Thank you Charles. Yes, it was anger inducing for me and for my wife. I believe that the anger we felt was righteous anger. God gets angry at abuse and injustice. But if we express that anger (even if we try to temper it) many will take it as prima facie evidence that we are unspiritual and wrong, and it becomes just another excuse for ignoring us and silencing us. It’s frustrating when, even now, people will say “I empathize with your pain” and then in the same sentence criticize you for expressing it.

Charles, I think you’re not on Facebook, but your last comment would fit right in: “…much of my time in UBF was painful. It was painful to see a so-called church systematically abuse people in the name of shepherding, praise those who did so, and then vilify and ignore those who either left or spoke against the issues. It was painful to see the whole congregation be asked to pray for such and such UBF chapter to have a big conference with many attendees while knowing that that very chapter has hurt people and ignored it. To see this done, with business as usual continuing, was painful and anger inducing. And then it happened to me too.

After leaving, I experienced the very things mentioned here. I realized how isolated my life had become. The feelings of deception, of embarrassment in becoming a self-absorbed fool for so long, of disappointment and betrayal, were all painful. But in the end I’m glad to have left and stood by my convictions with the support of my wife because despite the pains, it sure feels great to feel like I’m becoming human again. It has been simultaneously painful and difficult, and still exciting and wonderful.”
– See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2015/02/21/the-pain-of-leaving-ubf/#sthash.6xYMj7U8.dpuf

The fear of experiencing these pains can be paralyzing and also painful. At one point, they were used as threats for me to fall back in line with UBF. I wouldn’t be considered a “leader” and would be disqualified from being a director candidate (for not attending the 2013 International Conference). I was in UBF for 15 years, since I was 17, right out of high school. I was at times afraid of leaving everything I had built up in my adult life.

Being as busy as I was in UBF, my wife would sometimes tell me to stop doing a particular activity, saying, “Can’t someone else do it?” This bothered me so much because of course the answer is, “Yes.” I’m not offering anything unique in the world. There is someone else who can do everything that I do every day. But if I give up what I do because someone else can do it, then what will I do?

But it also became too painful to stay in UBF; and much of my time in UBF was painful. It was painful to see a so-called church systematically abuse people in the name of shepherding, praise those who did so, and then vilify and ignore those who either left or spoke against the issues. It was painful to see the whole congregation be asked to pray for such and such UBF chapter to have a big conference with many attendees while knowing that that very chapter has hurt people and ignored it. To see this done, with business as usual continuing, was painful and anger inducing. And then it happened to me too.

After leaving, I experienced the very things mentioned here. I realized how isolated my life had become. The feelings of deception, of embarrassment in becoming a self-absorbed fool for so long, of disappointment and betrayal, were all painful. But in the end I’m glad to have left and stood by my convictions with the support of my wife because despite the pains, it sure feels great to feel like I’m becoming human again. It has been simultaneously painful and difficult, and still exciting and wonderful.

But thank you for the clarification. I should have said “estranged from ubf.”

Yes, bad experiences with a single church can turn people off to Christianity and they might not want to even look for another church. That is unfortunate, because there are good churches out there.

Integrity is an interesting word. I know some people from ubf who have integrity, and some who don’t. Is there more integrity to be found in ubf as a group than in other churches? Not clear at all.

Are you saying that second gens have to either run far away or become mindless idiots who are staying just to marry? I would say that they fall into a larger category of millennialists who are disillusioned with organized religion and seek authenticity in their lives and relationships. They may be disillusioned by ubf but nothing else is that attractive either. But the bonds they’ve formed in ubf is genuine and it says something about the integrity of the members to want to marry someone from a group that you’re not that excited about.

The FB comment that Ben posted here was not coming from my need to share my pain. I wanted to open up and say something meaningful to a very nice, likeable and sincere young lady who grew up in ubf and is still there.

I got tired of doing that so I wrote three books to tell my authentic narrative. That gave me a lot of freedom and relief to pursue other things and yet still be a voice for healing:

Goodness Found: The Butterfly Narratives

(Warning: This book contains many trauma triggers for ex-ubf people, especially former ubf leaders like myself. Read at your own risk. In time, though, this book may prove to be the most helpful to ubf people.)

