Tag: YMCA Mission

This Is a Day of New Beginnings for the YMCA / by Harold C. Smith

Vision-casting at the turn of the millennium on the legacy and future of the YMCA, it’s Christian faith and works in our modern age:

“For the essential genius of the YMCA does not concern techniques, management, buildings, but reaches by God’s grace, into hearts, minds and bodies and strengthens them in wholeness and offers a unifying purpose that is needed and longed for.
 
God created something unique in the YMCA and works uniquely in the YMCA in spite of all of us. Again and again God has reshaped and renewed this organization, and it is my prayer that we, who have this great gift in our lives and time will be open to ways God will make all things new in this new century and always.”

“This Is A Day Of New Beginnings”

By Harold C. Smith / September 6, 2000 / Silver Bay YMCA, NY

Reproduced and Distributed at Springfield College to the inaugural OnPrinciple cohort by Mike Bussey, Chair of Friends of the Jerusalem YMCA

“The faith that brought the YMCA into being is a faith of ever new beginnings.

“Behold I make all things new” God proclaims in the Book of Revelation.

We are to embrace this newness and work with and for it.

That was a motive of mine when I called for this seminar and meeting. I appreciate the response.

It confirms I was not alone in my concern and thinking. I hope I can help move us into the new century in a revitalized and dedicated way.

My concern is the Christian part of our very name.

When I read the inspiring words of the former leaders of the Y, I am astonished by their vision and inspiration.

They envisioned “mobilizing the Lay Forces of Christianity” and “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation.”

They meant it and so did the Y.

When I look at our meetings and publications I don’t perceive vision or fire. That is a bad sign; “For without vision, people will perish.”

Let’s look at what we are and where we are and see if light comes onto the problems.

There is a feeling Christianity compromises our openness.

Yet the Christianity of the YMCA had as its core is John 17:21 “that they all may be one.”

This Christianity has always been inclusive.

Indeed, one of the most Christian aspects of the YMCA as I have known it is this openness and acceptance of everyone.

This said, there are dangers in openness.

We can be perceived, and are, as being all things to all people and ending up as being nothing to no one.

There is also a danger of being captured, shanghaied as it were, because of being open.

This could yield attempts to subvert or reinvent our association, its purpose and its mission.

Still further, there is the danger of assimilation. Of becoming part of a secular culture, or as a part of an American “state religion” in general.

Those who went before us realized this yet remained open.

Because it is in the very nature of the Christian faith as they understood it and it was an integral part of what they hoped for in a YMCA.

It was to be a community rooted and grounded on the love they perceived God had for everyone in sending the world Jesus as the Christ.

Now the YMCA was lay movement. Early on it agreed not to be theological or doctrinal.

But it also agreed to be inspired, moved and illuminated by God’s Word in the Bible as they understood it.

The YMCA wasn’t conceived with the right beliefs and confessions but with Christian action and life: “By their fruits you shall know them.”

And what fruit the Y brought forth and continues to bring forth!

The world is better for the YMCA; lives are better because of the YMCA.

In many ways faith in action worked.

But there are dangers here too.

It is harder to live faith than be doctrinaire about faith.

This is especially true of Christianity, a subtle faith without signs (except the signs of Jonah).

The Y position was: we will live our Christian faith and others will be attracted by that faith in life and perhaps catch it.

The YMCA approach as its best is magnificent and effective and at its worst is a disaster.

It assumes a deep, nourished, renewed and renewing faith on the part of those who would live it.

And this leads to the role association plays.

The YMCA creates community at the same time it serves as leaven in the larger communities it is part of.

For the member the goal is the loving community envisioned by prophets, Christ and the early church leaders.

That community helps people reach their highest potential, and unity of mind, body and spirit (as Luther Gulick of Springfield College pointed out) under God.

Harold C. Smith & Springfield College

What a need there is for this association.

We live in fractured communities living fractionated lives and desperately need the wholeness the YMCA has pointed to, and, at its best, delivered.

But this community is not an end in itself.

It has as its mission to change not only individuals by bringing them to wholeness but by bringing larger communities to wholeness under God.

For the Y serves a God of not only unity but peace and justice.

The function of the Y is not to reflect a community but redeem it; to lift it to new levels and promise.

The Y does this one person at a time, and by mobilizing those touched by the unity and purpose under God the Y can offer to reach out to others.

And what creative reaching out there has been, and what scope there is for more yet to be done, and not just locally.

