Our Founders
Loren & Darlene Cunningham
He is.
Loren and Darlene’s life message is one of faith, love and trust in God being who He has said He is.
Loren and Darlene’s life message is one of faith, love and trust in God being who He has said He is.
He is.
Loren’s Story
Loren Cunningham is the Founder of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an ever-expanding global missions movement born in 1960 which has reached into every nation on earth (www.ywam.org). YWAM encompasses evangelism, training and mercy ministries. It is manned by tens of thousands of full-time staff from 200+ countries and a wide variety of denominations and Christian traditions who serve at more than 2,000 YWAM locations in 191 nations. By the time of YWAM’s 50th anniversary in 2010, more than five million participants had served in YWAM programs as students, short-term volunteers and full-time staff. From that point, YWAM went “viral” and they decided to stop trying to keep a count. Now only God knows the numbers.
Loren is also the Co-Founder and International Chancellor of the University of the Nations (UofN), a global ministry of YWAM (www.uofn.edu). Since the university was established in 1978, it has grown to offer more than 600 different kinds of courses and seminars (some of which are offered in nearly 100 languages), held at more than 800 locations/campuses in 163 countries. The ten colleges of the UofN are: Applied Linguistics & Languages; Arts; Christian Ministries; Communication; Counseling; Education; Health Care; Humanities & International Studies; Science & Technology and Sports & Fitness. Hundreds of thousands of students have registered within the global UofN system and taken at least a Discipleship Training School (DTS), the entry course and pre-requisite for all other UofN courses and/or for becoming YWAM staff.
Loren and his wife, Darlene, his ministry partner from the beginning of YWAM, reside in Kailua- Kona, Hawaii investing their wisdom and influence into the leaders and staff of the University of the Nations Kona campus which they pioneered in 1977. (www.ywamkona.org).
By 1999, Loren had personally gone to every sovereign nation on earth, all dependent countries, and more than 100 territories and islands for the sake of Christ and the Great Commission. This has given him valuable insights into global trends and uniquely prepared him to share God’s strategies for world evangelism. His wisdom, experience, leadership understanding and call to build bridges of unity within the body of Christ have given him opportunity to speak publicly to live audiences from a few to more than a million people gathered in one location. Pre-COVID, he usually ministered on all six continents each year, and during COVID he says he went further and reached more people via Zoom than during all his previous years of ministry combined.
Click here for Loren’s “official” biography.
Visit Loren’s website here: LorenCunningham.com
A Passion for the Bible
Since the 1960s, Loren has carried a burden with many other global leaders to make the Bible accessible to every person on earth, thereby ending Bible poverty worldwide.
He has met with hundreds of influential leaders in evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal denominations, as well as those leading the oldest Christian traditions, to invite their partnership in this cause.
More recently, his passion has become fine-tuned to focus on making an oral translation of the Bible available in every mother tongue on earth, because the mother tongue is the language of the heart.
Early Days
Born in Taft, California, Loren’s family heritage is rich with generations of Christian ministers. His parents Tom and Jewell Cunningham were itinerant Assembly of God pastors who moved their children Phyllis, Loren and Janice with them as they planted churches across the Southwest. Loren’s maternal grandparents were traveling evangelists who planted churches in Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma and his paternal grandfather was an itinerant Bible teacher known as “the walking Bible.” Loren received his own missionary call at the age of 13 at a Monday night youth rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He attended high school in West Los Angeles at University High and graduated in December 1952. The following year marked his first missions outreach, an Easter break trip to Mexico with 11 other youth. “We preached in our broken Spanish and were absolutely amazed that God could use us to reach into another culture and win people for Jesus,” Loren recalls.
He took a year of courses at Santa Monica City College and UCLA, before moving on to Central Bible Institute and Seminary (CBI) in Springfield, Missouri, a school affiliated with the Assemblies of God. At CBI, Loren served as Student Body President and also joined a singing quartet called The King’s Magnifiers.
Loren’s Story
Loren Cunningham is the Founder of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), an ever-expanding global missions movement born in 1960 which has reached into every nation on earth (www.ywam.org). YWAM encompasses evangelism, training and mercy ministries. It is manned by tens of thousands of full-time staff from 200+ countries and a wide variety of denominations and Christian traditions who serve at more than 2,000 YWAM locations in 191 nations. By the time of YWAM’s 50th anniversary in 2010, more than five million participants had served in YWAM programs as students, short-term volunteers and full-time staff. From that point, YWAM went “viral” and they decided to stop trying to keep a count. Now only God knows the numbers.
