(Compilation of posts by Shane C. or UBFree., former Los Angeles UBF, at http://www.voy.com/60734/ from 2003-2005.)
Date Posted: 23:24:49 08/27/03 Wed
Author: UBFree
Subject: Further testimony...friends or business partners?
In reply to: Mike K. 's message, "Re: Question about LeHigh" on 00:29:24 08/27/03 Wed
As far as friendship in UBF let me add my own personal testimony to this point. I was a student leader in one of the west coast chapters. When I left I tried to do it discreetly. I didn't leave to go after a life of sin, I didn't leave out of any selfish ambition. In fact I could have fed my own ego for years to come if I would have stayed. BUT, As soon as I left, several of the KOREAN missionaries told some of my American friends, still in UBF, not to associate with me. They said "I would be a bad influnce on them", they offered other slanderous remarks about me. These words were told to me by several reliable friends. (This also raised red flags to my friends and they ended up leaving as they knew me and they knew the Korean leaders were lying.) ...
So what is my point? My point is that American students do not have true friendships with Korean missionaries. Many Americans are naive to UBF and think they are friends. But, Korean UBF missionaries view it in another way. How can we describe it? I'm not sure. Maybe more of a business relationship. Students are clients to be wooed into the UBF business and then used for other selfish reasons. The UBF relation dynamic is very close to biker gangs and the
mafia. I have done research on the Hell's Angels, did you know that when a member leaves the "gang" he's never seen
again by the other members. This is really the same dynamic as UBF. Once you leave UBF, thats it! Whats the point
with you, your trash, your a "waist of time". In conclusion, I would say that that UBF relationships are closer to
the Hell's angels or the mafia then a normal Christian church.
...
Date Posted: 23:26:37 09/29/03 Mon
Author: UBFree
Subject: Re: LA ubf failure
In reply to: Nick T. 's message, "LA ubf failure" on 12:16:49 09/29/03 Mon
I was in LA UBF for seven full years from 1989-1997. In a nutshell what I observed was this: High growth from 1989-1993 with few Korean missionaries and a more relaxed attitude. But as the numbers grew the more the desire of Ike Kim to rule LAUBF "Chicago" style. The more Korean missionaries came, the more poisoned the atmosphere. IN fact, many of the Korean missionaries did not get along with each other. In anycase the AMerican student leaders had enough and in 1993 there was a reform revolt. Eventually, all left and now the LAUBF is nothing more then a Korean club with a few weak willed American yes men.
...
Date Posted: 18:52:45 08/04/04 Wed
Author: UBFree
Subject: Any news about Isaac Kim and LA UBF?
My, how quickley time moves. Its been 8 years since I left the LA UBF. I married a Korean missionary, but she has almost completely given up UBF and we are now in a healthy Christian church. Last year I went into the LA UBF website out of curiosty. Nothing has changed they are still numbers based and they all repent of the same phony miserable
things: not fishing enough, not getting up early enough etc. etc. I know that IKIM moved his center from Long Beac
h to Downey but outside of that I have no idea whats going on.
...
Date Posted: 15:13:05 10/11/04 Mon
Author: UBFree/Shane C.
Subject: Answered, but what are the ramifications?
In reply to: Brian K.'s message, "Already answered" on 13:33:31 10/11/04 Mon
Hello Brian,
Since Iam identifying specific people in UBF, I feel it only fair that I reveal my own identity. My name is Shane C., I was in the LA UBF from 1989-1997. I came to know the UBF system quite well. I was an intern shepherd from 1993-1997. I am quite aware of UBF beleifs and practices. And Brian, I must say it is not the rosey picture you have presented on this website.
You mentioned that "you would not speak like this" referring to John Kwon's statement about "obey me like you obey God". Let me add context to his statement. In our conversation, John Kwon fully and aggressivly beleived in the idea of "obey me like you obey God." In otherwords your "shepherd" will decide such things as: where you live, your major, who you marry, when you can see your family members, when you can go on vacation and how long, etc. Every major decision on your life(and even minor ones) is given over to your "shepherd". Not only did John Kwon NOT deny that UBF was based on pyramid structure, he aggresivly ADVOCATED it as the biblical basis for church structure.
Brian, I am telling you the truth, I am not lying! The "shepherds" in LA asked John the following question: "what if UBF asks us to do something agaisnt our conscience?" John's answer was thus, "Absolutely obey your shepherd despite you conscience." He said "Let the curse fall on me(John Kwon). In otherwords, even if you go agaisnt your conscience, and even if you sin, God will not hold you accountable because you were obeying your "shepherd." This is called the doctrine of "covering".
Brian, I found this doctrine to be taught in every UBF I visited. Even in Korea, where I stayed and taught for one year. I am telling you as a witness to everything I have heard and seen in UBF. Brian, what are the ramifications of such a church based on absolute obediance to man and the doctrine of "covering". I can list some ramifications but I would rather read your reply first.
...
Date Posted: 15:45:33 10/11/04 Mon
Author: UBFree/Shane C.
Subject: Re: request for more info
In reply to: Joe 's message, "Re: request for more info" on 14:06:48 10/11/04 Mon
OK,
John Kwon was/is Isaac Kim's second in command. He was very zealous in advocating UBF ideology and culture. I beleive that he had a genuine christian conversion but that he was born again into the UBF ideology and thus knows nothing other then UBF. This does not excuse faulty doctrine but helps put him and his doctrine in context. I appreciated his zeal for God but could not agree with his rigid adhearance to UBF doctrine.
The conversation that I posted was had during a time of upheavel in the LA UBF, when many of the long time AMerican "shepherds" began to question the UBF doctrine and practices. Again, his take at the time, was that your shepherd had the role of God in your life. NOT that your shepherd was God, but he had all the authority of God in your life.
During this time another "shepherd" raised the issue of "Being led by the Holy Spirit". Could you be led by the Holy Spirit apart from your shepherd? He thought that this was an immature attitude towards scripture and "shepherding".
...
Date Posted: 00:34:17 10/15/04 Fri
Author: Shane
Subject: Re: Systematic Obedience Training
In reply to: PECAS 's message, "Systematic Obedience Training" on 21:11:16 10/14/04 Thu
Are there any examples? My friend, we could fill a book with examples. What you described is standard operating procedure in UBF and has gone on for decades. While in UBF for seven years, I saw missionaries choose majors, life long marriage partners, jobs and many other things for 'shepherds'.
The issue of being led by the Holy SPirit as opposed to following orders of your 'shepherd' was raised by 'shepherds' in the LA UBF. The missionaries scoffed at such an idea. They believed that the Holy Spirit would only work through the pyramid structure of UBF. And if you tried to make decisions outside of the pyramid structure, you were then outside of the will of the Holy Spirit.
If you hold to the pyramid model, the people at the top have enourmous power.
...
Date Posted: 21:20:31 10/15/04 Fri
Author: Shane
Subject: Re: Systematic Obedience Training
In reply to: PECAS 's message, "Re: Systematic Obedience Training" on 19:09:05 10/15/04 Fri
>Do you have a testimony about your experiences in LA
>UBF?
There are some postings that describe my experience in UBF. I was an easy target for cult recruitment. I was new to the area, alone with no family. I came from a broken dysfunctional family and was looking for love in a family environment. I went through the love bombing stage for about 1-2 years. Then the control and manipulation started to grow. Finally in 1997 I felt so suffocated by UBF that I just had to leave. After the love bombing stage UBF is a miserable place to be. Why? Because UBF has turned Jesus into a Moses. They take every example of Jesus and turn it into a rule or a law. And if you don't keep that rule or law you are "unspiritual" or "disobediant" or "easy-going". How can one be happy living under such a yoke of slavery? UBF Koreans totally miss the intent of Jesus. Moses brought the law, but Jesus brought "grace and truth".
...
Date Posted: 10:49:21 11/29/04 Mon
Author: Shane
Subject: Re: Please continue to think
In reply to: Brother in Christ 's message, "Re: Please continue to think" on 09:10:26 11/29/04 Mon
What brother in Christ is saying is true. They will only push you as far as you can go. Some missionaries are better at it then others. But once they have you they WILL demand all sorts of things from you. Here is a typical real life example that I witnessed.
Jeff M.-1.Asked to move out of apartment into "commonlife"(standard). 2.Major changed from Chemistry to Pre-Med.(total disaster)3.Pressured to marry another sister at the center.(Also disaster, as he was not willing and they really put the screws on him) He eventually left UBF.
Once they have you: majors are changed, living locations change, you are sent to various places, spouses are chosen, you name it and they will choose it for you.
...
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Friday, October 28, 2011
ex-Hong Kong UBF blog
Per somebody's request, here's a link to a Chinese-language blog put together by former members of the Hong Kong UBF:
hkubf.blogspot.com
hkubf.blogspot.com
Monday, September 14, 2009
N. Lee (former Midwest UBF chapter)
(circa 2004)
Hi, I found that as I struggled with leaving UBF, East***** (church) neither told me I had to, nor condemned me for originally going. The members told me that I was not being asked to leave UBF, but that I was being invited to experience God with them at THEIR church. Their open love and acceptance even though they knew about UBF really helped me to put my mind at ease. I no longer go to UBF, and I still keep in touch with some of it's more distant members. I pray that it will be fixed; either broken apart entirely, or rebuilt without the "control" and "power" issues it's been showing to have. I really love the people there, I just can't let them hurt me through what's either their ignorance, or serious problem.. I miss them sometimes, but God is all I need. If others are lost, they should try going to East*****, especially the youth grouped (sic), that's where I received the most help. Please don't display my email adress with this message, I worry for my protection from current members of UBF.. they've barged in my house numerous (sic) times before..
Thank you,
Sincerely, Anonymous N*****.
- Your site has truly blessed me.
Hi, I found that as I struggled with leaving UBF, East***** (church) neither told me I had to, nor condemned me for originally going. The members told me that I was not being asked to leave UBF, but that I was being invited to experience God with them at THEIR church. Their open love and acceptance even though they knew about UBF really helped me to put my mind at ease. I no longer go to UBF, and I still keep in touch with some of it's more distant members. I pray that it will be fixed; either broken apart entirely, or rebuilt without the "control" and "power" issues it's been showing to have. I really love the people there, I just can't let them hurt me through what's either their ignorance, or serious problem.. I miss them sometimes, but God is all I need. If others are lost, they should try going to East*****, especially the youth grouped (sic), that's where I received the most help. Please don't display my email adress with this message, I worry for my protection from current members of UBF.. they've barged in my house numerous (sic) times before..
Thank you,
Sincerely, Anonymous N*****.
- Your site has truly blessed me.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Zagatta
(Posted in the RSQUBF guestbook in 2008.)
Name: Zagatta
Comments: Wow, it is bad. At the beginning the worst mistake I did is to say yes to a Korean woman to have bible study the very first minutes I met her. I was coming back to my house after my last class in my bike. That day (stupid of me) I didnt ride my bike, just by the side of it. This Korean woman was walking normally but suddenly she changed her speed to veeeeery slow! We began to have our bible studies, but it was conflicting with my college studies so I decide not to have anything else with her. Wrong! One day I was alone in my house and taking a bath when this woman started to walk around the house to see if I was there..I got soooooo mad that I was about to call the police, but for pity I didnt. She asked me why I didnt like the bible studies..I didnt know how to explain so I lied to her. Something in my heart was telling me there was something wrong, but as always I never listened. Anyway, we continued the studies, but my feelings was attacking her verbally. I had to stop the studies in the middle of the sessions because I knew it wasnt right. Some how she was always patient...Eventually, I learn how to love her. Still, many things were bothering me. I dont like to be chased by her and UBF. It's been two years that I am in UBF and for the first time I found really bad info about UBF. I always knew they marriage by faith but never heard the bad side of it until I researched more about it. Plus, I never was agree... Ha! At the beginning M. (my teacher) asked me and pressured me to do testimonies. I did just one or three in the whole two years I've been here. I determined never do one because I dont like to share my information with anybody. I dont care! Now, I feel a little worried about everybody working hard doing testimonies and memorizing verses because I am doing nothing there. It is because I dont feel interested in doing it. I have lack of motivation for doing it. Honestly, I dont like the church to the point of hate it. If anyone has feel the Holy Spirit or the presence of the Lord that person knows it. I mean I do know when the Lord is around its people...and I cannot feel the presence of His Spirit in the church. Why??? because it is tooo methodical..the few times I felt the Lord was about to stay the stupid people leading the music stopped. They dont know how to recognize the Lord in the spirit! It is the kind of church I dont like. Here is there tradition: Stand up, pray, sit down, play the piano for silence pray, pray for everybody while reading, sing hymn #125, another pray, sing another hymn, preaching (usually boring till death, because they had to read it), offering, maybe any talent around to show up, and final praying with the neiborhood. What I mean with all this is: Where is the chance of the Lord to manifest??? Where is the real time of the Lord? Nowhere, because it is only human methodology...something empty of spirit. I am pleased that many people of this church are very good. I have been helped many times, but I dont want to stay in the church simply because they are giving me too much (maybe a way of manipulation to stay, who knows) It is something in my heart that long time ago is telling me: Don't trust them! I listen many times to God and I think this is God telling me to flee and I can confirm this because recently I found a job that I have to accept because I was economically bad. What happens is that this job I have to work on Sundays. M. is upset and praying about me to have me back on Sundays...I think that pray is not going to be answered since it is the same God that took me away from that church on Sundays...still I need to escape from the one on Wednesdays, plus the bible studies...but God is in total control...I love you God..thanks!
Thursday, August 14th 2008 - 09:39:39 PM
Name: Zagatta
Comments: Wow, it is bad. At the beginning the worst mistake I did is to say yes to a Korean woman to have bible study the very first minutes I met her. I was coming back to my house after my last class in my bike. That day (stupid of me) I didnt ride my bike, just by the side of it. This Korean woman was walking normally but suddenly she changed her speed to veeeeery slow! We began to have our bible studies, but it was conflicting with my college studies so I decide not to have anything else with her. Wrong! One day I was alone in my house and taking a bath when this woman started to walk around the house to see if I was there..I got soooooo mad that I was about to call the police, but for pity I didnt. She asked me why I didnt like the bible studies..I didnt know how to explain so I lied to her. Something in my heart was telling me there was something wrong, but as always I never listened. Anyway, we continued the studies, but my feelings was attacking her verbally. I had to stop the studies in the middle of the sessions because I knew it wasnt right. Some how she was always patient...Eventually, I learn how to love her. Still, many things were bothering me. I dont like to be chased by her and UBF. It's been two years that I am in UBF and for the first time I found really bad info about UBF. I always knew they marriage by faith but never heard the bad side of it until I researched more about it. Plus, I never was agree... Ha! At the beginning M. (my teacher) asked me and pressured me to do testimonies. I did just one or three in the whole two years I've been here. I determined never do one because I dont like to share my information with anybody. I dont care! Now, I feel a little worried about everybody working hard doing testimonies and memorizing verses because I am doing nothing there. It is because I dont feel interested in doing it. I have lack of motivation for doing it. Honestly, I dont like the church to the point of hate it. If anyone has feel the Holy Spirit or the presence of the Lord that person knows it. I mean I do know when the Lord is around its people...and I cannot feel the presence of His Spirit in the church. Why??? because it is tooo methodical..the few times I felt the Lord was about to stay the stupid people leading the music stopped. They dont know how to recognize the Lord in the spirit! It is the kind of church I dont like. Here is there tradition: Stand up, pray, sit down, play the piano for silence pray, pray for everybody while reading, sing hymn #125, another pray, sing another hymn, preaching (usually boring till death, because they had to read it), offering, maybe any talent around to show up, and final praying with the neiborhood. What I mean with all this is: Where is the chance of the Lord to manifest??? Where is the real time of the Lord? Nowhere, because it is only human methodology...something empty of spirit. I am pleased that many people of this church are very good. I have been helped many times, but I dont want to stay in the church simply because they are giving me too much (maybe a way of manipulation to stay, who knows) It is something in my heart that long time ago is telling me: Don't trust them! I listen many times to God and I think this is God telling me to flee and I can confirm this because recently I found a job that I have to accept because I was economically bad. What happens is that this job I have to work on Sundays. M. is upset and praying about me to have me back on Sundays...I think that pray is not going to be answered since it is the same God that took me away from that church on Sundays...still I need to escape from the one on Wednesdays, plus the bible studies...but God is in total control...I love you God..thanks!
Thursday, August 14th 2008 - 09:39:39 PM
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Chris Q. (former Canadian UBF)
This is a long testimony... Just be forewarned.
It’s been about 5-6 months now since I left UBF. It’s taken me a long time to get over it. I still have a lot of anger and pain from my experiences. The question that I have asked God several times now is, what good came from this and why did you send me there. Thus so far, there has been no concrete answer. But, I believe that God has a plan for the lives of everyone and that UBF for whatever reason was part of his plan for me. Nothing happens without His knowing and consent. I am thankful to Jesus for his saving grace and for taking me out of UBF.
I do not want to unfairly criticize UBF either. I do not believe that my Bible teachers intentionally set out to manipulate and control their students. I do not think that they have evil motives. I believe they do everything with the best intentions. Many Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also have good intentions, but none of these can save someone. It is said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Good intentions are not what is needed to found a healthy church. Being firmly rooted in Jesus and his saving power, his word, and a belief in his death for our sins and resurrection is a much better starting point. I cannot speak for others. So I will not talk about the experiences that I myself did not witness.
I started to attend UBF in the spring of 2007. I was approached by a very nice lady who asked me if I would like to study the Bible. I began talking to her about Jesus and about my walk with Him. She invited me to study the Bible with her. I agreed because I really wanted to be involved in a Bible study, I wanted to get my life on track. I was tired of a life without any real action, in terms of my spiritual well being. I believe that Jesus is the only answer to the emptiness and meaninglessness of life. I more than believe this, it’s everything to me; if it turns out to be false, there is no hope for mankind. So, I agreed to go to Bible study with her and I really enjoyed the 1 to 1 Bible study. After perhaps a month, she asked if I could come to the Sunday worship service and play guitar. So I decided to go. I told them I couldn’t commit to going every week because I already attend another church, but, I really didn’t mind serving them by playing guitar. I cannot remember the exact reason why, but I started playing guitar every week. At first I didn’t like it, because I told them I couldn’t, but eventually I realized that participating in church by serving was better than being a spectator, so I attended both churches (something they would latter reveal was unacceptable). UBF was great at first, I really felt like I was part of something and that I could contribute. I really liked the idea that they were missionaries to Canada (a nation which is apathetic, individualistic, and for the most part has rejected God). One thing I didn’t enjoy from the start, was that I was considered special. I was told that I was special on several occasions. I am no more special than anyone else, but they treated me like a first class human being, I even felt like I was treated as good as or better than their own children.
