Done with the church. Sociologists list the reasons why some highly committed church members are deciding that they are done with church.

* They wanted community…..and got judgment.

* They wanted to affect the life of the church…..and got bureaucracy.

* They wanted conversation…..and got doctrine.

* They wanted meaningful engagement with the world…..and got moral prescription.

– See more at: comment-19077.

Done with UBF. This 4-point list does describe the experience that some of us have had with American evangelicalism. But it doesn’t explain why so many highly committed people decided that they were done with UBF. That list is more like this.

* They wanted to understand the gospel ….. and were told to go and preach the gospel.

* They wanted to understand why their relationships were so bad and getting worse ..… and were told to go back to the Bible.

* They wanted to understand why the atmosphere felt so dead ..… and were told to invite more people to double the ministry.

* They wanted to actually think about the meaning Scripture ..… and were told to put aside their own ideas and just believe.

* They wanted leaders to just be honest and admit that lots of abusive things have happened and do happen in UBF….. and were met with silence.

* They wanted friends ..… and got coworkers.

* They wanted to stop the insanity of doing the same thing over again at every conference year after year ..… and the result was more of the same.

* They brought serious problems to the attention of leaders in a gentle and respectful manner… and were told “your tone is not right” and “you have overstepped your authority.”

– See more at: comment-19078.

What are your thoughts about why so many bright and promising people are done with UBF ….. even after decades of committed involvement?

Last time I had an argument with my wife, I was confident I was right and she was wrong. I had been wrong many times before. But I was sure this time I was right. And I felt I had right to raise my voice and correct her. Unfortunately, she did not think so and went to the bedroom and closed the door behind her and lied down and did not speak for a long time. I remained upset for sometime but then began to feel sorry for her and went to her and said, “I am sorry.” This type of incident has repeatedly happened for the last 33 years of our marriage. I am thankful that God has always given me strength and sense that I was able to say, “I am sorry” each time. It has always been I who said first, “I am sorry.” I have never demanded or wanted her to say, “I am sorry.” Just one time in our long 33 years of marriage, she actually said to me, “I am sorry.” I felt so sorry that she had to say that. I told her, “This will be the last time you ever say to me, ‘I am sorry.’

It is God’s grace to me that he has always given me strength to say, “I am sorry” first and not demand my wife to say, “I am sorry” to me. I am not sure how it began. It probably has something to do with the fact sometime in our marriage I began to have a keen sense how terrible I was as a husband and father and it often brought me to tears. I was only twenty four when I married my wife. I was really only a boy when I married her. And I had very few social skills. I was awkward. I never cared to understand others’ feelings especially women’s. I had four brothers and no sisters. I had a very few friends, if any, and definitely no girlfriends (It’s not that I never tried to get one but I was never successful.) until our marriage. I made numerous senseless mistakes as a husband. At the beginning of my missionary life I worked so zealously and sometimes worked at the UBF center until very late, 3 or 4 am in the morning. I remember more than once I did not carry my apartment key but rang the bell and woke up my wife to open the door for me (I don’t recollect how long and often I continued doing this terrible thing). As it was, my wife was already suffering from a lack of sleep because our first child wouldn’t sleep during the night and she had to go to work as a nurse 7am in the morning. There is a long list of incidents that show how terrible I was as a husband. And I won’t list them all. But my point is that I was a bad husband and by God’s grace I realized it. And since then it became natural I first say, “I am sorry.” I believe this one thing—saying first, “I am sorry,” has helped our marriage.

Somehow I believe the gospel of Jesus’ cross has something to do with ability to say, “I am sorry.” The cross of Jesus enables us to say, “God, I am sorry. I was wrong.” It’s not only that we say to God, “I am sorry.” Recently it occurred to me that when God sent his Son to die on the cross he might be in a sense saying to us, “I am sorry.” “My child, I am sorry you suffer in your sins.” “I am sorry you are addicted to that bad habit. You suffer too much.” I am not sure if this makes sense. But this thought gave me freedom and peace in my heart. I see a church member and she is not doing too well spiritually. I cannot do too much for her. I think to myself, “Young lady, you are suffering in your situation. I am sorry I am very limited in what I can do for you.” I can feel guilty about my inadequacy. But I can be still connected to her because I put the cross of Jesus between her and me. I walk down the street in my economically depressed neighborhood. There are so many problems in this neighborhood and the university I am ministering to. I feel so inadequate in ministering to people here. “O God, I am so weak and ineffective in reaching out to them with the gospel and with any help they need.” Only the cross of Jesus comforts me in my sense of inadequacy. Through the cross of Jesus I am still connected to these people for whom I am not doing too much at present.