Loren is also the Co-Founder and International Chancellor of the University of the Nations (UofN), a global ministry of YWAM (www.uofn.edu). Since the university was established in 1978, it has grown to offer more than 600 different kinds of courses and seminars (some of which are offered in nearly 100 languages), held at more than 800 locations/campuses in 163 countries. The ten colleges of the UofN are: Applied Linguistics & Languages; Arts; Christian Ministries; Communication; Counseling; Education; Health Care; Humanities & International Studies; Science & Technology and Sports & Fitness. Hundreds of thousands of students have registered within the global UofN system and taken at least a Discipleship Training School (DTS), the entry course and pre-requisite for all other UofN courses and/or for becoming YWAM staff.
Loren and his wife, Darlene, his ministry partner from the beginning of YWAM, reside in Kailua- Kona, Hawaii investing their wisdom and influence into the leaders and staff of the University of the Nations Kona campus which they pioneered in 1977. (www.ywamkona.org).
By 1999, Loren had personally gone to every sovereign nation on earth, all dependent countries, and more than 100 territories and islands for the sake of Christ and the Great Commission. This has given him valuable insights into global trends and uniquely prepared him to share God’s strategies for world evangelism. His wisdom, experience, leadership understanding and call to build bridges of unity within the body of Christ have given him opportunity to speak publicly to live audiences from a few to more than a million people gathered in one location. Pre-COVID, he usually ministered on all six continents each year, and during COVID he says he went further and reached more people via Zoom than during all his previous years of ministry combined.
A Passion for the Bible
Since the 1960s, Loren has carried a burden with many other global leaders to make the Bible accessible to every person on earth, thereby ending Bible poverty worldwide. Wherever the Scripture goes, the Spirit of God brings transformation!
He has met with hundreds of influential leaders in evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal denominations, as well as those leading the oldest Christian traditions, to invite their partnership in this cause.
More recently, his passion has become fine-tuned to focus on making an ORAL translation of the Bible available in every MOTHER TONGUE on earth, because that is the language of the heart. This must happen to fulfill Jesus’ prayer “on earth as it is in heaven” pictured in Revelation 7:9: “…a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb….”
Early Days
Born in Taft, California, Loren’s family heritage is rich with generations of Christian ministers. His parents Tom and Jewell Cunningham were itinerant Assembly of God pastors who moved their children Phyllis, Loren and Janice with them as they planted churches across the Southwest. Loren’s maternal grandparents were traveling evangelists who planted churches in Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma and his paternal grandfather was an itinerant Bible teacher known as “the walking Bible.” Loren received his own missionary call at the age of 13 at a Monday night youth rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He attended high school in West Los Angeles at University High and graduated in December 1952. The following year marked his first missions outreach, an Easter break trip to Mexico with 11 other youth. “We preached in our broken Spanish and were absolutely amazed that God could use us to reach into another culture and win people for Jesus,” Loren recalls.
He took a year of courses at Santa Monica City College and UCLA, before moving on to Central Bible Institute and Seminary (CBI) in Springfield, Missouri, a school affiliated with the Assemblies of God. At CBI, Loren served as Student Body President and also joined a singing quartet called The King’s Magnifiers.
A Vision in the Bahamas
While in the Bahamas on a tour with the quartet, Loren received a vision that changed the course of his life. While praying, he saw in his mind’s eye a world map with waves of young people crashing up the continents. He came to believe this was a call from God to involve young people in the work of world missions.
Loren graduated from CBI in 1957 with degrees in Christian Education, and Bible and Theology. Upon his return to California he took a position as youth pastor and musical director at Calvary Assembly in Inglewood. He also continued his education, earning another B.A., in Education, this one from University of Southern California in 1958.
Following this he did the course work at the University of Southern California for his M.S. in Administration and Supervision of Education from 1958 to January 1960.
A Vision for the World
During his work at Inglewood Calvary Assembly, Loren’s desire to mobilize young people into missions continued. In the spring of 1960 he led over a hundred youth on an evangelistic outreach to Hawaii. The trip confirmed his belief that young people could be effective in missions.
In July 1960, he resigned his pastorate, sold his car, and purchased a round-the-world air ticket. He traveled alone to Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Turkey, and Europe, visiting his parents’ missionary contacts and speaking in churches. Everywhere he went he was confronted with needs. If the world were to be reached with the gospel, he concluded, it would take men and women from all Christian churches and all generations working together.
The whole church reaching the whole world to meet the needs of the whole person with the whole Gospel.
This goal continues to be a driving passion of the organization Loren founded that year, Youth With A Mission.
Loren is the author of six books: Is That Really You, God? (translated into more than 140 languages), Making Jesus Lord, Daring to Live on the Edge, Why Not Women? , The Book that Transforms Nations and We Can End Bible Poverty Now.
