UBF members love to study the book of Genesis. I studied Genesis so many times that I lost count.

Where does Genesis reach its climax?

In the story of Joseph and his brothers. The longest and most detailed part of the book.

The sons of Jacob wanted to get rid of Joseph. He was one of their own. He was their own flesh and blood. When it became inconvenient to have Joseph around, they conspired to get rid of him. They threw him under the bus. They came up with a fanciful story to cover up their dirty deed.

That betrayal, and that lie, literally tore the family apart.

The brothers wanted to forget all about it. They wanted to bury the past. They told themselves that it wasn’t such a big deal. They thought they could go on as if it never happened.

But it was a huge deal.

If the sons of Jacob never reckoned with the dark secret and big lie of their past, what would have happened? They would have died in Canaan. Although they didn’t realize it at the time, the survival of their family — and the whole existence of the nation of Israel — hinged on their coming to grips with what they had done. Dire circumstances finally brought them to a moment of honesty. Together they acknowledged their sin, and their corporate repentance became their lifeline and opened a new chapter in history.

If we don’t see the importance of reckoning with the past, telling the truth, corporate repentance, and reconciling with the people that we threw under the bus, haven’t we missed the main point of the book of Genesis?

If you had to sum up the teaching of Genesis in one line, it would be something like this: “Reckoning with your past through truthtelling and corporate repentance is the bridge to your future.”

This letter, written by a former UBF leader, gives you some idea of what it was like when SL started to spin tales about you and your coworkers went along with it and threw you under the bus.

http://exubf.blogspot.com/2007/04/peter-c-former-columbus-ubf_26.html

“I have found that not a few missionaries act as though it is a great, terrible and horrible sin against God to say anything that is not glowing about not only SL but often also about their respective leader – See more at: http://www.ubfriends.org/2015/09/02/horrible-things-happen-to-those-who-run-away/#sthash.8NjZs0Xu.dpuf

My motivation for posting this article is not to trash SL or to announce to the world how bad UBF is.

I posted this because I wanted to publicly reflect on how this fanciful storytelling affected us. How it fostered a culture of dishonesty and untruth. How it distorted our relationships, making it hard to express what we really thought, until eventually we didn’t even know what we thought. (As Ben said, we didn’t think much about it.) When one man assumes the role of community historian and feels entitled to shape people’s life stories however he wants, and when everyone else allows him to do it, and when no alternative stories may be spoken, the damage to people’s relationships and lives is long lasting and profound.

I wish that the people who lived through this would open up and talk about it. Perhaps it’s still too raw and scary. But unless they do, healing won’t come.

“She served another young man, who rose up to become a Bible teacher and shepherd, but eventually he ran away because of his disagreements with the direction of our ministry.” from “Hope When There Is No Hope (Luke 7:11-17)”

I’m not mentioned by name, but the person who told me about it said that everyone knew I was being referenced. What I do find sad about the mention (besides not being named or that my relationship with the missionary is not accurately portrayed or that my fifteen years of service are reduced to this) is that it it supposed to be an encouragement to an older missionary to keep going despite someone leaving. The message tells people to just ignore any disagreements or concerns people have, including someone who has been through the system and was one of you as a shepherd, to ignore people who leave, and just keep doing the same old things you’ve been doing all along. Keep up the campus mission/shepherd business as usual.

As a Sunday messenger, I often heard about Dr. Lee (Shepherd Samuel) being such a good spiritual doctor through his messages and how he struggled with the word of God to receive one word, and so how I needed to become a great shepherd and messenger like him. His messages were referred to the “model message.” Another time in Africa, IK and I visited Nigeria to support a Spring Conference. We were asked to look at the messages a week before the conference. They were all word for word Lee’s messages, with the Chicago people and American references still intact. I was horrified to find that this was how so-called “message training” and “conference preparation” was done. And the messengers were not “new” or “young.” These manuscripts were given to the fellowship leaders and long-standing members. I’m grateful that in my time as a messenger, Isaac Kim never forced Lee’s messages on to my own in preparations.

Sadly, speaking bad about others has become so accepted and widespread in imitation of Lee that’s like second nature.

