‘What was the end result of this striving and seeking to be right before God using my human efforts? It was years of depression, anger and frustration, unreal expectations on family members, and joyless Christian living with no relationships with the greater body of Christ.’

herein we see the bigger trauma on our children/students: but thanks be to God the Holy Spirit can restore stolen fruits of joy, peace, love, etc; the “vineyard tenants” must pay God rent/produce good fruit, or get out & be replaced by true kingdom workers: HALLELUJAH!

‘When the relationships among us are healthy and loving and Christ-centered, then there’s a whole lotta discernin’ goin’ on. But when the relationships are screwed up, when the relationships are ideological and superficial and pragmatic and abusive, that process of discernment gets screwed up too.’

we must hold the feet of religion to the fire to repent of ungodly practices, until it learns to help seekers/believers hear God individually/collectively; if it fails to do so, the spiritual damage (‘bleeding’) must be stopped & replaced by individual ‘to Christ Alone’ spirituality, with Holy Spirit fruit/helps cultivation, & when possible sincere collective worship of God in Spirit/Truth:
HALLELUJAH!

‘So many times, when I did something that my heart told was right, the “servant of God” told me was wrong, and vice versa. So there was a conflict.’
therein lies the inherent schizoaffective-like damage imposed on adult, & worse yet child, psyche: do we follow our inner voice/gut feeling from God or the external religious authority who ‘knows best from God’ SUPPOSEDLY:::(

A UBF old timer I know recently sent a well-meaning message to a young person, a teenager, the gist of which was this: Learn and obey the Ten Commandments, have a strong desire to study hard and enter [Ivy League] University. Is that supposed to be the gospel of grace? Sounds like the “gospel” of “be a blessing” and “have a vision” that Samuel Lee was constantly drilling into people. Kevin, I think that UBF old timer I mentioned has never had your recent awakening and freedom. And I find that sad because he’s a good guy.

I blame the teaching. Ideas are powerful and stubborn things. What does a previously un-churched college-aged seeker learn first and often in UBF? Does he learn, “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved?” Or does he learn from his first few Bible studies that “man=mission” and a few weeks later, to “be a blessing” and “have a vision”. For so many, the message of grace will forever be overshadowed by the performance preoccupation.

Many UBFers are struggling with this I guess. I remember a shepherdess who admitted these thoughts to our chapter director. He then showed her that well-known picture of the broad and narrow path (it was the only picture in our center), teaching her it was normal that the right way (the UBF way) was a miserable one, while the fun was all on the other side, the way to destruction. That shepherdess really was “edified” through this picture and continued to follow the narrow UBF path, believing this was the way to heaven. Actually if you take this seriously this also means that all those who do not live in the UBF ways are comdemned and will burn in a fire that is waiting for them at the end of their way. One couple of Korean missionaries who left my UBF chapter (for good reasons) needed more than a year to free themselves from the thought that they would burn in that fire because they “left their mission” and did not “deny themselves” any more, because these pictures were so deeply implanted in their minds. Apart from this fear, even if you’re going on the right way (the UBF way), how can you be happy with the thought that nearly everybody else outside of UBF will face destruction? If you have such a worldview, you simply cannot be joyful.

My own personal thought over the last few years is to preach, teach, share, converse, discuss, interact and live out the gospel as of first importance as best I can (Acts 20:24). After that I pray that I may get out of the way ASAP so that by God’s help I may allow for a far better One who can do the job that I can never ever do (Jn 3:8; 1 Cor 2:12-13).

* Those men never set out to have evil lives. They all seemed to be normal, good people who fell into their evildoing more by accident, through a sequence of bad decisions that they made incrementally over time.

I recently ran across two articles that touched on this psychology.

The first article reports on what a team of psychologists found when they examined Nazi criminals on trial at Nuremberg. They found

* in many ways, these war criminals seemed like very ordinary people; they didn’t appear evil at all

* they routinely avoided responsibility for their own actions, placing all the blame on their leaders

* they lacked sensitivity and human empathy, and they never felt guilty or had any bad dreams about what they had done

* their personal development had been stunted by a lack of parental love and unconscious hostility toward their fathers

That article can be found here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/07/inside-the-nazi-mind-at-the-nuremberg-trials.html#url=/articles/2013/09/07/inside-the-nazi-mind-at-the-nuremberg-trials.html

Another article is about the psychology of “good people” who cheat. Although they know their actions are wrong, and they do feel bad about what they have done, they find comfort by convincing themselves that

* they don’t cheat as much as others do, and

* cheating is not their normal behavior, but something they do only once in a while, so when they cheat it’s not representative of their true selves (“that’s not who I am”)

Neither of those is very surprising, but it was interesting to see how it was demonstrated experimentally.

http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/11/20/how_cheaters_comfort_themselves_108367.html

In your example you said “the nurse will be judged on 2 things: did the nurse follow hospital protocol and did the nurse do what the average nurse would do anywhere?” What if these 2 things contradicted each other, i.e. if the hospital protocol prescribed things that no average nurse would do? Because that is exactly the case we have to deal with. I am pretty sure many things that are considered normal or mandatory in UBF are not what average Christians do. Also, your example assumes that the nurse had a proper education so she knows what you do. In our case, we got our education in the same dysfunctional hospital, so we never learned or quickly re-learned what an average nurse would do.

