4) The daily bread list of directors: One day you find that your name as Director was suddenly removed from the daily bread book without you knowing it and replaced with someone else.

5) The weekly Sunday report meeting for fellowship leaders: If you happened to miss a meeting as a fellowship leader, you may be asked to confess your “sin” in front of the other leaders and describe how you acted like Satan who disobeyed God.

6) The group conference photos: If you are not in them, you are considered as disloyal and disobedient by the leaders.

7) Payer topics: If you raise concerns of conscience or other issues you may find yourself on the prayer topic list of “those needing help”. My and my friend Tuf earned a spot on this weekly prayer topic list that goes to all leaders. It was said that we “needed prayers”. Disloyalty is seen as a sign of being unhealthy.

8) Your children: For parents you may be shamed by having your children compared to other “higher-performing” children in regard to school or instrument practice (and God forbid your children don’t want to play in the orchestra in ubf!). And according to the 2010 director’s slides I linked to in another comment, “healthy” marriages are only those who “produce children”. So in a strange sexual twist, if you are a newly married couple and DON’T have children for several years, you will be shamed for not producing the “1.7 average children needed to maintain the ubf workforce” (that is from another ubf teaching presentation by the way).

Writing clear ethical guidelines in the by-laws is good. The problem is the UBF by-laws are so boring that I could not bear to read it even to this day. Thanks, Chris, for deciphering it for me!

Yes, SL “taught” authoritarian abusive practices that are continuing to this very day in many parts of the UBF world. But in my opinion, repeatedly blaming him subtly shifts the responsibility from present UBF leaders. Sure, SL’s influence is pervasive. But the current leaders who currently practice such abuses must be continually called out to be accountable.

Presently, each person is responsible/accountable before God for his/her own sins. We cannot blame Adam for it, though Adam himself is responsible and accountable to God. Thus, perhaps channel the focus and blame not on SL (though he is responsible), but on the current leadership that in my opinion still refuses to come clean.

Also, in order to protect her own “holy image,” UBF categorically rejects anything they regard as “negative,” “discouraging” or “bashing” even if it is true. They “hate” UBFriends and will not consider what it said here simply because it is “negative.”

Boy, Jesus surely made mistakes like UBFriends for saying so many “negative things” against the religious leaders.

“Quite honestly, I doubt that you will ever get a reasonable reaction from leaders because they always seem quite happy to take up the power and exert some authority themselves.” :-(

but certainly the better/more excellent way is open honest communication, even if negative or mistaken at times: for then people can keep the good, change the bad, forgive one another/work together for God.

This is what I mean with UBF refusing to commit to the principles, rules and practices they are employing. They always want to stay ambiguous and never commit and admit anything. They want to be able to claim to the public that shaming and humiliation is bad and does not happen in UBF, and at the same time internally use and recommend it as a tool to mold disciples. What needs to happen is to push UBF to make a clear and unambiguous, official, written statement concerning such practices, and add this to their by-laws. It does not help to have some leaders apologize to somebody in a private talk behind closed doors. It is about general principles. UBF leaders must make a commitment to either fully support the principles of human rights and human dignity, or disdain and violate them under the name of disciple training, as Samuel Lee did and taught his followers. Only if leaders make such a commitment, followers can make an educated decision to obey and respect them as leaders or not.

1) Conference summary published online by senior chapter shepherds

First of all, never should a students or even shepherds full name be published online in todays world (only with consent). It can affect family relationships, friends and even an opportunity to get a job. Most people have learned to be careful because the internet can be a not so friendly place. After sharing my life testimony one time at a conference I was confronted with my family. They argued that they found my name and read what had been written. I know who the shepherd was and I was ashamed about it – because he should have known better when he reinterpreted my life testimony based on his own words and ideas. After reading the summary myself I had to admit to my family that it made them sound evil and terrible and that without them my life would have been better. I never said anything like that. I just confessed in my testimony that there were frequent problems between me and my family but that never meant that I did not love them. How grossly exaggerated online conference summaries can be when they attempt to capture what happened but miss the point because the auther is so blinded by their own ignorance. Who has to pay for the misinterpretation – the one who had been written about of course!

2) Being removed from a conference on the attendance list etc…

One year there was a retreat for young/senior leaders. I had been proposed as a group Bible study leader. Well, as a result of who I am and what I have done over the years the same shepherd who exaggerated the online summary argued against my role at this conference. Actually, he did not know one Friday meeting I had not yet left the church when we finished. I took some time to study in a Bible study room and heard the entire scene among the other senior leaders much to his unawareness. Later, I found out that the chapter director had no idea because I told him the reality after he prayed for my leadership in the conference. (Gotta love communication!) Anyhow, when the conference finally came I traveled and arrived at the site only to discover there was no trace of my name anywhere. I had not only been removed from the proposed role of group Bible study leader but I did not even have a name tag, or group to study with. I was truly humiliated because everyone knew me but no one could understand what had happened and none of my home chapter shepherds were willing to address the matter honestly. Thank goodness we had shared rooming because if we had single rooms where was I supposed to sleep?