Ben, when you told me that people were beginning to say that I have become negative toward UBF because of you and Ubfriends, I began drafting an article that would dispel that notion. But as I was writing, about both the good and bad, I realized that UBF has already taken up enough of my time. I don’t want to give the organization more attention than it has already demanded. Additionally, if people want to believe that I can’t think for myself and make educated observations about what I deem are very unhealthy ideologies and practices, then I feel sorry for them. They are basically projecting on to me what they have lived through their entire time in UBF, which is, they have been thoroughly convinced that they need to leave the hard thinking up to someone else, God’s chosen servant perhaps. So it’s only natural that they would think that someone senior to me, like you, is able to influence the way that I think and behave. That, to me, is a very tragic form of deception to be caught in. I may finish and publish that article, but right now, I feel as though dwelling on those things will take me to an unhealthy place. But eventually, I know that I will have to delve into this and somehow come to grips with it. Currently, I am enjoying my time away from the ministry, but we’ll see what happens. This recent blog post from someone who knows all too well about PTCS deeply resonates with me:

Christian culture doesn’t have a category for grief and anger over wrongs done in God’s name. They see it all as cynicism.

Anger is messy and frightening to Christian culture. It puts you in close touch with your raw humanity and doubt. This makes an essential step of the grieving process, anger, a threat to those who don’t know how to hold grief and sadness alongside possibility and mystery. They feel Jesus’s tantrum in the temple was okay, but all other anger stemming from abuses by those in religious authority will be swiftly shamed. – link

ubf newsletter and fake photos

One of my pains of leaving ubf was to see ubf from the outside and to notice how fake the whole ministry really is. ubf trained me to be a good actor, pretending to be holy when I knew nothing about holiness.

Missionaries who, because of ubf ideology, pushed their children so hard to follow in their footsteps, pressing upon them a “spiritual identity” that was not truly theirs. Many children of ubf missionaries felt they had no choice but to get far, far away from their parents otherwise they couldn’t breathe. Not long ago, I asked a Chicago elder: “How many of the elder missionaries have children who are estranged from them because of ubf?” His response: “All of them.” Unfortunately this hardcore training of 2nd gens continues. http://ubf.org/world-mission-news/north-america/new-jersey-ubf-25th-celebration

Children of missionaries who feel boxed into a church that doesn’t inspire them, that they are embarrassed by and must continually (in their minds) make excuses and apologize for, because they find the teaching at best tolerable but often boring, repetitive, childish, and sometimes offensive. Yet they cannot openly discuss this with their parents, because it will create too much conflict. And they cannot bear to leave either, because it would be too costly. It would put further strain on their families, distance them from their circle of friends. And it would block the pathways to marriage that ubf provides. They hold out hope that they can maneuver within the system to find and marry someone they like (in some cases they can). So they continue to stay and play the game, even though they wish they didn’t have to.

No, Ben, the leaders of ubf needn’t feel sorry for me. As Jesus said: “Do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children…”

on the other hand if perhaps we become a relevant/useful voice in religious or civic topics we may end up with an audience

But here’s the thing: Those environments were artificially created, and much of that audience was a captive audience. People came because their commitment to ubf essentially required them to be there. They would have come to the conference even if the main speaker was Shepherd Elmer Fudd or Shepherd Donald Duck. Many in the audience weren’t actually looking at me; they were looking past me to see the glorious ubf project. Most of them weren’t listening to me; they were sifting through my words to hear the voice of SL and the glorious ideas that captured their hearts in decades past. If I didn’t have a ready-made audience of ubf listeners, would hundreds or thousands of people have showed up and even paid money to register for a conference to hear me preach? No way. Because, in the wider context of American Christianity, my messages weren’t very good; the things that I had to say weren’t especially profound. When ubf people would say “Thank you for your beautiful message,” it meant very little, because they said that all the time, and whatever beauty that they heard in my message was so mixed up with their love of ubf ideology and their hopes for ubf that it had very little to do with whatever small contributions were uniquely mine.

That was hard to give up, but it was very healthy for me to give it up.

Yes, there is pain in leaving. But I regard it as a pain associated with purification and healing. There is a sorrow and mourning for what was lost, but that sorrow is mixed with hope and joy.

You are absolutely correct that I do not want sympathy from ubf leaders. They shouldn’t pity me, because I am in a much healthier place, and I am encountering God in ways that I never could when I was among them. I am restoring relationships with my family that were essentially cut because of ubf, and I am establishing relationships with people in the community that I used to ignore because I had no use for them (they weren’t potential sheep). I feel as though I am becoming human again.

But I often feel sorry for them. Especially for those who feel that they could never leave ubf because they would lose everything they ever worked for and their whole lives would amount to nothing. Or those who feel trapped because ubf has been their lifelong employer and if they left their job prospects are nil. Or those who could never leave because they have cut ties with their families and ubf has become their safety net, and if they left they would be totally alone and lost in the world. I do feel sorry for them. The ubf ship is listing. If it sinks, some will choose to go down with the ship. That makes me sad.