My family was poor, and $1000-$2000 was a whole lot of money that we didn’t have, so I knew a missions trip would be a “once in a lifetime” experience. Because the Christmas trips were only 2 weeks and cost almost as much as the summer trips, I decided to make the most of the opportunity and sign up for a 1 month Teen Mania Global Expedition for the Summer of 1998. The trip would cost $1,800, and because of my family’s financial situation, I would need to raise almost every penny of that money by myself.
I spent a solid eight months of my life fundraising pretty much every spare moment that I wasn’t in school. I was writing letters, talking to people at my church, selling candy bars, having garage sales…literally doing everything I could to raise this money. My assigned Teen Mania intern called me regularly to pray with me and keep me motivated to raise the money needed to go on my trip.
Another Acquire the Fire convention also happened in Pittsburgh just a couple of months before my missions trip, which of course I attended. As usual, the convention got me really excited and on-fire, and I felt even closer to God during the ATF in 1998 since I knew I had been working so hard to make this Teen Mania Global Expedition happen. I just knew, deep in my heart, that my trip to Venezuela was going to be a “turning point” for me…that spending an entire month immersed in the world of Teen Mania would really teach me once and for all how I could constantly feel connected to God and emotionally fulfilled.
Despite months of fundraising, I was still about $300 short just two weeks before my missions trip, which was the deadline to mail donations. My parents had already donated all the time & money they could towards my trip, and I was terrified that if I told them I was still $300 short for my trip, they would not pay the difference and I would not be able to do. So, I did something I regret to this day, and lied to them and told them I had met my fundraising goal. I knew that if my dad drove me from Pennsylvania to Texas, he’d have no choice but to pay the difference when we got there. Looking back, it should have been a huge warning sign that I was so desperately set on this trip to “serve God” that I was willing to lie to my parents to get there.
I did make it to Texas, and when my father found out about my fundraising shortfall, he put the difference on our family’s already-stretched credit cards. It’s hard to believe that Teen Mania allows parents to be so out of the loop about major financial issues involving these missions trips. Regardless, I was in Texas and quickly began meeting the people I would be traveling to Venezuela & spending the next month of my life with.
The first night in Texas, we had a big praise & worship session and Ron Luce spoke. It was just like Acquire the Fire, only even more emotionally intense because I had worked so, so hard to get there. I remember Ron telling us that we were different from other teens…we were “world changers” and had a special anointing from God for our trips that summer. I remember being so happy in those moments, and wanting to feel that way forever. Unfortunately, those first few hours on the Teen Mania campus turned out to be the last positive memory I have of my missions trip.
After that welcome session, all of the people going to Venezuela were split into 3 different teams, and each of the teams had their own auditions to see who would get what part in the street drama we would be learning as our primary missions tool. The auditions lasted for hours, well past midnight, and in 80-degree temperatures when you’ve been traveling most of the day, that is a long time! I was given the role of the Court Jester in our drama…by the time I was assigned my role, I was too tired to actually care much about it and just wanted to go to sleep. I wen to bed exhausted, but excited about really diving into drama training the next day.
When I woke up the next day in the dirty, run-down Quonset hut where the teens were housed, I remember being very uncomfortable. It was before 8:00am, and it was already a stifling 90 degrees, which feels even hotter in a big metal building with no air conditioning. The make-shift showers had no hot water and were very dirty, and the lack of privacy was a nightmare for a self-conscious person like me. I remember being very discouraged by all of this, and surprised that they had not made better accommodations for such an expensive trip.
Ron Luce spoke to us again that morning and talked about how Christians should endure physical discomforts. I remember him saying that things like air conditioning and hot water were temptations to keep us lazy, and that God calls us not to be “slaves to comfort.” He talked about how those who suffer to fulfill the Great Commission will be rewarded. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I now know I was being manipulated to endure some truly horrible conditions over the coming weeks without ever daring to complain about it.
My team had just under 5 days in which to learn and perfect a twelve minute, tightly-choreographed street drama. This meant rehearsing our drama over and over again for 6 to 8 hours per day…outside, in the middle of a grass field, with no shade in sight, in June, in the middle of Texas, during a drought. I definitely wasn’t prepared for the extreme physical demands of the drama training, but I felt as if I needed to just deal with it and not be a “slave to comfort,” as Ron Luce had shared with us.
When I woke up the morning following the first full day of drama practice, I was alarmed that my right ankle was swelled significantly while I was sleeping and was extremely painful to walk on. I went to the Teen Mania infirmary, and I was told by the nurse that I had probably just spent “too much time on my ankle” and she encouraged me to take some Advil for the pain and continue with another day of drama training.