Actually, most often I hear ex-sheep stories not in a Sunday message but during Bible study. The central theme of these stories is not usually great worldly catastrophes. Instead, the common idea is that they “fell back into the world.” What exactly this means is not entirely clear, but rather is taken to be obvious.

For example: “One of my sheep was touched greatly by God’s word and was very enthusiastic about making a decision to follow God. She seemed like she was on fire for God’s word. But then, she started attending another church… and she fell back into the world.”

I hear this sort of tale most often. Anybody else experience these in one-to-ones?

I often utilized Dr Lee’s messages in my own preparation of messages. I was impressed by his interpretation and division of the passages, but this kind of application shows him to be narcissistic and insecure. I pity him now.

Whenever I used his manuscript for a message or study, reading these parts always made me feel I could never say such a thing, nor should any Christian, ever, without grave concern.

BY THE WAY Dr Lee also had a famous car accident, supposedly upon hearing that Dr Jim R married (his first marriage). Most people believed the notion that it was SL and his broken shepherd heart. Now I’m convinced it was either a convenient way to shame Jim , or a sign that Lee found his meaning in controlling others, no matter the situation.

Reminds me now of the Whitewashed Tombs Jesus mentioned, painted up well, but full of dead men’s bones. He murdered them in his heart, in order to make an idol of them to suit his religious need.

“One girl student had a hope of becoming a world famous pianist. So she invested her youth in piano practice. She married a medical doctor. She was happy for some time. But she got breast cancer and suffered from it for seven years. After getting breast cancer she realized her hope in the piano was useless. She began to put her hope in the resurrection of Jesus. In the hope of the resurrection of Jesus she overcame pain and death and gave a good influence to her children, as well as to her one-to-one Bible students.” source

This “teaching” has been so deeply ingrained and firmly embedded in UBF that often some leaders are virtually unaccountable and untouchable even to this very day.

This was so in-grained in me for over two decades that I was not able to prepare a sermon and or Bible study by not going through this procedure and by using the UBF manuscript as the “absolute non-negotiable and final authority” on the passage.

Today I do the opposite. I read books, commentaries, blogs and (read or listen to) sermons by other pastors and scholars on the text of Scripture. Then after getting the perspective of many/several others, I look at the Bible with the understanding and learning of different scholars and pastors.

But when I explained this to certain people, their reaction is to believe what has been circulated about Bento in that “Bento is no longer studying the Bible but only reading books!”

This too should be called into question. If we believe God gives good weather as a blessing to the UBF faithful, what do we say when it rained on Lee’s gravesite celebration a few years ago?

Again, this is all hogwash and contradictory to what Jesus taught. God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. We cannot look to the weather as God’s direct blessing as a result of our faithful actions. That is magical thinking, not Christianity.

A very good way of decribing it.

Yes, Lee told us (in a very authoritative voice) what each Bible passage meant. But the process by which one arrives at a proper understanding of Scripture was shrouded in mystery. We were discouraged from reading books or consulting commentaries. That would be cheating. No, we were told to go sit in a room by ourselves, to memorize the passage, to recite it over and over, to struggle and wrestle with it, until Bingo! that elusive “one word” suddenly popped into our hearts. It was all rather magical. Something like Buddhist-style enlightenment. The onus was on us to make it happen. If it didn’t happen, it was because we didn’t have faith, or because we didn’t try hard enough.

This is why, after 25 years of supposedly studying the Bible, I understood very little about how to approach the Bible.

These stories by Lee show that he was not some innocent Christian preacher, and nor was he just someone who didn’t know what was going on. He knew exactly what he wanted – to create a worldwide network of people who obeyed and propagated his teachings.

These stories also reveal that God is sovereign (or kharma is a bitch). Lee claimed we would die of some great tragedy if we left God’s mission, which was ubf. But he himself died of a tragedy (fire). If what he said is true, then he must have run away from UBF and God punished him with death by fire. Of course, all this is preposterous. And sadly, it is also very un-Christlike.

