a new region that was advertised to me essentially as being ‘inner city.’ I am white and led cabin time for a handful of little girls of color. I did not understand the implication of this at the time. I did all this and YL Club, and various work crew and camp trips, special events; I even went to the church that other leaders were going to (they rotated churches a strange amount, too).
At one point, while on a work crew trip to one of Young Life’s camps on the West Coast, I was part of a group conversation that revealed some people had made claims of YL being a cult. I remember being shocked by this at the time.
I spent a month after I graduated high school working at a different YL camp, cleaning toilets. I can attest that every aspect of the camp experience is orchestrated. They are winning souls for the Lord, that’s the whole point. At one point early in the week, you are disoriented by your leaders dragging you out of your cabin late at night for a ridiculous obstacle course. It’s meant to be a bonding experience, but it’s aim is to wear you down, so that later in the week when you hear “the Talk,” you’re more open to the message. The 10 minutes of silence that follows is emotionally manipulative and underlined by some staffer ending it singing a moving Christian song with acoustic guitar. Campers who have been to camp multiple times are pulled aside early in the week and told to not tell anybody else on the trip what happens during the week. My sister attended one of these camp trips, during which she informed me that during a cabin time she had talked about her feelings regarding some situational problems I was having with mental illness at the time. That leader told my sister that I was going to hell, because of my mental illness.
These leaders are barely trained, if at all, and questionably experienced to work with kids. I knew one leader who was a former drug addict turned schizophrenic with his mental health well controlled. I knew of staffers/leaders with lapsed safety certifications. Camp incidents are always kept quiet. Students are pressured to bring other kids to Club, or to Camp. The Area Director of my region was a charismatic, type A personality who did kind of run things in a vaguely authoritarian way. He was still worshipped by kids/leaders. For years I thought of the situation as “maybe the people in my area were just kind of snobbish/cliqueish”. Now I know better. There was a cult-like structure to it all. Love bombing, which I was very susceptible to at the time. Leaders are taught strategies to try to reel kids in. The extent of how far they wanted you to go to bring in students made me uncomfortable when I was a leader, and I suspect I didn’t perform in that as intensely as they wanted. I was eventually “disfellowshipped” of a sorts, and ‘fired’ as a volunteer leader over the phone, for ‘not being dedicated enough.’ They still manipulated me enough to get me to give my testimony at Club before I was sent on my way. Because I ‘had a good testimony.’
For years after I thought to myself, what they didn’t realize by doing that - it basically took me out of Christianity entirely, and basically reversed everything the organization had tried to do in the first place. They wanted to win my soul for the Lord? Not anymore.
Even after I’d left, at one point I’d worked past my anger and confusion enough to really miss the Young Life experience, and I briefly flirted with reintegrating myself with the organization. I stayed away.
Young Life does need to do better. However, they don’t seem inclined to do so. In fact, as I hear, they are doubling down on their policies, including the anti-LGBT stance, all of which seems so out of place in this current age - I can hardly see how this current generation of teens is going to continue to be accepting of this group on proselytizing on their campuses. But there will always be vulnerable teens, just as there are vulnerable adults susceptible to cults. I was a vulnerable teen, and I was pulled in. There will always be vulnerable teens, even in a Gen Z world (and especially now with the sharp increase in mental illness statistics), and we as adults need to be aware of the signs. We need to be able to recognize when teens are displaying overzealous, amped-up behavior. I hope we don’t fail them.
My experience in Young Life left me so confused it took me years to unpack, and even when the #DoBetterYoungLife movement started, it took nearly a year for me to find out about it. I had removed myself from the Young Life or evangelical sphere that thoroughly.
Once upon a time though, I was deeply involved. I went to Club as a teenager in the early aughts. I had “given myself to the Lord” maybe a year or so earlier, and was in my early days attending a Foursquare church’s youth group when their group disbanded and was taken over, essentially, by Young Life. So it wasn’t like Young Life brought me to Christ, but it cemented the relationship. I was part of a core group of youth that sort of seed-sprouted YL in my city, and then region. I became so dedicated after a week at camp, that I re-dedicated my life to Christ, and expressed dismay to one of my leaders that I wasn’t sure I would be able to sustain the relationship. That there were a lot of situational circumstances at home that I felt would preclude my being a Christian, that I could “backslide” and it would all be for nothing.
My leader suggested that I become a WyldLife leader, in addition to Campaigners. So when I got home, I applied and was accepted and trained. I spent roughly three or four years as a leader working with middle schoolers, and helped start a Club in a new region that was advertised to me essentially as being ‘inner city.’ I am white and led cabin time for a handful of little girls of color. I did not understand the implication of this at the time. I did all this and YL Club, and various work crew and camp trips, special events; I even went to the church that other leaders were going to (they rotated churches a strange amount, too).
At one point, while on a work crew trip to one of Young Life’s camps on the West Coast, I was part of a group conversation that revealed some people had made claims of YL being a cult. I remember being shocked by this at the time.
