Main YWAM Page, or to YWAM Communications, or to Main News Digest PageYOUTH WITH A Mission's national director Frank Naea is to become the organization's first non-white international President.
The 41-year-old former truck driver will take up his role as head of the 10,500-strong missionary group in 2000, during the organization's 40th anniversary year.
The appointment was confirmed when YWAM's international leadership team met recently in Brazil. Naea will be YWAM's third President, replacing Jim Stier, the national director of the mission's work in Brazil.
A New Zealander of Samoan and Maori parents, Naea has served with YWAM since 1981 and has over the years played a significant role in encouraging Maori and Pacific Island Christians in rising to the challenge of taking their place in missionary service. Forty-three per cent of YWAM's worldwide staff now come from the non-Western world.
Formerly a member of the Island Breeze ministry team that presents the gospel through cultural arts presentations, Naea became national director in New Zealand in 1993. The mission has around 150 staff at more than a dozen ministry centers across the country. In 1995 Naea was appointed regional director for the Pacific.
Based at the mission's Mangere training campus in Onehunga, Auckland, Naea will assume responsibility for leading YWAM's Global Leadership Team and representing the mission to the wider world when he becomes President for four years.
"It's a great honor, and I was shocked when I was first asked to consider it," he said. "YWAM continues to grow and expand, and I hope that during my term we will be able to look at issues that will enable us to be even more effective - things like making sure there is room at the table for the next generation. indigenous and women leaders."
Naea and his American-born wife, Sonia, have two children - Luke, 19, and Ruth, 16. The couple joined YWAM after an Island Breeze team visited the Auckland church where they were leading the youth work. "I had seen lots of different kinds of ministry, but most of it seemed the same to me," he said. "Then Island Breeze came along and they were totally different. It looked like 'me'."
Among Naea's ancestors his Samoan great-grandfather, a missionary who died in Papua New Guinea. His Maori grandparents were active in preaching the gospel for more than 50 years. He sees his mixed heritage as an advantage. "I consider myself a New Zealander, and whichever slant is more appropriate, that's the way I go, but I am comfortable in most settings.
When Stier, who is also YWAM's international director of rvangelism and frontier missions, steps down he will have served as President for six years. He replaced YWAM founder and first President Loren Cunningham, who relinquished the role to concentrate on other leadership responsibilities within YWAM's
University of the Nations training division. Cunningham also serves as chairman of YWAM International.
(Photo available on request)
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