Oh man, where to even start? Well, if you haven’t heard, I am back in the United States. I am currently sitting on the dock of the most beautiful lakehouse in Virginia. The sweetest, most generous friend and her family were kind enough to offer me space to be alone and try to process. Fair warning, this is going to be rather heavy. I would also like to be incredibly clear about my intentions of this blog… My goal is not to tear Adventures In Missions, and The World Race, down to the ground. My goal is to give an honest look into where I am at, and additionally warn future racers for what they should be prepared for. For this reason, I won’t be using any names in this blog.
So why did I leave the race after 6 months, and not finish out the final 4?
I am going to break this down into 4 categories: false doctrine, lack of ministry opportunities, inept leadership, and emotional abuse.
False Doctrine:
Let’s jump right in. World Race holds the stance that the wrath of God doesn’t matter. They teach that fearing God simply means respecting Him. To the extent that a squad coach from one of our girl’s past squad believes that hell isn’t a real place. This coach claims that love just wins in the end, and everyone ends up in heaven. Note that a coach is one of 3 people most directly influencing and leading a group of 20 somethings.
I was told that the Bible doesn’t need to be our foundation. I was “encouraged” in a letter by being told that I am a man who walks with a deep understanding of scripture, but I need to learn how to focus more on my experience and feelings because those are more important than truth. On top of that, there is this obsession with teaching from experience and trying to include truth rather than teaching from truth and including experience… to the extent that at our first debrief we had multiple people break down because of the teaching. They were led to believe that they don’t have the Holy Spirit because their experience didn’t mimic that of our squad coach. Additionally, we had a girl on our squad get told that her blogs contained too much scripture. She was told that, instead, she needed to focus on titling her blogs better. This would draw in numbers. A GLARING issue with World Race is that they preach the name World Race more than they preach the name of Jesus. They are so image-obsessed that truth takes a backseat.
That leads me to the most glaring issue on the truth front. World Race has an unhealthy obsession with Holy Spirit. They completely neglect Father and Son for the sake of Spirit. I am not exaggerating when I tell you we didn’t talk about Jesus one time in our 6 months of teaching. Multiple people asked about it, and the response we were given was that Holy Spirit just matters more to the rest of the world. This issue goes much deeper, and I want to be very clear with this next part. I know what Matthew 12 says about blaspheming the Holy Spirit. I know the repercussions of that act. I am not going to claim to know exactly what it looks like to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, but I am going to tell you that at the very least World Race toes this line. The number of times I heard the phrase, “well Holy Spirit told me it was okay” is staggering. And I am not talking about being reminded of truth. I am not talking about having a word from the Lord, considering it, and presenting it through the lens of saying something like “I think God is saying this. I would encourage you to pray into it and test it”. I am talking about frivolously making definitive statements that Holy Spirit said sin was okay. To give you one example, we had a squad leader who claimed he could just curse all he wanted because, “Holy Spirit told Him it was okay”. And not only did he do this, he led other people into believing that it was okay to walk directly into sin. Holy Spirit was constantly used as an excuse, and justification, to just do whatever you want. Walking in obedience to scripture was always secondary.
Certain members of leadership did this more than others. I think I could make a very strong case for one of our squad coaches being a false prophet. She has an obsession with prophesying things over people without ever considering them. They come to mind and she just says them through a lens of just being completely true rather than advising caution and encouraging people to pray through things. I could list simple things like telling us that God told her all 44 members of our squad would stay together the whole year (8 people are gone at this point). I could list ridiculous things like claiming that God gave someone on our squad a new name and refusing to call this person by their name anymore. I could list countless other examples of using Holy Spirit as a manipulation tactic, but I will get to some of those later. And to be clear, prophesy is absolutely a real thing. I have experienced the Lord speaking in all kinds of ways. But never in my life would I consider it okay to fully project my thoughts onto somebody else without any caution or counsel… and claim it is God.