From the earliest days the YMCA has had a world outlook, purpose and mission.

That mission, the product of the unity of a person under God, had and continues to have an appeal that transcends borders, cultures and historic baggage.

For the essential genius of the YMCA does not concern techniques, management, buildings, but reaches by God’s grace, into hearts, minds and bodies and strengthens them in wholeness and offers a unifying purpose that is needed and longed for.

God created something unique in the YMCA and works uniquely in the YMCA in spite of all of us.

Again and again God has reshaped and renewed this organization, and it is my prayer that we, who have this great gift in our lives and time will be open to ways God will make all things new in this new century and always.”


For more about Rev. Dr. Harold C. Smith (1934-2017)
Chief Investment Officer of the YMCA Retirement Fund (1983-2000), pastor of Unity Hill Church in Connecticut, and the HCS Foundation.

The Ecclesia of the New Testament and the YMCA / by Emil Brunner

Professor Brunner is considered one of the greatest European Christian theologians in the early to mid 20th century. His enormous and brilliant influence on the YMCA is revealed in this essay he penned, inspired by his friendship with John R. Mott, to encourage and guide the Y in their faithfulness to Christ amidst a radically swift-changing post-war culture in Britain, Germany, and America.


The posted article below is an excerpt by Emil Brunner from Toward Our Second Century, a report of the plenary meeting of the World’s Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Organization at Geneva, Switzerland in July, 1953. Archived by the World Alliance YMCA

A theological advisor to the Y.M.C.A. in 1948.

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“From its very beginning the YMCA has set great store by the fact that it is not a church.

It has rather exhorted its members to join a church. This conception and policy has stood the test and will remain the same in the future.

The ecumenical movement, however, and more especially the creation of the World Council of Churches, has required a re-thinking which, of course, has to start from and be based upon the New Testament.

If we read without prejudice what the New Testament says about Ecclesia, we see that this word signifies a reality which resembles the YMCA at least as much as today’s so-called churches.

The bodies which generally are recognized as “churches” are at least as different from the Ecclesia of the New Testament as the YMCA.

For Ecclesia is nothing else than a brotherhood of people bound together with Jesus Christ and with each other by the Holy Spirit and leading their daily life in such fellowship.

The Ecclesia is described to us as a common life under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a common life in Faith, in Hope, and in Love, where what we are used to calling characteristic features of a church, “ecclesiastical” institutions, ecclesiastical offices, ecclesiastical actives do not play an essential role.

The following points deserve attention:

  1. There is no distinction between priests and laymen, but the whole community is “a priestly people”, everybody is expected to to act in a priestly manner.
  2. There is no sacrificial rite, but on the contrary: by the sacrifice of Christ all other sacrifices are done away forever, whereas everybody, each member of the community, is supposed to dedicate his or her life to God as an acceptable sacrifice.
  3. Each member of the community is called upon for service in the community. There is no difference between “active” and “passive” members, but, as each organ within a living organism exercises its function to the benefit of the whole, thus everybody within the Ecclesia is an organ fit for a function of which a “service” is expected and rendered. Non-active members have to be regarded as non-functioning dead organs and be cut off.
  4. There are certainly special Sunday meetings of the community for “worship”. But again, what matters most is that everybody contributes to the edification of the community, that nobody is passed over because some want to monopolize speaking.
  5. But these Sunday meetings of the community are not called Divine Service. On the contrary the daily life of the individual Christians, who dedicate their life to God as sacrifice, explicitly receive this title. Therefore, everyday life in the service of men in love is the genuine divine service.
  6. For this reason there is such a gulf, characteristic of our ecclesiastical life, between “Divine Service and Everyday Life”, between a “spiritual” and a “profane” realm outside. Everything is “spiritual” – even the most secular thing, if it is done united with Christ; then also eating and drinking then also trivial everyday work is “spiritual” if it is done “in Christ”.

If therefore the members of a YMCA by their faith are really united with Christ and the love which is flowing out of this faith unites them with the fellow members that they feel as brethren, and if these members regard their activities as service to Christ and to the brethren and sacrifice their lives in this service, they are Ecclesia as well as any church.

This insight is of utmost importance because it permits us to conceive our “secular” work, be it in sports groups, in professional evening classes, in manual work of the Boy’s Town in Indian slums, as spiritual work, as “church work in the meaning of the New Testament.”

