Tom Brown’s Story (1984)
A report taken from “Churches that Abuse” by Ronald M. Enroth (Zondervan, 1992), Chapter 5
Tom Brown’s [name changed] story of his involvement in the Korea-based University Bible Fellowship (UBF) typifies the victimization of young, idealistic college students on campuses across the country. In their intense desire to seek and serve the true God, they are taken advantage of by sometimes sincere individuals who exploit their ideals to achieve personal goals and fulfillment. Fortunately for Tom, he was not left with a “shipwrecked faith” as so many others have been.
Tom Brown’s story of his involvement in the Korea-based University Bible Fellowship (UBF) typifies the victimization of young, idealistic college students on campuses across the country. In their intense desire to seek and serve the true God, they are taken advantage of by sometimes sincere individuals who exploit their ideals to achieve personal goals and fulfillment. Fortunately for Tom, he was not left with a “shipwrecked faith” as so many others have been.
Tom’s involvement with UBF began in 1979, during his junior year at Northwestern University. His fraternity roommate of the previous year had been studying with UBF missionary “Sweety” Rhee. When the roommate did not return to school, Sweety turned her attention to Tom. Although at first he hesitated to accept her invitation to attend a UBF worship service, Tom felt that God may have been answering his prayer for a God Bible study to attend. So he accepted the invitation. He was impressed by the earnestness that UBF members displayed, as well as their spiritual intensity, which he found very refreshing. Most of the congregation happened to be Korean missionaries who had come to evangelize on American college campuses.
During his years at Northwestern, Tom had been struggling to grow as a Christian and sincerely desired to find a Bible study in which he could participate and minister to other college students like himself. UBF seemed to be an answer to prayer. Sweety “took very good care” of Tom during this initial phase, teaching him to write “sogams” – personal confessions based on Bible passages selected by the leader – calling him every week, walking him home, and buying him dinner.
Tom now realizes that he was “love bombed” by Sweety during this phase, particularly since Sweety was derogatively know as a “no-sheep missionary” among the other UBF Korean staff. Tom was her only student in an organization where individually teaching the Bible to many students is the chief goal. Along with the “love bombing” came initial subtle manipulations of Tom’s time and behavior, as well as mystical stories of God’s providence and judgment toward the Fellowship. All of this left a deep impression on Tom.
Over time, Sweety learned all about Tom, including his desire to earn a PhD degree and become a nationally recognized expert in his field of study. It was at this point that “Sweety told me that I should give up my own plans because they were a result of sinful selfishness. She said that I should serve Jesus instead.” Having set the barb of guilt, Sweety waited until Tom “made the decision to cut off my own future direction and wait for God’s new direction for my life.” Tom suffered a good deal due to that drastic decision. “Sometimes I cried because of my sense of loss and frustration.”
After his first four months with UBF, Tom met the leader, Samuel Lee, a short man who spoke broken English. Lee began doing things that made Tom feel special. In turn, Tom responded to the attention and recognition, and, for the group’s Spring Conference of 1980, he was asked by Lee to deliver a message. At this point, Tom’s intense indoctrination began.
“Message training” is one of the ways UBF leaders “help” students to deepen their commitment to the group. Tom began by studying 1 Corinthians 15 with Samuel Lee. He was required to memorize and recite the passage for Lee each time they met. Tom was then to write his own message on the passage using Lee’s previously written message as a guide. After several revisions, essentially Tom had Samuel Lee’s own message to deliver at the Spring Conference. The point was that he had had the opportunity to “struggle with the Word of God and learn from Samuel Lee” as all the Korean missionaries already knew. What Tom and the other Americans did not know at the time was that the Korean missionaries considered Americans to be spiritually inferior to them. “Many of the Korean UBF members call Korea ‘Mt. Zion’ and refer to non-Koreans as ‘Gentiles.’”
As Tom acknowledges, his behavior and perceptions were already changing by the time of the conference. He had manipulated a number of his friends to attend, and, when one balked at the registration fee, Tom told him that payment was a sign of his “commitment to God” and a measure of his “spiritual desire.” By the end of the conference, Tom was praying that God would establish him as a Bible teacher for American college students, all past aspirations of doctoral work having been put aside as fleshly, human pride.
Further indoctrination was carried out when Tom and several other American UBF students were invited by Lee to accompany him on his annual “world mission report” journey to Korea. Tom began preparing on his own for the trip by sleeping on the floor, knowing that Koreans did not sleep in beds. He was quite disappointed when Lee and his entourage stayed in hotels – and slept on the beds. He was also instructed to write an autobiography of his life, which would be the basis for the testimony he would give in Korea.