Slowly they started to ask more of me. I chose to participate because there were spiritual benefits. The more I was in God’s word, the better my overall wellbeing. At the same time, this is also when manipulation began. I got the feeling that not attending was not an option. If I missed a Sunday service (for good reason or not) or a Bible study, it was a really really big deal. This didn’t alarm me too much though at the time. One pivotal moment in my experience with UBF and one where the Holy Spirit literally comforted me was when I confessed during a group leaders meeting (since they considered me an upcoming leader) some sexual sin. They rebuked me (which was good) and made a big deal of it (which I believe it is). The problem came the next day during the Sunday worship service. The missionary began to rain fire and brimstone down on me (without mentioning my name), condemning me, explaining that people who do and think such things are garbage. How can God love such people? They are filthy. He wanted the sincere repentance of young people who do these things. I didn’t understand, wasn’t confessing and repenting exactly what I had done the night before? This went on and on for about five minutes. I was so hurt and angry that I wanted to get up and leave. At the same time I was confused... was this really what God thought of me? Was I really beyond salvation? I prayed, "God, I'm going to open my Bible, and I want you to reveal your truth to me." I opened my Bible and the very first thing my eyes fell upon were Jesus words as he died on the cross, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." I realized that God saw my suffering and agony. God knew my heart was sincere. Why would I confess my sin publicly if I was not disgusted with it? He wanted me to forgive the missionary. I encourage anyone who has been hurt by UBF to follow Jesus example. The people who abused you in UBF are no different than the Roman soldiers who tortured Jesus. Jesus loved those who crucified him; Jesus loves your UBF Bible teacher and desperately wants them to repent and believe in him as their saviour. I forgave him, but, I decided that I wanted to talk to him and his wife about it, because it was unacceptable and hurtful. I called a meeting, I could tell they were afraid (what was I coming to talk to them about?). But they came prepared. The missionary denied the event ever took place saying, "I don’t remember what I wrote in last week’s sermon, but I never have any individual in mind." (His English was probably not the same, as English is his second language but the meaning hasn’t changed) I was angry that he denied it but the meeting became even stranger. He decided that the best defence was a good offence and came up with a baseless charge against me. He charged, “Chris, I noticed that you are not putting any money in the offering.” He then began to explain that it was my duty (I didn’t disagree). The problem is that, I attend another Church and choose to support missions work at that Church. This is where 100% of my offerings go. I will not say how much I give because that’s between Jesus and me. I had given money to UBF, but I refused to put my name on it because I don’t want to be recognized. So, his charge was a bit insulting. He insisted that I start putting money in the UBF offering with my name on it. I boil this down to distrust; something I soon realized was a major problem in UBF. But once again I decided to forgive him for it. After that things were more or less the same at UBF for some time.
Later there was my trip to California for the 2007 West Coast Summer Bible Conference. The conference was great and I met a lot of great people. I do not want to undermine or unduly criticize the conference because overall it was pretty good. People were very kind to me and treated me like I was an ambassador from Canada. I was the only non Korean Canadian at the conference, so I got a lot of attention. Actually, the trip down there was quite the miracle, which included getting on the plane about 1 minute before it took off. However, despite the overall positive experience I had, I noticed some strange things at the conference during the group Bible study meetings. I noticed that people were pretty perfect. No flaws, no sin, since they started attending UBF and became missionaries and shepherds. Their testimonies seemed unrealistic. I remember questioning them in my mind. Is it truly possible to rid myself of sin and become perfect? It was an attractive idea but one that I knew was impossible. Several times after the conference I mentioned this to my Bible teacher. She didn’t deny that it was possible I had interpreted their testimonies that way, she even said in some cases some “sheep” may think they do not have sin. My problem with her answer was that it was the missionaries who claimed to be without sin since attending UBF. The other strange thing was that I was assigned (at least this is my belief) someone to watch over me and “guide” me during the conference. He was a really nice guy and I felt that he was my friend. He is also the one who taught me about ‘proper’ testimony writing. Although a strange practice, having a watcher, I didn’t think much of it. But, it did make me feel like they were treating me like a child. Since leaving UBF I have not heard a word from anyone in California. (I posted something on their West Coast UBF network explaining the Gospel of Jesus Christ before I left, once I realized that many of them might not know that Jesus is the only way to salvation).
After the conference, things started to become a little darker for me. Several times during the group Bible studies I would hear something I knew was wrong. Most of the time it was about something trivial, but sometimes it concerned the nature of our Salvation. Works? Or Grace? Or Both? The answer according to Ephesians chapter 2 is that GRACE ALONE is our hope. Jesus said he is the way the truth and the life, the ONLY way to the Father is through him. Once saved, works should follow because faith without deeds is dead. I would argue this point to them. But, it was never clear to me at the time what exactly they believed, only that they came across as believing in a works centred salvation. Once I was asked to pick my key verse for the year. I picked, “who so ever would come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Later, when feeling a bit down and depressed and tired of the constant pressure of UBF, I told them that I was tired and depressed. Their response was very manipulative and evil. They said, “Chris... didn’t you say you would deny yourself and pick up your cross?” I didn’t respond... Jesus said, “my burden is light... come all who are tired and weary.” This is VERY DIFFERENT TO UBF’s PHILOSOPHY. Jesus wasn’t talking about laziness, he was talking about rest. Rest, which is something the Bible discusses a lot, is ignored in UBF. God doesn’t want us to be tired and weary all the time. He wants us to be full of energy and life. After all, if we are supposed to burn brightly and shine on this dark world, we are going to need a source of light to share. In UBF if you are not tired and weary, you are not working hard enough. And even if you are tired and weary, not having 12 disciples means you still are not working hard enough...
At Christmas the ‘minder’ from California came up to visit. (The use of the word ‘minder’ was intended to be sarcastic because it really wasn’t all that bad.) I didn’t see much of him, but I decided to take him on a tour of Vancouver, which is a dreadful place to visit in winter... just in case you ever wanted to come here at that time. (unless you enjoy skiing or snowboarding, in which case it’s probably #1 in North America). The visit was uneventful with the exception of one small portion of our conversation. He started talking about how faithful the missionaries in Vancouver were and how God wanted me to be like “His Jesus for Canada” and that Canada was my mission field. It was implied that leaving Canada was not in God’ plan. He told me I needed to be more obedient to my Bible teachers. My response was, “I don’t trust them,” “It takes time to earn my trust and they have not earned it yet.” I regret not telling him that I AM NOT JESUS. But he may have meant something else. I am an ambassador of Christ. I carry Christ with me. I am filled with his spirit. But I am not Jesus.
While at UBF I had an amazing work of the Holy Spirit in my life that was not related to UBF at all. While at my college, I saw a group of three Korean girls. Something inside of my told me, “they are Christians” “I want you to meet them” “Go, sit down on that bench over there and they will come and talk to you about Jesus.” So, I did as the voice said. Then, one of the girls crossed the room and sat down with me. She asked me if she could practice English with me. I obliged. Then she asked me if she could tell me about Jesus. She admitted her English was not very good and asked if she could read to me from a gospel tract. I realized at that moment that the Spirit of God had literally spoken to me. As a result I met Bo Ram, a 22 year old missionary from Korea who shares the gospel, not because she feels the need to earn her salvation, but because she loves Jesus and she loves the people of Canada. Today she is one of my best friends and a gift from God. When I told my Bible teachers about this, they appeared threatened and gave me the silent treatment. They didn’t know how to respond to this, the power of God for the salvation of mankind. It’s like they were hearing something new and impossible. I should have realized at this moment that UBF was not where I belonged. The Bible says that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable; denying His power and denying Him access to the hearts of young people is blasphemy.
My exit from UBF was not what I had planned. After a Bible study on Luke Chapter 19, which they twisted to mean salvation comes though works; I realized that UBF believes that we are saved by doing lots and lots of good deeds. I planned on talking to them in private, like I had the first time. Hopefully, I thought I could convince them that this belief is not correct. I prayed with many people including my youth pastor, friends, and accountability partners before talking to them. I knew the Bible says that in the last days some evil minded people will worm their way into peoples’ lives and convince them that there is another way other than Jesus. The Bible says that such people are already amongst us. I know that my Bible teachers have been deceived by these people and have becomes slaves, not to righteousness or to Jesus, but to the higher ups in UBF. My hope was to convince them of this, and hopefully get them to leave with me and sever their ties with the UBF mother ship. After this we could all attend a healthy church (denomination didn’t matter to me) and everything would go on happily ever after. This didn’t happen. After the Sunday service the usual prayer and 1 to 1 discussion began. I was asked what I thought of the message. Instead of telling him what I thought of his message, I shared the gospel with the missionary. He rejected this and began trying to convince me that works are the key to our salvation. I stood up and said “NO.” I felt like I was stopping bullets with my hands and that everything was in slow motion. He continued... I said “NO,” He paused. I said, “NO.” “It is by grace we are saved.” His wife shouted at me, “REPENT.” I Shouted back, “REPENT FOR WHAT?” “REPENT FOR BELIEVING JESUS DIED FOR ME?” I opened my Bible and stumbled to find Ephesians chapter 2. I read it to them. They responded by telling me the book of James says we must earn our salvation, which is a lie and a misinterpretation. I told them that I had read some things about them on the internet, they denied all of it. I walked out and the missionary followed me saying “just one second Chris” “Chris I want to talk.” I didn’t turn around, comparing it to Lot returning to Sodom when the fire storm was beginning and after witnessing his wife turning to stone. I knew that all he wanted was more time to tell me I was a sinner and had no right to rebuke him for false teachings. After all, what do I know? By the way, I am a sinner, he is right; I am a disgusting sinner not worthy of a saviour like Jesus. But guess what? Jesus doesn’t think so; Jesus loves me so much he died on a cross for me. Jesus has a plan for my life and it is good! It may seem like a silly thing to say, but my Bible teacher literally rejected Jesus when I shared the gospel with him on that final day. Instead he continues to believe that by teaching 12 sheep he can erase his sin and earn Jesus saving grace...
Today I ask... If Jesus started to attend UBF would he be welcomed? My answer is probably not... Jesus turned water into wine (BIG NO NO IN UBF), Jesus hung out with sinners, prostitutes and tax collectors (also not acceptable in UBF), Jesus preached salvation and life, freedom from sin, repentance, and Gods love. Jesus taught his disciples to labour in love and obedience to God. UBF teaches labour in exchange for salvation and obedience to the missionaries and shepherds. Jesus message was for the whole world. UBF’s message is just for university students. Once, after telling them I bought some groceries for and shared the gospel with a homeless man, something I was very happy about, they gave me the silent treatment. Whereas when I told them about how I shared the gospel with my peers, they were overjoyed.
I received some nasty emails from him after leaving. I was told that maybe God could forgive me. Yes, the answer is Jesus death on a cross means God can forgive me. Adding the element of doubt isn’t going to work on me. I was told that I had a “weak and brittle faith” that I was a loser, washed up bum, a failure. According to them, I will become nothing. Thank God they are not the final authority on the outcome of my life. Jesus holds the pen UBF, not you, get it straight! By the way UBF, I still have those emails. This means I have evidence... Are you scared? You should be, but not of evidence, but of God who will hold all of us accountable for what we have done. God has all the evidence he needs.
I would like to highlight some other strange things I heard while attending UBF. My bible teacher told me on two occasions that she really respected Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses because of their hard working spirit, whereas their own brothers and sisters in Christ were condemned as lazy second class Christians. On a few occasions I was told to pick a church, the shepherd from California who came up to Canada at Christmas said this to me as well, they were offended by me attending another church besides theirs. On one occasion I told them about how I wanted to tutor English to make some extra money. My Bible teacher told me she thought it was a very bad idea. She thought that I would have a sexual relationship with one of my female students. She based this on past experience with another member (a sheep) of their group. Instead she insisted I work for a bank. I called her on this and told her that her worries were baseless. When I told them that I wanted to go to China to teach English, it suddenly became clear to them that this was not Gods plan for me. On one occasion it was even suggested to me that they believed my intentions were to go to China to have sexual relations. This because according to them many women would be attracted to me. The problem with this line of thinking is that, if I am actually so attractive, sexual relationships right here in Canada shouldn’t be too hard to find either. Which means, no matter where I am, temptation will always follow me. Testimony writing was also a major issue in UBF. They insisted I only study the passages of the Bible they were studying instead of my own pick-a-book-at-random-and-read-it-until-finished-strategy. The middle ground I reached with them was that I would study both, which takes twice as much time, but you cannot ever read too much of the Bible. I found that there was no freedom of expression in testimony writing. I had to write essentially the same thing as everyone else. I rebelled though, and started writing my testimony about whatever was on my heart. They eventually gave up on me and allowed me this freedom. I could tell it bothered them, but there was no Biblical premise for what they were asking me to do, something I would often remind them of. There were probably several other moments where I was completely dumbstruck by what they said or suggested, but these are the ones that stuck out the most to me.
I cannot come to a conclusion about UBF because after writing this I actually hope it’s not over. I pray that God would use me to tear down the stronghold that is UBF and in its place lift Jesus to his proper position. I will continue to pray for their salvation.
I also want to say that overall 90% of my experience with UBF was positive. One of the nicest things they did for me while I attended their Church was that while my mother was in the hospital they bought flowers and insisted on coming to visit her. Something no one in my other Canadian church ever did. They cooked a great meal every Sunday which I know is a huge financial burden. I found it so funny how they would load up my plate because they thought I was too skinny. (I don’t consider my situation as “eating training” as others have called it; I am also not denying that some may have been subjected to this). I really appreciate all the things they did for me while I attended. I really believe that they loved me. I shared many laughs with them and a lot of my time with them. I think the most hurtful thing for me, was that I knew I couldn’t remain friends with them after leaving. They have chosen their path and I have chosen mine. I have decided that Jesus is the best possible solution to my problems with sin. He is the only one who can save me at the last day.
“Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do” – Jesus
I strongly encourage anyone who has been hurt by UBF to forgive them and continue praying for them. In the same way that only Jesus can save us from our sin, only Jesus can save them. It is your responsibility to pray for them and to love them.
-Christopher Q.
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(Posted in the discussion page of a UBF Wikipedia article, April 2008)
I agree, I have heard a few reports of "Business Missions" but was unsure of exactly what that meant. This is so Orwellian, making up these phrases, "Faith Marriage", "Business Mission", "World Mission", "Sports Training", "Bible Teacher Training", "Fishing." They imply that their interpretation of these words are Biblical. However, this may not be the case in every situation(especially "sports training"?). I dont think we can deny that "Fishing" or Evangelism (in common speach) is Biblical and is in fact our duty as believers. But in UBF "fishing" has a much more specific meaning, it means going to the local university campus and offering Bible study. Going to homeless people and telling them about Jesus is not considered "fishing." UBF doesnt have a world mission, they have a campus mission. Jesus said "go into ALL the world and make disciples of ALL nations." But I was told by UBF that my mission was in Vancouver Canada, and that if I went to China or Korea or Japan to share Gods word, I would be abandoning "World Mission". In fact they went so far as to suggest that my real desire in wanting to go overseas was to defile myself by fulfilling lustful desires with prostitutes. It is such a contradiction. I never saw any evidence of the Holy Spirit during my stay with UBF(other than from Bible study students never from missionaries). Iam not saying that UBF missionaries do not have the Holy Spirit, only that the evidence was very slim. UBF seems to think that getting more Bible study students is equal to having the Holy Spirit. However, if that were the case, then the Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses would be overflowing with the Spirit. I never had communion while in UBF(JESUS COMMANDED US TO DO IT IN REMEMBERANCE FOR WHAT HE DID FOR US). Praying in tongues was looked down upon (it is a gift from God, please read ACTS). Now they run my name through the mud. However, I am glad that I share in the sufferings of Jesus. To them I am on my way to hell, but Jesus has a plan for my life. IT IS WRITTEN, "THAT HE WHO BEGAN A GOOD WORK IN YOU WILL CARRY IT ON TO COMPLETION IN THE DAY OF CHRIST JESUS." One of their own shephards prophesied about me saying that I would share the gospel with millions. Now they take those words back, but not God, what God has spoken no one can contradict. UBF's legalistic righteousness by works will not get them very far. Abraham was justified by faith. David defeated Goliath by faith. Gideon cut down his fathers Asherah pole by faith. Paul shared the gospel with millions by faith and grace. Jesus said "the work of God is this, to believe in the one that He sent." "EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE FOR HIM WHO BELIEVES." I dont care what UBF says about me, I will do what God has asked me, by faith alone! I cannot do any work unless God enables me to do it. SO IT IS NO LONGER I WHO DO IT, but the Spirit of God working through me. I will not take credit for HIS work. I am only a willing unworthy servant, that is it. And God will use me, and anyone else who calls on his name. God asked me to rebuke UBF, I prayed and prayed about it and his words to me were, "FATHER FORGIVE THEM, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO." UBF is so lost, they even call me, Gods unworthy servant "a follower of Satan" (they used to try and put me on a throne and said "you are sooo spiritual" "You will be a successful UBF Bible teacher.") The Pharisees called Jesus a follower of Satan also and they also called him "good teacher"(Make up your minds UBF, what am I to you?). But how can they call me a follower of Satan now? I believe in Jesus, he is my Savior "The Savior of the world." I forgive UBF church for its abuse and trying to lead me away from the plan that God has for my life. I am thankful for studying the Bible with them. But they told me that they didnt do it for me, but for themselves, they didnt teach me because they loved me, instead they taught me because they thought it would win them points with God. Since they do their works to be seen by men, they have already recieved their reward in full. "Without faith it is impossible to please God" and we know that only those who "please God" will appear in his Kingdom. That last sentence was a warning to everyone, both UBF and former UBF. If you are in UBF now, do not leave, instead pray for God's truth (unless the abuse is unbearable, in that case leave). If you are outside UBF, pray! "Pray without ceasing." PRAY PRAY PRAY AND THEN PRAY SOME MORE. Pray that God would restore UBF, that he would cleanse it of all unrighteousness, that they would know Gods grace and his true Gospel(That is "Christ and him crucified" and him risen from the dead). Pray on behalf of them if you truly love them. PRAY!
Can I hear an AMEN?
Amen
Chris and unworthy servant of Christ Jesus our Lord.
It’s been about 5-6 months now since I left UBF. It’s taken me a long time to get over it. I still have a lot of anger and pain from my experiences. The question that I have asked God several times now is, what good came from this and why did you send me there. Thus so far, there has been no concrete answer. But, I believe that God has a plan for the lives of everyone and that UBF for whatever reason was part of his plan for me. Nothing happens without His knowing and consent. I am thankful to Jesus for his saving grace and for taking me out of UBF.
I do not want to unfairly criticize UBF either. I do not believe that my Bible teachers intentionally set out to manipulate and control their students. I do not think that they have evil motives. I believe they do everything with the best intentions. Many Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also have good intentions, but none of these can save someone. It is said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Good intentions are not what is needed to found a healthy church. Being firmly rooted in Jesus and his saving power, his word, and a belief in his death for our sins and resurrection is a much better starting point. I cannot speak for others. So I will not talk about the experiences that I myself did not witness.
I started to attend UBF in the spring of 2007. I was approached by a very nice lady who asked me if I would like to study the Bible. I began talking to her about Jesus and about my walk with Him. She invited me to study the Bible with her. I agreed because I really wanted to be involved in a Bible study, I wanted to get my life on track. I was tired of a life without any real action, in terms of my spiritual well being. I believe that Jesus is the only answer to the emptiness and meaninglessness of life. I more than believe this, it’s everything to me; if it turns out to be false, there is no hope for mankind. So, I agreed to go to Bible study with her and I really enjoyed the 1 to 1 Bible study. After perhaps a month, she asked if I could come to the Sunday worship service and play guitar. So I decided to go. I told them I couldn’t commit to going every week because I already attend another church, but, I really didn’t mind serving them by playing guitar. I cannot remember the exact reason why, but I started playing guitar every week. At first I didn’t like it, because I told them I couldn’t, but eventually I realized that participating in church by serving was better than being a spectator, so I attended both churches (something they would latter reveal was unacceptable). UBF was great at first, I really felt like I was part of something and that I could contribute. I really liked the idea that they were missionaries to Canada (a nation which is apathetic, individualistic, and for the most part has rejected God). One thing I didn’t enjoy from the start, was that I was considered special. I was told that I was special on several occasions. I am no more special than anyone else, but they treated me like a first class human being, I even felt like I was treated as good as or better than their own children.
