Hellas

 12-14 – Venice, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, England

When Jewish boys turn 12, they have a rite of passage called a Bar-mitzvah that ceremonially ushers them into manhood. One of our teachers thought this would be a good custom for us to practice as well, albeit with an altered kind of ceremony. We were required to choose, memorize and recite a whole chapter from the Bible. It was a good tradition to participate in but I still had a lot of growing up to do.

There was a fun, two-person strategy game we started playing when we were in Venice called Mastermind and while we were docked there, the Mastermind organization asked to rent the ship for a tournament. It was fun watching the proceedings but the best part was that they left us all their extras. There were cases of small bottles of juice that were so intensely delicious I can still taste them in my mind to this day. They were such a treat that we gorged ourselves. 

While some work was done on the ship in the Venice shipyard, our leaders realized that Italy was not the best place to get the ship repaired. It was notorious for worker’s strikes. They decided to move to Greece. The ship still couldn’t run under her own engines so it had to be towed with my dad and 12 other crew aboard. The rest of us took a bus through what was then still communist Yugoslavia.

Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization - democracy, Western philosophy, the Olympic games, Western literature, major scientific and mathematical principles and Western drama. But in 1980, it was rather less the cultural foundational civilization it had once been with a more recent history of wars, foreign occupation and coups. 

Shipping, however, has been one of Greece’s biggest industries since ancient times, furthered by two of the biggest shipping magnates in the world – Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis. The Onassis name became famous around the world when he married John F. Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline. Greece also has the largest merchant navy in the world. 

The ship was anchored in Elefsina Bay, not too far from the capital of Athens. Elefsis Bay is ringed by the mainland on one side and the island of Salamis on the other. We were anchored near Salamis, the site of a very famous battle between the Greeks and Persians. In ancient times, Elefsis was one of Greece’s most sacred towns. 

By the late seventies, Elefsis had become part of a stark industrial coastline with gas works, steel works, cement works and the largest oil import and refinery location in the country. The bay had become a ship graveyard filled with all manner of ships attached together in groups of five to ten, waiting to be scrapped. Into this climate we brought our decrepit ship to be restored. With the lack of money, we seemed to fit right into the environment. Conversely, during this time, the ship was renamed the Anastasis, which means resurrection in Greek. The Anastasis was to be the resurrection of the ship ministry that had died in New Zealand, along with the outworking of the greatest resurrection in history. 

The ministry was to have three main purposes – evangelism, mercy ministries and training. Evangelism was the most important of the three. Everything else was done with the purpose of pointing people to a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It was all to be God-centered. At the same time, there was a genuine concern for people and their plights. Through mercy ministries, the ship ministry intended to bring aid and relief to people in need, whether it be through food supplies, building materials or medical help.

The ship was also to be a training center. YWAM has a basic training course called a Discipleship Training School (DTS). It has a three-month classroom segment where speakers come and teach on various aspects of Christianity, including a person’s personal faith and reaching out to others in evangelism. Then there is an outreach phase for about two months where the students do a hands-on evangelism practicum, usually in a different country for a cross-cultural experience.