At my UBF chapter we don’t have a cross hanging on any wall. Once I thought about putting up a beautiful cross on the front wall of the sanctuary. But having a cross on the wall won’t really help us much unless we as a church really live a life that reflects the cross of Jesus. “O God, we as a church are not doing too well. We are not doing well to the university students or the needy people in our neighborhood. Yet they are not strangers to us. We don’t hope that they will see us as indifferent strangers. The only thing connects between them and us is the cross of Jesus.” We don’t have a cross of Jesus hanging on a wall in our church. But we really have to live a life that reflects the cross of Jesus.

God has given me grace to have sense to say to my wife, “I am sorry,” whenever I realized that I made her sad or difficult in any ways. That has helped our marriage. How much more a church the body of Christ should say to one of our members, “We are sorry,” if we offended her or him in any way. They are the brides of Christ, whom he purchased with His precious blood. I am sad and heartbroken to offend my bride. How much more we should be if we offended the brides of Christ. Have we UBF offended or abused any of our members spiritually for the last 50 years of history? Are there signs that we have done? If there are, we as church must be ready to say, “We are sorry” and offer sincere apology to those who have been affected and find ways to rectify our mistakes and wrongdoings.

“For 27 years my (Ben Toh’s) identity was in my faithfulness to never miss a UBF Sun worship service, never miss any meetings, never miss writing a testimony every week, never missing any UBF conferences, having 10 1:1 Bible studies a week, etc. I did well as a UBF man. Yet, though I love Jesus, my identity was not in Christ but in what others in UBF expected of me.”

This is what is so blinding here. I think people can attest to these things that you listed. These are some of the expectations for a faithful member of UBF. As long you do these things, you’re growing. Well that’s what it seems to be. As Christians, our identity should be rooted in Christ, but with the environment of UBF that’s really hard to overcome, since there are the human shepherds who are supposed to be in charge of their members in UBF. As a young member or college student, you’re accountable to your shepherd as to whether you’re growing or not. The shepherd seems to have the final say. The shepherd has the final approval of basically everything in your walk with Christ. So basically you’re really trying to live out the expectation of your shepherd rather than Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd.

Is this true? Is this reflective of the experience of UBFers and exUBFers? Is this accurate? Inaccurate? Right? Not right? Neutral? Why?

If the Lord had never risen,
we’d have nothing to believe.
But his promise can be trusted:
“You will live, because I live.”
As we share the death of Adam,
so in Christ we live again;
death has lost its sting and terror,
Christ is down to earth to reign.

Death has lost its old dominion,
let the world rejoice and shout!
Christ the first-born of the living,
gives us life and leads us out.
Let us thank our God who causes
hope to spring up from the ground;
Christ is risen, Christ is giving
life eternal, life profound.

My heart is steadfast, O God;

— from Psalm 8, of David

This is the Night,

This is the Night
In which Christ broke the chains of death
And rose in radiant victory
From the pit of Hades.

— Ancient hymn of the Easter vigil, author unknown

Ambition… Virtue or Vice?

This article was written by ‘RJS’ who is a frequent contributor on the Jesus Creed website. RJS is a sincere Christian, a woman, an accomplished scientist, and a faculty member at a secular university. She writes primarily about the relationship between faith and science and occasionally about the role of women in the church.

In this article, she discusses what brain imaging technology (fMRI) has revealed about some of the Seven Deadly Sins. She reports that lust, especially in males, “sets nearly the whole brain buzzing,” producing a biochemical response that can be very addicting and destructive. Envy produces patterns of brain activity that reflect ‘a kind of social pain,’ and when the object of envy (the person who incites it) experiences a downfall, the response is a kind of pleasure which is well described by the German word schadenfreude.