Slowly they started to ask more of me. I chose to participate because there were spiritual benefits. The more I was in God’s word, the better my overall wellbeing. At the same time, this is also when manipulation began. I got the feeling that not attending was not an option. If I missed a Sunday service (for good reason or not) or a Bible study, it was a really really big deal. This didn’t alarm me too much though at the time. One pivotal moment in my experience with UBF and one where the Holy Spirit literally comforted me was when I confessed during a group leaders meeting (since they considered me an upcoming leader) some sexual sin. They rebuked me (which was good) and made a big deal of it (which I believe it is). The problem came the next day during the Sunday worship service. The missionary began to rain fire and brimstone down on me (without mentioning my name), condemning me, explaining that people who do and think such things are garbage. How can God love such people? They are filthy. He wanted the sincere repentance of young people who do these things. I didn’t understand, wasn’t confessing and repenting exactly what I had done the night before? This went on and on for about five minutes. I was so hurt and angry that I wanted to get up and leave. At the same time I was confused... was this really what God thought of me? Was I really beyond salvation? I prayed, "God, I'm going to open my Bible, and I want you to reveal your truth to me." I opened my Bible and the very first thing my eyes fell upon were Jesus words as he died on the cross, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." I realized that God saw my suffering and agony. God knew my heart was sincere. Why would I confess my sin publicly if I was not disgusted with it? He wanted me to forgive the missionary. I encourage anyone who has been hurt by UBF to follow Jesus example. The people who abused you in UBF are no different than the Roman soldiers who tortured Jesus. Jesus loved those who crucified him; Jesus loves your UBF Bible teacher and desperately wants them to repent and believe in him as their saviour. I forgave him, but, I decided that I wanted to talk to him and his wife about it, because it was unacceptable and hurtful. I called a meeting, I could tell they were afraid (what was I coming to talk to them about?). But they came prepared. The missionary denied the event ever took place saying, "I don’t remember what I wrote in last week’s sermon, but I never have any individual in mind." (His English was probably not the same, as English is his second language but the meaning hasn’t changed) I was angry that he denied it but the meeting became even stranger. He decided that the best defence was a good offence and came up with a baseless charge against me. He charged, “Chris, I noticed that you are not putting any money in the offering.” He then began to explain that it was my duty (I didn’t disagree). The problem is that, I attend another Church and choose to support missions work at that Church. This is where 100% of my offerings go. I will not say how much I give because that’s between Jesus and me. I had given money to UBF, but I refused to put my name on it because I don’t want to be recognized. So, his charge was a bit insulting. He insisted that I start putting money in the UBF offering with my name on it. I boil this down to distrust; something I soon realized was a major problem in UBF. But once again I decided to forgive him for it. After that things were more or less the same at UBF for some time.
Later there was my trip to California for the 2007 West Coast Summer Bible Conference. The conference was great and I met a lot of great people. I do not want to undermine or unduly criticize the conference because overall it was pretty good. People were very kind to me and treated me like I was an ambassador from Canada. I was the only non Korean Canadian at the conference, so I got a lot of attention. Actually, the trip down there was quite the miracle, which included getting on the plane about 1 minute before it took off. However, despite the overall positive experience I had, I noticed some strange things at the conference during the group Bible study meetings. I noticed that people were pretty perfect. No flaws, no sin, since they started attending UBF and became missionaries and shepherds. Their testimonies seemed unrealistic. I remember questioning them in my mind. Is it truly possible to rid myself of sin and become perfect? It was an attractive idea but one that I knew was impossible. Several times after the conference I mentioned this to my Bible teacher. She didn’t deny that it was possible I had interpreted their testimonies that way, she even said in some cases some “sheep” may think they do not have sin. My problem with her answer was that it was the missionaries who claimed to be without sin since attending UBF. The other strange thing was that I was assigned (at least this is my belief) someone to watch over me and “guide” me during the conference. He was a really nice guy and I felt that he was my friend. He is also the one who taught me about ‘proper’ testimony writing. Although a strange practice, having a watcher, I didn’t think much of it. But, it did make me feel like they were treating me like a child. Since leaving UBF I have not heard a word from anyone in California. (I posted something on their West Coast UBF network explaining the Gospel of Jesus Christ before I left, once I realized that many of them might not know that Jesus is the only way to salvation).
After the conference, things started to become a little darker for me. Several times during the group Bible studies I would hear something I knew was wrong. Most of the time it was about something trivial, but sometimes it concerned the nature of our Salvation. Works? Or Grace? Or Both? The answer according to Ephesians chapter 2 is that GRACE ALONE is our hope. Jesus said he is the way the truth and the life, the ONLY way to the Father is through him. Once saved, works should follow because faith without deeds is dead. I would argue this point to them. But, it was never clear to me at the time what exactly they believed, only that they came across as believing in a works centred salvation. Once I was asked to pick my key verse for the year. I picked, “who so ever would come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Later, when feeling a bit down and depressed and tired of the constant pressure of UBF, I told them that I was tired and depressed. Their response was very manipulative and evil. They said, “Chris... didn’t you say you would deny yourself and pick up your cross?” I didn’t respond... Jesus said, “my burden is light... come all who are tired and weary.” This is VERY DIFFERENT TO UBF’s PHILOSOPHY. Jesus wasn’t talking about laziness, he was talking about rest. Rest, which is something the Bible discusses a lot, is ignored in UBF. God doesn’t want us to be tired and weary all the time. He wants us to be full of energy and life. After all, if we are supposed to burn brightly and shine on this dark world, we are going to need a source of light to share. In UBF if you are not tired and weary, you are not working hard enough. And even if you are tired and weary, not having 12 disciples means you still are not working hard enough...
At Christmas the ‘minder’ from California came up to visit. (The use of the word ‘minder’ was intended to be sarcastic because it really wasn’t all that bad.) I didn’t see much of him, but I decided to take him on a tour of Vancouver, which is a dreadful place to visit in winter... just in case you ever wanted to come here at that time. (unless you enjoy skiing or snowboarding, in which case it’s probably #1 in North America). The visit was uneventful with the exception of one small portion of our conversation. He started talking about how faithful the missionaries in Vancouver were and how God wanted me to be like “His Jesus for Canada” and that Canada was my mission field. It was implied that leaving Canada was not in God’ plan. He told me I needed to be more obedient to my Bible teachers. My response was, “I don’t trust them,” “It takes time to earn my trust and they have not earned it yet.” I regret not telling him that I AM NOT JESUS. But he may have meant something else. I am an ambassador of Christ. I carry Christ with me. I am filled with his spirit. But I am not Jesus.
While at UBF I had an amazing work of the Holy Spirit in my life that was not related to UBF at all. While at my college, I saw a group of three Korean girls. Something inside of my told me, “they are Christians” “I want you to meet them” “Go, sit down on that bench over there and they will come and talk to you about Jesus.” So, I did as the voice said. Then, one of the girls crossed the room and sat down with me. She asked me if she could practice English with me. I obliged. Then she asked me if she could tell me about Jesus. She admitted her English was not very good and asked if she could read to me from a gospel tract. I realized at that moment that the Spirit of God had literally spoken to me. As a result I met Bo Ram, a 22 year old missionary from Korea who shares the gospel, not because she feels the need to earn her salvation, but because she loves Jesus and she loves the people of Canada. Today she is one of my best friends and a gift from God. When I told my Bible teachers about this, they appeared threatened and gave me the silent treatment. They didn’t know how to respond to this, the power of God for the salvation of mankind. It’s like they were hearing something new and impossible. I should have realized at this moment that UBF was not where I belonged. The Bible says that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable; denying His power and denying Him access to the hearts of young people is blasphemy.
My exit from UBF was not what I had planned. After a Bible study on Luke Chapter 19, which they twisted to mean salvation comes though works; I realized that UBF believes that we are saved by doing lots and lots of good deeds. I planned on talking to them in private, like I had the first time. Hopefully, I thought I could convince them that this belief is not correct. I prayed with many people including my youth pastor, friends, and accountability partners before talking to them. I knew the Bible says that in the last days some evil minded people will worm their way into peoples’ lives and convince them that there is another way other than Jesus. The Bible says that such people are already amongst us. I know that my Bible teachers have been deceived by these people and have becomes slaves, not to righteousness or to Jesus, but to the higher ups in UBF. My hope was to convince them of this, and hopefully get them to leave with me and sever their ties with the UBF mother ship. After this we could all attend a healthy church (denomination didn’t matter to me) and everything would go on happily ever after. This didn’t happen. After the Sunday service the usual prayer and 1 to 1 discussion began. I was asked what I thought of the message. Instead of telling him what I thought of his message, I shared the gospel with the missionary. He rejected this and began trying to convince me that works are the key to our salvation. I stood up and said “NO.” I felt like I was stopping bullets with my hands and that everything was in slow motion. He continued... I said “NO,” He paused. I said, “NO.” “It is by grace we are saved.” His wife shouted at me, “REPENT.” I Shouted back, “REPENT FOR WHAT?” “REPENT FOR BELIEVING JESUS DIED FOR ME?” I opened my Bible and stumbled to find Ephesians chapter 2. I read it to them. They responded by telling me the book of James says we must earn our salvation, which is a lie and a misinterpretation. I told them that I had read some things about them on the internet, they denied all of it. I walked out and the missionary followed me saying “just one second Chris” “Chris I want to talk.” I didn’t turn around, comparing it to Lot returning to Sodom when the fire storm was beginning and after witnessing his wife turning to stone. I knew that all he wanted was more time to tell me I was a sinner and had no right to rebuke him for false teachings. After all, what do I know? By the way, I am a sinner, he is right; I am a disgusting sinner not worthy of a saviour like Jesus. But guess what? Jesus doesn’t think so; Jesus loves me so much he died on a cross for me. Jesus has a plan for my life and it is good! It may seem like a silly thing to say, but my Bible teacher literally rejected Jesus when I shared the gospel with him on that final day. Instead he continues to believe that by teaching 12 sheep he can erase his sin and earn Jesus saving grace...
Today I ask... If Jesus started to attend UBF would he be welcomed? My answer is probably not... Jesus turned water into wine (BIG NO NO IN UBF), Jesus hung out with sinners, prostitutes and tax collectors (also not acceptable in UBF), Jesus preached salvation and life, freedom from sin, repentance, and Gods love. Jesus taught his disciples to labour in love and obedience to God. UBF teaches labour in exchange for salvation and obedience to the missionaries and shepherds. Jesus message was for the whole world. UBF’s message is just for university students. Once, after telling them I bought some groceries for and shared the gospel with a homeless man, something I was very happy about, they gave me the silent treatment. Whereas when I told them about how I shared the gospel with my peers, they were overjoyed.
I received some nasty emails from him after leaving. I was told that maybe God could forgive me. Yes, the answer is Jesus death on a cross means God can forgive me. Adding the element of doubt isn’t going to work on me. I was told that I had a “weak and brittle faith” that I was a loser, washed up bum, a failure. According to them, I will become nothing. Thank God they are not the final authority on the outcome of my life. Jesus holds the pen UBF, not you, get it straight! By the way UBF, I still have those emails. This means I have evidence... Are you scared? You should be, but not of evidence, but of God who will hold all of us accountable for what we have done. God has all the evidence he needs.
I would like to highlight some other strange things I heard while attending UBF. My bible teacher told me on two occasions that she really respected Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses because of their hard working spirit, whereas their own brothers and sisters in Christ were condemned as lazy second class Christians. On a few occasions I was told to pick a church, the shepherd from California who came up to Canada at Christmas said this to me as well, they were offended by me attending another church besides theirs. On one occasion I told them about how I wanted to tutor English to make some extra money. My Bible teacher told me she thought it was a very bad idea. She thought that I would have a sexual relationship with one of my female students. She based this on past experience with another member (a sheep) of their group. Instead she insisted I work for a bank. I called her on this and told her that her worries were baseless. When I told them that I wanted to go to China to teach English, it suddenly became clear to them that this was not Gods plan for me. On one occasion it was even suggested to me that they believed my intentions were to go to China to have sexual relations. This because according to them many women would be attracted to me. The problem with this line of thinking is that, if I am actually so attractive, sexual relationships right here in Canada shouldn’t be too hard to find either. Which means, no matter where I am, temptation will always follow me. Testimony writing was also a major issue in UBF. They insisted I only study the passages of the Bible they were studying instead of my own pick-a-book-at-random-and-read-it-until-finished-strategy. The middle ground I reached with them was that I would study both, which takes twice as much time, but you cannot ever read too much of the Bible. I found that there was no freedom of expression in testimony writing. I had to write essentially the same thing as everyone else. I rebelled though, and started writing my testimony about whatever was on my heart. They eventually gave up on me and allowed me this freedom. I could tell it bothered them, but there was no Biblical premise for what they were asking me to do, something I would often remind them of. There were probably several other moments where I was completely dumbstruck by what they said or suggested, but these are the ones that stuck out the most to me.
I cannot come to a conclusion about UBF because after writing this I actually hope it’s not over. I pray that God would use me to tear down the stronghold that is UBF and in its place lift Jesus to his proper position. I will continue to pray for their salvation.
I also want to say that overall 90% of my experience with UBF was positive. One of the nicest things they did for me while I attended their Church was that while my mother was in the hospital they bought flowers and insisted on coming to visit her. Something no one in my other Canadian church ever did. They cooked a great meal every Sunday which I know is a huge financial burden. I found it so funny how they would load up my plate because they thought I was too skinny. (I don’t consider my situation as “eating training” as others have called it; I am also not denying that some may have been subjected to this). I really appreciate all the things they did for me while I attended. I really believe that they loved me. I shared many laughs with them and a lot of my time with them. I think the most hurtful thing for me, was that I knew I couldn’t remain friends with them after leaving. They have chosen their path and I have chosen mine. I have decided that Jesus is the best possible solution to my problems with sin. He is the only one who can save me at the last day.
“Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do” – Jesus
I strongly encourage anyone who has been hurt by UBF to forgive them and continue praying for them. In the same way that only Jesus can save us from our sin, only Jesus can save them. It is your responsibility to pray for them and to love them.
-Christopher Q.
----
(Posted in the discussion page of a UBF Wikipedia article, April 2008)
I agree, I have heard a few reports of "Business Missions" but was unsure of exactly what that meant. This is so Orwellian, making up these phrases, "Faith Marriage", "Business Mission", "World Mission", "Sports Training", "Bible Teacher Training", "Fishing." They imply that their interpretation of these words are Biblical. However, this may not be the case in every situation(especially "sports training"?). I dont think we can deny that "Fishing" or Evangelism (in common speach) is Biblical and is in fact our duty as believers. But in UBF "fishing" has a much more specific meaning, it means going to the local university campus and offering Bible study. Going to homeless people and telling them about Jesus is not considered "fishing." UBF doesnt have a world mission, they have a campus mission. Jesus said "go into ALL the world and make disciples of ALL nations." But I was told by UBF that my mission was in Vancouver Canada, and that if I went to China or Korea or Japan to share Gods word, I would be abandoning "World Mission". In fact they went so far as to suggest that my real desire in wanting to go overseas was to defile myself by fulfilling lustful desires with prostitutes. It is such a contradiction. I never saw any evidence of the Holy Spirit during my stay with UBF(other than from Bible study students never from missionaries). Iam not saying that UBF missionaries do not have the Holy Spirit, only that the evidence was very slim. UBF seems to think that getting more Bible study students is equal to having the Holy Spirit. However, if that were the case, then the Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses would be overflowing with the Spirit. I never had communion while in UBF(JESUS COMMANDED US TO DO IT IN REMEMBERANCE FOR WHAT HE DID FOR US). Praying in tongues was looked down upon (it is a gift from God, please read ACTS). Now they run my name through the mud. However, I am glad that I share in the sufferings of Jesus. To them I am on my way to hell, but Jesus has a plan for my life. IT IS WRITTEN, "THAT HE WHO BEGAN A GOOD WORK IN YOU WILL CARRY IT ON TO COMPLETION IN THE DAY OF CHRIST JESUS." One of their own shephards prophesied about me saying that I would share the gospel with millions. Now they take those words back, but not God, what God has spoken no one can contradict. UBF's legalistic righteousness by works will not get them very far. Abraham was justified by faith. David defeated Goliath by faith. Gideon cut down his fathers Asherah pole by faith. Paul shared the gospel with millions by faith and grace. Jesus said "the work of God is this, to believe in the one that He sent." "EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE FOR HIM WHO BELIEVES." I dont care what UBF says about me, I will do what God has asked me, by faith alone! I cannot do any work unless God enables me to do it. SO IT IS NO LONGER I WHO DO IT, but the Spirit of God working through me. I will not take credit for HIS work. I am only a willing unworthy servant, that is it. And God will use me, and anyone else who calls on his name. God asked me to rebuke UBF, I prayed and prayed about it and his words to me were, "FATHER FORGIVE THEM, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO." UBF is so lost, they even call me, Gods unworthy servant "a follower of Satan" (they used to try and put me on a throne and said "you are sooo spiritual" "You will be a successful UBF Bible teacher.") The Pharisees called Jesus a follower of Satan also and they also called him "good teacher"(Make up your minds UBF, what am I to you?). But how can they call me a follower of Satan now? I believe in Jesus, he is my Savior "The Savior of the world." I forgive UBF church for its abuse and trying to lead me away from the plan that God has for my life. I am thankful for studying the Bible with them. But they told me that they didnt do it for me, but for themselves, they didnt teach me because they loved me, instead they taught me because they thought it would win them points with God. Since they do their works to be seen by men, they have already recieved their reward in full. "Without faith it is impossible to please God" and we know that only those who "please God" will appear in his Kingdom. That last sentence was a warning to everyone, both UBF and former UBF. If you are in UBF now, do not leave, instead pray for God's truth (unless the abuse is unbearable, in that case leave). If you are outside UBF, pray! "Pray without ceasing." PRAY PRAY PRAY AND THEN PRAY SOME MORE. Pray that God would restore UBF, that he would cleanse it of all unrighteousness, that they would know Gods grace and his true Gospel(That is "Christ and him crucified" and him risen from the dead). Pray on behalf of them if you truly love them. PRAY!
Can I hear an AMEN?
Amen
Chris and unworthy servant of Christ Jesus our Lord.
Monday, January 19, 2009
John W. (former Columbus UBF)
(See also http://exubf.blogspot.com/2008/11/chris-j-former-chicago-ubf.html and https://exubf.blogspot.com/2007/07/parent-of-u-of-chicago-recruit-1985.html.)
(Testimony of John W., son of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley W., career missionaries under Wycliffe to Indian tribes of Guatemala. This testimony was given at a Cult Awareness Network Conference in Ohio, in 1986.)
My name is John W., and currently I am the supervisor of an industrial engineering firm in Newark, Ohio, for a company called Diebold. My involvement was in an organization called University Bible Fellowship. It began back in March, 1980. At that time I was 23 years of age and had been out of college with a degree in industrial engineering for two years.
My introduction was an invitation to attend an interdenominational Bible study. Certain aspects appealed in the term interdenominational for you felt you would not get indoctrinated in any one brand of Bible interpretation. Another appeal was in the term, 'University,' as I felt there might be a nice crowd of young people present.
When I attended this first Bible study. what I saw were people who were very enthusiastic, very devoted, very interested in their Bible study. That was not the normal situation I had encountered in previous Bible studies I had attended or taught. As a matter of fact, my parents were missionaries to Guatemala, and over the years I had led numerous Bible studies myself. Keeping people interested in Bible study had been something of a challenge.
When I mentioned my background, I was immediately accepted as one who already knew a lot about the Bible and questions were often referred to me so that I could give an answer. Even though I hadn't studied that particular passage, my past study enabled me to give some kind of a response.