Although his parents were terribly concerned about his making the trip, given the civil unrest in Korea at the time, Tom put aside their fears as evidence of their lack of faith. During the flight and the first day after their arrival, Lee made the students share their autobiographies, after which he would comment about their characters and basic problems. They were then told to condense their writings down to a six-page testimony. It was at this point that Lee began comparing Tom to the apostle Paul; hence one of Tom’s UBF nicknames, Tom Paul.
While in Korea, Lee focused his attention on Tom’s “training.” He made Tom team leader over the other students, encouraged him to focus more on the other students than on his own testimony, and yet continually had him revise and rewrite his testimony, which by this time was retitled, “True Greatness.” Tom explains the point of the title: “I had lived my life up to this time seeking human greatness for myself. My decision now was to live as a great servant of God like the apostle Paul.”
Lee also began to drive wedges between Tom and his parents, telling Tom that they didn’t want him to become a man of God but only a dutiful son. By the end of the journey, Tom had a great vision to become the apostle Paul for the 21st century – through UBF, of course.
Upon returning to Illinois, Tom commuted one hundred miles each day to minister to his sheep in Chicago. Because it was summer break, he lived at home with his parents and worked for his father, but was committing all of his extra time to UBF and the Summer Conference. Sweety put great pressure on him to leave his home to minister full-time in Chicago, and, after a few weeks, he told his parents that he was leaving. His parents, not understanding the power of UBF influence on Tom, spoke to him about his responsibility to make money for his senior year. After Tom responded that he must also do the work of God, his father gave him an ultimatum. Tom packed and left the next day, fully believing that to stay would mean going against God’s will. He reasoned that this was part of the persecution one must expect when serving God. Further, his action insured that his “human relationship” with his parents was severed. As Tom says, “Now I was only a servant of God.”
After his move, Tom suffered a great deal over his emotional separation from his family. Several of the women missionaries at the UBF center consoled him. According to Tom, many male students in UBF develop a kind of maternal dependency on the women missionaries, related perhaps to the sexually repressive atmosphere of the organization.
He also began to have an attraction for Lee’s teenaged daughter, Sarah. At this point, another form of spiritual discipline became an integral part of Tom’s indoctrination. “Sweety hit the roof. She harshly rebuked me over and over for my ‘sinful desires’ for Sarah. Whenever I opened my mouth to protest, she rebuked me more.” This response, according to UBF philosophy, was actually demonstrating love for the American students who were lost in their “fleshly desires.” Sweety was eventually rebuked – by Samuel Lee – for badgering and rebuking Sarah.
Tom, not able to control his feelings for Sarah, entered into a pit of guilt, shame, and depression. Sweety continued to berate him. He became physically ill. Lee entered into “no-mercy message training” with him. He was given the passage Mark 8:27-38, on Peter’s confession of Christ, to prepare for the Summer Conference. Tom was required to write and rewrite the message many times. Each time, Lee would rebuke him more and give him additional rewriting directions. As Tom says, “This served to completely break down my ego. After a week of this training, I felt like I was at the bottom of a deep pit of my sins and weaknesses. No one could help me. I felt I had betrayed God in my sinful life. All I had were sins and sinful desires.” He was now ready for additional training.
Preparation for Summer Conference usually reached fever pitch the three weeks prior to the event. It was during these times that extensive spiritual manipulation and indoctrination occurred. Lee would meet nightly with all the UBF staff, accusing some of “playing Satan” and actually saying that he had prayed they would die if they did not repent. He rebuked some, praised others, and made the “no-sheep” missionaries get together to repent, ridiculing the students’ personal problems. He led them all in shouting prayers of repentance that sometimes lasted for hours. These prayers, when spoken correctly in a group of people, could communicate a great deal without one’s ever having to speak directly and substantively. Lee would often pray, “Our Father, have mercy on Shepherd Tom Paul (Tom’s nickname). He has no spirit.” That kind of ambiguous prayer left the victim in a state of confusion and guilt, especially, “when you ask God to forgive someone of something of which they are not aware.” Tom himself was to use this same technique later on in his “ministry” with UBF.
