1. The ubf mindset seems very similar to the 8 points of Buddhism: The eightfold path of Buddhism

2. This post from 2003 by someone who left NYubf is spot on: Description of the ubf agenda

I can only read that report for what it is. I don’t see it as being dishonest or suffering from a language barrier at all. I believe those words were carefully chosen and intended. I think we can only assume that the report said what it intended to say. That jargon is the measurement of her performance and they wished for continued performance “as a good soldier.” Interestingly, last Sunday she shared her life key verse in LA from that passage and prayed to be a good soldier.

Just one small statement bothered me: “We are depending on methods that worked in the past.” I have heard similar statements from 2nd and 3rd gen UBF members in the last years and frankly I don’t understand why such statements are made.

As we know and understand pretty well, the methods of UBF provoke and facilitate spiritual abuse. This was exactly the same in the past, just read the 1976 letter. So these methods never “worked” – at least not when you define “work” as producing a healthy community with mature people and not a cult.

So if you claim that things “worked” in the past, then it sounds to me as if you either do still not understand the degree of abuse in the past (which was higher than it is today), or you believe that this abuse was somehow tolerable for people in the past (like me), but not for people today. When I hear this from 2nd gens, I feel like mocked. Somehow like you’re saying: It was OK for Samuel Lee in the past to have people pull toenails out as a punishment, because they were silly, immature people who deserved such treatment and needed such training, it “worked” for them, but we in our modern generation do not accept such methods any more. This is nonsense. The treatment was just as abusive in the past as it is today. Even if it happened 2000 years ago, it was still abusive and not acceptable in the church.

It’s a subtle difference, but it has huge implications. It’s like when you are sailing on a boat, if you are at the wrong angle from your destination, you won’t notice it in the beginning, but as time goes on, you will see how far you are.

I feel like in UBF there were certain faults, like marriage by faith (only for mission), exaggerating numbers of attendants at conference, putting an unnecessary emphasis on ministry related activities over everything else, neglecting families for campus ministry, etc. At the time, they weren’t that big of a deal, but as time goes on those faults grow and get bigger and bigger. And the practices are repeated and exacerbated. It’s like with water, the farther you get from the source, the muddier the water gets. We are depending on methods that worked in the past, but don’t work now and we are just copying and pasting and ignoring the fact that now is a new time with a new generation and a new culture. We have to stop pushing the UBF agenda. It’s really suffocating and it tethers people down.

My own opinion is that change won’t happen top-down. The culture of the organization has to change. I’m all about grass root movements;). Everybody has to do the best they can to follow the HS in whatever ministry, chapter, church, country they’re in.

In language they call the sudden use of two separate terms/ideas interchangeably (and one always falls out of fashion) “flattening” and represents a social, linguistic and cognitive flattening of ideas for expediency. Joe Schafer’s comments are probably spot on.

The scary part is when people in the “house churches” begin to see themselves in such a light (missionary, shepherd) that those roles take over priority in their lives over their true God-given roles (child of God, husband/wife/father/mother). I often remind people in my “reflections” and messages that God made people (aka child of God) first, then he made the family (Adam and Eve), and then the church grew out of that. We need balance and priority.

And I do hope they have a lovely life together! I hope we can all enjoy the blessed family God has for us.

Brian, you’re probly right. I think I collapsed two diagrams in my mind. the process of making disciples is 1) Evangelizing, 2) Establishing, 3) Equipping and 4)Sending. It’s very much in line with Robert Coleman’s Master Plan books.

The Wheel is another diagram, The Obedient Christian in Action, Witnessing, Fellowship, The Word and Prayer are the 4 spokes of the wheel, and the center is CHRIST. That’s my favorite part.

Follow up is a Building. The foundation is JESUS (1Cor 3:11), the walls are doctrine and ministry, the roof is character, and the top is Romans 15:14. Anyhow, the clear emphasis is building our life and ministry on Christ, something the 1 Timothy leadership conference helped me see (it was good for the most part), but which we, in UBF, often confuddle with other issues.

The structure really is sound, but I feel we very often make a replica (since sheep cannot think for themselves?) to substitute and people often stop thinking and are satisfied by being in the process and having the approval of their shepherds.

In the 1976 crisis I was in 2nd grade :)
In the 1989 crisis I was a witness to the James Kim events.
In the 2000 crisis I stood by idly, trying to be neutral.
In the 2011 crisis I was the main voice of criticism.

Are not the seven woes Jesus pronounced precisely the summary of ubf leadership problems we’ve been discussing during each “crisis” every 10 years or so?

Will ubf leadership listen to Jesus’ warnings in Matthew 23:13-39? Or will they continue to keep their arrogant silence and maintain their status as God’s anointed servants in our generation?

In a similar vein, every journey to another country, even if only for attending a conference, was called a “missionary journey”, equating it with St. Paul’s journeys.

But there was also a tendendy to reserve the title “missionary” to Koreans only. For instance, my wife who came to Germany from a non-Korean country was not addressed as “missionary” but as “shepherdess” only, while the Koreans who were married to Germans were addressed as “missionaries”.