“We have to think about how motive makes people different. Would you like to hear a story? Me, too. There were two students who got room and board at their uncle’s house in Korea. Their purpose was to finish high school. In order to do so, they had to study high school English. But their motive of studying English was to get good grades and pass the college entrance exam. They were not fully motivated to master English; their motive was only to pass a test. As a result, they studied every night for three or four hours. But they could not get even one A. If they had been motivated to master English, they could have gotten all A’s. On the other hand, a factory boy, who was the house owner’s son, was motivated to study in great hunger. So he overheard their English study and memorized everything. He mastered high school English in one semester. Next, he began to teach his cousins. When he understood high school English, he was greatly motivated and wanted to become an English Bible teacher for American students in the future. Then God gave him a photographic memory. After three months, he could memorize an English dictionary which contained 25,000 words, and review it two more times. In the course of studying English he was beaten by his step-mother, who said he was burning a kerosene lamp too much. She beat him until one of his eyes was bleeding, and later, legally blinded. Then he was even more motivated to study English. God had mercy on him and he is now an English Bible teacher to gorgeous American students.”

http://www.washingtonubf.org/BibleMaterials/John/Jn12a_msg.txt

Response No. 1, by Elsa Ronningstam, associate clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and author of Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality: Referring to yourself in the third person creates distance between “I” and “he.” So if you have an exaggerated view of how great you are, you could be using this distance to make yourself even bigger. Or, if you’ve achieved major success suddenly, using the third person could be a way to adjust to the bigger role that’s been assigned to you. It’s a way to enlarge yourself to fit that role.

Response No. 2, by Mike Birbiglia, stand-up comedian who currently stars in the off-Broadway show Sleepwalk with Me: People love to rip those who refer to themselves in the third person, but they don’t understand the power that comes with it. The third person is how you indicate that the topic is not open for debate. You are speaking about facts that just so happen to include you. Like when Alonzo Mourning says, “Alonzo Mourning has to make the best business decisions for Alonzo Mourning,” everyone steps back a little, and somebody hands him $15 million a year for seven years. But that same sentence in the first person would have sounded like, “I just enjoy playing basketball with my friends and all the free Gatorade.” See the difference? Maybe this is a case of what the f%$# is right with these people…. – http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5036/third-person-1108/

There was a pretty young woman, a born-pianist. If she practiced piano hard, she might have been a contestant at the Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow. So in the hope of raising her as our Chicago pianist, we applied for her permanent residency. Soon she received permanent residency. Then we came to know that she was going to a young boy’s house, and had slept with the boy for almost one year. Not only so, she also cooked many other boys. We thought that we could help her. So many shepherds, especially Pastor Mark Vucekovich, worked hard. But she could not leave the boy alone. She stuck to him like a rat sticks to flypaper. After much pain, we sent her to her home country, where her father was. There was a UBF full-time staff shepherd. His ministry was prosperous. But he was seized by a foxy woman and only listened to the lady; he refused to listen to his senior shepherd. We could not believe how he could do that. Soon his ministry crumbled and disappeared. In 1982 a 19-year-old country boy came to Chicago UBF. He looked as if he had some problem. So a shepherd asked him, “What’s your problem?” He answered, “I have a great marriage problem.” Everybody was surprised that he had a great marriage problem and was so heavy when he was just 19 years old. His desire was too mean; he could not be a young man of vision and dream. It was not the 19-year-old boy who talked about his great marriage problem, but obviously the demon in him.

http://chicagoubf.org/dsl/print_pdf.php?book=matthew&file=mt17b

One young man received UBF training. Usually UBF trains a man to be a shepherd, Bible teacher, scholar and administrator, which are essential qualities in being a leader. But this young man only learned the principle of administration. Then he made $3,000,000 in New York and bought a big house in Manhattan. At the age of 37 he retired and began to enjoy his life with his money. He soon became idle and proud. Moreover, after 6 months he was no longer happy with what he had. So he began to fight with his wife. His happiness depended on the ebb and flow of his wife’s
emotions. His wife soon died because of breast cancer. Then he married a woman who had a shamanistic Christian background. He said, “My wife uses two rolls of toilet paper to cry during the nighttime and sleeps during the daytime. I can hardly sleep. Nobody cooks for me.” In two years’ time, his hair turned white and he looked like a porcupine.

http://chicagoubf.org/dsl/daniel/dan04.txt