Another smaller issue is this ridiculous culture of “feedback” that they instill. Giving honest and constructive feedback is absolutely a beautiful idea. It is essential for healthy community. But World Race preaches that it has to be done in a team environment. They blatantly disregard Matthew 18 and the clear instruction to start 1 on 1 then go to a few and then go to the church. It results in an absolutely absurd culture of gossip, but again I will address this one further in another section.
Lack of Ministry:
I am going to choose to believe that COVID had a deep impact on my experience when it comes to ministry. I recognize that finding opportunities proves wildly more difficult amidst a pandemic. I really hope that my experience in this category is an outlier due to COVID.
The first two months of my race I scrubbed and painted walls half of the time, and the other half of the time I sat around aimlessly (I was literally told to go sit in a park where there was nothing to be done instead of doing anything remotely productive like evangelizing on the beach… I was given 2 days at the end to finally do that). The second 2 months I sat aimlessly for 2 months. In 2 months, we had ministry opportunities with the community maybe 5-10 days out of 60. Apart from that we had maybe 30 days with about 2-3 hours of construction work for 2-3 people to do (there were 13 of us there). The 5th month I was doing absurd manual labor, like carrying 200 pound trees over a mile up and over the mountains… none of which even ended up getting used for any construction purpose. The 6th month was the only month of the race I actually had ministry to do, and not just humanitarian work that we were pretending was ministry.
I think the part of this that stands out that would for sure be a bigger picture issue, and not be impacted by COVID, is that we severely lacked translators. In Costa Rica we didn’t have any. In Guatemala we had one for 13 of us, and it was our host. The first month of Honduras we had a bunch of high school kids who somewhat knew English, but not enough to explain evangelistic concepts. The second month of Honduras we didn’t have any.
There is also just also no logic used in placing teams. In Guatemala, we had one team of 6 living in a house that had enough beds for 50 people. They had a completely full ministry schedule. Meanwhile they sent 13 people to my location where we had absolutely nothing to do.
I actually had this really beautiful opportunity yesterday as I drove from Chicago to this lakehouse in Virginia. I had the chance to share the Gospel with a man named Garrett at some random Culvers, in Ohio. It was awesome! I got back in my car and realized that was literally the first time I had gotten to do that since before leaving for the race. It breaks my heart to think about what the World Race could be when it comes to evangelism and discipleship vs what it actually is.
Inept Leadership:
I genuinely don’t know how to start this one. I can’t express clearly enough how ridiculous this one is. Our leadership was unbelievably unsafe. World Race preaches this model of giving feedback, to the point that it is forced upon you daily… Yet, if you offer leadership feedback you are always met with, “I hear you, but” or “I am excited to see you grow in this area”. Every single time it is met with extreme levels of pride, arrogance, and an unwillingness to admit an ounce of fault. Communication in that is incredibly passive aggressive, and almost entirely done through text.
Our leadership fed a model of gossip to our entire squad, and it now runs rampant. If you tell a single person on leadership anything, they immediately turn around and tell the entire leadership team. On top of that, we had one squad leader in particular who would constantly share people’s vulnerability with other squad members in one on ones. I would actually argue he is one of the most emotionally manipulative people I have ever met. I helped lead a church for 3 years, and I can genuinely only think of one time where anybody in leadership felt the need to share vulnerable details across the board… and it was because a man showed up who was trying to convince people to leave and join a cult.
Our squad mentor started in a place of lies from the very beginning. At our training camp she talked all about how she couldn’t wait to visit us on the field for debriefs. The first debrief rolled around and she came up with an excuse for why she wouldn’t be there. Then month 4 of our race came around, and we were about to have our second debrief. She then came out and said that she had known all the way since before training camp that she wouldn’t be coming to any debrief, for medical reasons. Now does that make any sense to lie about for no reason at all?
There is also this ridiculous power structure within World Race. They choose to never share information with the squad. Instead, they choose to tell only team leaders and tell them not to tell their teams. On top of that, they preach to team leaders that they are more important with their actions… and it is heartbreaking to see the effect of that. And I am just going to add this in so in no way does it seem like I am bitter or jealous of a position… I was a team leader.