A cynical but realistic answer: Because UBF wants to count her as a missionary.

Since the earliest days of UBF, any member who has left his or her own country and gone to another country for any reason has been counted as a missionary.

That practice started in the 1970s when Korean women received visas to go to West Germany and work as nurses. SL quickly “trained” them and commissioned them as missionaries. Since then, if you went to another country to get married, to study, to work, or for just about any reason (except to run away from UBF), you were counted as a missionary. Whether you actually had the calling or training or ability to do cross-cultural witness was irrelevant. To my knowledge, no reputable missionary-sending organization has such a broad definition of missionary. By any reasonable standard, most of the missionaries sent by ubf should just be called immigrants.

“I have about 15 soccer students. We started our soccer fellowship with them about one year ago.”

Probably soccer is ok because it is not one of those EVIL sports from America like NBA or MLB or NFL or NHL….

“Also, we should have a right attitude. For example, one person said “See other missionaries, they don’t go fishing, they don’t raise any disciples, so what is a problem for me not to raise up even one disciple. This kind of attitude is not graceful. We must have a right attitude and live before God and live on this words. When we see other missionaries not being able to raise up disciples, we should think in a right attitude by making a decision to work even harder and pray harder in order to take care of my portion and plus other missionaries’ portions. This is true love toward other missionaries.”

“We are not regular ordinary civilians since we were bought by the blood of Jesus and became born again. We are disciples of Jesus. We are blessed to grow in Jesus and serve Him and His Kingdom. So we do not live like other regular civilians. How do other regular civilians live? Their first priority is family oriented life or their jobs or anything else they like to do in this world. But, the priority of Jesus’ disciples is to please our commanding officer, Jesus. So we focus on growing in the words of God and teaching his sheep and raising them up as his disciples. It is easy to say this, but this requires a lot of work and focus. If we do not focus on this, we are very distracted by so many things in this world, and at the end we can not see good results. We can not raise up even one disciple. We are living in very distracting generation with such as all kinds of media such as endless news daily through the internet. So we can waste our precious time at least a few hours per day easily watching over those things on the internet.”

July 2014 blog article from a long-time ubf Korean missionary

The red flags in this lecture are so many and so horrendous that I would just have to mark the entire lecture as a classic example of what I mean by the evangelicalism mixed in with the Christianized-Confucianism.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice — Matthew 12:7, Hosea 6:6

Another quote by Thomas Merton (No Man is an Island):

“Next comes the temptation to destroy ourselves for love of the other. The only value is love of the other. Self-sacrifice is an absolute value in itself. And the desire of the other is also absolute in itself. No matter what the lover desires, we will give up our life or even our soul to please him. This is the asceticism of Eros, which makes it a point of honor to follow the beloved into hell. For what greater sacrifice could man offer on the altar of love than the sacrifice of his own immortal soul? Heroism in this sacrifice is measured precisely by madness: it is all the greater when it is offered for a more trivial motive.”

“Mark 3: A healthy parachurch ministry avoids acting like the church. If a parachurch organization confuses the boundaries of church and parachurch it will begin to practice things best left to the church. When parachurch ministries begin to act like the church they often allow people involved in their ministries to substitute parachurch involvement for church involvement, which is an unhealthy exchange.”

Many of the unhealthy and abusive aspects of many ubf chapters is a result of their intentional blurring of boundaries.

This quote is a huge red flag, and explains why ubf has earned the cult label. People are not treated as human beings at ubf, but as inanimate products that exist solely for propagating the ubf heritage…

“May God have mercy on Kiev UBF to repent our complacency and to stand firm as a missionary sending center through serving the discipleship ministry well all the more!”

One comment in the article reminded me of the article here on ubfriends on training, particularly the mention of missionary organizations becoming gyms:

“The standard cliché for parachurch is that it’s not the church, but an arm of the church. Yet historically, that arm has shown a tendency to develop a mind of its own and crawl away from the body, which creates a mess. Given the grand scope and size of many parachurch ministries, those which go wayward can propagate error for years: missionary organizations become gyms, heretical seminaries pump out heretical pastors, and service organizations produce long-term confusion between the gospel and social action.”

Jim Downing is 100 years old (if he is still alive) and has been doing one to one since 1933.

Basically there is very little in the ubf heritage that is uniquely created by SL or SB. Take parts of the Student Volunteer Movement, the Navigators, Scripture Union and InterVarsity, add in a heavy does of Korean culture and Christianized-Confucianism, drop in a large portion of absolute authority, mix in significant amounts of weird, made up training exercises, top it off with fundamentalist Christianity and there you have the ubf cocktail. This cocktail is sweet at first, but watch out for that bitter aftertaste.

“About 10 years ago, one of our shepherds (since departed) discovered a few blurbs that Dr. SL learned the “one to one” model from the Navigators, a ministry that thrived for a time and doesn’t make much news now.”

Yes several parts of ubf were copied from other student movements, including the Daily Bread format (which up until recent years had been plagirized from Scripture Union. Those drawings about praying, etc. are a direct copy from the older material:

Daily Bread from Scripture Union

Sample Daily Bread (check out page 3)

In regard to Navigator’s, maybe you are referring to their “Discipleship Wheel” diagram?

