The Y Is More Than You Think

Treadmills, pools, basketballs. Growing up, if you asked me where to find these items, I would have pointed you in the direction of the closest Y. For much of my life, the Y to me was simply a place where people learned to swim and lift weights. Fast forward to today, my paradigm related to the Y has changed dramatically.

At some point during my childhood, I discovered the name was not just the Y, but the YMCA. YMCA stands for Young Men’s Christian Association. Started by George Williams in 19th-century London, the YMCA began as a prayer gathering for urban textile workers. The history and legacy of the Y kept getting juicier the more I dug into it. The Y also produced giants of the Christian faith with the likes of John Mott, Oswald Chambers, Dwight L. Moody and many others.

How could this be? America didn’t start the Y? I thought we made everything awesome. Recently, I discovered that America didn’t even create the chicken dance, Germany did (a friend told me this after he returned from a YMCA trip to Columbia). Contrary to what I believed about Y, it is in over 120+ countries around the world.

I came into the orbit of the YMCA early on in life. I grew up in a church that meets in a YMCA. We found the church after my mom googled ‘evangelical free churches’ in my area. The only one that came up was a church meeting in our city’s YMCA. After spending most of my childhood and young adult years at the church, I was offered the position of youth pastor, which is when my global view of the YMCA started to shift.

A Trip To Prague

It wasn’t until I was on staff that I experienced just how wide reaching the YMCA is! In August of 2022, a small group of American twenty-somethings and I traveled to a remote skiing village in the Czech Republic on the border of Poland participating in a gathering of about 40 young Christians involved with the YMCA all across the world uniting under one banner – Jesus Christ. 

Our five days there were spent discussing the book of Ephesians and the gospel, hiking the Czech/Polish mountains, learning cultural dances, listening to stories of hardship from Ukrainian brothers and sisters, singing songs of praise in different languages – I tried my best – and growing in friendship with one another. Every morning I was eager to make it down to breakfast to learn more about my new friends and their home countries. 

That week the 40 of us grew so close while learning traditional Czech dances, wrestling with the hard truths of Ephesians 2, laughing when we couldn’t understand each other’s English, fighting when the Germans said our Oktoberfests weren’t “real ones”, and for many of us crying when we had to say goodbye.

As I reflected on the week, riding the train back to Prague, I thought to myself how necessary the YMCA is for our world. Most people go to their gyms with just physical fitness in mind, what if their gym was more? What if their gym was a YMCA, where people not only worked out but heard about the good news of Jesus? Most Christians build a church and ask the community to come to them. What if the church met where the community was already gathering?

Do you want to learn more about the Christian mission of the YMCA, planting churches in Y’s, or going on a trip like this? Reach out to us at uscitymovement@gmail.com.