Our squad coaches modeled manipulation to our squad constantly. Our debriefs were marked by the wife teaching and belittling her husband with stories, while her husband sat passively by. This woman also would constantly manipulate for information in one on ones. To just give you one example, there was a man on our squad that she walked in and claimed that she already knew he was in love so she just wanted to hear it from him. This man wasn’t even remotely interested in anybody. That might seem little, but it was constant. Repeatedly making claims that were not true to see if something would stick.
Additionally, leadership paired us with a host that was incredibly unsafe. We were on a mountain, over an hour from town. We had a woman break out with a really bad rash on her face and neck. We had a man hit his head and have concussion symptoms. It took us 2 hours to convince the host to let them go to a hospital. His answer for a concussion was ibuprofen because that helped with COVID… in case you didn’t know, ibuprofen would kill you if you had bleeding in the brain with a concussion. We had a nurse on the mountain tell him they needed to go to the hospital and we were told to wait for natural remedies. The woman finally got to the hospital and had critically low blood pressure.
Our leadership also walked with an overwhelming double standard. I was told that I couldn’t spend time with 3 of my best friends on the race who happened to be women… the 4 of us plan on starting a house church when this is all over… Or I couldn’t spend time with them out of sight of the rest of the squad, even though there was 4 of us. Meanwhile, our male squad leader could constantly talk to women 1 on 1 until midnight, away from everybody. He could also share hotel rooms with women… even one on one with a woman where there is a history of feelings.
This same squad leader was given feedback to stop flirting with every single woman on our squad for 5 months straight, and none of these actions changed. This is a man who brags about a girl who asked him out through an Instagram video to a disgusting level. He feels the need to share this with every single man he encounters. This is a man who pushes well beyond any emotional boundary with women, constantly asking for details about their past. This is a man who constantly tells people that they are a less mature version of himself. There are way more alarming patterns, but I just share a few… not to belittle this person but to say that this man just got hired to now be a squad mentor leading primarily 20 something year old women.
Another example of double standard, and just ridiculousness altogether, came with COVID complications. Earlier in the race we had a girl test positive and one of our squad leaders was exposed. She needed to go home for a wedding. She had a negative test and then went and got an antibody test and was allowed to fly home. A few weeks later, our visas were about to expire in Honduras. We had a few people test positive for COVID. All of the men had the exact same tests as this squad leader and we were told that we had to stay in Honduras, AND pay for the fine ourselves… even though by any legal measure we could fly. On top of that, we raised $17,900 for this trip. That money was raised expecting to go to 11 countries. We were 6 months in and had flown twice, and we hadn’t even left central America. It wasn’t like there wasn’t money in the budget. It wasn’t until dozens of people fought back that AIM decided to pay the fine. On top of that, we were directly told that our top priority as a squad was to get one of our squad leaders home… not get us healthy.
I called our squad mentor that day and was met with an instant pity party for her having to deal with people getting mad… Gee wow, I wonder why people would be mad when they are being told they have to pay hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets when they can legally fly? I will get to this one more in the final section.
I could keep going, but I am going to move on to the final section and give a detailed example of a situation I had to walk through.
Emotional Abuse:
So here I am going to share the most ridiculous situation that I walked through and then summarize the patterns of abuse that our leadership walks in.
So, I was lucky enough to spend 5 months living with members of my squad prior to launch. Because of COVID, we spent a lot of time on zoom calls. Eventually that led to meeting in person. And then that led to literally living with 5-10 of these people from August until launch in January. During this time, mutual interest developed with one of the girls on my squad. We had a conversation about it right before launching in January. Our intention was to not let it be a distraction… obviously still spend time with each other when we could, but never during ministry time.
The first two months of the race, we were on different teams in completely different locations. She didn’t have access to wifi really at all. We facetimed one time during those two months.
One week into the race, I chose to let our leadership in on the fact that we had feelings for each other. This meant that we would never be together the entire year… we would always be at different ministry locations, unless we had an all squad month. I knew this, and I still chose to let them in.