Then she goes on to discuss the deadliest of the deadly sins, which is pride. Brain scans have shown that it takes less mental energy to puff ourselves up with pride than to think about ourselves critically in sober self-examination. And, even more interestingly, “the experiments demonstrate that righteous humility, deliberate self depreciation, is but arrogance and pride in disguise.”

The heart of RJS’s article is a discussion of how we view ambition. Ambition is usually regarded as a good thing. We treat it as a virtue in the workplace, in academia, and in the evangelical church. We admire people who set large goals and strive to achieve them. But ambition is closely related to greed and pride. Ambition can wreak havoc on personal relationships and community life, even more so than sexual immorality. She concludes that, although ambition may sometimes produce results that seem beneficial (e.g., church growth), it is like ‘playing with fire’ because it so easily turns into a poorly disguised effort to gain ‘influence and power hidden behind a veneer of righteous humility.’

What do you all think about this?

Dear friends: Today a comment arrived from one of our readers. It was originally addressed to Joshua Yoon in response to this:

http://www.ubfriends.org/2011/02/questions-for-the-next-general-director/comment-page-1/#comment-2168

Because of its length and scope, we have decided to run it as an article. Take a look and see if you can offer him any advice. Thanks!

Hi Joshua!

Thank you for your comments. I was particularly interested in your question about keeping the name, “University Bible Fellowship.”

My comment is more personal in nature and not so much directed toward the ministry’s overall structure and leadership. If anything, I think it is a personal prayer request (with a bit of background) for us to seek the Lord’s guidance and direction for our new house-church ministry.

As you and several others know, our family moved from Canada to Japan in 2009 to serve as pioneers. We live on a southern island of Japan called Kyushu. Our city is called Oita. There is one other UBF chapter on the island in Nagasaki, which is located about 3-4 hours away by car. We meet sometimes for retreats which are very encouraging to us. I also get invited to a yearly director’s meeting in Tokyo to meet with other leaders. We exchange several e-mails throughout the year and pray for each other. I definitely feel that God is working on a national level through this loving and diverse community of believers (most directors have a Korean background, one is Japanese, and another is, well, Canadian).

With the exception of these meetings, on a day-to-day level, mostly we are on our own in our small house church. Because of language problems and lack of Christian resources in Japan, I’ve been turning to other ministries to help me with Bible studies, personal growth, and message preparation. Combined with a good foundation in UBF, God is really beginning to open my eyes to a rich and well-rounded personal relationship with God as my eternal Husband, Friend, Provider, Counsellor, Master, Redeemer, Creator, etc.

My wife, Tsukasa, is Japanese. Through God’s sovereign leading, she met Christ through UBF in Canada and she has been serving the ministry very faithfully and joyfully ever since. That said, she never attended University or College (she started working after high school). Although she expressed interest in attending some post-secondary program after our children start school, I guess she felt a little strange being in a campus-based ministry until now. At present, we are alone in a small city with no other campus ministries around. When we visit nearby campuses, there are signs everywhere saying we shouldn’t be there because a) we’re not officially affiliated with the University, and b) all faith-based activity is strictly prohibited on Japanese campuses.

So, my question is: should we keep the name “University Bible Fellowship”? Even more, should our family be limited to campus mission?

Recently, we started our study of the book of Acts and one thing I noticed was the lack of church organization. With the exception of using terms like the church in Jerusalem, the church in Antioch, etc. the early church didn’t really have a name. I guess the same was true of the Old Testament as well. Of course there was a temple, but essentially it was just a group of people called by God to be His treasured people and to participate in His eternal salvation purpose.

In Japan, Christianity is pretty foreign (less than 1% of the population is Christian) and one of the questions I’m often asked by native Japanese people is about the differences among the different denominations. If Jesus is one, why are there so many Christian groups? Why do they have different names? Which one is the *right* one? I think all these questions are good. But in the end, the different groups can create unnecessary confusion and stumbling blocks for very early seekers, especially in a culture which doesn’t have a strong Christian heritage.