Darlene’s Story
As Loren Cunningham went from church to church sharing his vision, young people responded eagerly. One of those was a young woman named Darlene Scratch, whose parents Ed and Enid were pastors of an Assemblies of God church in Redwood City, California.
About Darlene
Darlene Cunningham was born in Vancouver, Canada to Pastor Ed and Enid Scratch. From an early age, she was aware of a distinct calling from God on her life. The course of that call became clarified forever when she met a handsome, single young man-with-a-vision named Loren Cunningham. Upon marrying Loren in 1963, she became the Co-founder of Youth With A Mission, the ever-expanding global missions movement Loren had started in 1960, which has now reached into every nation on earth (www.ywam.org). Darlene is also the International Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Nations (UofN), a global ministry of YWAM (www.uofn.edu). (Click here for Darlene’s “official” biography.)
Darlene is a “prime mover” in the areas of leadership development and implementation of vision. One of her greatest heart motivations is to discover leadership giftings in young men and women and help them to reach their full potential in God. Over the past four decades, she has led scores of YWAM Leadership Training Schools and DNA Infusion leadership training events on every continent of the world, in response to a call from God to “take a banquet of leadership training to those who have not had opportunity to eat,” especially those in the Global South, making it accessible geographically, financially and in the languages of the regions where they have been held.
Darlene is eagerly sought as a speaker worldwide because she is recognized as a woman of wisdom who hears from God. Whatever the context, she constantly points the hearer to God’s faithfulness in every situation, and to His great grace.
She is uniquely qualified to give leadership to those within Youth With A Mission because she understands the lifestyle, pressures and joys of the Mission from an inside perspective. Darlene is the one who first began to identify and teach on YWAM’s Foundational Values in 1985. That teaching was later formalized as one of YWAM’s cornerstone documents: The Statement of Purpose, Core Beliefs and Foundational Values of Youth With A Mission. Her book Values Matter – Stories of the Beliefs and Values of YWAM expands on these topics through many inspiring, live-giving narratives, and includes one of her core teachings for life and decision-making, “The Belief Tree.”
About Darlene
Darlene Cunningham was born in Vancouver, Canada to Pastor Ed and Enid Scratch. From an early age, she was aware of a distinct calling from God on her life. The course of that call became clarified forever when she met a handsome, single young man-with-a-vision named Loren Cunningham. Upon marrying Loren in 1963, she became the Co-founder of Youth With A Mission, the ever-expanding global missions movement Loren had started in 1960, which has now reached into every nation on earth (www.ywam.org). Darlene is also the International Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Nations (UofN), a global ministry of YWAM (www.uofn.edu). (Click here for Darlene’s “official” biography.)
Darlene is a “prime mover” in the areas of leadership development and implementation of vision. One of her greatest heart motivations is to discover leadership giftings in young men and women and help them to reach their full potential in God. Over the past four decades, she has led scores of YWAM Leadership Training Schools and DNA Infusion leadership training events on every continent of the world, in response to a call from God to “take a banquet of leadership training to those who have not had opportunity to eat,” especially those in the Global South, making it accessible geographically, financially and in the languages of the regions where they have been held.
Darlene is eagerly sought as a speaker worldwide because she is recognized as a woman of wisdom who hears from God. Whatever the context, she constantly points the hearer to God’s faithfulness in every situation, and to His great grace.
She is uniquely qualified to give leadership to those within Youth With A Mission because she understands the lifestyle, pressures and joys of the Mission from an inside perspective. Darlene is the one who first began to identify and teach on YWAM’s Foundational Values in 1985. That teaching was later formalized as one of YWAM’s cornerstone documents: The Statement of Purpose, Core Beliefs and Foundational Values of Youth With A Mission. Her book Values Matter – Stories of the Beliefs and Values of YWAM expands on these topics through many inspiring, live-giving narratives, and includes one of her core teachings for life and decision-making, “The Belief Tree.”
Loren and Darlene’s Family Today
Darlene and Loren reside in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii investing their wisdom and influence into the leaders and staff of the University of the Nations Kona campus which they pioneered in 1977. (www.ywamkona.org).
The Cunninghams have two adult children, Karen, who has a University of the Nations Bachelor of Science degree in Early Childhood Education, and David, who is a graduate of University of the Nations and University of Southern California. Karen is a preschool teacher and David is a film director.
David and his wife Judy have also given Loren and Darlene their most cherished title, promoting them to the role of “grandparents,” by producing three wonderful grandchildren, two of which (so far) have attended University of the Nations and are called to various aspects of the film industry.