After struggling a great deal over whether to complete his college studies, Tom decided to finish out his last year. However, since up to this time his parents had supplemented his income, he was now forced to make up the difference by working as a park grounds keeper. This was heavy work for a man of only 121 pounds. It was at this point, after the rigors of the Summer Conference, that Lee entered Tom into “eating training” and “international stomach training.” That meant he was forced to eat far beyond his capacity and to “eat all kinds of foods so that I could become a missionary.” Lee would make comments about his picky eating habits and encourage Tom to “overcome” himself by eating foods he knew were too much for his digestive system. Although he did gain fifteen pounds, he suffered greatly. “I ate so much food at dinner that my fraternity brothers could not believe it.”
Believing that equipment failures at the park were God’s message to him about his unbelief in providence – an emphasis on suffering typical of UBF – Tom quit his job and wrote home demanding that his parents support his schooling. His parents did not budge.
In the fall, after completing his “eating training,” Tom embarked on “hair training,” supposedly to give him a more pleasing appearance. He was given a permanent and was not allowed to cut his hair. He also had it curled before every worship service. According to Tom, “My hair grew longer than everyone in my fraternity except the house hippie.” His appearance was further altered by his wearing of suits (the pants of which always had to have belt loops according to Lee – one of Lee’s idiosyncratic and unexplainable quirks).
“Voice training” was next, in order to make Tom’s speaking voice more powerful, especially since he was beginning to preside over many meetings. Lee would alternately tell Tom after each of these meetings that he “did not have enough spirit” or that he was “grandstanding” and that “he needed to repent.” The inner conflict and confusion left Tom baffled – and open to further “training.”
At this point, Tom was in his last year of school. He refused to return home for Thanksgiving since it was purely a “human” celebration and not one of God’s concerns. He had given up all extracurricular activities and had thrown away his entire collection of classical and Christian music and most of his books, and he sold his guitar. This last sacrifice was the result of his decline into poverty – he needed the money to survive. He was tithing twenty percent of his income (which increased to forty percent upon graduation) and was pledging $50 per month to the UBF world mission offering. Sweety often had to supplement his “offering” because Tom’s income was so minimal. Failure to meet the monthly offering resulted in severe rebuke. Tom himself, at Lee’s direction, would shout and pound on tables in his rebuke of a student’s “bad attitude toward the offering.”
In the spring of 1981, his last quarter at Northwestern, Tom moved into an apartment with his UBF sheep, Mark, partly due to perceived persecution on the part of his fraternity brothers, who, at this point, were sure that he was in a cult. Tom also believed that the “spiritual environment” of the fraternity house was too decadent.
Lee began “testing” Tom in different ways to determine the extent of his commitment – and indoctrination. Once, he was told that he was to leave Northwestern to go and pioneer the UBF work at Harvard University. He was ready to go the next day. Lee also would say things in order to see others’ reactions and thereby assess their “spiritual condition.” At one point, he told a missionary to give Tom his new car. The “test” got to the point of Tom nearly driving away before Lee was satisfied with the missionary’s loyalty.
Upon graduation, Tom visited his parents who again debated his involvement in UBF. His mother expressly stated, to no avail, her view that he was in a destructive group. Tom was unaffected by her concern and her emotional distress. “I told her that I did not want their human [as opposed to spiritual] love, and that human love had made me very sick in my soul.” The next day he returned to Chicago to begin life as an “intern” in UBF.
The main emphases of UBF intern training are service and learning “faith.” In preparing for leadership positions, interns must learn to serve others and to obey their leaders. The training may last several years, and may involve even more severe spiritual and psychological abuse. Tom had heard that interns in Korea may be beaten by their shepherds in order to break them of their stubbornness and independent spirits. In the United States, during weekly meetings, the American leaders are required to share their sogams on the passage they had been studying the week before. They use Samuel Lee’s messages as the basis of their sogams. Their “sharing” gives the Korean leaders an opportunity to “check their spiritual condition.” By the 1981 Summer Conference, Tom’s internship experience had intensified. He was rebuked by Lee as having “life security” and “marriage” problems, accusations not hard to understand when one considers that Tom was living in poverty, often skipping meals, and, because of his experience with Sarah, afraid to even talk with any young women. “All through the conference Lee rebuked me and prayed for me to repent. When I told him ‘I am a great sinner,’ he said, ‘No, you are only a small sinner.’” Tom slept only four hours in four days and finally had to have Lee dictate the message he was to deliver. It took him almost two weeks to recover from the humiliations he had suffered.