I took the nurse’s advice, and while the Advil helped briefly, it was just a few hours into the day’s drama training that my ankle was literally burning & throbbing with pain, and I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. I told my Team Leader this, and was asked to “keep it up for just a few more minutes” until our next break when I could sit and rest. That break actually came over an hour later, and by time I sat down I was literally crying because I was in so much pain. Not wanting to disappoint anyone on my team, I took several more Advil and somehow managed to muddle through the rest of the day’s training.
As the week progressed, my ankle continued to get worse and worse. I was taking around a dozen Advil in an 8 hour period just to bring the pain down to the point where I could actually stand on my bad ankle. At times, even that wasn’t enough, and I would need to sit down for a few minutes to relieve some of the pressure on my ankle in order to be able to press on with training. My Team Leader, despite me telling him repeatedly that I was in serious pain, actually pulled me aside on day after training to talk about my “attitude of laziness” and said I shouldn’t be stopping so much to sit down during drama training. Instead of seeing the absurdity of this, I really took it to heart and thought I was letting my team & God Himself down by taking periodic breaks to rest my ankle, and I forced myself to endure even more pain & not rest my ankle….all so I could be a “good Christian.”
Despite all this, I was really enjoying the praise & worship sessions and hearing Ron Luce speak and I did feel really close to God. I figured the problems with my ankle, in addition to the substandard accommodations on the Teen Mania campus, were just my “cross to bear” and that these trials would help build my character and make me a better Christian in the end. The drama training was physically & emotionally draining, but I knew each night I had a “mini-ATF session” to look forward to and I’d be feeling the emotional rush of God’s presence soon.
Luckily, the actual travel from Texas to Venezuela took a great deal of time over a couple of days, and I was able to rest enough that my ankle began to feel better. When we arrived in Venezuela late at night on our second day of travel, we went to the hotel where we were supposed to be staying at, only to find out that Teen Mania had incorrectly booked the reservation and there were not enough rooms for everyone. After waiting outside with no water or bathroom access for several hours, our Project Directors were able to secure lodging at another local hotel.
The hotel was run-down and obviously not equipped to deal with the demands of 120+ American teenagers. The hotel’s water supply was based on a tank system that was only refilled once per day, and while we were promised we would have at least 8 hours of “water access” per day, with all the kids staying there it ended up being closer to two hours per day. There were 6 guys staying in my room (5 teen missionaries and 1 college-aged “Missionary Advisor”). That means that all 6 of us had to shower within that 2 hours per day, and it also meant we could not flush the toilet 22 out of the 24 hours in a day. Worse yet, there wasn’t a set time that the water was turned on, and if your team happened to be out performing a drama while the hotel’s water was on, that was just too bad.
This made for some truly appalling living conditions. All the guys in my room were unable to shower for a five day period shortly after we arrived at the hotel because of the timing of the water supply. Teenage guys, sweating profusely while performing street dramas in polyester costumes in the middle of summer all day long, unable to shower for almost a full week. Feces and urine simply built up in the toilet when it couldn’t be flushed–sometimes for days at a time. The stench was absolutely sickening. Looking back on it, if an American child was found living in those conditions, they would probably be taken from their parents and placed into foster care. But when these concerns were brought up to the Team Leaders and Project Directors, the missionaries were told to stop complaining & to be thankful for the accommodations God had provided for us.
In addition to no running water, there was no place for us to do laundry. I had been repeatedly assured that missionaries would have access to laundry facilities while abroad, and was encouraged to just pack a few outfits that could be washed so that I wouldn’t have too much baggage with me. The original hotel we were supposed to stay at had laundry facilities, but the new hotel picked by the Project Directors did not. Apparently, they didn’t feel the need to make sure that the promise Teen Mania had made us regarding laundry was kept. So, I ended up wearing the same 4 unwashed outfits for my entire month-long missions trip, and as you can imagine they were extremely dirty and uncomfortable for most of my time in Venezuela.
Because of the appalling hygiene conditions…and because I wasn’t used to being in the heat and sweating so much….I developed a rash that made it very uncomfortable for me to perform dramas and just walk around in general. I knew one of the girls on my team had some baby powder, so I asked her for some, and she asked me what it was for. I told her “It’s for a rash that I have ‘down there.'” (Those were my exact words.) She decided to report my comment to the team leader, and I was quickly called into a meeting with the Project Directors where I was questioned and had to explain why I made “sexual comments” to a female on my team. I had never intended my comment to be at all sexual, and was just answering a question that I was asked, and having to discuss this with the PDs was absolutely humiliating.
There was actually a discussion of sending me home (“getting BV’d” as Teen Mania refers to it) because of the comment I had made. After some consideration (and a prayer meeting where I had to “confess my sin” to God), it was decided that instead I would be grounded to my room for two days. I couldn’t leave my room for anything except to perform dramas or attend worship services. I had to eat my meals alone in the room, and I wasn’t allowed to do anything in the room but read, pray, or sleep. Everyone on the trip knew I was “being punished,” which was very embarrassing. I ended up getting very depressed over this particular situation, which started with nothing more than an innocent, off-the-cuff remark.