In the end, though, I agree with you that the nurse had no defense if she did things that violated common sense human ethics. As another comparision, we could take the “I only followed orders” defense used by some German subleaders after WW2. I totally agree with you on that this kind of defense is not valid. The whole concept of “absolute obedience” is not a valid. If you trusted in this principle, you were fooled. In reality, as Luther said, “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.” As a German, I always felt something was wrong when the Koreans tried to teach me obedience.

So, you’re right, the individual guilt stays. Still, what happened in Germany in the time of Hitler can not be explained and understood if we concentrate only on the individual guilt of the German people or the sub-leaders, without talking about the real leaders like Hitler and Goebbels and the ideology that they propagated. This ideology must be analyzed and dissected: Why was it so appealing to people? How did their propaganda work? Also, which mechanisms did they use to stifle dissent? How could they gain power so quickly and hold it? How did everything happen, what where their roots? What were the fundamental flaws in their ideology? What were their fundamental crimes? This all must be properly processed. If you can’t pinpoint all these things very clearly, how can you make sure that such things will never happen again?

We need both, admission of our own guilt, but also exposal of the whole system that mislead us lower-ranking members, and that also mislead the leaders. We need to speak about the psychological mechanisms behind it, because it worked by exploiting such mechanisms. As I recently wrote, that system aggravated our failures. It aggravated not only the sheepish behavior of the rank and file, but also the authoritarian behavior of the leaders. Recognizing this also helps us to put their sin into perspective, because in the end, we both were victims of the same evil system. Even though this does not take our and their guilt away, it puts things in better perspective and helps us understand why we and other people behaved the way they did. It also helps us understand and underestimate the danger and power and dynamics of such systems. Without seeing the larger picture, without naming and framing the system that kept us all enslaved, we stay confused about what really happened.

Your question is very good, and I am asking myself similar questions. Part of my anger is also anger about myself because I did not listen. On the other hand, I must say that in UBF I systematically un-learned to take any thought that raised in my own heart seriously. So many times, when I did something that my heart told was right, the “servant of God” told me was wrong, and vice versa. So there was a conflict. Whom should I trust more, the servant of God, my everlasting calling to be a UBF shepherd, or my own inner voice, which could be God speaking to me, but could as well be my lazy, unspiritual, family-centered, humanist, individualist ego, as UBF leaders warned me, or could be just “feeligns” and “emotions” which should be ignored as UBF leaders told me? The only things that counted in UBF was “absolute obedience” in a “leap of faith”. Both are pretty incompatible with what you feel in your heart. You just jump. You just blindly follow. Feelings and thoughts of my own had to be neglected. My chapter director gave us examples in which seemingly foul things turned to be good in the end. What we learned was that there was actually no way for us to discern good and bad, we should only follow the direction given by our shepherd, as obedient sheep. The system and our teachers systematically discouraged us from searching for the voice of God in our heart and taking our own thoughts seriously.

You asked, “Why was I not listening years ago if he is in my heart, which God is?”

Behind this question there seems to be an assumption: That every Christian should automatically know how to discern the inner voice of the Holy Spirit who speaks to him/her personally. And that if we aren’t listening to this voice, it’s because we are sinning.

In my experience, however, that practice of discernment — learning to hear the voice of God — does not happen automatically. It needs to be cultivated. It needs to be learned from others and taught to others. The practice of discernment is rooted in spiritual disciplines that go beyond Bible study and the familiar things that we were taught in ubf.

And it is not merely an individual activity; it happens in churches and in families. You learned a great deal from your wife; she helped you to start discerning. My wife did the same for me, and continues to do so, and I do the same for her. When the relationships among us are healthy and loving and Christ-centered, then there’s a whole lotta discernin’ goin’ on. But when the relationships are screwed up, when the relationships are ideological and superficial and pragmatic and abusive, that process of discernment gets screwed up too.

And if you were discipled in a faith community that had little understanding of the Christian contemplative traditions and spiritual formation — a community with a narrow, hierarchical, top-down educational model — a community where innovative learning and nonconformist thinking and connections to the greater Body of Christ were often discouraged — a community where one leader exerted a great deal of control and dictated (what he believed to be) the will of God to everyone else — then when did you ever have the chance to learn the art of personal spiritual discernment?

What I’m trying to say is this. We who are are steeped in the traditions of modern evangelicalism tend to place a great deal of burden on the individual believer to discern right from wrong. I think we underestimate how much of our ability (or inability) to hear God’s voice depends on the quality of relationships with significant people in our lives and on the culture of our faith community.

You’re right, we all have to blame ourselves in the first place. Yet doing so we should not overlook what caused us to develop these unbiblical mindsets and unhealthy practices. I know you did not invent these things in your mind from thin air. Someone implanted these ideas in your mind, someone imposed these ideas onto you. We should expose clearly what these false ideas are and in which ways they were imposed onto us. We need to start naming and framing things. It were not things which “just happened” and we let them happen. No, the happening of these things was systematically, and we were systematically trained to let these things happen.