Tom then entered into “driving training” and “humanity training.” Because of a car he received as a result of someone’s UBF-arranged marriage (dating is considered sinful indulgence and a lack of trust in God for one’s future), he became chauffeur for the Chicago chapter of UBF. This he found hard to do, but he was told “to do it for the glory of God.” Also, because of his supposed legalistic character and lack of human compassion, he was told to “listen closely to many life testimonies and sogams, read books, and see certain movies.” (The “certain movies” were intended to inform members about society, the nature of people, and so on. These movies included “Ben Hur,” simply because it was a favorite of the leader, “Ordinary People,” and “ET,” which supposedly depicted the alienation and plight of the American teenager!) He thus learned to understand people – for the sake of manipulating them.
Tom began finding that he was adopting the same methods that had been used on him in order to “train” his sheep. He would make people stay up all night to repent, hit them with sticks for not remembering passages, force them to run distances to “restore their spirits,” and squash “rebellion” in the same way that his own abilities to think independently had been squashed. “At that time, I was working out many of my personal frustrations on those who were under my authority.”
Lee decided to deal with Tom’s “marriage problem” once and for all. He forced him to deliver a sogam entitled “Not a Dog but a Shepherd” to the entire congregation of the Spring Conference of 1982. Supposedly, he was “like a dog barking around a hen house.” After delivering that message before hundreds, Tom was numb for almost two weeks. “My feelings were totally burned away.”
Two weeks after that, Lee allowed Tom to go to Michigan State University as part of the pioneering team (which also included Sweety Rhee and her husband, who had joined Sweety in the USA after living in Korea for some time). Without the “protective environment of Chicago” and no more strong people to depend upon, Tom began to have a difficult time and began “losing his direction as a campus pioneer.” The MSU Summer Conference, designed both as a training conference for younger leaders and as an opportunity for evangelism, was “long on rebuking and short on sleep,” and Lee dictated another message for him to deliver. Tom began to wonder if he was being used.
Tom got a full-time job as a maintenance man for a group of apartments and worked for two months prior to the beginning of the fall quarter. He gave up full-time campus pioneering for the time being. By the time Spring Conference rolled around, his life had become somewhat smoother, but he had actually run away from the dissonance his doubts had caused, and was again struggling to keep up his “ministry.” Samuel Lee then “decided that he should light a fire under me.” Tom was told by one of Lee’s messengers that “if I did not have seven one-to-one Bible studies each week, I would have to come to Chicago for additional training.”
Tom went out every day to invite students to study the Bible with him. After two weeks, he had twelve Bible students. He also was successful in recruiting three women students, unusual in that UBF has proportionately more men than women (the goal being to raise up male leaders). Sweety strongly disapproved, but Tom had declared that “by faith I would be the ‘father of all American women.’” And Samuel Lee had approved. Summer Conference of 1983 was pivotal for Tom. He was to prepare a message on Luke 5:1-11, the calling of the first disciples, and, for the first time, Samuel Lee did not want to check it before delivery. As Tom says, “It was sink or swim.” Because of car problems and the need to get visas, he and his passengers arrived almost a day late to the conference site in Canada. Lee was livid. Tom was asked to write a sixty-page sogam of apology for disappointing all those who had prayed so much for him over the last year. Lee told him that “the most important thing was for us as God’s servants to participate in God’s history. There was no excuse for being late.” Tom was told, “You should have left three foreigners behind in a different country and hitchhiked to the conference in order to arrive on time.” He wrote all night to prepare his message. Fortunately, Lee thought that he was able to deliver it “with one main point and with spirit.” Tom was spared for the final round.
In September, Tom was told by Lee that he should have a new car for his ministry since his old one was out of commission. Lee personally promised him four thousand dollars and UBF would also contribute five hundred dollars. However, he was told to ask his father for an additional four thousand dollars because “a young man like you should have a new car.” His parents, of course, refused, saying that UBF should be responsible. After several rounds of pointless negotiation, Tom began to get the idea that he was being tested again. Lee told him, “You are very sharp.”
Tom was to use any means available to extract the four thousand dollars from his parents. Lee did not care how it was done. After several attempts, Tom began to realize that “Not only was I beginning to attempt to exert control over my parents, but I was also beginning to actively try to control the students at the MSU chapter. I used my position and the Bible to get them to make ‘decisions of faith’ that would conform them to the image of a servant of God that I held. I even began to rewrite messages that students were to deliver, just as Samuel Lee had rewritten mine. Those students who accepted my direction in writing were ‘good.’ Those who did not were ‘rebellious.’” Tom had become a little Samuel Lee, and he was appalled.
On April 1, 1984, after four years in Samuel Lee’s University Bible Fellowship, Tom was convinced to leave through the efforts of his parents and several other concerned persons.
