Or perhaps we could call it pride. Or elitism. Or exclucivism. Or cultural imperialism. Or superiority. Or ego.

I never heard about the terms “sending church” or “mission agency” until I got out of the ubf bubble. And yet these terms and concepts are essential to mission work. Being a missionary is about networking. Being a Christian is about networking to the global body of Christ. Being a human is about networking. Yet for some reason in UBF there is this self-sufficient ascetic spirit. I don’t know where its root is from, but when mission work is done that way it is analogous to one shooting themselves in the foot.

This is the One Word for all of us. This is what they hate to hear. This is what they fear to hear. Because it is clear their whole life is nothing but a total failure. Especially, when this accurate assessment comes from a man who all loved and respected so much. Alas, it is God who speaks to us through a man if we hear and repent. But is it not also true all prophets were rejected and killed? Let us hear if we have ears. Thank you for sharing this.

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Penn State UBF began in January 1992. For almost twenty years, we tried to operate as an independent church, campus fellowship and disciplemaking ministry in the UBF tradition. Gradually we realized that planting a church in State College and building a campus ministry at Penn State in the name of UBF was not viable. Many factors were involved in that realization; here is the short list.

• We discovered that there is much, much more to church than having Bible studies. Our families and our students needed to be in a healthy, nurturing spiritual environment, and we didn’t have the knowledge, experience, manpower, energy or wisdom to provide it.

• It was unrealistic to think that we could work full time in demanding professional jobs, give our children (some of whom have intellectual disabilities) the attention they needed, keep our homes and home lives in working order, build a church community from scratch, recruit more members, create a campus ministry, maintain the church facilities (cleaning, maintenance and repair), prepare and lead Bible studies, conduct services, preach weekly messages, tend to our marriages, and carry out the duties of good citizenship – not to mention, participate in the leadership of the UBF organization at the national and international levels. What in the world were we thinking?

• For a church to become stable, it needs a critical mass of families who settle and put down roots in the community. In our college town, families could come for a few years for graduate study, postdocs, etc. but would inevitably leave. Year after year, no matter what we did, we were always going to be in a mode of building the congregation from scratch. When local families from the State College community tried to join us, they found that we were too focused on campus ministry to pay attention to them; they sensed that we mainly wanted to use them to fulfill our campus ministry vision, so they left.

• Penn State already has dozens of campus ministries, and as we got to know them better, we couldn’t find any compelling reason to start another one.

• State College (a city of less than 100,000 people) is filled with churches of all kinds, including dozens that you might describe as evangelical and Bible-oriented. As we got to know them better, we couldn’t find any compelling reason to start another one.

• We were American, which made it hard for the rest of UBF to relate to us. For the first ten years, Penn State UBF consisted entirely of Americans, with no Korean missionaries. When missionaries from Korea arrived on the scene, they felt bewildered, because the environment was unlike anything they had experienced before. They couldn’t adjust to us, and we sometimes felt judged by them. They seemed to regard us as unspiritual because we didn’t act like Korea UBF.

• Yet in many ways we still acted quasi-Korean, which made it hard for American students to relate to us. Students found our discipleship methods to be unattractive and our atmosphere to be awkward. When they came, they wondered, “Why is there a group of Americans in the middle of central Pennsylvania acting like Koreans?” We always felt like fish out of water, because that’s what we were.

• UBF is still widely known as a fringe group with a dark history and questionable ministry methods. Placing the logos of NAE and ECFA on UBF websites have not erased that bad reputation. Many students did research on UBF and decided to leave us because they feared that our ministry practices were unsound. If the UBF organization had admitted wrongdoing and taken observable, measurable steps to clean up its reputation, then this problem would have been so much easier to deal with. How wonderful it would have been if we could point to an official UBF website where the problems were being squarely faced and addressed! But year after year, nothing ever came. We felt like soldiers being sent out to fight battles on behalf of an organization while the commanders sat back in safety inside their headquarters, never coming out to face the conflicts that to us were so real and so heartbreaking.

• Year after year, the support and training provided by UBF headquarters and was inadequate and did not the problems we faced at the local level. When we went to staff conferences, the advice we kept hearing was “Have faith!”, “Go back to the Bible,” “Recover your first love,” “Renew your calling for campus mission,” “Love one another.” It was abstract, overspiritualized, and sidestepped the actual problems that we were facing day after day.

• The support and training provided by the midAtlantic region was even worse. When we tried to bring up these issues to Jacob Lee, he avoided the problems and took active steps to silence us and to marginalize us. I repeatedly appealed to UBF headquarters for help but nothing was done. Participation in midAtlantic events became too painful to endure.

• When I tried to bring up some these issues to the senior staff over the course of several years, I was ignored and rebuffed and made to feel that the problems were because of me, because of my shortcomings and proud mind and bad attitude and impatience and lack of faith.

In summary: We discovered the hard way that plant a church and building a successful campus ministry is not simply a matter of going out and doing it by faith and working hard until you succeed. It takes considerable time, training, resources, manpower, understanding, networks of support at the local, regional and national level that we could not provide and UBF could not provide. To think we could do all this on our own while supporting ourselves and taking care of our families was (to put it bluntly) insane. The business model was flawed, and there was no way to fix it.

Are you saying you are ok with shepherding theology that says you must obey your shepherd forever with eternal gratitude?

And what, we just sweep Winnepeg under the rug too? We ignore the police reports, the abortions, the suicides, all the pain of former members, we just ignore it and say “no matter”?

Ha! Exactly what I started to do in our “sending out”. Instead, the chapter director became infuriated that we were attacking his authority. He disbanded our support team and told us we needed 6 months of driving training. ubf is not a Christian missionary sending organization in any sense. ubf has no intention of sending missionaries of any kind unless they are Korean, apart from a handful of token “natives”.

We cannot begin to speak of ubf as a church or even a missionary-sending organization until some serious problems are exposed and bad practices ended.

I like your six categories, but in regard to each I have many questions for any ubf person reading this:

1. a sending church: When will ubf admit its bad theology called UBFism?
2. a mission agency: When will ubf stop demanding absurd sacrifices?
3. a receiving church: When will ubf address its cult label and stop looking down on mainline churches?
4. a missionary team: When will ubf talk honestly to its members and respond to what former members have been saying?
5. a “person of peace”: When will ubf report sexual abusers to the police?
6. the family: When will ubf stop arranging marriages?

And most importantly, when will the 2nd Gens speak up? When will people stop enabling this cult to operate on over 300 campuses?

For instance, here is a quote from the Northern Latin America SBC mission report on UBF’s main page: “Near 40 missionary candidates pledged to go anywhere, anytime as missionaries.” This kind of pledge is of course a remarkable feat of faith, but at the same time isn’t this dangerous? I’d love to hear some thoughts on this.