Not the subject itself, Bible Study or sports, but the motive for the one as for the other: to serve Christ and to serve the brother, constitutes the difference between spiritual and non-spiritual; not the affiliation to a certain church makes our work Christian, but the belonging to Christ of each worker.

On the other hand, this insight makes us independent from the principle of “practical success.”

There are other organizations today, UNO, UNESCO, international emergency organizations or individual governments, doing the same as we do, seen from the outside, doing it even better than we can because of more money available to them.

Yet it is quite another thing, as it does not spring forth from the source of love of Christ and therefore is not realized in the same spirit.

Our social work does not have its value in itself, but as a demonstration of the love of Christ.

We are not a YMCA because of the model swimming pools available to everyone, but because we build and use a swimming pool to bring the love of Christ to young men.

The YMCA has little importance as an institution of welfare.

The YMCA either is a form of Ecclesia or it is nothing.

If it is not Ecclesia it is useless, amateurish duplicate of public welfare institutions.

Thus we arrive at this peculiar statement: the YMCA is inwardly Ecclesia, church in the meaning of the New Testament; outwardly it is a welfare institution for young people of all nations.

The fact that it unites this interior with this exterior makes its character and is the basis of its peculiar, incomparable activity.

There are, therefore, two dangerous deviations which may cause the YMCA to miss its destiny.

The first: that it loses its soul, that it ceases to be Ecclesia.

The second: that it loses its particular body, that it becomes a mere institution of one of the churches, a “church youth group” whose main purpose is Bible study.

The first one is wrong extraversion, the second a wrong intraversion.

In the first case, the YMCA ceases to be Christian; in the second case it ceases to be YMCA.

The centenary of the year 1955 must help each local and national YMCA all over the world to grasp this insight of the homogeneousness of body and soul and to win back the soul which the YMCA has lost in many places.

There is less danger for the exterior, for the “body” of the YMCA; for this exterior social service is evident to everybody and can be started rather easily.

The main danger is the first, the loss of the Christian soul, the character as Ecclesia.

The most important task of the Ecclesia in the New Testament is to make Christ known to all men.

Therefore the most important task of the YMCA is to win the youth of our time for Christ. Youth for Christ, Christ for Youth.

Whether this is done by swimming pools, evening classes, sports training or Bible and Prayer Meetings is not the main question.

What matters only is the aim that young people come into a living contact with Christ.

This, however, can only happen if the Bible is read, where it is preached; and where experiences are shared in a heartfelt, sincere, brotherly manner.

The soul of the YMCA cannot live without being nurtured and purified by the sources of faith.

We may imagine the ideal YMCA a society of young people looking very worldly, open to everybody, which is attractive by its activities for young people and renders service to them. But while it looks rather worldly from the outside, the leading men inside are eager to speak to the young people of Jesus Christ as soon as they ask: why are you doing that? why are you so kind to us? why are you interested in just me?

To proclaim the message of Jesus Christ with a few words in such moments, to explain what actually is a YMCA – that is the proper aim.

The YMCA is a proof that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is no “religion” but the love of men based upon the love of God.

Therefore it is possible to bear witness to Christ by simple exterior services.

Where there is real love towards men, there Christ is at work; where Christ really is at work, there is genuine love towards men.

The foundation of Ecclesia is God’s Love in Jesus Christ, received and accepted by human hearts.

There is no need for a creed, even the Paris Basis, a model of brevity.

Who loves Christ and is willing to obey Him belongs to it. Who does not love Him and does not obey Him does not belong to it.

The love of Christ is the sole criterion; the unquestionable manifestation of this love to Christ is love to the brethren, willingness to serve the brethren.

Therefore the “Christian Religion” is something so simple, something so ecclesiastical, something so laymen-like.

That is why the YMCA has such an extraordinarily good chance to serve Christ.

The churches have their particular values and services and the YMCA cannot do better than remain on a good relationship with them all.

They certainly have much to give to their members which the YMCA cannot provide.

But, it is able to give the most essential to young people if its soul, its hidden innermost, is the communion with Christ, which moves it to act and guides it, that is to say if it really is a kind of Ecclesia.”

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Professor Brunner is considered one of the greatest European Christian theologians in the early to mid 20th century. His enormous and brilliant influence on the YMCA is revealed in this essay he penned, inspired by his friendship with John R. Mott, to encourage and guide the Y in their faithfulness to Christ amidst a radically swift-changing post-war culture in Britain, Germany, and America.

