Loren Cunningham, the charismatic visionary who launched Youth With a Mission (YWAM) and mobilized millions of young people for short-term trips, died on Friday morning. The organization stopped counting how many young people it sent on short-term missions in 2010, when the total number was around 4.5 million. In his later years, Loren Cunningham remembered learning that the leading of the Spirit could be a matter of life or death. Darlene Cunningham implements the visionWhen Cunningham met a young woman named Darlene Scratch in 1962, the struggling missionary organization was sending out about five annually. But Scratch, who had herself dreamed of cross-cultural ministry after her uncle was imprisoned for missionary work in Communist China, saw some ways to implement the YWAM vision practically.
