The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Loren Cunningham
1935–2023 · American
Saw waves of young people covering the continents when he was twenty, and opened the mission field to teenagers who had no seminary degree.
The life
Loren Cunningham was a twenty-year-old preacher's son on a trip to the Bahamas in 1956 when, he said, he saw waves rolling over the continents that turned into young people telling others about Jesus. Missions at the time meant career appointments, seminary training, and a lifetime commitment, and mission boards told him what he was proposing was not how it was done.
He started anyway, sending small teams of young volunteers for short trips, and Youth With A Mission grew into one of the largest missionary organizations in the world, with staff in most countries and a habit of going where the professionals were not. With his wife Darlene he founded a training university built around going rather than sitting, and their teams pioneered hospital ships and disaster relief. He kept traveling into his eighties and set foot in every recognized country on earth.
He died of cancer at home in Hawaii on 7 October 2023, aged eighty-eight.