From that point, I was definitely flattered and my background was stated as a great strength. With only six to ten people in the Bible study, the community feeling was definitely very strong. Thus my background was stressed as something that I had over the others in the group. Over the period of weeks and months that followed, this background was tapped into by the leader. Rather than my studying the Bible with one of the young student members, he chose to teach me himself--a privilege only granted to those who had been in the group for a long time or who had a strong Bible background.
Two Sundays later they asked me to speak at the evening service. Well, I obviously was pretty flattered and relished that opportunity. A few months later a new Bible study was to be established on a different night and I was to be the leader of that. So in the initial stages, I was complimented and flattered a lot because of my background.
In order to understand how people are drawn into a group like this, I want to stress that there was a lot of me that was heightened and clarified as being great and good, but in the months and years that progressed, that became less and less the theme of the relationship between the leader and myself. More and more it was emphasized how little I knew and how much my background had actually been a detriment to my really understanding the Bible.
Through the one to one Bible study, a shepherd/sheep relationship was established and s close personal relationship was developed as well. This eventuated in a dependency relationship. In the Bible study, I would answer the questions and the leader would respond. He was in a position where he could listen to what I said and add something, applaud me, or whatever. But in this position, he was the one in control. It was not like in a group situation where you can do some preparation while someone else is answering the question. I was always in the place where he was listening to me and then giving me feedback.
Through that Bible study, he was also able to learn about me. As a part of the Bible study there were questions designed for personal application and confession. These confessions for a new member were pretty general and summarized in one or two sentences. What later developed was a six to ten page written analysis of oneself in light of a particular theme that was planted in that Bible study, and a basic catharsis of anything that a person may be feeling about himself, or a revealing of oneself in great detail. In future meetings, these confessions were made public.
Now what that did for me was to create a fear that these things might be leaked out beyond the group. In the group there was understanding because we were 'all in it together'. This took away a bit of my ego, as well created a kind of unity and cohesiveness within the group itself.
One of the things that a person would note in these meetings was the outbursts of laughter at very strange points. When talking about something very humbling and very painful, people would laugh. For instance, if you were talking about being rejected by a student on campus that you were trying to recruit, that was a reason to laugh because they had shared the same experience.
This laughter tended to distort reality, for instead of feeling painful because a student ran away from your Bible study, your ability to think critically, as to why that student ran away from your Bible study, was shut down. Laughter also heightened the group unity.
Another factor in the cohesiveness of the group was the increased isolation from past associations. Involvement in the one to one study with the leader on Tuesday night, the Friday night Bible study, the Sunday night meeting, the Fellowship Meeting on Thursday night and a leadership meeting on Monday night, eventuated in a cutting off of contact with the outside world. I was too busy attending meetings or preparing my Bible studies or speaking assignments.
The leader never told me to turn my back on my family, my friends and my past life, but circumstances created the situation whereby the isolation took place. In order for a person to commit that amount of time, the approach that was used was that of guilt in decision making. When faced, for instance, with a choice between attending a Bible study or a graduation service, we were confronted with the decision as to which would be of greater benefit between the individual and God? This, in my estimation, was a use of motivation by guilt, and can be quite detrimental to oneself.
I had always been very interested in exercise and sports, but at the time I left the group, I felt winded even walking up a set of stairs. I had so concentrated on group activities and sitting for hours and hours, plus the fact that my job in engineering tends to be a little sedentary, I had put on about 30 pounds above what I am now. At any rate, that aspect of the wholeness of an individual was lost sight of. A normal thinking individual would have time for exercise or relationships with people that are not always geared toward a group goal or a spiritual goal.
There is another practice which isn't necessarily written in the teachings of the group, but which becomes very effective in strapping a person to the group. In their emphasis that one's walk with God is the full responsibility of the individual, the leadership took advantage of the individual's desire to walk close to God, and introduced what is known as 'training.'
Training is not done so much for the individual's educational development, but rather to develop faith--and faith is equated with obedience. Here, also, obedience to the shepherd is equated with obedience to God. As a leader, and to expand my role as a leader, I was willing to subject myself to training. There is a tolerance for what might seem like questionable practices in order that a person could aspire to gain a leadership role.
To give you an appreciation of what 'trainings' might involve, one instance comes readily to mind. A member in Chicago was told to carry two empty suitcases from the Chicago center all the way to the Sears Tower, which meant walking up 103 stories or flights of stairs. Now we might ask, 'What is the point of that kind of training?' It's not like sitting down and doing a Bible study. It doesn't seem to have any correlation. But the practice is that if you want to be 'trained' and grow closer to God, you listen to what your shepherd says; you don't question it; you just obey. If you don't, you're not obeying God, and you're not willing to be trained and molded into a leader.
Training also brought about a heightened unity in the group for you looked upon the group as an elite group, above others in spirituality. So the isolation, the eliteness, the total commitment to the group--because the group has the answer to how to get closer to God and to benefit society--filled the framework of the individual.
Now the contact with the outside world had been severed. If my parents, my sister or a concerned pastor were to try to penetrate my world of total commitment to the group and to its objectives, I would shut them off. 'Couldn't they understand that I was only wanting to draw closer to God? I'm on a crusade and I'm a zealot for what is right. Don't expect me to do anything other than help you to come into the group so that you can have the right answers also.'
It's a bit scary now as I look back on my situation and see how I had shut down my emotions for my family, for we had been a loving family. One of the reasons why I am still involved in education of the public in general about cults, and in particular, Bible based cults, is this 'zealot mentality for the group' which I regard as very dangerous. That zeal and concern for the group is so strong and the isolation is so complete that former members of this group have been assaulted, lies have been spread about them, and the concern for what is ethical and right and what should have been the practice of the teaching they were giving in their Bible studies are sacrificed at the expense of protecting the group and advancing the goals of the group. For society and for the individual, that is a concern of mine.
To show how committed I had become to the group, I was willing to marry a girl that I basically did not know and what I had heard of her was of a negative report. Yet I was ready to marry her at a time that would be appointed by the leader rather than at a time that she and I would choose. Some in the group were told that the next morning they were to marry so and so. They would accept this, feeling that this decision was by the direct will God through the shepherd, and they would not want to miss God's best for them.
To be willing to marry a girl I hardly knew at the direction of another shows how much I had lost touch with my own freedom to do what I would want or feel right before God myself. I had never been in a position where I felt I couldn't find a suitable partner. Dating was no problem to me, nor was I afraid that I would be single the rest of my life, and who I was to marry was not a decision that I would readily want to give up. When I first heard of the practice, in my initial stages of joining the group, I thought it to be the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. 'To marry somebody I didn't even know? You've got to be kidding!'
In summary I would like to say that I have been out of the group for two years and my concern about this and other groups is for the freedom of the individual. They are victims! They need help. They need to be approached. when I look at myself as I was in the group, or when I look at others still in the group, I don't see people who have become better. Rather. I see negative changes and problems that developed because of their association with the group. Therefore I have a desire to do what I can to prevent people from entering into this kind of relationship; also to talk to people who are involved for the purpose of helping them evaluate where they are at.
--John W.
(Testimony of John W., son of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley W., career missionaries under Wycliffe to Indian tribes of Guatemala. This testimony was given at a Cult Awareness Network Conference in Ohio, in 1986.)
My name is John W., and currently I am the supervisor of an industrial engineering firm in Newark, Ohio, for a company called Diebold. My involvement was in an organization called University Bible Fellowship. It began back in March, 1980. At that time I was 23 years of age and had been out of college with a degree in industrial engineering for two years.
My introduction was an invitation to attend an interdenominational Bible study. Certain aspects appealed in the term interdenominational for you felt you would not get indoctrinated in any one brand of Bible interpretation. Another appeal was in the term, 'University,' as I felt there might be a nice crowd of young people present.
When I attended this first Bible study. what I saw were people who were very enthusiastic, very devoted, very interested in their Bible study. That was not the normal situation I had encountered in previous Bible studies I had attended or taught. As a matter of fact, my parents were missionaries to Guatemala, and over the years I had led numerous Bible studies myself. Keeping people interested in Bible study had been something of a challenge.
When I mentioned my background, I was immediately accepted as one who already knew a lot about the Bible and questions were often referred to me so that I could give an answer. Even though I hadn't studied that particular passage, my past study enabled me to give some kind of a response.
From that point, I was definitely flattered and my background was stated as a great strength. With only six to ten people in the Bible study, the community feeling was definitely very strong. Thus my background was stressed as something that I had over the others in the group. Over the period of weeks and months that followed, this background was tapped into by the leader. Rather than my studying the Bible with one of the young student members, he chose to teach me himself--a privilege only granted to those who had been in the group for a long time or who had a strong Bible background.
Two Sundays later they asked me to speak at the evening service. Well, I obviously was pretty flattered and relished that opportunity. A few months later a new Bible study was to be established on a different night and I was to be the leader of that. So in the initial stages, I was complimented and flattered a lot because of my background.
In order to understand how people are drawn into a group like this, I want to stress that there was a lot of me that was heightened and clarified as being great and good, but in the months and years that progressed, that became less and less the theme of the relationship between the leader and myself. More and more it was emphasized how little I knew and how much my background had actually been a detriment to my really understanding the Bible.
Through the one to one Bible study, a shepherd/sheep relationship was established and s close personal relationship was developed as well. This eventuated in a dependency relationship. In the Bible study, I would answer the questions and the leader would respond. He was in a position where he could listen to what I said and add something, applaud me, or whatever. But in this position, he was the one in control. It was not like in a group situation where you can do some preparation while someone else is answering the question. I was always in the place where he was listening to me and then giving me feedback.
Through that Bible study, he was also able to learn about me. As a part of the Bible study there were questions designed for personal application and confession. These confessions for a new member were pretty general and summarized in one or two sentences. What later developed was a six to ten page written analysis of oneself in light of a particular theme that was planted in that Bible study, and a basic catharsis of anything that a person may be feeling about himself, or a revealing of oneself in great detail. In future meetings, these confessions were made public.
Now what that did for me was to create a fear that these things might be leaked out beyond the group. In the group there was understanding because we were 'all in it together'. This took away a bit of my ego, as well created a kind of unity and cohesiveness within the group itself.
One of the things that a person would note in these meetings was the outbursts of laughter at very strange points. When talking about something very humbling and very painful, people would laugh. For instance, if you were talking about being rejected by a student on campus that you were trying to recruit, that was a reason to laugh because they had shared the same experience.
This laughter tended to distort reality, for instead of feeling painful because a student ran away from your Bible study, your ability to think critically, as to why that student ran away from your Bible study, was shut down. Laughter also heightened the group unity.
Another factor in the cohesiveness of the group was the increased isolation from past associations. Involvement in the one to one study with the leader on Tuesday night, the Friday night Bible study, the Sunday night meeting, the Fellowship Meeting on Thursday night and a leadership meeting on Monday night, eventuated in a cutting off of contact with the outside world. I was too busy attending meetings or preparing my Bible studies or speaking assignments.
The leader never told me to turn my back on my family, my friends and my past life, but circumstances created the situation whereby the isolation took place. In order for a person to commit that amount of time, the approach that was used was that of guilt in decision making. When faced, for instance, with a choice between attending a Bible study or a graduation service, we were confronted with the decision as to which would be of greater benefit between the individual and God? This, in my estimation, was a use of motivation by guilt, and can be quite detrimental to oneself.
I had always been very interested in exercise and sports, but at the time I left the group, I felt winded even walking up a set of stairs. I had so concentrated on group activities and sitting for hours and hours, plus the fact that my job in engineering tends to be a little sedentary, I had put on about 30 pounds above what I am now. At any rate, that aspect of the wholeness of an individual was lost sight of. A normal thinking individual would have time for exercise or relationships with people that are not always geared toward a group goal or a spiritual goal.
There is another practice which isn't necessarily written in the teachings of the group, but which becomes very effective in strapping a person to the group. In their emphasis that one's walk with God is the full responsibility of the individual, the leadership took advantage of the individual's desire to walk close to God, and introduced what is known as 'training.'
Training is not done so much for the individual's educational development, but rather to develop faith--and faith is equated with obedience. Here, also, obedience to the shepherd is equated with obedience to God. As a leader, and to expand my role as a leader, I was willing to subject myself to training. There is a tolerance for what might seem like questionable practices in order that a person could aspire to gain a leadership role.
To give you an appreciation of what 'trainings' might involve, one instance comes readily to mind. A member in Chicago was told to carry two empty suitcases from the Chicago center all the way to the Sears Tower, which meant walking up 103 stories or flights of stairs. Now we might ask, 'What is the point of that kind of training?' It's not like sitting down and doing a Bible study. It doesn't seem to have any correlation. But the practice is that if you want to be 'trained' and grow closer to God, you listen to what your shepherd says; you don't question it; you just obey. If you don't, you're not obeying God, and you're not willing to be trained and molded into a leader.
Training also brought about a heightened unity in the group for you looked upon the group as an elite group, above others in spirituality. So the isolation, the eliteness, the total commitment to the group--because the group has the answer to how to get closer to God and to benefit society--filled the framework of the individual.
Now the contact with the outside world had been severed. If my parents, my sister or a concerned pastor were to try to penetrate my world of total commitment to the group and to its objectives, I would shut them off. 'Couldn't they understand that I was only wanting to draw closer to God? I'm on a crusade and I'm a zealot for what is right. Don't expect me to do anything other than help you to come into the group so that you can have the right answers also.'
It's a bit scary now as I look back on my situation and see how I had shut down my emotions for my family, for we had been a loving family. One of the reasons why I am still involved in education of the public in general about cults, and in particular, Bible based cults, is this 'zealot mentality for the group' which I regard as very dangerous. That zeal and concern for the group is so strong and the isolation is so complete that former members of this group have been assaulted, lies have been spread about them, and the concern for what is ethical and right and what should have been the practice of the teaching they were giving in their Bible studies are sacrificed at the expense of protecting the group and advancing the goals of the group. For society and for the individual, that is a concern of mine.
To show how committed I had become to the group, I was willing to marry a girl that I basically did not know and what I had heard of her was of a negative report. Yet I was ready to marry her at a time that would be appointed by the leader rather than at a time that she and I would choose. Some in the group were told that the next morning they were to marry so and so. They would accept this, feeling that this decision was by the direct will God through the shepherd, and they would not want to miss God's best for them.
To be willing to marry a girl I hardly knew at the direction of another shows how much I had lost touch with my own freedom to do what I would want or feel right before God myself. I had never been in a position where I felt I couldn't find a suitable partner. Dating was no problem to me, nor was I afraid that I would be single the rest of my life, and who I was to marry was not a decision that I would readily want to give up. When I first heard of the practice, in my initial stages of joining the group, I thought it to be the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. 'To marry somebody I didn't even know? You've got to be kidding!'
In summary I would like to say that I have been out of the group for two years and my concern about this and other groups is for the freedom of the individual. They are victims! They need help. They need to be approached. when I look at myself as I was in the group, or when I look at others still in the group, I don't see people who have become better. Rather. I see negative changes and problems that developed because of their association with the group. Therefore I have a desire to do what I can to prevent people from entering into this kind of relationship; also to talk to people who are involved for the purpose of helping them evaluate where they are at.
--John W.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Chris J. (former Chicago UBF)
(See also http://exubf.blogspot.com/2007/07/parent-of-u-of-chicago-recruit-1985.html, http://exubf.blogspot.com/2009/01/john-w-former-columbus-ubf.html and http://exubf.blogspot.com/2007/07/donna.html.)
(Original scanned copy can be found here. Letter written by Chris J., ex member of UBF. Chris is the daughter of the late Dwight J., a Swedish Covenant minister. Chris was the UBF sheep of Sarah Barry at the U. of Chicago. She was, at one time, arranged to marry a Columbus UBF member named John W. Her account of her "deprogramming" does not resemble the stories told about "deprogramming" by UBF's leaders at the time, as usual.)
I came to UBF in 1979 as a senior in high school. At a time in my life when I was questioning my faith, God used the Bible study I received in UBF to confirm in me the truth of His Word and of Jesus Christ. I continued studying with Sarah Barry throughout my freshman year at North Park College in Chicago. That year I grew much as she gave me the room to learn from God's Spirit personally. I also grew to love M. Sarah and our one-to-one study very much. However, there were a few things which prevented me from becoming fully involved in UBF and from encouraging my friends to do so. I saw the pressure that was put on the students to belong exclusively to UBF and the guilt it placed on them; I was wary of the attitude I sensed in the members towards other Christian ministries; and I was disturbed by the members' attitude toward Samuel Lee. At the end of my freshman year I left UBF because of these questions. I returned the following fall, however, because I missed the one-to-one Bible study and the zeal which I felt was lacking in my church. I was relieved to have returned. Yet I still did not have peace about the attitudes that were present in UBF. Throughout that sophomore year I struggled intensely with this problem. At the same time, I began to associate Jesus with the demand for exclusive allegiance to UBF, and I became afraid of Him. In my fear I ran from Him and opened myself up to Satan, who oppressed me with insecurity and guilt. That year was hellish for me because I allowed fear to separate me from my God. But Jesus, my beautiful Good Shepherd, stood by me until I could call out to him. When I cried out to Him in the spring He answered and drew me to Himself through His Word. Jesus used that year in my life to teach me His mercy and the danger of running away from Him for any reason. That summer He showed me that He was leading my life and that I was to keep my eyes On Him alone. However, while He gave me the increased assurance of His presence with me, I was never brought to rest about the attitudes present in UBF.
The next year I transferred from North Park to the University of Chicago. I learned a lot that year about the nonChristian world, and my desire to help the people around me in Christ grew as I studied the Bible with a number of students. However, at the same time I was burdened by two things which prevented me from living in the freedom of Jesus that I taught my Bible students about. First was a gnawing term of slavery to the sins which I continually tried to overcome. Second was the burden of unrest concerning the unchecked power of Samuel Lee in UBF. This had not left me, although by now I really wished it would.
During the winter and spring of 1983, Jesus showed me the cause of my inability to overcome my sins. It was because I was not remaining in Him like a branch to the Vine, and I was not claiming the victory over my sins that He won through His death and resurrection. Through John 15, Mark 16, and Romans 1-8, Jesus began to show me what it meant to live by faith in His power and that I was to live by His Spirit, not by my own strength or by the law. That spring I experienced freedom that I had not known before. I fell in love with Jesus all over again and my only desire was to please Him. During that time, however, in my new found joy and my desire to be open to God in everything, I also began to open myself up to attitudes which were not of Him. Because it had been through UBF that God's Word came to me, I reasoned that everything that UBF did must be alright. I become ready to do almost anything that my friends in UBF felt was God's will for me. This included cutting off all contact with my family, former church members, and many other Christians, for in interpreting Hebrews 11:24-26 I identified them with my life in sin, and identified only UBF as "God's people". I began to think that in God's eyes we were somewhat more special than other Christians because we were working harder and persecuted more. I began to suspect most other Christians and felt truly comfortable only around other UBF believers, putting full confidence only in the words of Sarah Barry and Samuel Lee. As time went on, although I believed I was following Jesus in these attitudes, I was moving away from Him.
But again, Jesus is my faithful Shepherd, and He would not allow me to do this. Toward the end of my junior year in 1983 I felt as though He were preparing me for something. On the day that I came home for summer break I found out what it was. I received a phone call from a Christian friend of mine who said that the Lord had been leading him all week to call me. The last I had heard of him, he had been studying the Bible with UBF, as well as going to his own church. When he told me he had stopped studying with UBF and I asked him why, he proceeded to tell me of God's work in his life which led him to make this decision. As he spoke of Jesus' work I began to sense Jesus' presence very strongly in our conversation, both confirming the words he spoke and also commanding me to pay close attention to what he was about to say. The phrase, "The strong hand of the Lord upon me" (Ezek. 3:14b) became a reality to me, for the Lord's Spirit surrounded me in peace, love and power. By the middle of our conversation I knew that Jesus had sent this servant to speak His words to me, and that I was to listen closely.