I spent a month after I graduated high school working at a different YL camp, cleaning toilets. I can attest that every aspect of the camp experience is orchestrated. They are winning souls for the Lord, that’s the whole point. At one point early in the week, you are disoriented by your leaders dragging you out of your cabin late at night for a ridiculous obstacle course. It’s meant to be a bonding experience, but it’s aim is to wear you down, so that later in the week when you hear “the Talk,” you’re more open to the message. The 10 minutes of silence that follows is emotionally manipulative and underlined by some staffer ending it singing a moving Christian song with acoustic guitar. Campers who have been to camp multiple times are pulled aside early in the week and told to not tell anybody else on the trip what happens during the week. My sister attended one of these camp trips, during which she informed me that during a cabin time she had talked about her feelings regarding some situational problems I was having with mental illness at the time. That leader told my sister that I was going to hell, because of my mental illness.
These leaders are barely trained, if at all, and questionably experienced to work with kids. I knew one leader who was a former drug addict turned schizophrenic with his mental health well controlled. I knew of staffers/leaders with lapsed safety certifications. Camp incidents are always kept quiet. Students are pressured to bring other kids to Club, or to Camp. The Area Director of my region was a charismatic, type A personality who did kind of run things in a vaguely authoritarian way. He was still worshipped by kids/leaders. For years I thought of the situation as “maybe the people in my area were just kind of snobbish/cliqueish”. Now I know better. There was a cult-like structure to it all. Love bombing, which I was very susceptible to at the time. Leaders are taught strategies to try to reel kids in. The extent of how far they wanted you to go to bring in students made me uncomfortable when I was a leader, and I suspect I didn’t perform in that as intensely as they wanted. I was eventually “disfellowshipped” of a sorts, and ‘fired’ as a volunteer leader over the phone, for ‘not being dedicated enough.’ They still manipulated me enough to get me to give my testimony at Club before I was sent on my way. Because I ‘had a good testimony.’
For years after I thought to myself, what they didn’t realize by doing that - it basically took me out of Christianity entirely, and basically reversed everything the organization had tried to do in the first place. They wanted to win my soul for the Lord? Not anymore.
Even after I’d left, at one point I’d worked past my anger and confusion enough to really miss the Young Life experience, and I briefly flirted with reintegrating myself with the organization. I stayed away.
Young Life does need to do better. However, they don’t seem inclined to do so. In fact, as I hear, they are doubling down on their policies, including the anti-LGBT stance, all of which seems so out of place in this current age - I can hardly see how this current generation of teens is going to continue to be accepting of this group on proselytizing on their campuses. But there will always be vulnerable teens, just as there are vulnerable adults susceptible to cults. I was a vulnerable teen, and I was pulled in. There will always be vulnerable teens, even in a Gen Z world (and especially now with the sharp increase in mental illness statistics), and we as adults need to be aware of the signs. We need to be able to recognize when teens are displaying overzealous, amped-up behavior. I hope we don’t fail them.
Re: Young Life?
Posted by:
savvy1
()
Date: January 04, 2023 11:52PM
Hi everyone! I am a documentary producer developing a project to expose the dark side of Young Life. Would anyone on this thread be willing to talk to me about their experiences with the organization? Whether you've had awful interactions with YL or if you vehemently defend it, I'd like to hear from you. Looking for a wide variety of perspectives to contribute to this discourse. Please reply to this post or send me a PM and I will get back to you! Thanks!
Re: Young Life?
Posted by:
burned
()
Date: February 01, 2023 08:46AM
Following. Encourage reviving this topic. There is more to be said—or amplified to a wider audience. Glad someone brought up the recent (2020-2021?) Business Insider series on YL (Some is behind a pay wall, but I think the whole investigation story can be pulled up from website of an entity that is mentioned in the non-paywalled intro story).
The astute points and observations that PhoenixGirl and others have put forth here need to be amplified in more public places. Or news outlets. This is not old news. And where it is older news, those people’s lives are still being affected no matter the decade they got wrapped up with young life.
And I am not saying that everyone’s experience with young life has been bad. But I am glad forums like this exist where people can dialogue about their experiences, their observations and their lived understanding of the structure, goals and guidelines of the organization. And where other people are not allowed to hijack the threads by evangelizing, defending young life, or carrying on excessively about tired and dismissive “one bad apple” apologetics.
YL has been around since at least the mid 1940s, they’ve had over ~75 years to “introduce kids to Christ,” But that is far from the only thing they have facilitated in people’s lives. The stories that they don’t and won’t tell are the ones that need to be told.
What has happened to people as Young Life has pursued evangelism above all else cannot be written off as the expected or excusable byproduct of Young Life’s intentional close-relationship teen outreach model.