3) Highlighting the verses as a messenger

Anyone who has done message preparation with certain leaders will know about this. Some may agree with me or disagree. This is not so much humiliating to me, however, it is uncomfortable when you are told what you need to do when delivering the message. On occassion, depending on the passage of course, members of the congregation are pre-selected to read a verse. Why? Because the director or leader believes that those people need to repent for their sin based on this or that verse. In theory I can agree, but we know the environment and what is going on. This is a subtle public method to shame people among their peers. When I was told to call on person A, person B and person C to read certain verses I was sorry in my heart. It was not for my humiliation but because I had been told to single these people out strategically. It is wrong. Reading verses is not the trouble, but singling out people so that they were “convicted” by the word of God is a shameful way to express sin to your brother. Like I said in my other comment for messages. Messages should be universal and more inpired so that you should not need to call people out.

Now we need to have an “absolute attitude” and a “sacrificial spirit” and “repent of our laziness” by having a clear goal and vision to “double the number” in one year by praying three times a day like Daniel!

Btw, Ralph played the power posture of cult (sub)leaders very well, emanating an intimidating authority very similar to Korean chapter directors in UBF. Another detail is the clothing. As you see in the movie, in the beginning and the end, Joe dressed casually according to his own style, but while in the JW org, he dressed like the others, with suit and tie. He was forced to feign a different personality which he did not really have. It seems even clothing can tell a lot about whether a person is integer or not.

His final reproach to the JWs was “you deliberately misrepresented Jesus to me”. Here we could ask the same question, was it really deliberately? Didn’t Ralph and Leo really believe what they taught about Jesus? The basic problem of Ralph and Joe was their dishonest way of dealing with the obvious problems of their beliefs, and their refusal to listen to the “apostates”. As long as you fool yourself that way, this is sad, but it stays your own problem. But when you actively convince and manipulate others, and are not even honest to yourself, this is a problem.

[Note from Admin: Vitaly, thanks for sharing your experiences and the video. Because this clip is long and worth watching, I’m going to pull it from the comments sections and place it in a separate article so that it will get more attention.]

For 50 years it has been the “sheep” who must do such things, while the “shepherd” just praises God and has all his/her sins forgotten about. The ratio is certainly close to 1000:1, where for every 1 director/shepherd who “gives the benefit” there have been 1000 “sheep” who also did so.

Perhaps, we all, as collective sinners and fellow sojourners, live with varying degrees of cognitive dissonance. I want to but fail daily and repeatedly to love God with all my heart and to love my neighbor as myself. I want to be kind and gracious toward my wife, but often hurt her because of thoughtlessness, insensitivity and selfishness. The list can just go on forever.

Perhaps, we all need to give “the other side” some benefit of the doubt, and extend graciousness without compromising the truth. Other than Christ, no human can do so perfectly. So we need each other to help each other out.

In the case of UBF, people know that Samuel Lee gave people humiliating and abusive trainings, they know that this is bad, but they rationalize it away by saying that UBF is like the military, and that Samuel Lee did everything out of love. They just don’t want to give up their view about Samuel Lee and UBF, so they do everything to avoid conflicts with other views, information and reality checks. That’s also a reason why so few UBF people are reading and posting here. It would create cognitive dissonance in them which they try to avoid by just not coming here.

So for him to speak like he did in the 2013 new year message is indeed more of a deception than merely cognitive dissonance. Too much has happened for us to let people off the hook so easily.

Perhaps he is only deceiving himself because of his own past humiliation, but too many facts are now known for me to believe he is honestly working toward reconciliation between UBF and ex-UBF.

Yes. My worst humiliation was sitting at a council meeting with all the top leaders of UBF in the summer of 2003 and having my “shepherd” tell them that my family had disobeyed him and had already gone out to Detroit without his permission. And furthermore, the only way we would be sent to Detroit is if we accepted obedience training for 6 months.

I was so shocked because he had been fully informed of all our decisions and we had been preparing for months. On one hand, I was so furious I nearly stood up and threw the tables. On the other hand, I was so full of self-pity and self-doubt that I accepted this as my way to appease God and UBF. I can’t fully explain it, but that event then sparked my online rampage of defending UBF in following years.

This is my opinion. I think that Lee’s theology (and thus UBF’s theology) is skewed toward (over)emphasizing correct biblical human response to the gospel: repent, humble yourself, decide, choose, discipline yourself, work hard, deny yourself, make disciples, love God, love others, be united, reject hedonism, overcome laziness, lust, pride, etc, etc, etc.