God had worked in this brother powerfully throughout 1982 through a personal study of His Word, bringing him into a new understanding of Jesus and the Person and work of His Spirit. In the fall of that year he began studying with UBF while continuing in his personal study and going to his church. While he liked the one-to-one study, at the same time there began growing in his spirit a sense of danger about what was going on in UBF as a whole. As this sense grew he cried out to God to know whether it was just his own feelings and fears or whether it was the Spirit warning him about something. In November, Jesus brought him to a complete surrender to His Spirit and He then slowly gave him the discernment he had prayed for. He allowed Jesus' Spirit to shepherd him daily, and as he did the Lord made it evident to him that the sense of danger which he had was not just his feelings, but the Holy Spirit's warning. He saw that Jesus' power to shepherd his people directly was not fully being acknowledged, and as a result the relationship which Jesus meant to have with His people -- their complete Shepherd through His Spirit -- was wrongly being held by the leaders In UBF. Through a study of Moses' call in Exodus, which included with it several times of 'being drawn out alone' with God to be taught by Him, the Lord called this brother to leave UBF and go on to the ministry He would have for him. Because UBF had persistently remained in her error, he was not to lead anyone back into UBF the way it stood. He obeyed and left, and that year the Lord used him powerfully in the lives of a number of people as he followed the leading of the Spirit.
Throughout the conversation I tried to justify all of UBF's practices both to the brother and to myself. I had heard all these words many times before, both from myself and other people, and had learned to pass them off as being human words from people who did not understand Samuel Lee or what went on in UBF. But this time the message came with a power and a conviction that was not of man, but of God. I struggled against the Spirit's conviction at length, but when I could no longer do this I fell at Jesus' feet and prayed, "Lord Jesus, help me! If what he is saying is from you, let me know, and give me the courage to obey you. If not, then protect my mind and heart from doubt. Just help me to obey you." As I kept my eyes on Jesus He filled me with His peace and also confirmed to me through His Spirit that what my friend said was from Him. That night after we had hung up the Lord spoke to me powerfully through Ezekiel chapters 1-3. I saw the absolute unity between the living creatures and the spirit that led them. As I read this passage God's Spirit overshadowed me with the holiness and love of God. With trembling I knew that the Lord was calling me into the same kind of oneness with His Spirit that the living creatures had with the spirit that led them (1:12, 19-21). In the passages that follow Ezekiel is called to speak God's Words to His people. However, they would not listen to him (2:4,7). Nonetheless, he was to speak the words God gave him (2:5,7-3:3). He was not to be afraid of them, no matter what they said or did to him, for God would make him as strong as they were (3:8-11). God's holiness and power had never been made so clear to me. I could sense in Him the tremendous love that He had for the people in UBF, and yet also a righteous hatred of sin. I could see that He wanted us to know we were sinning against Him in many of our attitudes and practices. He did not show the favoritism between His children that we thought He did; and He did not look with favor on the overuse of authority practiced by our leaders and ourselves. He wanted our relationships and the relationships of our sheep with Himself to be pure, mediated only by Jesus and His Spirit, not by other men. Like Ezekiel I was to open my heart to the Words His Spirit would give me, and as He opened up the way, I was to speak to Sarah Barry about what I had been told by this brother. I was simply to do this and to follow whatever His leading would be after that. The words of 3:20,21 were a warning to me, "…when a righteous man turns from his righteousness and does evil, and I put a stumbling block before him, he will die. Since you did not warn him, he will die for his sin. The righteous things he did will not be remembered, and I will hold you accountable for his blood, But if you do warn the righteous man not to sin and he does not sin, he will surely live because he took warning, and you will have saved yourself."
As I kept my eyes on Jesus He gave me strength to accept His Words, and His Spirit enveloped me in peace. But soon I took my eyes off Him end became afraid that He would lead me out of UBF if Sarah Barry did not pay attention to what I would say. I then fell into doubt and fear and thought, "How can I do this? Sarah Barry and Sarah B. will be so hurt. They've heard all of this from me before; they'll just think it's from myself again. Can this really be from God?' He led me into UBF. Now He can't be leading me away!" I made the mistake of placing my security and life's direction in the ministry I was in rather than in God Himself and Jesus my risen Lord. Because of this sin I fought with God for two weeks. But His Spirit never left me alone. He haunted me day and night with His call and with Proverbs 3:5,6, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths." Despite His patience I let His Words drop to the ground. Finally I asked Him for proof that things in UBF were really as displeasing to Him as the brother had testified to, and that Sunday through His servant at my parents' church He gave it to me. In 1 Cor. 1 and 2 He showed me how displeasing it is for us to take pride in men rather than in Jesus alone, because it causes us to think like children and to divide off from other believers. I knew He was speaking directly to me concerning UBF. But as soon as I got into the UBF environment I shut my ears to His Words. Finally, when I could not stand the Spirit's haunting any longer I agreed to talk to Sarah Barry.
On the night that I was to talk to her, Jesus strengthened me through Genesis 22:8. In a very real way I was being called to offer up my Isaac, for I had grown to love Sarah Barry and UBF more than even my own family. However, the Lord's Word to me was "love the Lord more that the people you love, and He will provide.'' I was to keep my eyes on Jesus, and His Spirit would give me the words I was to say. His grace end peace surrounded me again when I looked to Him. However, I did not make a clear decision to keep my eyes on Him, and as a result, when I saw M. Sarah Barry, I watered down the message that the Lord had waited to give through me. I told her the brother's testimony apologetically, but asked her to seriously pray with me about why the Lord had led him away.
After I told her his testimony, she did not take seriously his reason for leaving. She seemed determined tied to defend UBF and Samuel Lee and unable to believe that God could have led someone away from UBF because there was something wrong in our ministry. Rather, she called into question the brother's real motives for leaving, stating that there was probably something that he did not want to give up which he knew he would have to if he remained in UBF.
Later that night I was rebuked by my Bible teacher for having hurt Sarah Barry by what I had said. After that night a battle began in my heart which lasted until the end of 1983. I knew that the call really had been from the Lord. Yet because I did not want to be rebuked again or try to go against the strong current of UBF's tide, I tried hard to deny that the phone call in June had ever taken place. I tried to convince myself that it was only my friend's human concern for me, and that Satan had used this call to plant doubt in me to slow me down in my mission. To combat this doubt I tried to take part in UBF's activities all the more vigorously, putting all my strength into conference preparations, etc.. I tried to put up a spiritual front around my sheep and other people in UBF. Yet the reality was that I was running away from Jesus' Spirit, and my spirit was dying. Sogams became increasingly harder to write, because in order to honestly accept God's Word I would have to repent and do what Jesus had called me to do: to clearly stand before M. Sarah Barry and state that UBF was sinning before Cod. Thus sogams became 'form sogams', written more in the exact pattern of the manuscripts, which may have pleased some others, but did not please God, as the sincere sogams of the spring before had. Periodically, I revealed to Sarah Barry or my Bible teacher what was bothering me. On those occasions my Bible teacher suggested that if I still had such problems with Samuel Lee, why didn't I go to another church? I couldn't accept the possibility of God calling me away from UBF, so I clung to the fact that God had led me to UBF over two years earlier and insisted, "No! God has called me here." By the end of 1983 my heart had become so wounded by my disobedience, doubt, fear and confusion that I experienced again what death it was to have cut myself off from God. After being raised up so high the spring before, this fall was harder and the hell I experienced again was deeper than anything I had ever been though in my lifetime. I again cried out for God's mercy, vowing never to allow myself to run so far from Jesus again. I made a decision to write sogams on Luke every week and to accept whatever point the Holy Spirit would give me from each passage. I also decided to talk to at least one person a day about Jesus and invite them to study the Bible in order to force myself to follow the Spirit's leading. I still was not ready to accept Jesus' call of the summer before, but I was stepping in the right direction.
My amazing and merciful God honored even this half obedient prayer and as I accepted His Word from His Spirit, He slowly restored my relationship with Him and my ministry. As I looked to the Holy Spirit for wisdom in teaching my Bible students, He gave it to me. Many of you in Chicago witnessed the fruit that was born in both their lives and mine.
Eventually, as I grew stronger, Jesus in his mercy again began showing me where my obedience to some of UBF's standards was causing me to look away from Him and His Word. This occurred first in the spring, when He made it clear to me that He wanted me to attend the graduation of my second brother, who had been questioning in his faith for a while. I was to go to encourage him in Jesus' love and speak the words the Holy Spirit would give me. However, to do so I would have to miss a Sunday worship service, which was virtually unthinkable for a shepherdess. As I prayed about the decision, Jesus spoke to me that morning through His Word. Through Mark 2:23-3:6 (which is Jesus' defense of His disciples' actions on the Sabbath and His healing of the man with a shriveled hand), He showed me that He was to be the Lord of my Sabbath, not the Sunday worship service. If He was calling me to see my brother in His Name in order to contribute to the saving of my brother's life, I was to go. However, rather than going through the struggle with my Bible teacher in trying to explain my reason for missing Sunday's service, I disobeyed the Spirit's leading and stayed home. My decision was seen as a spiritual one by those in UBF who knew about it, but in reality I had ignored the Holy Spirit's voice in order to submit to our UBF tradition of absolute attendance to the UBF Sunday worship service.
The second major case like this, when the strong pressure of UBF's traditions influenced me to disobey Jesus, came in the late summer. The previous November Samuel Lee had told me to pray about marriage with John W. from Columbus. In January of 1984 I told Samuel Lee that if it was the Lord's will, I would marry him. As I continued to pray about it throughout that year, however, I received no confirmation from God that this was His will. In fact, His Spirit seemed to put a sense of danger in my heart toward this arrangement. I wondered if this were only my feelings, or if I was placing expectations on John that he could not live up to. So I let go of all expectations that I had on him and decided to accept him without condition. When he came to Chicago in July for message preparation I began to like him. Despite all of this, however, the unrest in my spirit only grew. That week, through Genesis 21, God spoke to me concerning him. He forewarned me not to give my heart to the blessing which seemed good humanly but was not the blessing of His choosing. He gave me a sense that He was going to bring about a change in the marriage plans. I was to wait and see what He would do. In my desire to make some sense out of M. Samuel Lee's strong position in this arrangement, I grabbed on to the words in Genesis 21:12, "Listen to whatever Sarah tells you", applying "Sarah" to M. Samuel Lee, and I decided to watch closely to Samuel Lee's direction. Now, however, as I have since been learning how to discern and follow the Holy Spirit's leading, I have come to see that the spirit which led me to make that comparison was different than that of God.
A few weeks later, when John started talking about coming to my graduation, I cried out to the Lord because of my unrest, and He gave me the assurance that He had heard my cry and would do something about my situation. A few days later my Bible teacher made a deadline of that night for me to make a decision one way or the other concerning my engagement. I realized that if I had such severe unrest about it, it could not be God's will, and I should not let the engagement go on any farther. When I decided this, it was as if a veil which separated me from Jesus was lifted. It was more than just a burden lifted from me, but it was an overwhelming sense of His presence with me and a deep conviction of the truth of His gospel. I realized that this was the change in plans that He had given me a sense about. I knew that I had made the right decision before God.
That night, however, after I had told my Bible teacher of my decision, Sarah Barry, and then she, called me to persuade me to reconsider my decision. In the eyes of them both I was failing the test of faith and letting go of God's blessing. My Bible teacher emphasized obedience to Samuel Lee as showing my obedience to God. In my heart I knew that I was obeying God in my present decision. However, in my tiredness I took my eyes off of Jesus and again put them on the people around me. As I looked back at the passage in Genesis 21 without my spiritual eyes focused straight ahead on Jesus, I became scared that I had not completely followed through in watching for Samuel Lee's direction. Before I knew it, I had allowed myself to be talked into changing my decision back to the original one, not giving myself time to pray about it.
From that time on, the veil separating me from Jesus, which had been removed earlier that evening, was replaced by a thicker one. My soul could see no light from God before me, and my spirit felt lost and frightened. This decision was a very significant one for me; in it I had finally fully committed myself to UBF for life and submitted to Samuel Lee's authority in my life. But while I felt 'obedient', it was obedience to the wrong spirit. True obedience to God, although it may be hard, brings peace and confidence, for "the fruit of righteousness will be peace; the effect of righteousness will be quietness and confidence forever" (Isaiah 32:16b). The kind of obedience I was experiencing brought only unrest, confusion, darkness and fear.
Strangely, this 'obedience' also brought with it the shut down of all compassion or understanding from my heart. The only thing I thought I should be concerned with was clarity, and so it was much easier to rebuke people without thinking or caring about them, and to do it with a feeling of authority. Tolerance for people who left UBF fled me and I began to despise them. I also began to despise other Christians who did not seem to have a 'specific mission' like mine. My heart grew stone cold, and I became like a machine.
While all of this was happening to me, I tried over and over to convince myself that I was in God's will, and that the spiritual blackness I was experiencing was just my feelings. However, I knew in my heart that this was not true. The truth was that the Lord had hidden His face from me to bring me to repentance, and like the Psalmist, I 'was totally dismayed (Ps. 30:7) Finally I cried out to God that if my misery was because I was disobeying His will in my engagement to John W., He would do something big to make it evident to all involved that it was not His will that we marry.
About five days later John was discovered missing. We later found out that he was being 'deprogrammed'. I was sad and worried for him, but I was also thankful because God had answered my prayer. He was getting me out of what I could not get myself out of. This was the reason why I baffled everyone by being so strong while John was missing.
After that, even though I was relieved, I still was not at rest with God because I had not repented of listening to my Bible teacher above the Holy Spirit. I did not because in doing so I would be acknowledging that unconditional submission to my leaders was not always the Lord's will for me and that in the future I would have to discern between the Spirit's leading and man's. The number of times that I had mentioned to M. Sarah Barry that I had not been in God's will she insisted that I should have no regrets about my decision to marry John. In her eyes I had fulfilled obedience to God's servant and thus had no more responsibility before God. She did not seem to take into consideration the fact that we are each responsible to seek out and obey God's will personally. The Israelites were not excused for disobeying God because they had followed their leaders' guidance (Isaiah 9:16,17). In my fear to disagree with M. Sarah I remained in my sin.
In His faithful love, Jesus would not leave me alone until I had fully repented, and He haunted me with my sin. At the same time He began showing me the direction in which we were leading our Bible students at U. of C.. We were slowly leading them to depend on us and our ministry rather than on Jesus alone. We had a fixed system of leadership training through which we were already starting to put a few of them, and if they could not conform to it they were subtly being made to feel guilty through our pressure. I was extremely disturbed over this because I did not believe that this pressure was from Jesus.
Personally, I also began to feel a bondage in my mind and soul which was not from Jesus, As I 'rose in rank', coworking with Mary Petti in heading the. U. of C. ministry, my dependence on Sarah Barry, on my Bible teacher, and on M. Samuel Lee also grew. Now, instead of looking to the Holy Spirit for words during my Bible studies, I was getting them from my Bible teacher. I became afraid to search the Holy Spirit's leading for myself because of the number of times that it had been different from hers. As a leader I also knew that my life and ministry were being watched by M. Samuel Lee and I found myself living before him more and more. His and Sarah Barry's opinions became the standard by which I judged whether something was spiritual or not; if they approved of it, I regarded it as spiritual, even if it went against the Word of God. If they did not regard it as spiritual, it was not. In nearly every area of my life they had become my standard, for I thought about their lives as much as and more than I thought about Jesus' life.
By the beginning of December, my spirit was almost completely suffocated because my relationship with Jesus was being mediated by men. The life commitment I had made to the UBF ministry did not bring a true commitment to Jesus and the Life found only in him, but a death to my spirit and a bondage to an organization and to a man. And I was leading my sheep into this same bondage. I began to see that this was not from the Spirit of the Lord. I had been afraid of knowing God's Spirit in his fullness because it reminded me of the brother's phone call in 1983. I had also been afraid of being drawn out alone with God, like Moses, for the same reason. But now I longed to be ruled by Jesus' Spirit, without the mediation of another person. So I cried out to the Lord to lead me into the desert, speak to me personally and let me be ruled by Him alone. I vowed to spend three days alone with Him and His Word after the Christmas worship service in order to choose a key verse for 1985. And this time, I decided, I would listen to whatever He was to tell me.
After the Christmas activities I kept this vow, and the Lord was completely faithful to help me. During my time alone with Him His Spirit taught me powerfully from His Word. The first thing I needed to do was to repent of looking at others rather than at Him. In the study of Jesus' genealogy, the message had talked about David, who, though he was a king, knew that he was not right with God. In David, Jesus showed me myself, and finally I repented of having listened to my Bible teacher above the Holy Spirit. For the first time, since that evening in the summer the veil separating me from Jesus was removed, and His peace enveloped me.
The next thing the Holy Spirit taught me was from Mark 7:8-13. This passage is Jesus' reply to the Pharisees who were judging the disciples according to their man made traditions rather than God's Word. He said, 'You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men. ... You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, 'Honor your father and mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' But you say that if a man says to his father or mother 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that." As I studied this passage the Holy Spirit showed me that I, as well as most of us in UBF, were committing this same sin: we were letting go of the commands of God for the sake of our traditions. The Word of God says, "'Honor your father and mother' - which is the first commandment with a promise - 'that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth'." (Ephesians 6:2,3), and, "Children obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord." (Colossians 3:20) His Word teaches that a disobedient or insolent attitude toward ones' parents is very displeasing to God (Lev. 20.9, Prov. 50:l7, Romans 1:30, 2 Timothy 3:2). Yet because of our 'absolute attitude' toward our traditions we were constantly pushing students to blatantly disobey their parents, even Christian parents, in order to attend our meetings, our practices, and our conferences. Thus we were reinforcing in them over and over again a disobedient spirit toward their parents. The Word of God says of believers who have widowed mothers, especially Christian widowed mothers, that "these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God .... If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." (I Tim. 5:4,8; see also James 1:27) Yet because of our tradition that a servant of God in UBF must leave all family matters behind and serve God exclusively 'through one-to-one Bible study', many students were prevented from obeying this Word. Thus the gospel of Jesus was defamed in the eye of those family members on account of our traditions.
We based our actions in these matters on Abraham's and the disciples' calls to leave their families in order to follow God. But while we are called to leave the worldly attitudes and actions of our past lives behind to follow Jesus, it is not always true that we are called physically to leave our families behind. There are other cases in God's Word when following Jesus meant taking care of one's family (1 Tim. 5:4-8) or being with them to tell of God's grace in one's life (Mark 5:18-20, Luke 8:58,39), and we in UBF were completely ignoring these. We had made following Jesus synonymous to taking part in UBF activities, rather than daily living in obedience to His Spirit and word. Thus we were making students' relationships with us equivalent to their relationships with God. I began to realize in how many ways I had made following our traditions synonymous with following Jesus in my life and in the lives of my sheep. I began to repent of this attitude and prayed for God to show me other ways in which I was putting our tradition above His Word.