Fast forward to month 5. We had an all squad month in Honduras. This girl and I chose to go out of our way to call leadership and share our boundaries with them. We chose to do this. We weren’t asked to. Our boundaries were to emotionally not share anything with each other that we weren’t sharing with men for me, and women for her. We additionally gave ourselves one night a week to have an hour to talk 1 on 1.
2 weeks go by and everything is going great. We are holding to our boundaries, enjoying seeing each other, and engaging in ministry well (granted we were basically doing slave manual labor this whole month… they had an expectation that we would work 8-8 six days a week and still be available on our “off” day… obviously we didn’t do this). The whole squad comes down the mountain to go to Dunkin Donuts for our off day.
I step into wifi and have a text from our squad mentor claiming that we need to talk because this girl and I have just gone wildly across boundaries and ignored feedback that has been given over and over. I ask if we can just call her instead of going through our squad leader since he already didn’t have the guts to talk to us (he had been on the mountain with us the whole time and then we got a text after he left the mountain to be with the girl who had the rash that I mentioned earlier). The response that I was met with was, “Nah… To be honest I don’t have the time to alleviate stress you feel based off choices you made”.
An entire week goes by before we finally talk to anybody from leadership. We find out that some 20 year old kid who used to do the World Race, and lives there now, claims that he saw this girl chase me around and give me a big hug after I got back from being down the mountain. He made this comment in passing to just ask if we were a thing. Turns out, this girl didn’t hug me. I didn’t even see her until 10pm that day. I was by myself, completely away from everyone all day. She hugged a former teammate. Not me. So, I said that wasn’t me. The response I was given is that it didn’t matter. Even after expressing how absurd it was that I was completely falsely accused of this, the only apology I got was, “I am sorry on behalf of this 20 year old for giving me false information”. Absolutely zero admitting of fault. We were never even asked about the situation, just wildly accused.
Additionally, our squad coach lied and said she saw us cuddle up watching a movie at a debrief. We literally watched a movie in sight of everybody with the computer in between us and probably at least 2 feet.
We were also told that we had been given feedback over and over and just disregarded. Completely made up just like the hug situation. I was literally claimed to have been given feedback from a squad leader I had never talked to in my life, all the way back in month 2… you know the time where she was 4 hours away from me and we talked once in 2 months.
Then we were told by our male squad leader that he was pissed off because this girl leaned against me while playing cards… her back against my shoulder.
It was literally as if we were in 6th grade. But it gets so much worse.
I sit down to talk to this squad leader (the same one who is the incredibly manipulative man) and he starts blindly accusing me of all kinds of things. He tells me that I am the sole reason behind the disunity of our squad. He tells me that I am no longer fit to lead because this girl leaned against me. He lies and threatens me with taking away leading (I later found out that was never even being considered). He accused me of using 2 other friends to just get to this girl (literally my best friends on the trip who I spent hours upon hours with the first 4 months of the race while the girl I liked wasn’t there). He accused me of not even caring about this girl’s heart and just doing whatever was fun. He claimed that I had told him I didn’t know if we would be a thing after the race, which was absolutely not a conversation we had. I very intentionally had not let him into details the whole race because I saw how manipulative he was. I mean this is the same man who started telling other people on our squad about the fact that we had feelings for each other. Our squad coach suggested that I should think about not talking to her for the next half year. They made a list of who was deemed capable for us to talk to about this because our friends weren’t deemed mentally capable of having those conversations with us. They more or less accused this girl of being a hoe because she gave a hug to a man.
All because as a 28 year old man and 24 year old woman, she leaned against me while playing a card game.
I had 4 people on our squad come up to me and tell me that if they ever developed interest in someone, they wouldn’t tell leadership anymore after watching how they handled my situation… that me letting them in should’ve resulted in more trust and instead it resulted in them watching us like hawks. And 3 of these 4 people were people that I barely even knew.
There was never space for a conversation to ask what was going on. There was never a single apology for being falsely accused and lied to. There was never an ounce of admitting that they were wrong or put words in our mouths. There was never an ounce of admitting fault for making up scenarios.
There are way more ridiculous details to how this played out, but that is the overview. World Race just walks in such pride and arrogance, that they always have to blame shift to protect their image.