The ministry side of things wasn’t much better. Although Teen Mania Global Expeditions recruiting literature makes frequent mention of “street evangelism” and talking to “unreached people groups,” most of the time we performed our drama, it was for an established church or a Catholic school. These same churches and schools housed us for several nights & fed us many of our meals, which made me wonder why I had to raise so much money for Teen Mania if they weren’t even footing most of the bill for our accommodations while abroad.
Occasionally, we would perform our drama on a street corner or in a public square, which was more exciting because there was a chance of actually reaching people who hadn’t yet heard the good news of Jesus Christ. I was alarmed, however, by the emphasis placed on physical healing by the Teen Mania leadership. We were encouraged not only to pray for immediate healing for people with physical ailments, but to “believe in faith” that these people had already been healed. If someone wasn’t immediately healed, it was because of a lack of faith, and not because it just wasn’t God’s will. I witnessed a group of missionaries pray for a man with a broken leg, tell him he had been healed, and tell him to believe in faith and start walking on it. He did try to walk on it, and it was clear that he was in a whole lot of pain and that his leg was still very much broken. Regardless, this story was held up as an example of God’s healing power, and everyone involved really did believe this man was healed, even though any uninvolved bystander seeing the situation would know that just wasn’t true.
When I expressed the fact that I didn’t believe our actions were really in line with what the Bible says about God’s healing power, I was quickly “hushed” and a few Bible verses were quoted to me that really didn’t answer my concerns. God does work miracles and has the power to heal…absolutely…but that doesn’t mean that God is at the beck and call of a group of teenagers, and it doesn’t mean that God chooses physical healing in all situations. Just look at the story of Job! But, I quickly learned to just tow the Teen Mania party line, and I tried to stay quiet about this the rest of my trip.
We maintained our daily quiet times while in Venezuela, and in the evenings we would have praise & worship sessions led by our Team Leaders or Project Directors. But something just wasn’t the same. I wasn’t feeling close to God…I wasn’t “on-fire” any more….and my problem of not being able to maintain my emotional high that I thought I would learn to solve on this trip was only getting worse. I felt very alone, very distant from God, and very disappointed that this Teen Mania trip I had worked so hard to make happen just wasn’t at all what I expected it would be….and wasn’t at all what I had been promised by Teen Mania.
I tried my best to maintain a positive attitude and a focus on God, but those things got harder and harder for me to do as the month dragged on and conditions didn’t seem to be improving. Then, another issue started to surface for me. For a very long time, I had thought that I might be gay, but I was usually able to suppress those feelings and focus on something else, like my relationship with God. My Teen Mania trip was the first time I had ever really been involved in a large group of male peers, and I started to find it harder and harder to make my feelings of attraction towards members of my own sex go away. This was extremely scary for me, because I firmly believed at that point in time that there was no such thing as a gay Christian, and if you were a homosexual you were going to hell.
I had become good friends with one of the Missionary Advisers (not mine) who was in Venezuela with me, and towards the end of my month in Venezuela, I was getting so depressed about my inability to feel close to God that I decided I had to confide in him the struggles I was having with my sexuality. To his credit, he was very sympathetic and I didn’t feel like I was being judged by him at all. He prayed with me, and I actually remember him “casting the homosexuality out of me in the name of Jesus.” Then he told me it was up to me to believe that God had delivered me and to make sure that I didn’t fall into temptation. Years and years of wrestling with my sexual orientation, “solved” in a one hour conversation with a Teen Mania team leader!
The problem is, nothing was actually solved. I still felt distant from God, and I was still very much struggling with my attractions towards other guys. The only thing that was different is that now these things were 100% my fault. I had been “healed” by Jesus through my team leader’s prayer, and now the only thing standing between me and a normal heterosexual life was how much faith I had in God. I really beat myself up over this, trying so very hard to just believe a little more or muster a bit more faith, trying to claim the “healing” from my homosexuality that I just knew Christ had granted me. But it didn’t help. My despair and depression over all of this was just growing deeper by the day.
I remember being excited to get back to the Teen Mania campus in Texas because I knew there would be awesome praise & worship, and that I would get to hear Ron Luce speak. But by the time I made it back to Texas, something had fundamentally changed in my life. I felt like there was a simple solution to me feeling distant from God and my struggles with sin–more faith–but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t make it happen. I couldn’t get that “close to God” feeling back during the praise & worship sessions, and hearing Ron speak didn’t fire me up like it had before. I remember praying so hard the night before I left Teen Mania to return home…begging that God would set my heart on fire again and let me feel his presence. Unfortunately, all I ended up feeling after my Teen Mania missions trip was loneliness, sadness, and emptiness that would stick with me for years to come.