Also parents need to know that YL leaders and volunteers are still actively traipsing around public high school campuses trying to “Win kids for Christ” without parents’ permission. Not to mention what can happen when those kids go to camp, or are taken on trips or regularly visit homes of involved folks, etc. If you thought the Boy Scout model was ripe for unfortunate activity, young life is exponentially more so, IMHO.
Lastly, I was flabbergasted how little apparent public response there was when the Business Insider story broke. I hoped to see more action on that Twitter page and other associated social media. Not that I want people to have been harmed in a way that requires support. But hopefully what was visible in those bravely undertaken forums was just the tip of the iceberg of people finding the support that they need. I realize not everyone can be public about their experience or chooses to be. That’s fine too. But I hope that those with stories will know that they are unequivocally not alone.
Oh, and one more thing. A PS I guess: Young life is a friggin’ powerful worldwide organization, but one with incredible domestic power and alliances, primarily with the wealthy religious right. And one way they’re powerful is that they have strong alliances and cross-pollination with organizations like the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, or more exclusive offshoots. That whole web of mostly white and male power brokers needs to be looked at and talked about more often—and acknowledged as being associated with Young Life. Some of these folks are of the ilk that the series “The Family” was about. Young life likes to paint itself as “non-denominational” and “non political.” At the highest levels of YL, I don’t really buy the non-political part. For the reasons I just mentioned.
The astute points and observations that PhoenixGirl and others have put forth here need to be amplified in more public places. Or news outlets. This is not old news. And where it is older news, those people’s lives are still being affected no matter the decade they got wrapped up with young life.
And I am not saying that everyone’s experience with young life has been bad. But I am glad forums like this exist where people can dialogue about their experiences, their observations and their lived understanding of the structure, goals and guidelines of the organization. And where other people are not allowed to hijack the threads by evangelizing, defending young life, or carrying on excessively about tired and dismissive “one bad apple” apologetics.
YL has been around since at least the mid 1940s, they’ve had over ~75 years to “introduce kids to Christ,” But that is far from the only thing they have facilitated in people’s lives. The stories that they don’t and won’t tell are the ones that need to be told.
What has happened to people as Young Life has pursued evangelism above all else cannot be written off as the expected or excusable byproduct of Young Life’s intentional close-relationship teen outreach model.
Also parents need to know that YL leaders and volunteers are still actively traipsing around public high school campuses trying to “Win kids for Christ” without parents’ permission. Not to mention what can happen when those kids go to camp, or are taken on trips or regularly visit homes of involved folks, etc. If you thought the Boy Scout model was ripe for unfortunate activity, young life is exponentially more so, IMHO.
Lastly, I was flabbergasted how little apparent public response there was when the Business Insider story broke. I hoped to see more action on that Twitter page and other associated social media. Not that I want people to have been harmed in a way that requires support. But hopefully what was visible in those bravely undertaken forums was just the tip of the iceberg of people finding the support that they need. I realize not everyone can be public about their experience or chooses to be. That’s fine too. But I hope that those with stories will know that they are unequivocally not alone.
Oh, and one more thing. A PS I guess: Young life is a friggin’ powerful worldwide organization, but one with incredible domestic power and alliances, primarily with the wealthy religious right. And one way they’re powerful is that they have strong alliances and cross-pollination with organizations like the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, or more exclusive offshoots. That whole web of mostly white and male power brokers needs to be looked at and talked about more often—and acknowledged as being associated with Young Life. Some of these folks are of the ilk that the series “The Family” was about. Young life likes to paint itself as “non-denominational” and “non political.” At the highest levels of YL, I don’t really buy the non-political part. For the reasons I just mentioned.
Re: Young Life?
Posted by:
burned
()
Date: February 01, 2023 03:24PM
Hi Watersheds. Thanks for sharing your story. Everything you experienced is so familiar and true to how they do things based on my experience also.
Really 95% of what you said is exactly how it was in our west coast area “club” also. I also gave a big testimony twice. They squeeze it out of you, even at in-opportune times. Sounds just like our AD too. Charismatic, well-liked. But certainly not flawless by any stretch. They are busy saving souls with an aggressive strategy with a “fun” energetic veneer. Your description of camp and workcrew were spot on, including the disorienting kidnapping, obstacle course, and the exhaustion at camp before the big talk. The silent time. All of it.
Glad you’ve been able to work through it. It can really twist a person around. I imagine it is somewhat of a deprogramming—-has been for me.
Take care and thanks again.
Really 95% of what you said is exactly how it was in our west coast area “club” also. I also gave a big testimony twice. They squeeze it out of you, even at in-opportune times. Sounds just like our AD too. Charismatic, well-liked. But certainly not flawless by any stretch. They are busy saving souls with an aggressive strategy with a “fun” energetic veneer. Your description of camp and workcrew were spot on, including the disorienting kidnapping, obstacle course, and the exhaustion at camp before the big talk. The silent time. All of it.
Glad you’ve been able to work through it. It can really twist a person around. I imagine it is somewhat of a deprogramming—-has been for me.
Take care and thanks again.
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