As I looked for my key verse He answered this prayer. I had thought of choosing I Cor. 4:2, and so I studied I Cor. 1-4 to get the context of this verse. As I did this I saw the attitude which Paul had toward himself and other servants of Jesus. The Corinthians had begun taking pride in the servants that led them to Christ rather than in Christ alone and they had begun to boast about which servant they followed. As a result, this caused divisions in the church. Rather than letting them continue in it, Paul spent the first four chapters of this letter rebuking them for their proud and divisive attitude and explaining to them why it was wrong. In chapter 3 Paul describes the people of God as a field or a building, and all of God's servants as fellow workers on the same project, each one having a different, but equally important function. God had used Paul to plant the seed in the Corinthians and Apollos to water it. The emphasis, however, was never to be on them, for "neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow" (3:7). In chapter 4 he shows the way for the Corinthians to guard against this divisive spirit. He says in verse 6, "Now, brothers, I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, so that you may learn from us the meaning of the saying, "Do not go beyond what is written. Then you will not take pride in one man over against another." It was hard for me to look at these passages honestly because in their light I saw that our ministry had strayed from the truth. First of all we, like the Corinthians, were putting so much emphasis on the servants who had led us to Christ that they had become just as important to us as Jesus. Although we taught that God was the only one who could make things grow, we did not fully encourage the attitude that "neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything" because to do so would put our leaders on the same level as all other Christians. Because of our desire to be the spiritual elite of this nation and the desire for our sheep to remain with us and eventually serve in UBF, we kept ourselves, as well as our sheep, from fully accepting this attitude.
Second, I painfully realized that we were going way "beyond what is written" in our method of sogam and message training. We were giving students M. Samuel Lee's messages, telling them to closely base all of their sogams on them, and in many cases to memorize them. If they did not do this, our attitude toward them was that they did not have a learning mind. After a period of time in UBF, just to relieve the pressure put on them by us, students began trusting Samuel Lee's interpretations above all others. Eventually, they felt that they could not properly interpret the Word of God without the assistance of the manuscripts. Thus, we made them as dependent on Samuel Lee's interpretations as they were on the Word of God, and as dependent on Samuel Lee for interpretation as they should be only on the Holy Spirit.
This severe dependence on Samuel Lee was also causing a great division between those of us in UBF and the rest of Jesus' Body. We were taking pride In Samuel Lee's wisdom and his shepherd's heart to such an extent that we looked down on many other servants who did not seem to have his qualities. Therefore we had no qualms about drawing people away from their own churches and subtly pressuring them to commit themselves exclusively to UBF. We had no sense of coworking with the rest of Jesus's Church to build God's Building. Instead, we were building our own monument of '56l fulltime American shepherds' to God, and how the things we did or the way we did them affected the rest of Jesus' people made no difference to us. As I realized these things the Holy Spirit cut my heart as with a knife, for his truth was circumcising sins which were deeply ingrained in me. I cried out and prayed for Jesus to help me to obey Him.
Later that same day, New Years Eve, God spoke to me again through the Book of Galatians while I was making a tape of this book for a friend. When I got to the third chapter, the Holy Spirit once more began circumcising my heart, particularly through verses 1-3: "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very ages Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?" As God's Spirit worked in me, I saw that we were doing exactly what Paul rebuked the Galatians for doing, we had started out with the Spirit, but we had turned to depending on human effort to sustain and increase our faith. The Galatians had turned to circumcision; we had turned to human forms of 'training' Teaching and training in the ways of God by older Christians is both good and necessary for young believers. However, our overemphasis on the training given by us and our shepherds was working against what we wanted to accomplish through them, for they led us to constantly focus in on our weaknesses, rather than on Jesus, who is the only one who can do any real changing in us. Therefore, instead of freeing us from our sins through Jesus' Spirit, our trainings in many cases became like laws which bound us to our sins.
As I tried to justify our emphasis on training to God in my mind, Jesus convicted me strongly with the words of Galatians 5:1-4, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves he burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all .... You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ, you have fallen away from grace." In these words God showed me why my inner person had been in such chaos that entire fall; I had been alienated from Jesus and had fallen away from His grace. I was not being ruled by His Spirit, but by meetings, trainings, activities and the opinions of other people; and this to such an extent that I had no ears to hear what Jesus had for me to do each day. In my mind the will of God for me had been portrayed as being a UBF one-to-one Bible teacher, which included, along with feeding sheep, being absolutely faithful to all the meetings, never choosing to be with non-UBF members over being at a prayer meeting or group Bible study, and never missing a Sunday service. But I had become so run by these man-made schedules and our fixed conception of what it meant to follow God's will, that when the Holy Spirit had tried to lead me otherwise, I brushed His voice away as being 'my feelings detering me from my mission'. As the Spirit now continued to cut through my sin I saw how deaf I really had become to Him. I made a decision that afternoon to be ruled by Jesus' Spirit only, despite what my peers in UBF might say. I also repented of my wrong attitude toward M. Samuel Lee, acknowledging that his manuscripts must be viewed with the same attitude that I viewed other commentaries on the Bible. I decided to stick closely to the Bible itself.
That evening I went to a Monday night leaders meeting. for the first time in a year and a half I was not holding the people around me back from God. The peace and presence of the Lord's love in me was overwhelming. As I allowed Jesus' Spirit to take more control of me, I began seeing through new eyes; and what I saw that night disturbed me. As the intern shepherds expounded (in speaking on Jesus' birth in Luke 2:1-14) on the misery of man being ruled by other men and the joy that only comes through being ruled by Jesus, my spirit soared with the truth of these words. Yet as I looked around me, I saw that this exact thing was happening in our midst, and we were totally unaware of it. We claimed to have the freedom of Jesus, but we were living under oppression; oppressed by our sins and oppressed by the spirit of another man, M. Samuel Lee. We feared him and lived before him. Our eyes were on him, not on Jesus. As a result we did not have the power we should have had to overcome our sins, and we were remaining oppressed by them.
I prayed to the Lord to know whether what I was seeing was from Him or from myself, and as I did, two passages which I had read years before suddenly became very clear in my mind. These were Acts l8:24-26 and Acts I9:1-7. I remembered Apollos and the disciples of John, both of whom had known only of John's baptism of repentance. In ApoIlos' case he knew the Scriptures and could teach many things about Jesus that were accurate. However, there was a very important part of the gospel that both he and John's disciples needed to know: the fulfillment of John's baptism, which is life through Jesus' Spirit, whom He sent to give the believers the power they needed to overcome their sins and to serve Him as He wanted them to.
We had not talked very much about the Holy Spirit in UBF, except periodically in prayers or when He happened to come up in the passages we studied. But now, as Jesus opened my eyes to the purpose and importance of His Spirit, the whole New Testament opened up to me in a new way. I realized that the Word of God gives a much more important position to the Spirit than we were giving Him. It was after receiving the Spirit's power that the disciples were changed into bold witnesses of Jesus, not simply after their meeting of the risen Christ, as we had so often taught. And from the time of Acts 2 onward everything the apostles and other believers did was guided directly by His Spirit. It was this power that counseled them, that trained them, that guided each step of their lives, that instilled in them a passion to preach the gospel, and that united them with all other believers. Jesus did all of these things directly through His Spirit; He did not need the mediation of another person to do them. While he used many servants to lead His people, they never held the same position as the Holy Spirit in their lives. I realized that we were not fully acknowledging the power of God's Spirit to train His sheep completely and directly. And consequently, in our desire to 'raise them up' according to our ambitions for them, we were usurping the Spirit's role in their lives. We had begun like Apollos and John's disciples, but we had remained in this state for twenty years, building a ministry on an incomplete gospel. And because we had closed ourselves off from the counsel of other Christians, when God had sent them to us to correct us, we had stubbornly refused to listen.
That night, I realized that all of this is what Jesus had been trying to tell me for a year and a half. I was ashamed of my disobedience and prayed that He would somehow use me to help bring His people in UBF back to direct shepherding by His Spirit and to restored fellowship with the rest of His people. In order to do this I knew that I would need to learn how to follow His Spirit very closely above all other influences around me.
As the week went on I found out how hard this was to do in the UBF environment, because the emphasis on unquestioning obedience to the leadership was so strong and any thought which ran contrary to the UBF way of thinking was quickly eliminated by peer pressure. I knew from past experience that If I told my Bible teachers what I was learning from Jesus, they would most likely try to discredit it as being 'old Christian' reactions to the Word of God. I was still very influenced by them, and I knew it, so I said nothing.
As the week progressed God's Spirit continued to fill me with more and more of Jesus' love and power, and to draw my mind into His way thinking. It scared me a little and I resisted at points because it was drawing me away from a likeness of mind with other UBF members. But Jesus' love compelled me forward. Through the announcement of Jesus' birth to Mary in Luke 1 that week, he renewed the calling He had given me a year and a half before, to help the people in UBF see what Satan was doing among them. Later that week, on Thursday night, as I was struggling with His call and slipping into doubts as to whether it was from Him, He again spoke to me powerfully through Psalm 32, "I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you. Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you, Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord's unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him." (Ps. 32:8-10)
The next morning, through Psalm 146, Jesus touched one of my deepest problems, my dependence on my Bible teachers, and my fear to disagree with M. Samuel Lee. Verses 3-5 say, "Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God." I had always applied these verses to people such as my parents or a future husband, but had never allowed my self to fully apply them to Samuel Lee. Now I knew that God was calling me to do this. I repented of putting Samuel Lee and my other leaders on a level equal with Jesus.
That night I went to a Friday leaders meeting, and I could see even more clearly how far from Jesus' Spirit we had become. While we seemed to rejoice in Jesus' love, at the same time we continually praised the greatness of UBF and acted as if we were the only ones in Jesus Church truly obeying His call. We had cut ourselves off from the Body, like the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you!" (1 Cor. 12: 21). While we said that our service was to Jesus, this once-pure service to Jesus was now being spiritually prostituted to a god named UBF. We actually reveled in this sin, and we were drawing young believers to do the same. That night it became evident to me that something was desperately wrong, and that we had been shutting our eyes to it for a long time. As a result, our sin had been silently eating away at the purity of Jesus' gospel in our midst. In the horror of what I saw, I didn't know what to do except to pray. I realized that we needed help from Jesus and the rest of His people.
The next day was a strange day for me. I had an indescribable peace and joy because of the presence of Jesus' Spirit in me, but at the same time I was disturbed at the things He was showing me. I felt as if He were leading me into something that I did not understand. That night, after music practice, my parents took me to see some Christian counselors, whom some people call "deprogrammers", although they themselves do not like to be called that. It was through this that the Lord 'drew me out into the desert' to be alone with Him, just as I had prayed. At first I was very angry with my parents, feeling that they had given in to the "deprogramming scare". But the more I prayed about it the more I saw that God had led this counseling and had been preparing me for it for two weeks. I was assured by His Spirit that the men who were to speak to me were His servants, and I was to pay close attention to the Words of God that we were to study in depth over the next several days. As I did I saw that Jesus is serious about many more things which we had consistently ignored in UBF. These include our relationship to the rest of His Body, the superiority of His new covenant over the old covenant, and what is required of a man or woman who wants to be a leader or a teacher. Whenever anyone before had tried to bring up these areas, I had brushed their words off as being irrelevant and I judged them as being 'old Christians'. But after the two weeks of the Lord's teaching I had been through before the counseling, I realized that Jesus had given these guidelines in His Word for a reason, and we were to obey them. By ignoring these areas of God's Word UBF had given Satan a foothold. And by continually ignoring the servants God had sent over many years to correct her, Satan's foothold had grown even stronger.
I had known since before the counseling that God was changing my relationship with UBF. In continuing to serve in her as if there was nothing wrong, I had been sharing in UBF's sins with her. I knew that I could not do this any more. After many days of prayer I made a very painful decision to leave UBF. When I called M. Sarah Barry a week after the counseling had ended I did not tell her that I was leaving UBF because I wanted to do this soon afterward in person, explaining in detail God's call to me in 1983 and His work since then. However, during our conversation the Lord showed me how deeply influenced I was by her, for just hearing M. Sarah's voice almost made me forget everything that He had taught me. I realized then that before I could talk to her at length again I would need ample time to grow strong in Jesus‘ Spirit so that I would not be drawn into UBF's influence above what His Word had shown me. For this reason I wrote only a letter to M. Sarah explaining that because of some powerful working of God in my life I could no longer serve Jesus from within UBF in good conscience. I promised that later, as the Lord led, I would explain to her in detail what this work had been.
After that I began working on this testimony. For the first two and a half months, before writing, I concentrated on prayer and studying God's Word so that I could get my guidance from Him rather than writing down my own ideas. During that time Jesus made it very evident to me that I needed a lot of healing and growth before I could say what needed to be said clearly. This is the reason it took me so long to complete this testimony.
In September of l985 I finished the testimony in the form of a letter to M. Sarah Barry. I had asked my pastor to be present with me to discuss the content of the letter with M. Sarah. I did this because of the Lord's command that "every matter must be established by two or three witnesses" (Deut 19:15), and also Jesus' command that after we have gone to a brother once alone and are not listened to, we should bring one or two witnesses (Matt. 18:15-17). I had gone to M. Sarah in 1983, and I knew that others from among Jesus' people had gone to her concerning the same matters and had not been listened to. Therefore I felt it was important to have a Christian witness present, and one whose intent was not to condemn M. Sarah but to seek the truth in Christ. This was the intent of my pastor. We both agreed that M. Sarah and he should have a chance to get to know each other first so that she would not feel uncomfortable or threatened in his presence. Early in October they met and talked, and M. Sarah agreed to meet with both of us. On the day after they had met, however, M. Sarah called and cancelled the agreement due to my not having shown up to sing on the Sunday that I went to see the counselors and because I "caused trouble" in UBF’s having to pay for the towing of Mary Petti's car. (We could not see the biblical basis or the reasoning behind this cancellation, for I could in no way have changed my situation at the time.) After much prayer for guidance after this cancellation, I have decided to send this testimony to you, for I feel it is important that each of you know why I left UBF.
Since I have left Jesus has been showing me what it means to submit to Him out of love, rather than fear of condemnation. He has been teaching me to follow the leading of His Spirit to help those who He sends to me. He has also been teaching me how to love and work together with others of His Body in humility. He is working powerfully throughout His Church these days, and I thank Him for the privilege of serving in Her. I praise Him for His mercy, and for His faithfulness. He is working to uphold David's kingdom with justice and righteoushess (Isaiah 9:7) May His Name be forever praised!
The defense that many UBF members have used for not taking seriously what other Christians have had to say concerning UBF's practices is the fact that Jesus has blessed UBF and therefore it cannot come under condemnation from others. The attitude among the leaders seems to be that if there is a problem within UBF, the only way God will solve it is to reveal it to Samuel Lee so that Samuel Lee will solve it. They do not seem to think it necessary for M. Samuel Lee to be accountable to other Christians for his actions. However, in my understanding this contradicts much of the Bible. As I read the New Testament I do not come across any servant of God who was above the correction of his fellow Christians. Jesus used all parts of the Church to correct each others' sins; He had to, because the people from within the same groups were often blind to the same sins. When Peter was in the wrong in Antioch, Paul rebuked him, not another Jewish Christian from Jerusalem, for it was the wrong attitude of many of the Jerusalem Christians that had influenced Peter to sin in the first place. (Gal. 2:11-21) Similarly, Paul did not consider himself above the counsel of the Jerusalem apostles and elders, nor did he consider his Gentile churches to be, even though the Jerusalem believers were not directly involved in their ministry. He submitted the to elders' direction to take part in the purification rites of some Jewish believers for the sake of keeping peace among the Household of God. (Acts 21:17-26) The Gentile Churches also obeyed the letter of counsel given to them from the elders in Jerusalem, even though they seemed to have had nothing directly to do with their own conversion. (Act 16:4,5)
I do not know how many servants the Lord has sent to UBF to correct the points brought up in this letter, but I suspect that over the last 10 years it has been many. But (and I say this with tears) I believe that the leaders have become so accustomed to ignoring the warnings in order not stop world mission expansion that it has become inconceivable in their minds that they are from the Lord. It is because other servants have experienced this deafness from UBF members for so long that they have felt it necessary to use such extreme measures as the counseling that I went through to get through to those in UBF.
UBF is assuming that it is for bearing the Name of Jesus that she has been suffering during the last few years, and therefore her attitude has been to 'tighten up the ranks' and work even harder at raising up UBF shepherds. However, it is not for bearing Jesus' Name that UBF has been having trouble. It is for planting attitudes and actions in young believers which are not of Him. UBF's 'tightening up of the ranks' and pushing forward without honest self examination in the light of God's whole Word and without acknowledgement of His Spirit working through other servants has become like the attitude of the Israelites in Isaiah 9:8-12. "The bricks have fallen, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled, but we will replace them with cedars." (Isaiah 9:10) Based on what the Lord has shown me, as well as a number of other Christians, in His Word since the time of my leaving last year, I believe that if UBF does not begin to listen to the servants sent to her, He will be forced to exert the same kind of judgement on her as He did on Israel when she did not listen to those sent to her in Isaiah 30:9-14. "Because you have rejected this message, relied on oppression and depended on deceit, this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses suddenly, in an instant." Isaiah 30:12, 13)
Brothers and sisters in Christ, for this reason I implore you to consider prayerfully before God alone the words of this testimony. I do not want to make any of you doubt the grace of Jesus you may have received during your time in UBF. I know that He used my time in UBF to expose me to His Word and to teach me some valuable lessons. If He has called you to Himself and you have received Him while you have been in UBF, do not doubt that salvation. But now continue in Him and learn how to distinguish between His voice and man's. He loves you too much to share His place in your life with anyone. If things seem confusing to you now, don't be afraid; call out to Jesus. He is your Shepherd, and He will lead you.
"Trust in the Lord with all you heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your path." Proverbs 3:6
In the love of Jesus Christ,
Chris J.
(Original scanned copy can be found here. Letter written by Chris J., ex member of UBF. Chris is the daughter of the late Dwight J., a Swedish Covenant minister. Chris was the UBF sheep of Sarah Barry at the U. of Chicago. She was, at one time, arranged to marry a Columbus UBF member named John W. Her account of her "deprogramming" does not resemble the stories told about "deprogramming" by UBF's leaders at the time, as usual.)
I came to UBF in 1979 as a senior in high school. At a time in my life when I was questioning my faith, God used the Bible study I received in UBF to confirm in me the truth of His Word and of Jesus Christ. I continued studying with Sarah Barry throughout my freshman year at North Park College in Chicago. That year I grew much as she gave me the room to learn from God's Spirit personally. I also grew to love M. Sarah and our one-to-one study very much. However, there were a few things which prevented me from becoming fully involved in UBF and from encouraging my friends to do so. I saw the pressure that was put on the students to belong exclusively to UBF and the guilt it placed on them; I was wary of the attitude I sensed in the members towards other Christian ministries; and I was disturbed by the members' attitude toward Samuel Lee. At the end of my freshman year I left UBF because of these questions. I returned the following fall, however, because I missed the one-to-one Bible study and the zeal which I felt was lacking in my church. I was relieved to have returned. Yet I still did not have peace about the attitudes that were present in UBF. Throughout that sophomore year I struggled intensely with this problem. At the same time, I began to associate Jesus with the demand for exclusive allegiance to UBF, and I became afraid of Him. In my fear I ran from Him and opened myself up to Satan, who oppressed me with insecurity and guilt. That year was hellish for me because I allowed fear to separate me from my God. But Jesus, my beautiful Good Shepherd, stood by me until I could call out to him. When I cried out to Him in the spring He answered and drew me to Himself through His Word. Jesus used that year in my life to teach me His mercy and the danger of running away from Him for any reason. That summer He showed me that He was leading my life and that I was to keep my eyes On Him alone. However, while He gave me the increased assurance of His presence with me, I was never brought to rest about the attitudes present in UBF.