For a very brief overview of Emil Brunner’s life, Christian ministry and theological significance, read this overview by the Study Centre for Faith and Society.

For more about the brilliant and compelling writings of Emil Brunner, read this review by Roger Olsen.

For more in depth exploration of Dr. Brunner’s scholarship, read this paper by Alister McGrath.

For a fuller account of Emil Brunner’s writings and their helpfulness yet today, check out this book by Dr. McGrath.
Click here for the story behind this 1900 YMCA that met in a Skagway, Alaska Presbyterian church.

YMCA & Challenge 21: Global Inspiration for Local Mission-work

As YMCAs in the United States grapple with the roiling upheavals of 2020, and the tumultuous start to 2021, as we seek solid ground from which to stand and serve our struggling communities, there is much we can learn from our global YMCA friends and their foundation for serving amidst world-wide challenges.

Grinding poverty, political violence, ethnic resentments, religious strife, environmental pollution, broken families, corrupt cities – whatever shock or resistance American citizens have to these realities in our own country (the wealthiest and most powerful in modern history) fellow YMCA workers from around the world have also had to strive for success in this grueling reality for generations.

What can USA Christian YMCA leaders learn from Y’s in other countries – particularly ones committed to the legacy of George Williams and the Paris Basis?

What have other international Y’s figured out when it comes to embodying the gospel of Christ in a dangerous and violent world?

YMCA Challenge 21 is a gritty and enduring Christian commitment to historical and spiritual realities, but focused on an inspirational and grounded future.

Challenge 21, was drafted by the 14th World Council of YMCAS in Germany, 1998:

YMCA Challenge 21

“Affirming the Paris Basis adopted in 1855 as the ongoing foundation statement of the mission of the YMCA, at the threshold of the third millennium we declare that the YMCA is a world-wide Christian, ecumenical, voluntary movement for women and men with special emphasis on and the genuine involvement of young people and that it seeks to share the Christian ideal of building a human community of justice with love, peace and reconciliation for the fullness of life for all creation.

Each member YMCA is therefore called to focus on certain challenges which will be prioritized according to its own context.

These challenges, which are an evolution of the Kampala Principles, are:

• Sharing the good news of Jesus Christ and striving for spiritual, intellectual and physical well-being of individuals and wholeness of communities.

• Empowering all, especially young people and women to take increased responsibilities and assume leadership at all levels and working towards an equitable society.

• Advocating for and promoting the rights of women and upholding the rights of children.

• Fostering dialogue and partnership between people of different faiths and ideologies and recognizing the cultural identities of people and promoting cultural renewal.

• Committing to work in solidarity with the poor, dispossessed, uprooted people and oppressed racial, religious and ethnic minorities.

• Seeking to be mediators and reconcilers in situations of conflict and working for meaningful participation and advancement of people for their own self-determination.

• Defending God’s creation against all that would destroy it and preserving and protecting the earth’s resources for coming generations.

To face these challenges, the YMCA will develop patterns of co-operation at all levels that enable self-sustenance and self-determination.”

Imagine the humble posture of North American YMCA’s discarding their exceptionalism and turning towards global Y’s to learn in mutuality how to live out our mission in this new era of unprecedented disruption and chronic uncertainty?

Imagine the kind of solidarity we could generate in the United States if we relented of reinventing the YMCA and took some lessons from our world partners on living out the historic mission of the Y amidst these challenging times?

Challenge 21 enables North American Y’s to transcend the boring discussions of whether we should be more or less a business or non-profit focused, more or less a gym/swim or social agency.

The vision and depth of Challenge 21 could transform the spirit, energy and creativity of local Y’s, if they are brave enough to embrace it.

Here’s how different Y’s across the world highlight Challenge 21:

East Jerusalem YMCA

YMCA Europe

Asia and Pacific Alliance of YMCAs

YMCA Africa Alliance

If you were to “grade” your Y in light of Challenge 21, what would the result look like?

If you were to connect the most exciting parts of your Y with the Challenge 21, which parts would be highlighted?

Just imagine how exciting your Y could be with a more intentional holistic focus in solidarity with fellow associations across the globe!

One can make the case that Challenge 21 is a robust, thoughtful, dynamic, transformational unpacking of our current YUSA mission statement.

It can open up a way to transcend the colloquial American political and religious anxieties; it can reconnect us with our world neighbors and the immanent love that empowers us all.

Evolution of USA YMCA logo’s