Imitating other ministries is not a problem for me. Imitating other ministries and then claiming you are the unique, elite inventors of such things is a big problem.

ubf would fare much better if the let all the official/church/denomination/seminary talk just die off. Instead of creating those things, ubf would be far healthier if they would take the Navigator’s path and focus on being a Christian network with a small number of specific, well-documented, publicly available training sessions.

Well my old friend found a small handbook for leading 1 to 1 studies made by Navigators. If I can find a copy, I will try to share their “4 step” plan which was actually quite good.

step one was like laying a foundation in a house, ie, laying a foundation in Christ. Compare to step one in UBF being “join Bible study”–a performative behavior, where the former is a decision of faith.

step two was being rooted in the faith, ie, developing a godly walk. This seems to be where the 6 steps plan noted above gets really stuck in the mud.

The third step was learning to share one’s faith, and the fourth was actually participating in discipleship ministry. If I recall correctly.

The most jarring thing is, the six-step method mentioned here is entirely focused on the believer’s relationship with the UBF Church. The center is one’s commitment to UBF and NOT CHRIST. This seems to explain a number of “peculiar phenomena” I have seen and heard from others (being nice here, bear with me). The second most jarring thing (and the most unpopular theme people hear from me in my ministry) is that the outward action of sharing the gospel and raising disciples of all nation comes *at the end* after a person has a strong foundation in Christ and a genuine walk of faith. To often our ministry has it backwards–participate, commit, you will see fruit (and you don’t in most cases) and in the process you will eventually see Jesus and find out this is the right way.

That being said, If I can find that handbook I will try to scan the diagram. It’s quite beautiful and really shows a reasonable path that Scripture attests to.

*Side note* As I was driving home this afternoon these thoughts finally came together. In fact, it seems that I have inside me a well thought out presentation of the problems that UBF needs to face to preserve its credibility/integrity as a gospel organization. It’s too extensive for me to even think about all at once, and needs to be developed and perhaps written out to share. Why haven’t I developed it yet? Perhaps because of chronic busy-ness, which is quite frankly a convenient excuse for many (my family is guilty of this) to avoid the actual issues.

Note that the “missionary training” here is very different from any ordinary missionary training. It doesn’t prepare people for mission, you don’t learn missiology, counseling, foreign language and culture or anything like that. You just have to write and share UBF style sogams and show absolute obedience for a course of several weeks or months. Actually the same program as usual UBF training, only on a more intense level.

“I think there was a time for MBF”

No, there was never a time for MBF, at least in America. My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary last week. It was the first actual date trip we’ve ever had.

At some point, probably in 2015 when a new general director is selected by the ubf echelon, that same ubf echelon will need to make some decisions regarding the redeemed, Christian chapters like WL. Because in reality the only reason WL is still a recognized ubf chapter is because of the fight and suffering taken on by Ben and a few others.

I’m sill in UBF, but I’m not going through the sheep/shepherd training. And I think that’s why people think WL is a rogue chapter and not “truly” UBF. It’s an interesting comment, I hear all the time. West Loop is not UBF. Dr. Ben is not in UBF. Does UBF have something that the gospel does not? Does UBF add extra stipulations for a believer, because I’m pretty sure Galations has something to say about that.

Good point Joe and I agree. The “training plan” is not very sophisticated and as Ben pointed out, is highly subjective by the shepherds. The big problem for ubf trainers is that the trainees keep messing things up.

One Korean missionary told me the other week that “we don’t have any training plan, but we should adopt one.” That is true in the sense that there is no official documented training program at ubf. But this is also misleading because the six turning points or measurements of spiritual growth are almost universally applied in ubfland:

1) accept 1:1 bible study, 2) attend Sunday services, 3) share his/her life testimony, 4) move into a common life house, 5) graduate from college and 6) accept the arranged marriage process.

Regardless, here is the gift ubf leaders have given me: Because ubf leaders have remained silent all these years and refused to document their training, claiming to be spiritual mature servants of God, someone else gets to define their teaching. Someone like me.

Based on my observations of North Americsn ubf over three decades, I would say this:

Yes, the number of people who have actually gone through these stages and remained in ubf is very small. Out of necessity, almost everyone deviates from this game plan. Then the missionaries see the person as problematic; they say that he or she has “become difficult.” They will probably still let the person hang around to keep their fellowship’s numbers up, but they no longer have aspirations for that person to grow as a leader and start to put their hope in someone else.

It is difficult to know. I read about that 1,500 number, and later a 3,000 number. The reality is that no one outside the ubf top echelon will know for sure, especially if the numbers dropped.

The public claim is over 9,000 average Sunday attendants.

According to the leader’s preference, which is often arbitrary and sometimes illogical and whimsical, people under him or her absolutely NEED “all kinds of training,” which NEVER ENDS as long as you have someone senior over you.

Perhaps the numbers are closer to 1,500 missionaries to 80 countries, which was so some years ago. I may be wrong but I don’t think this has increased significantly in recent years, because fewer and fewer missionaries from Korea are going out each year.