The next year I transferred from North Park to the University of Chicago. I learned a lot that year about the nonChristian world, and my desire to help the people around me in Christ grew as I studied the Bible with a number of students. However, at the same time I was burdened by two things which prevented me from living in the freedom of Jesus that I taught my Bible students about. First was a gnawing term of slavery to the sins which I continually tried to overcome. Second was the burden of unrest concerning the unchecked power of Samuel Lee in UBF. This had not left me, although by now I really wished it would.
During the winter and spring of 1983, Jesus showed me the cause of my inability to overcome my sins. It was because I was not remaining in Him like a branch to the Vine, and I was not claiming the victory over my sins that He won through His death and resurrection. Through John 15, Mark 16, and Romans 1-8, Jesus began to show me what it meant to live by faith in His power and that I was to live by His Spirit, not by my own strength or by the law. That spring I experienced freedom that I had not known before. I fell in love with Jesus all over again and my only desire was to please Him. During that time, however, in my new found joy and my desire to be open to God in everything, I also began to open myself up to attitudes which were not of Him. Because it had been through UBF that God's Word came to me, I reasoned that everything that UBF did must be alright. I become ready to do almost anything that my friends in UBF felt was God's will for me. This included cutting off all contact with my family, former church members, and many other Christians, for in interpreting Hebrews 11:24-26 I identified them with my life in sin, and identified only UBF as "God's people". I began to think that in God's eyes we were somewhat more special than other Christians because we were working harder and persecuted more. I began to suspect most other Christians and felt truly comfortable only around other UBF believers, putting full confidence only in the words of Sarah Barry and Samuel Lee. As time went on, although I believed I was following Jesus in these attitudes, I was moving away from Him.
But again, Jesus is my faithful Shepherd, and He would not allow me to do this. Toward the end of my junior year in 1983 I felt as though He were preparing me for something. On the day that I came home for summer break I found out what it was. I received a phone call from a Christian friend of mine who said that the Lord had been leading him all week to call me. The last I had heard of him, he had been studying the Bible with UBF, as well as going to his own church. When he told me he had stopped studying with UBF and I asked him why, he proceeded to tell me of God's work in his life which led him to make this decision. As he spoke of Jesus' work I began to sense Jesus' presence very strongly in our conversation, both confirming the words he spoke and also commanding me to pay close attention to what he was about to say. The phrase, "The strong hand of the Lord upon me" (Ezek. 3:14b) became a reality to me, for the Lord's Spirit surrounded me in peace, love and power. By the middle of our conversation I knew that Jesus had sent this servant to speak His words to me, and that I was to listen closely.
God had worked in this brother powerfully throughout 1982 through a personal study of His Word, bringing him into a new understanding of Jesus and the Person and work of His Spirit. In the fall of that year he began studying with UBF while continuing in his personal study and going to his church. While he liked the one-to-one study, at the same time there began growing in his spirit a sense of danger about what was going on in UBF as a whole. As this sense grew he cried out to God to know whether it was just his own feelings and fears or whether it was the Spirit warning him about something. In November, Jesus brought him to a complete surrender to His Spirit and He then slowly gave him the discernment he had prayed for. He allowed Jesus' Spirit to shepherd him daily, and as he did the Lord made it evident to him that the sense of danger which he had was not just his feelings, but the Holy Spirit's warning. He saw that Jesus' power to shepherd his people directly was not fully being acknowledged, and as a result the relationship which Jesus meant to have with His people -- their complete Shepherd through His Spirit -- was wrongly being held by the leaders In UBF. Through a study of Moses' call in Exodus, which included with it several times of 'being drawn out alone' with God to be taught by Him, the Lord called this brother to leave UBF and go on to the ministry He would have for him. Because UBF had persistently remained in her error, he was not to lead anyone back into UBF the way it stood. He obeyed and left, and that year the Lord used him powerfully in the lives of a number of people as he followed the leading of the Spirit.
Throughout the conversation I tried to justify all of UBF's practices both to the brother and to myself. I had heard all these words many times before, both from myself and other people, and had learned to pass them off as being human words from people who did not understand Samuel Lee or what went on in UBF. But this time the message came with a power and a conviction that was not of man, but of God. I struggled against the Spirit's conviction at length, but when I could no longer do this I fell at Jesus' feet and prayed, "Lord Jesus, help me! If what he is saying is from you, let me know, and give me the courage to obey you. If not, then protect my mind and heart from doubt. Just help me to obey you." As I kept my eyes on Jesus He filled me with His peace and also confirmed to me through His Spirit that what my friend said was from Him. That night after we had hung up the Lord spoke to me powerfully through Ezekiel chapters 1-3. I saw the absolute unity between the living creatures and the spirit that led them. As I read this passage God's Spirit overshadowed me with the holiness and love of God. With trembling I knew that the Lord was calling me into the same kind of oneness with His Spirit that the living creatures had with the spirit that led them (1:12, 19-21). In the passages that follow Ezekiel is called to speak God's Words to His people. However, they would not listen to him (2:4,7). Nonetheless, he was to speak the words God gave him (2:5,7-3:3). He was not to be afraid of them, no matter what they said or did to him, for God would make him as strong as they were (3:8-11). God's holiness and power had never been made so clear to me. I could sense in Him the tremendous love that He had for the people in UBF, and yet also a righteous hatred of sin. I could see that He wanted us to know we were sinning against Him in many of our attitudes and practices. He did not show the favoritism between His children that we thought He did; and He did not look with favor on the overuse of authority practiced by our leaders and ourselves. He wanted our relationships and the relationships of our sheep with Himself to be pure, mediated only by Jesus and His Spirit, not by other men. Like Ezekiel I was to open my heart to the Words His Spirit would give me, and as He opened up the way, I was to speak to Sarah Barry about what I had been told by this brother. I was simply to do this and to follow whatever His leading would be after that. The words of 3:20,21 were a warning to me, "…when a righteous man turns from his righteousness and does evil, and I put a stumbling block before him, he will die. Since you did not warn him, he will die for his sin. The righteous things he did will not be remembered, and I will hold you accountable for his blood, But if you do warn the righteous man not to sin and he does not sin, he will surely live because he took warning, and you will have saved yourself."
As I kept my eyes on Jesus He gave me strength to accept His Words, and His Spirit enveloped me in peace. But soon I took my eyes off Him end became afraid that He would lead me out of UBF if Sarah Barry did not pay attention to what I would say. I then fell into doubt and fear and thought, "How can I do this? Sarah Barry and Sarah B. will be so hurt. They've heard all of this from me before; they'll just think it's from myself again. Can this really be from God?' He led me into UBF. Now He can't be leading me away!" I made the mistake of placing my security and life's direction in the ministry I was in rather than in God Himself and Jesus my risen Lord. Because of this sin I fought with God for two weeks. But His Spirit never left me alone. He haunted me day and night with His call and with Proverbs 3:5,6, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths." Despite His patience I let His Words drop to the ground. Finally I asked Him for proof that things in UBF were really as displeasing to Him as the brother had testified to, and that Sunday through His servant at my parents' church He gave it to me. In 1 Cor. 1 and 2 He showed me how displeasing it is for us to take pride in men rather than in Jesus alone, because it causes us to think like children and to divide off from other believers. I knew He was speaking directly to me concerning UBF. But as soon as I got into the UBF environment I shut my ears to His Words. Finally, when I could not stand the Spirit's haunting any longer I agreed to talk to Sarah Barry.
On the night that I was to talk to her, Jesus strengthened me through Genesis 22:8. In a very real way I was being called to offer up my Isaac, for I had grown to love Sarah Barry and UBF more than even my own family. However, the Lord's Word to me was "love the Lord more that the people you love, and He will provide.'' I was to keep my eyes on Jesus, and His Spirit would give me the words I was to say. His grace end peace surrounded me again when I looked to Him. However, I did not make a clear decision to keep my eyes on Him, and as a result, when I saw M. Sarah Barry, I watered down the message that the Lord had waited to give through me. I told her the brother's testimony apologetically, but asked her to seriously pray with me about why the Lord had led him away.
After I told her his testimony, she did not take seriously his reason for leaving. She seemed determined tied to defend UBF and Samuel Lee and unable to believe that God could have led someone away from UBF because there was something wrong in our ministry. Rather, she called into question the brother's real motives for leaving, stating that there was probably something that he did not want to give up which he knew he would have to if he remained in UBF.
Later that night I was rebuked by my Bible teacher for having hurt Sarah Barry by what I had said. After that night a battle began in my heart which lasted until the end of 1983. I knew that the call really had been from the Lord. Yet because I did not want to be rebuked again or try to go against the strong current of UBF's tide, I tried hard to deny that the phone call in June had ever taken place. I tried to convince myself that it was only my friend's human concern for me, and that Satan had used this call to plant doubt in me to slow me down in my mission. To combat this doubt I tried to take part in UBF's activities all the more vigorously, putting all my strength into conference preparations, etc.. I tried to put up a spiritual front around my sheep and other people in UBF. Yet the reality was that I was running away from Jesus' Spirit, and my spirit was dying. Sogams became increasingly harder to write, because in order to honestly accept God's Word I would have to repent and do what Jesus had called me to do: to clearly stand before M. Sarah Barry and state that UBF was sinning before Cod. Thus sogams became 'form sogams', written more in the exact pattern of the manuscripts, which may have pleased some others, but did not please God, as the sincere sogams of the spring before had. Periodically, I revealed to Sarah Barry or my Bible teacher what was bothering me. On those occasions my Bible teacher suggested that if I still had such problems with Samuel Lee, why didn't I go to another church? I couldn't accept the possibility of God calling me away from UBF, so I clung to the fact that God had led me to UBF over two years earlier and insisted, "No! God has called me here." By the end of 1983 my heart had become so wounded by my disobedience, doubt, fear and confusion that I experienced again what death it was to have cut myself off from God. After being raised up so high the spring before, this fall was harder and the hell I experienced again was deeper than anything I had ever been though in my lifetime. I again cried out for God's mercy, vowing never to allow myself to run so far from Jesus again. I made a decision to write sogams on Luke every week and to accept whatever point the Holy Spirit would give me from each passage. I also decided to talk to at least one person a day about Jesus and invite them to study the Bible in order to force myself to follow the Spirit's leading. I still was not ready to accept Jesus' call of the summer before, but I was stepping in the right direction.
My amazing and merciful God honored even this half obedient prayer and as I accepted His Word from His Spirit, He slowly restored my relationship with Him and my ministry. As I looked to the Holy Spirit for wisdom in teaching my Bible students, He gave it to me. Many of you in Chicago witnessed the fruit that was born in both their lives and mine.
Eventually, as I grew stronger, Jesus in his mercy again began showing me where my obedience to some of UBF's standards was causing me to look away from Him and His Word. This occurred first in the spring, when He made it clear to me that He wanted me to attend the graduation of my second brother, who had been questioning in his faith for a while. I was to go to encourage him in Jesus' love and speak the words the Holy Spirit would give me. However, to do so I would have to miss a Sunday worship service, which was virtually unthinkable for a shepherdess. As I prayed about the decision, Jesus spoke to me that morning through His Word. Through Mark 2:23-3:6 (which is Jesus' defense of His disciples' actions on the Sabbath and His healing of the man with a shriveled hand), He showed me that He was to be the Lord of my Sabbath, not the Sunday worship service. If He was calling me to see my brother in His Name in order to contribute to the saving of my brother's life, I was to go. However, rather than going through the struggle with my Bible teacher in trying to explain my reason for missing Sunday's service, I disobeyed the Spirit's leading and stayed home. My decision was seen as a spiritual one by those in UBF who knew about it, but in reality I had ignored the Holy Spirit's voice in order to submit to our UBF tradition of absolute attendance to the UBF Sunday worship service.
The second major case like this, when the strong pressure of UBF's traditions influenced me to disobey Jesus, came in the late summer. The previous November Samuel Lee had told me to pray about marriage with John W. from Columbus. In January of 1984 I told Samuel Lee that if it was the Lord's will, I would marry him. As I continued to pray about it throughout that year, however, I received no confirmation from God that this was His will. In fact, His Spirit seemed to put a sense of danger in my heart toward this arrangement. I wondered if this were only my feelings, or if I was placing expectations on John that he could not live up to. So I let go of all expectations that I had on him and decided to accept him without condition. When he came to Chicago in July for message preparation I began to like him. Despite all of this, however, the unrest in my spirit only grew. That week, through Genesis 21, God spoke to me concerning him. He forewarned me not to give my heart to the blessing which seemed good humanly but was not the blessing of His choosing. He gave me a sense that He was going to bring about a change in the marriage plans. I was to wait and see what He would do. In my desire to make some sense out of M. Samuel Lee's strong position in this arrangement, I grabbed on to the words in Genesis 21:12, "Listen to whatever Sarah tells you", applying "Sarah" to M. Samuel Lee, and I decided to watch closely to Samuel Lee's direction. Now, however, as I have since been learning how to discern and follow the Holy Spirit's leading, I have come to see that the spirit which led me to make that comparison was different than that of God.
A few weeks later, when John started talking about coming to my graduation, I cried out to the Lord because of my unrest, and He gave me the assurance that He had heard my cry and would do something about my situation. A few days later my Bible teacher made a deadline of that night for me to make a decision one way or the other concerning my engagement. I realized that if I had such severe unrest about it, it could not be God's will, and I should not let the engagement go on any farther. When I decided this, it was as if a veil which separated me from Jesus was lifted. It was more than just a burden lifted from me, but it was an overwhelming sense of His presence with me and a deep conviction of the truth of His gospel. I realized that this was the change in plans that He had given me a sense about. I knew that I had made the right decision before God.
That night, however, after I had told my Bible teacher of my decision, Sarah Barry, and then she, called me to persuade me to reconsider my decision. In the eyes of them both I was failing the test of faith and letting go of God's blessing. My Bible teacher emphasized obedience to Samuel Lee as showing my obedience to God. In my heart I knew that I was obeying God in my present decision. However, in my tiredness I took my eyes off of Jesus and again put them on the people around me. As I looked back at the passage in Genesis 21 without my spiritual eyes focused straight ahead on Jesus, I became scared that I had not completely followed through in watching for Samuel Lee's direction. Before I knew it, I had allowed myself to be talked into changing my decision back to the original one, not giving myself time to pray about it.
From that time on, the veil separating me from Jesus, which had been removed earlier that evening, was replaced by a thicker one. My soul could see no light from God before me, and my spirit felt lost and frightened. This decision was a very significant one for me; in it I had finally fully committed myself to UBF for life and submitted to Samuel Lee's authority in my life. But while I felt 'obedient', it was obedience to the wrong spirit. True obedience to God, although it may be hard, brings peace and confidence, for "the fruit of righteousness will be peace; the effect of righteousness will be quietness and confidence forever" (Isaiah 32:16b). The kind of obedience I was experiencing brought only unrest, confusion, darkness and fear.
Strangely, this 'obedience' also brought with it the shut down of all compassion or understanding from my heart. The only thing I thought I should be concerned with was clarity, and so it was much easier to rebuke people without thinking or caring about them, and to do it with a feeling of authority. Tolerance for people who left UBF fled me and I began to despise them. I also began to despise other Christians who did not seem to have a 'specific mission' like mine. My heart grew stone cold, and I became like a machine.
While all of this was happening to me, I tried over and over to convince myself that I was in God's will, and that the spiritual blackness I was experiencing was just my feelings. However, I knew in my heart that this was not true. The truth was that the Lord had hidden His face from me to bring me to repentance, and like the Psalmist, I 'was totally dismayed (Ps. 30:7) Finally I cried out to God that if my misery was because I was disobeying His will in my engagement to John W., He would do something big to make it evident to all involved that it was not His will that we marry.
About five days later John was discovered missing. We later found out that he was being 'deprogrammed'. I was sad and worried for him, but I was also thankful because God had answered my prayer. He was getting me out of what I could not get myself out of. This was the reason why I baffled everyone by being so strong while John was missing.
After that, even though I was relieved, I still was not at rest with God because I had not repented of listening to my Bible teacher above the Holy Spirit. I did not because in doing so I would be acknowledging that unconditional submission to my leaders was not always the Lord's will for me and that in the future I would have to discern between the Spirit's leading and man's. The number of times that I had mentioned to M. Sarah Barry that I had not been in God's will she insisted that I should have no regrets about my decision to marry John. In her eyes I had fulfilled obedience to God's servant and thus had no more responsibility before God. She did not seem to take into consideration the fact that we are each responsible to seek out and obey God's will personally. The Israelites were not excused for disobeying God because they had followed their leaders' guidance (Isaiah 9:16,17). In my fear to disagree with M. Sarah I remained in my sin.
In His faithful love, Jesus would not leave me alone until I had fully repented, and He haunted me with my sin. At the same time He began showing me the direction in which we were leading our Bible students at U. of C.. We were slowly leading them to depend on us and our ministry rather than on Jesus alone. We had a fixed system of leadership training through which we were already starting to put a few of them, and if they could not conform to it they were subtly being made to feel guilty through our pressure. I was extremely disturbed over this because I did not believe that this pressure was from Jesus.
Personally, I also began to feel a bondage in my mind and soul which was not from Jesus, As I 'rose in rank', coworking with Mary Petti in heading the. U. of C. ministry, my dependence on Sarah Barry, on my Bible teacher, and on M. Samuel Lee also grew. Now, instead of looking to the Holy Spirit for words during my Bible studies, I was getting them from my Bible teacher. I became afraid to search the Holy Spirit's leading for myself because of the number of times that it had been different from hers. As a leader I also knew that my life and ministry were being watched by M. Samuel Lee and I found myself living before him more and more. His and Sarah Barry's opinions became the standard by which I judged whether something was spiritual or not; if they approved of it, I regarded it as spiritual, even if it went against the Word of God. If they did not regard it as spiritual, it was not. In nearly every area of my life they had become my standard, for I thought about their lives as much as and more than I thought about Jesus' life.
By the beginning of December, my spirit was almost completely suffocated because my relationship with Jesus was being mediated by men. The life commitment I had made to the UBF ministry did not bring a true commitment to Jesus and the Life found only in him, but a death to my spirit and a bondage to an organization and to a man. And I was leading my sheep into this same bondage. I began to see that this was not from the Spirit of the Lord. I had been afraid of knowing God's Spirit in his fullness because it reminded me of the brother's phone call in 1983. I had also been afraid of being drawn out alone with God, like Moses, for the same reason. But now I longed to be ruled by Jesus' Spirit, without the mediation of another person. So I cried out to the Lord to lead me into the desert, speak to me personally and let me be ruled by Him alone. I vowed to spend three days alone with Him and His Word after the Christmas worship service in order to choose a key verse for 1985. And this time, I decided, I would listen to whatever He was to tell me.
After the Christmas activities I kept this vow, and the Lord was completely faithful to help me. During my time alone with Him His Spirit taught me powerfully from His Word. The first thing I needed to do was to repent of looking at others rather than at Him. In the study of Jesus' genealogy, the message had talked about David, who, though he was a king, knew that he was not right with God. In David, Jesus showed me myself, and finally I repented of having listened to my Bible teacher above the Holy Spirit. For the first time, since that evening in the summer the veil separating me from Jesus was removed, and His peace enveloped me.