I can imagine different pros and cons for maintaining a church structure, but sometimes I wonder if in a situation like ours we should just drop the church name all together yet still live like Christians in a very genuine way. Whoever God sends to us, whether University student or not, we should just embrace and try to give them an appropriate environment where they can feel comfortable and grow in the knowledge of Christ which their soul is so obviously longing for. Maybe as the church grows, we could think more about name or organization.

These are just some of the thoughts I’ve been having recently as I try to adjust to my new life serving Christ in a foreign country and culture, and Joshua’s post inspired me to write about them. In reading some of the posts on this site, I realized that some of them are written from a North American perspective (and they should be!). In some ways, I’ve come to understand myself and the UBF ministry much better now that I am living in an Asian environment, a little similar to Korea. Turning to the Bible, when the Samaritan woman met Jesus, at first she didn’t see the Son of God; she saw a Jewish man. In other words, Jesus became a man of the time and culture so he could connect very naturally with the people. Surely if he came now, he would do things a little differently and the parables would probably be about things like smart phones and cars, instead of vineyards and mustard seeds. Either way, the never changing message about God’s passionate love to be with us — his bride — for eternity would be the same!

Anyway, my hope in this post is to let our prayer requests be known. I also welcome any comments or feedback.

That has happened. God has blessed us with lots of interesting articles and lively discussion. Even during the recent holiday period, when our pace of publishing slowed down to less than one new article per week, we were still averaging about 50 site visits per day by readers from all over the world.

But one aspect of UBFriends has been gnawing at my conscience: the overwhelming majority of posts and comments have been written by males.

At present, we have some nice articles in the queue witing to be published. The articles are thoughtful, interesting, and provocative. But they were authored by men. When they appear on UBFriends, I suspect that they will generate lots of lively comments by our male readers but not by women. This is one reason why I am hesitating to press the “Publish” button. I don’t want to do anything that will unwittingly reinforce our image as an all-boys club.

What has happened to the fairer sex?

Perhaps women have become disinterested because the content of the articles does not appeal to them. Perhaps UBFriends articles have become overly abstract. I have learned from experience that when conversations turn to ideas, doctrines, and principles, women start to yawn and bow out. That’s a huge oversimplification, of course. I don’t want to be guilty of stereotyping. But there are significant differences between men and women in how they think. I have heard from reliable sources — and seen by personal observation — that men fall in love with principles much more readily than women do, whereas women tend to be focused on relationships and people. When discussing a problematic issue in ministry, men are likely to wonder, “If we do such-and-such, what kind of message are we sending to our members, and what kind of precedent are we setting?” But women are likely to wonder, “If we do such-and-such, what impact will it have on the significant persons in my life?” (Both of these perspectives are important. Men and women truly need each other.)

Or perhaps the style of our communication is subconsciously hushing women up. I have seen how this happens. I have sat through meetings where most of the people sitting around the conference table are men, except for one or two women. If those women are not accustomed to working in a predominantly male environment and have not adapted themselves to male styles of verbal and nonverbal communication, they tend to just sit by and watch. Similarly, I have attended meetings where I am the only male surrounded by females. In those settings, I feel out of place and tend to just keep quiet and listen. It’s hard to pinpoint how the ethos of a male-dominated forum differs from a female-dominated one. But these differences are real and instinctively felt.

It is interesting to speculate about why UBFriends has become male-dominated.

But it is more important to ask: What should we do about it?

One solution is to publish more articles authored by women. That is something we would love to do. If any women would like to contribute articles to UBFriends, please email them to us (admin@ubfriends.org) and we will put them at the head of the queue. If you are unsure about your ability to write and express yourself, please don’t worry. We can help you to revise or edit your piece as needed.

Another solution is for the men who are contributing to UBFriends to become more attuned to how their content and style is perceived by women. If you have the urge to write something, perhaps you can show it to your wife, daughter, sister, etc. and ask them what they think. Consider co-authoring a piece with them.

If you have any suggestions on how to make UBFriends a more welcoming place for women, please let us know.