And this is just one example I have of how I was treated for half a year. World Race models cycles of emotional abuse. They tell you what to do. They give no space for you to actually offer input or have conversations. Then if you provide any feedback, you are accused and attacked over and over until you give up. Then they see you give up, offer a completely hollow apology (maybe), and then nothing changes. Cycle that over and over and over again.
Their obsession with a death-grip control of everything is alarming at best. Multiple people who were having biblical conversations at the start of the race were told they weren’t capable of those conversations… we had to refer all questions about theology to leadership.
They then also operate in a manner where they constantly need to walk you through “healing sessions”. They love to bring up your past and make you re-walk through things you have already seen healing from. They operate in such an abusive way that I currently see dozens of people walking back into unhealthy patterns from the past. World Race will claim that you need to heal when in reality they are triggering past abusive cycles because they treat you in a manner that mimics emotional abuse.
To be open and honest, I have watched unhealthy patterns get created in this environment. I have never struggled with vulnerability in my life… like ever. You can ask anybody who knows me, I overshare if anything. I am now finding it hard to trust people after any piece of vulnerability I offered was freely shared over and over. I am finding it hard to even share how truly horrible my experience was because I know it is hard to believe. I can’t possibly paint the picture clearly enough. And I know how easily this could be written off as me overreacting. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t walk through it. I didn’t believe it before my race. I read the hundreds of blogs out there calling AIM a cult, and I didn’t believe them. I don’t know if I would go that far, but they definitely operate in a lot of patterns of a cult. But that is the reason I share examples and make this blog so long. I hope it offers insight into how truly horrible this organization is, instead of being just entirely opinion. I would also ask you to consider that 6 people just left my squad for very similar reasons. It wasn’t just me.
Furthermore, the result of this year is me feeling more distant from the Lord than I ever have in my adult life. After being constantly controlled and offered no space to be alone with the Father (we were forced into team times 6 nights a week), I am trying to realign with the Father’s heart. After watching His word be manipulated and blasphemed for 6 months, I am finding myself questioning when I hear His voice because of how abused it was.
So, did God work the last 6 months? Yes, but it is a hard question for me to answer. Completely in spite of leadership, He did. When I look back, it is very difficult for me to find anything to take away from these 6 months. I learned how not to lead. I learned that my heart is for America and not the nations. I got the sweetest gift I will ever receive in this relationship. But none of those are the reason I came on the race. I came on the race to experience ministry. And it is really sad to see what the race actually is. An emotionally abusive, manipulative environment that teaches heresy and cares more about their own image than truth, or its participants.
Would I ever recommend this trip to anybody? I want to say absolutely not. But I do think there is a possibility that my experience was so horrendous because of my specific leadership, and maybe it isn’t reflective of AIM as a whole… Seems doubtful, but it is possible. Here would be my advice: Make dang sure that the Lord is calling you to the World Race and not just international missions. Because I am telling you there are countless better opportunities than being a part of this organization.
It has left me seeking restoration in all kinds of areas. I know that the Lord will be faithful in this, but man it is hard, and so incredibly unnecessary.
These lyrics have brought peace in the week since being back:
Be still my heart and know
You are God alone
Stop thinking so much and just let go
Be still my soul and rest
Humbly I confess
in my weakness your strength is perfect
For You alone are God
There will be no other
And You have won my heart more than any other
So I will give it all ’cause you gave it all for me
I know that restoration is coming. I know that an absolutely beautiful relationship is coming out of this race for me. I know that the Lord answered my questions around where my heart is passionate (The United States). I know that He will be faithful to put me back together and that in my weakness His strength is made perfect.
This is officially my final blog. I will be posting this in 2 places because I know World Race will delete this off of their website.
To my supporters, thank you so much for believing in me and trusting me to carry the Gospel. I am so excited to be able to freely do that again here in America. If it makes you feel better, I did take those few things away from this year… a beautiful relationship, insight on how not to lead, and answers that my heart is for America.
I love you all and would love your prayers as I step into this season of seeking restoration!