The next thing the Holy Spirit taught me was from Mark 7:8-13. This passage is Jesus' reply to the Pharisees who were judging the disciples according to their man made traditions rather than God's Word. He said, 'You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men. ... You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, 'Honor your father and mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' But you say that if a man says to his father or mother 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban' (that is, a gift devoted to God), then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that." As I studied this passage the Holy Spirit showed me that I, as well as most of us in UBF, were committing this same sin: we were letting go of the commands of God for the sake of our traditions. The Word of God says, "'Honor your father and mother' - which is the first commandment with a promise - 'that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth'." (Ephesians 6:2,3), and, "Children obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord." (Colossians 3:20) His Word teaches that a disobedient or insolent attitude toward ones' parents is very displeasing to God (Lev. 20.9, Prov. 50:l7, Romans 1:30, 2 Timothy 3:2). Yet because of our 'absolute attitude' toward our traditions we were constantly pushing students to blatantly disobey their parents, even Christian parents, in order to attend our meetings, our practices, and our conferences. Thus we were reinforcing in them over and over again a disobedient spirit toward their parents. The Word of God says of believers who have widowed mothers, especially Christian widowed mothers, that "these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God .... If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." (I Tim. 5:4,8; see also James 1:27) Yet because of our tradition that a servant of God in UBF must leave all family matters behind and serve God exclusively 'through one-to-one Bible study', many students were prevented from obeying this Word. Thus the gospel of Jesus was defamed in the eye of those family members on account of our traditions.
We based our actions in these matters on Abraham's and the disciples' calls to leave their families in order to follow God. But while we are called to leave the worldly attitudes and actions of our past lives behind to follow Jesus, it is not always true that we are called physically to leave our families behind. There are other cases in God's Word when following Jesus meant taking care of one's family (1 Tim. 5:4-8) or being with them to tell of God's grace in one's life (Mark 5:18-20, Luke 8:58,39), and we in UBF were completely ignoring these. We had made following Jesus synonymous to taking part in UBF activities, rather than daily living in obedience to His Spirit and word. Thus we were making students' relationships with us equivalent to their relationships with God. I began to realize in how many ways I had made following our traditions synonymous with following Jesus in my life and in the lives of my sheep. I began to repent of this attitude and prayed for God to show me other ways in which I was putting our tradition above His Word.
As I looked for my key verse He answered this prayer. I had thought of choosing I Cor. 4:2, and so I studied I Cor. 1-4 to get the context of this verse. As I did this I saw the attitude which Paul had toward himself and other servants of Jesus. The Corinthians had begun taking pride in the servants that led them to Christ rather than in Christ alone and they had begun to boast about which servant they followed. As a result, this caused divisions in the church. Rather than letting them continue in it, Paul spent the first four chapters of this letter rebuking them for their proud and divisive attitude and explaining to them why it was wrong. In chapter 3 Paul describes the people of God as a field or a building, and all of God's servants as fellow workers on the same project, each one having a different, but equally important function. God had used Paul to plant the seed in the Corinthians and Apollos to water it. The emphasis, however, was never to be on them, for "neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow" (3:7). In chapter 4 he shows the way for the Corinthians to guard against this divisive spirit. He says in verse 6, "Now, brothers, I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, so that you may learn from us the meaning of the saying, "Do not go beyond what is written. Then you will not take pride in one man over against another." It was hard for me to look at these passages honestly because in their light I saw that our ministry had strayed from the truth. First of all we, like the Corinthians, were putting so much emphasis on the servants who had led us to Christ that they had become just as important to us as Jesus. Although we taught that God was the only one who could make things grow, we did not fully encourage the attitude that "neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything" because to do so would put our leaders on the same level as all other Christians. Because of our desire to be the spiritual elite of this nation and the desire for our sheep to remain with us and eventually serve in UBF, we kept ourselves, as well as our sheep, from fully accepting this attitude.
Second, I painfully realized that we were going way "beyond what is written" in our method of sogam and message training. We were giving students M. Samuel Lee's messages, telling them to closely base all of their sogams on them, and in many cases to memorize them. If they did not do this, our attitude toward them was that they did not have a learning mind. After a period of time in UBF, just to relieve the pressure put on them by us, students began trusting Samuel Lee's interpretations above all others. Eventually, they felt that they could not properly interpret the Word of God without the assistance of the manuscripts. Thus, we made them as dependent on Samuel Lee's interpretations as they were on the Word of God, and as dependent on Samuel Lee for interpretation as they should be only on the Holy Spirit.
This severe dependence on Samuel Lee was also causing a great division between those of us in UBF and the rest of Jesus' Body. We were taking pride In Samuel Lee's wisdom and his shepherd's heart to such an extent that we looked down on many other servants who did not seem to have his qualities. Therefore we had no qualms about drawing people away from their own churches and subtly pressuring them to commit themselves exclusively to UBF. We had no sense of coworking with the rest of Jesus's Church to build God's Building. Instead, we were building our own monument of '56l fulltime American shepherds' to God, and how the things we did or the way we did them affected the rest of Jesus' people made no difference to us. As I realized these things the Holy Spirit cut my heart as with a knife, for his truth was circumcising sins which were deeply ingrained in me. I cried out and prayed for Jesus to help me to obey Him.
Later that same day, New Years Eve, God spoke to me again through the Book of Galatians while I was making a tape of this book for a friend. When I got to the third chapter, the Holy Spirit once more began circumcising my heart, particularly through verses 1-3: "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very ages Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?" As God's Spirit worked in me, I saw that we were doing exactly what Paul rebuked the Galatians for doing, we had started out with the Spirit, but we had turned to depending on human effort to sustain and increase our faith. The Galatians had turned to circumcision; we had turned to human forms of 'training' Teaching and training in the ways of God by older Christians is both good and necessary for young believers. However, our overemphasis on the training given by us and our shepherds was working against what we wanted to accomplish through them, for they led us to constantly focus in on our weaknesses, rather than on Jesus, who is the only one who can do any real changing in us. Therefore, instead of freeing us from our sins through Jesus' Spirit, our trainings in many cases became like laws which bound us to our sins.
As I tried to justify our emphasis on training to God in my mind, Jesus convicted me strongly with the words of Galatians 5:1-4, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves he burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all .... You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ, you have fallen away from grace." In these words God showed me why my inner person had been in such chaos that entire fall; I had been alienated from Jesus and had fallen away from His grace. I was not being ruled by His Spirit, but by meetings, trainings, activities and the opinions of other people; and this to such an extent that I had no ears to hear what Jesus had for me to do each day. In my mind the will of God for me had been portrayed as being a UBF one-to-one Bible teacher, which included, along with feeding sheep, being absolutely faithful to all the meetings, never choosing to be with non-UBF members over being at a prayer meeting or group Bible study, and never missing a Sunday service. But I had become so run by these man-made schedules and our fixed conception of what it meant to follow God's will, that when the Holy Spirit had tried to lead me otherwise, I brushed His voice away as being 'my feelings detering me from my mission'. As the Spirit now continued to cut through my sin I saw how deaf I really had become to Him. I made a decision that afternoon to be ruled by Jesus' Spirit only, despite what my peers in UBF might say. I also repented of my wrong attitude toward M. Samuel Lee, acknowledging that his manuscripts must be viewed with the same attitude that I viewed other commentaries on the Bible. I decided to stick closely to the Bible itself.
That evening I went to a Monday night leaders meeting. for the first time in a year and a half I was not holding the people around me back from God. The peace and presence of the Lord's love in me was overwhelming. As I allowed Jesus' Spirit to take more control of me, I began seeing through new eyes; and what I saw that night disturbed me. As the intern shepherds expounded (in speaking on Jesus' birth in Luke 2:1-14) on the misery of man being ruled by other men and the joy that only comes through being ruled by Jesus, my spirit soared with the truth of these words. Yet as I looked around me, I saw that this exact thing was happening in our midst, and we were totally unaware of it. We claimed to have the freedom of Jesus, but we were living under oppression; oppressed by our sins and oppressed by the spirit of another man, M. Samuel Lee. We feared him and lived before him. Our eyes were on him, not on Jesus. As a result we did not have the power we should have had to overcome our sins, and we were remaining oppressed by them.
I prayed to the Lord to know whether what I was seeing was from Him or from myself, and as I did, two passages which I had read years before suddenly became very clear in my mind. These were Acts l8:24-26 and Acts I9:1-7. I remembered Apollos and the disciples of John, both of whom had known only of John's baptism of repentance. In ApoIlos' case he knew the Scriptures and could teach many things about Jesus that were accurate. However, there was a very important part of the gospel that both he and John's disciples needed to know: the fulfillment of John's baptism, which is life through Jesus' Spirit, whom He sent to give the believers the power they needed to overcome their sins and to serve Him as He wanted them to.
We had not talked very much about the Holy Spirit in UBF, except periodically in prayers or when He happened to come up in the passages we studied. But now, as Jesus opened my eyes to the purpose and importance of His Spirit, the whole New Testament opened up to me in a new way. I realized that the Word of God gives a much more important position to the Spirit than we were giving Him. It was after receiving the Spirit's power that the disciples were changed into bold witnesses of Jesus, not simply after their meeting of the risen Christ, as we had so often taught. And from the time of Acts 2 onward everything the apostles and other believers did was guided directly by His Spirit. It was this power that counseled them, that trained them, that guided each step of their lives, that instilled in them a passion to preach the gospel, and that united them with all other believers. Jesus did all of these things directly through His Spirit; He did not need the mediation of another person to do them. While he used many servants to lead His people, they never held the same position as the Holy Spirit in their lives. I realized that we were not fully acknowledging the power of God's Spirit to train His sheep completely and directly. And consequently, in our desire to 'raise them up' according to our ambitions for them, we were usurping the Spirit's role in their lives. We had begun like Apollos and John's disciples, but we had remained in this state for twenty years, building a ministry on an incomplete gospel. And because we had closed ourselves off from the counsel of other Christians, when God had sent them to us to correct us, we had stubbornly refused to listen.
That night, I realized that all of this is what Jesus had been trying to tell me for a year and a half. I was ashamed of my disobedience and prayed that He would somehow use me to help bring His people in UBF back to direct shepherding by His Spirit and to restored fellowship with the rest of His people. In order to do this I knew that I would need to learn how to follow His Spirit very closely above all other influences around me.
As the week went on I found out how hard this was to do in the UBF environment, because the emphasis on unquestioning obedience to the leadership was so strong and any thought which ran contrary to the UBF way of thinking was quickly eliminated by peer pressure. I knew from past experience that If I told my Bible teachers what I was learning from Jesus, they would most likely try to discredit it as being 'old Christian' reactions to the Word of God. I was still very influenced by them, and I knew it, so I said nothing.
As the week progressed God's Spirit continued to fill me with more and more of Jesus' love and power, and to draw my mind into His way thinking. It scared me a little and I resisted at points because it was drawing me away from a likeness of mind with other UBF members. But Jesus' love compelled me forward. Through the announcement of Jesus' birth to Mary in Luke 1 that week, he renewed the calling He had given me a year and a half before, to help the people in UBF see what Satan was doing among them. Later that week, on Thursday night, as I was struggling with His call and slipping into doubts as to whether it was from Him, He again spoke to me powerfully through Psalm 32, "I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you. Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you, Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord's unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him." (Ps. 32:8-10)
The next morning, through Psalm 146, Jesus touched one of my deepest problems, my dependence on my Bible teachers, and my fear to disagree with M. Samuel Lee. Verses 3-5 say, "Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God." I had always applied these verses to people such as my parents or a future husband, but had never allowed my self to fully apply them to Samuel Lee. Now I knew that God was calling me to do this. I repented of putting Samuel Lee and my other leaders on a level equal with Jesus.
That night I went to a Friday leaders meeting, and I could see even more clearly how far from Jesus' Spirit we had become. While we seemed to rejoice in Jesus' love, at the same time we continually praised the greatness of UBF and acted as if we were the only ones in Jesus Church truly obeying His call. We had cut ourselves off from the Body, like the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you!" (1 Cor. 12: 21). While we said that our service was to Jesus, this once-pure service to Jesus was now being spiritually prostituted to a god named UBF. We actually reveled in this sin, and we were drawing young believers to do the same. That night it became evident to me that something was desperately wrong, and that we had been shutting our eyes to it for a long time. As a result, our sin had been silently eating away at the purity of Jesus' gospel in our midst. In the horror of what I saw, I didn't know what to do except to pray. I realized that we needed help from Jesus and the rest of His people.
The next day was a strange day for me. I had an indescribable peace and joy because of the presence of Jesus' Spirit in me, but at the same time I was disturbed at the things He was showing me. I felt as if He were leading me into something that I did not understand. That night, after music practice, my parents took me to see some Christian counselors, whom some people call "deprogrammers", although they themselves do not like to be called that. It was through this that the Lord 'drew me out into the desert' to be alone with Him, just as I had prayed. At first I was very angry with my parents, feeling that they had given in to the "deprogramming scare". But the more I prayed about it the more I saw that God had led this counseling and had been preparing me for it for two weeks. I was assured by His Spirit that the men who were to speak to me were His servants, and I was to pay close attention to the Words of God that we were to study in depth over the next several days. As I did I saw that Jesus is serious about many more things which we had consistently ignored in UBF. These include our relationship to the rest of His Body, the superiority of His new covenant over the old covenant, and what is required of a man or woman who wants to be a leader or a teacher. Whenever anyone before had tried to bring up these areas, I had brushed their words off as being irrelevant and I judged them as being 'old Christians'. But after the two weeks of the Lord's teaching I had been through before the counseling, I realized that Jesus had given these guidelines in His Word for a reason, and we were to obey them. By ignoring these areas of God's Word UBF had given Satan a foothold. And by continually ignoring the servants God had sent over many years to correct her, Satan's foothold had grown even stronger.
I had known since before the counseling that God was changing my relationship with UBF. In continuing to serve in her as if there was nothing wrong, I had been sharing in UBF's sins with her. I knew that I could not do this any more. After many days of prayer I made a very painful decision to leave UBF. When I called M. Sarah Barry a week after the counseling had ended I did not tell her that I was leaving UBF because I wanted to do this soon afterward in person, explaining in detail God's call to me in 1983 and His work since then. However, during our conversation the Lord showed me how deeply influenced I was by her, for just hearing M. Sarah's voice almost made me forget everything that He had taught me. I realized then that before I could talk to her at length again I would need ample time to grow strong in Jesus‘ Spirit so that I would not be drawn into UBF's influence above what His Word had shown me. For this reason I wrote only a letter to M. Sarah explaining that because of some powerful working of God in my life I could no longer serve Jesus from within UBF in good conscience. I promised that later, as the Lord led, I would explain to her in detail what this work had been.
After that I began working on this testimony. For the first two and a half months, before writing, I concentrated on prayer and studying God's Word so that I could get my guidance from Him rather than writing down my own ideas. During that time Jesus made it very evident to me that I needed a lot of healing and growth before I could say what needed to be said clearly. This is the reason it took me so long to complete this testimony.
In September of l985 I finished the testimony in the form of a letter to M. Sarah Barry. I had asked my pastor to be present with me to discuss the content of the letter with M. Sarah. I did this because of the Lord's command that "every matter must be established by two or three witnesses" (Deut 19:15), and also Jesus' command that after we have gone to a brother once alone and are not listened to, we should bring one or two witnesses (Matt. 18:15-17). I had gone to M. Sarah in 1983, and I knew that others from among Jesus' people had gone to her concerning the same matters and had not been listened to. Therefore I felt it was important to have a Christian witness present, and one whose intent was not to condemn M. Sarah but to seek the truth in Christ. This was the intent of my pastor. We both agreed that M. Sarah and he should have a chance to get to know each other first so that she would not feel uncomfortable or threatened in his presence. Early in October they met and talked, and M. Sarah agreed to meet with both of us. On the day after they had met, however, M. Sarah called and cancelled the agreement due to my not having shown up to sing on the Sunday that I went to see the counselors and because I "caused trouble" in UBF’s having to pay for the towing of Mary Petti's car. (We could not see the biblical basis or the reasoning behind this cancellation, for I could in no way have changed my situation at the time.) After much prayer for guidance after this cancellation, I have decided to send this testimony to you, for I feel it is important that each of you know why I left UBF.
Since I have left Jesus has been showing me what it means to submit to Him out of love, rather than fear of condemnation. He has been teaching me to follow the leading of His Spirit to help those who He sends to me. He has also been teaching me how to love and work together with others of His Body in humility. He is working powerfully throughout His Church these days, and I thank Him for the privilege of serving in Her. I praise Him for His mercy, and for His faithfulness. He is working to uphold David's kingdom with justice and righteoushess (Isaiah 9:7) May His Name be forever praised!
The defense that many UBF members have used for not taking seriously what other Christians have had to say concerning UBF's practices is the fact that Jesus has blessed UBF and therefore it cannot come under condemnation from others. The attitude among the leaders seems to be that if there is a problem within UBF, the only way God will solve it is to reveal it to Samuel Lee so that Samuel Lee will solve it. They do not seem to think it necessary for M. Samuel Lee to be accountable to other Christians for his actions. However, in my understanding this contradicts much of the Bible. As I read the New Testament I do not come across any servant of God who was above the correction of his fellow Christians. Jesus used all parts of the Church to correct each others' sins; He had to, because the people from within the same groups were often blind to the same sins. When Peter was in the wrong in Antioch, Paul rebuked him, not another Jewish Christian from Jerusalem, for it was the wrong attitude of many of the Jerusalem Christians that had influenced Peter to sin in the first place. (Gal. 2:11-21) Similarly, Paul did not consider himself above the counsel of the Jerusalem apostles and elders, nor did he consider his Gentile churches to be, even though the Jerusalem believers were not directly involved in their ministry. He submitted the to elders' direction to take part in the purification rites of some Jewish believers for the sake of keeping peace among the Household of God. (Acts 21:17-26) The Gentile Churches also obeyed the letter of counsel given to them from the elders in Jerusalem, even though they seemed to have had nothing directly to do with their own conversion. (Act 16:4,5)
I do not know how many servants the Lord has sent to UBF to correct the points brought up in this letter, but I suspect that over the last 10 years it has been many. But (and I say this with tears) I believe that the leaders have become so accustomed to ignoring the warnings in order not stop world mission expansion that it has become inconceivable in their minds that they are from the Lord. It is because other servants have experienced this deafness from UBF members for so long that they have felt it necessary to use such extreme measures as the counseling that I went through to get through to those in UBF.
UBF is assuming that it is for bearing the Name of Jesus that she has been suffering during the last few years, and therefore her attitude has been to 'tighten up the ranks' and work even harder at raising up UBF shepherds. However, it is not for bearing Jesus' Name that UBF has been having trouble. It is for planting attitudes and actions in young believers which are not of Him. UBF's 'tightening up of the ranks' and pushing forward without honest self examination in the light of God's whole Word and without acknowledgement of His Spirit working through other servants has become like the attitude of the Israelites in Isaiah 9:8-12. "The bricks have fallen, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled, but we will replace them with cedars." (Isaiah 9:10) Based on what the Lord has shown me, as well as a number of other Christians, in His Word since the time of my leaving last year, I believe that if UBF does not begin to listen to the servants sent to her, He will be forced to exert the same kind of judgement on her as He did on Israel when she did not listen to those sent to her in Isaiah 30:9-14. "Because you have rejected this message, relied on oppression and depended on deceit, this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses suddenly, in an instant." Isaiah 30:12, 13)
Brothers and sisters in Christ, for this reason I implore you to consider prayerfully before God alone the words of this testimony. I do not want to make any of you doubt the grace of Jesus you may have received during your time in UBF. I know that He used my time in UBF to expose me to His Word and to teach me some valuable lessons. If He has called you to Himself and you have received Him while you have been in UBF, do not doubt that salvation. But now continue in Him and learn how to distinguish between His voice and man's. He loves you too much to share His place in your life with anyone. If things seem confusing to you now, don't be afraid; call out to Jesus. He is your Shepherd, and He will lead you.
"Trust in the Lord with all you heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your path." Proverbs 3:6
In the love of Jesus Christ,
Chris J.
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