Over the last few weeks, some of you have tried to leave comments and experienced difficulty. Without our realizing it, commenting privileges were restricted to subscribers only, and then all comments were being held for moderation.

We believe the problem has now been fixed.

If you tried to leave a comment on UBFriends and were unsuccessful, please accept our apologies. This website is dedicated to open discussion, and we don’t want to exclude anyone who is willing to join in. If you continue to experience any difficulties, please send a note to admin@ubfriends.org

Thank you.

Is UBFriends having an impact? You bet it is.

One way to measure impact is to examine the traffic flow. Our webmaster, Mary J., installed a nifty counter that records the number of times each page has been viewed. Each of our articles has read by hundreds of people. One of them has been viewed nearly 800 times.

And as of today, our readers have contributed more than 360 comments. Many comments are lengthy and detailed, showing a level of interest, depth of thought, and heartfelt conviction that is rarely seen on a public website. Genuine communication is taking place here. People are learning from one another. They getting to know one another, and friendships are forming across boundaries of distance, age and culture.

As this website was starting, some UBF members expressed concern that it might become a forum for complaining, arguing, and uncivil behavior. To guard against that, we developed a commenting policy and have been closely monitoring the website to make sure that the rules are being followed. In our first three months, not a single comment has ever had to be removed from UBFriends. Let me say that again: Not a single comment has ever had to be removed from UBFriends. This speaks volumes about the quality of our articles and character of our readers. You have demonstrated a level of charity and maturity that is rarely found on public blogs. Our authors do not expect everyone to agree with what they write. Dissenting views are welcome on UBFriends. We encourage people to disagree in gentleness and respect, so that we may truly learn from one another.

In our first three months, we have posted 25 substantive articles by 13 different authors. Two or three new pieces have been appearing each week.

But you may have noticed that last week, we did not post any new articles. What happened?

We ran out of material to publish.

Some of you sensed this and responded by sending us new articles. So we now have three new pieces in our queue, which will keep us going until the end of next week. But after that, the well is going to run dry again, and we may have to pause until new material comes in.

If UBFriends has intrigued, blessed, or edified you in any way — if we have made you think, smile, frown, or pray — and if you would like to see this website prosper, grow, and bless people, then please help us.

What can you do to help UBFriends?

First of all, you can pray for us. Our administrators, editors, authors, and commenters are not profiting from this effort in any way. We are paying for the material costs (the subscription fee for the domain name, the server space, purchasing stock photos, etc.) out of our own pockets. We are happy to donate our time and money to this project because it is truly a labor of love, borne of sincere desire to bless the members of the Body of Christ. We are not asking you for money, but for something much more valuable: your sincere prayers that God will inspire all who contribute to UBFriends and continue to bless and use this website.

Second, you can leave a comment. The majority of you who have been reading UBFriends have never left a single comment. Why not? Perhaps you don’t feel confident enough to express yourself. Perhaps you are wary of being seen as “endorsing” or “supporting” the content of this website. If that’s the case, please remember this: Our contributors hold diverse views on all sorts of issues. UBFriends is not an organization, and it takes no official positions on anything. All views expressed here belong solely to the individuals who make them. We are not promoting causes; we are fostering friendship and open discussion. If you have been reading, why should you be ashamed or afraid to let other people know it?

If you are an occasional or regular reader of UBFriends but have never left a comment, please leave a comment now, just to let us know that you are out there. If you don’t know what to say, then just say “Hi.” Please do this as a small gesture to encourage our authors and editors, to let us know that you appreciate our efforts. We are human beings, after all, and we need some affirmation and encouragement. By leaving a comment now, you will send a strong signal to potential contributors that their efforts will not go unnoticed.

Third, you can contribute your own material to UBFriends. We are willing to publish just about anything that satisfies our guidelines. It doesn’t need to be sophisticated or even well written; our editors can help to revise and improve it.

Thanks for stopping by UBFriends. Come back soon!

Please tell your buddies about UBFriends.org so that this online community will continue to thrive. And please send your creative work to us so that we can schedule it for publication.