Thus, human rights in Lee’s mind is horrible and anti God, because it is simply man’s stubborn insistence to cling to our sinful human nature, and rejecting Christ as Lord.

There is an element of truth to this. The problem, as you and others have alluded to, is that a man/leader/shepherd/missionary is the God ordained person to bring this about–to train you to overcome your clinging to your sinful human rights.

Inadvertently, this elevates the work of the man, the Christian leader and diminishes the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit.

Although I love the irreverent humor in that cartoon, it doesn’t capture the idea of cognitive dissonance.

A more accurate (and less vulgar) presentation involving cute bunnies was posted by Peter Enns today:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/01/when-cute-little-bunnies-talk-theology/

During my 30+ years in the ministry, I have experienced a great deal of cognitive dissonance. At times I engaged in passive deception (keeping quiet to deceive others) and on a few occasions active deception (saying things that, at some level, I didn’t believe or knew were untrue). People have many interesting and clever ways of handling cognitive dissonance — rationalizing, compartmentalizing, justifying, etc. I also have a PhD., and I believe that the cleverness that comes with formal education can actually increase your capacity to live with cognitive dissonance.

By the way, do you remember how Samuel Lee ridiculed the idea of “human rights”? His humiliation training had to violate human dignity, but the invulnerability of human dignity is a part of the human rights, so he had to rationalize that the concept of human rights was an ungodly, humanistic one. I remember that even my chapter leader used to make derogative remarks about the concept of human rights, based on what he learned from Samuel Lee.

Also, my personality type is least appealing to a regimented-type ministry. I am autonomous-minded and I “hate” to jump through hoops, which some UBF leaders implicitly expect you to do so, “if you want to climb the corporate UBF ladder.” In their mindset, such an attitude promotes disrespect, anarchy, chaos, and a disregard of the older leaders, tradition and conformity. It is totally unsettling for some older UBF leaders.

Mainly, the leader(s) who dismissed me believed it was their absolute God given, God ordained right to do so. In their mind, they did not sin against me. They were just doing what their conscience and experience dictated. So, even if I did not like what they did and felt totally humiliated, I really have no ill will toward them to this day.

They, I believe, truly believed that what they did (replacing me as the leader/overseer) was for the ultimate good of the future of UBF. From what I heard through the grapevine, they did not like the fact that I was not “structuring” the ministry (according to UBF tradition), and not “training” the next generation of UBF leaders. But since no one directly told me this, it can be denied.

You’ve called the New Year’s message deceptive. You’re saying that the general director is trying to have it both ways, simultaneously praising Samuel Lee and denouncing his practices. I can see this in the message too. My question to you now is this. (I don’t know the answer to this question; I’m asking you because I truly want to know what you think.) Is this necessarily deception? Or could it be a display of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Let me give one small, but concrete example so we know what we’re talking about. I remember a European UBF Summer Conference in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Usually we had guests from America in these conferences and the American shepherds would perform a capella pieces which we enjoyed and admired a lot. When one of these pieces was performed, one of the a capella singers was standing behind the others in a strange way. So we somehow expected that he would suddenly step forward and surprise us with a great solo or something. But nothing happened, the piece ended and the person was still standing there behind the others with a sad face. I found this very strange and bewildering. Later I found out that Samuel Lee ordered that person to stand behind the others, in order to humiliate him. It was said that the person did something bad and this “humiliation training” was a kind of punishment measure.

Let’s assume that this person really did something awful. How do you think that should have been handled? Do you think humiliating others in such ways is ok?

The problem here is that this not only happened once and was considered a mistake. It happened all the time, and we have reports of Samuel Lee humiliating others in much more degrading and cruel ways, starting from 1976. I can also give many examples of chapter leaders who copied such training methods. E.g. in a neighbor chapter a member got he name “Shepherd Nobody” with the sole purpose of humiliating him.

What I want to see is a clear statement of UBF leaders that these practices are not ok and that Samuel Lee gave a bad example that others should not follow. Or, if they don’t want to do that, they should officially proclaim that these practices are considered ok and good in UBF, and that they are only an expression of the love of Samuel Lee, the great servant of God, and that others should follow his example. Take a clear stance! That’s my problem with Abraham Kim’s New Year’s message. He tries to do both, stick to the heritage of Samuel Lee and praise him as a great servant, and at the same time deny his principles and practices by claiming that we must be respectful with each other. That’s what I call deceptive and what makes that message so disgusting for my taste. (Oops, I did it again. Will shut my big mouth now.)

Ben, forgive me for putting up another article today. I don’t want to draw attention away from this one. But I think I ought to do it because it’s so closely related.