Brian,

I apologize I haven’t read all your postings here. Help me out. What do you feel toward those who have hurt you?

Wesley, this is such a good question. Brian has given you his response. I want to respond as well and explain to you how I feel. My answer has gotten too long to comfortably fit in the comment section, so I have decided to post it as an article.

Some people who come to this website perceive a lot of “bitterness.” They assume that this “bitterness” is unhealthy and dangerous and lies at the root of the broken relationships between our members and former members. They see the “bitterness” as our moral failure.

I don’t accept that point of view. I have thought long and hard about this. I have searched the Bible for answers. I have prayed and cried out to God. I have studied theology, missiology and cross-cultural understanding. I have searched my heart and delved into my own darkness. I have gone to Christian therapy to see my way through the emotions of the past few years, emotions that may appear to be surfacing now but have been with me for a very long time. And I am now convinced that this “bitterness”  is not our moral failure.

One book that has helped me to make sense of this is Strange Virtues: Ethics in a Multicultural World by Bernard Adeney. This was one of the recommended readings prior to the February 2010 North American UBF staff conference. We never discussed the book. I suspect that very few of our missionaries read it. But I have read the book very carefully and have returned to it many times since then.

I read this book from an unusual perspective: not as a Western missionary, but as a recipient of efforts by missionaries from the East. I find that I do not identify with the missionary, the stranger who enters the foreign mission field. I identify with the natives.

Let me explain.

Adeney was born in Shaghai, China and raised in a missionary family. He has lifelong calling  has been to study, from Asian and American perspectives, the difficulties and misunderstandings that arise in cross-cultural missionary activity. The historic failures of Western missionaries have brought deep clarity and insight to Adeney and other scholars of mission. This hard-won insight is that the goal of the missionary, a stranger in a foreign land, is above all to build friendships of mutual trust and long-term commitment in which the gospel brings new life to both parties.

Adeney writes (p. 29):

When we enter another culture, whether across town or across the ocean, we enter as strangers… Even after many years of  living in another culture we remain as strangers.

The first role of the stranger is not to teach, give and to serve. It is to learn, to receive, and to be served by the host. Only when these first tasks are mastered to the host’s satisfaction does the stranger earn the privilege of being allowed to criticize and exert influence over the host’s culture.

Missionary work is not the act of one person giving the gospel to another. Missonary work happens as a mutual  cross-cultural relationship develops where the rules of hospitality between stranger and host are not violated. Over time, new understanding of the gospel emerges and transforms all parties.

Adeney calls this process incorporation. Incorporation is a level of unity in which the stranger and the host never change roles, but operate in mutual edification. He writes  (p. 136):

An ideal goal… is incorporation.  A stranger is incorporated when she or he is fully accepted and integrated into the culture. Both sides have made a long-term commitment to the other which will not be terminated even if the stranger leaves. When you are incorporated, you have internalized the culture to the extent that it has become part of you. Incorporation does not occur at the initiative of the stranger. It is an act of the host to make the stranger a real part of the family.  The closest analogy may be adoption. But it is also like marriage in that both parties make a commitment to each other.

Adney also warns that the stranger must always remember that it is the natives who must adopt him into their family, not the other way around.. In the passage below, Adeney refers to Anthony Gittens, another favorite author of mine (p. 136):

As in adoption, a person who has been welcomed into a new family does not ever become structurally equal with his new “parents.”  The new culture may become family, but it will also remain your host, at least for a very long time. As an incorporated foreigner, you remain a quest, structurally subordinate to your hosts. Gittens  suggests that if strangers are unwilling to accept this and how it in their attitudes, they are unlikely to be incorporated into the culture.

And then Adney includes this quote from Gittens (p. 136):

Acceptance by the host is no carte blanch for the stranger to forget the precedence due to the other….If the stranger wishes to remain “free” and not be beholden to the host, then incorporation is not desirable; but where incorporation does take place, then noblesse oblige [requires] the guest to defer to the host and be loyal rather than critical…  If we sense that we are incorporated into a group, do we thereby acknowledge our responsibility to support and be loyal to our hosts?  Or do we retain the “right” to criticize and judge others, thus effectively making it undesirable for us to seek incorporation?  And what of our hosts; do we appreciate the relative slowness in accepting us fully?  Do we understand how seriously they take the duties of hospitality?   Can we accept that they remain superordinate, since we are on their turf and not our own?  And do we nevertheless aspire to learning how to be appropriate strangers, or do we with to repudiate the conventions and seize intitiative and control?”

The stranger must always tread carefully, never forgetting that he is the stranger (p. 132):

Gittens asks “Do we show adequate and genuine  deference to our hosts?  Do we willingly acknowledge their authority in the situation, and their rights and duties as hosts?  Do we allow ourselves to be adequately positioned as strangers , according to the legitimate needs of the hosts?   Or do we try to seize initiatives, show them clearly what our expectations are, make demands on them, and  thus  effectively refuse the role of stranger, thereby impeding them  from being adequate hosts?”

Adeney believes that this strangeness, when properly embraced and understood, is a gift. This gift will be missed, however, if the missionaries refuse to submit to their hosts and continually turn to one another for validation and insight. The result of this can only be a reinforcement of cultural bias that will sabotage the whole enterprise. If the missionary doesn’t fully embrace the role of a stranger, it will reap profound, unintended, negative consequences. The missionary must guard the autonomy and uniqueness of the host and give him precedence. If he does, miracles happen (p. 141):

This may be one of the highest aims for which we were created.  Each person, and each culture, has a unique secret.  Each is capable of knowing something of God which no one else knows.  In the meeting of strangers we have the opportunity to share that treasure with each other.

For years, I tried to become part of the UBF family, but have never really succeeded. I have always felt like the stranger trying to learn and adapt to a foreign family. I have rarely, if ever, been allowed to serve as the host. For years, I thought that my inability to fit in was a personal failure I needed to own. But now I am realizing that this has been the failure of the entire UBF paradigm from the start.

In fact, I am now convinced that it was really not necessary for me to be made part of this family at all.  Rather, it was the missionaries who should have become part of my family. 

Without a doubt, we Westerners in UBF have been blessed by the “strangeness” of our Korean missionaries. I don’t deny this and I remain thankful for their efforts to serve. But there is something going on in me and in many others that makes it impossible for us to be content and silent right now. We feel compelled, Wesley, to express other emotions which under the present circumstances are appropriate and valid.

As a young and troubled college student, I didn’t know any of this. I had problems in my birth family which made me vulnerable to the influence of others. However, as time went on and as I matured, I have come to love and respect my parents and siblings. I have seen their genuine faith and soul searching. I now deeply regret that I had unnecessarily cut my relationship with my Christian family for so many years, because I was expected to put my UBF “family” first.

I have also struggled with my identity. The chaos of American culture in the past few decades had affected me deeply. Rather than learning to navigate the tidal waves of change, I was encouraged to remove myself and adopt a new and strange identity in UBF. The influence and pressure was profound and affected every area of my life: my hairstyle, my clothing, how I married, how I raised my children, and so on.

I tried to suppress my true identity as an American. But that identity was real and it resurfaced. Jesus wants me to be authentic.

How does it feel now to realize all of this?

Well, it is very painful. At times, I feel angry for having unnecessarily given up so much of myself. But I also feel liberated and more alive in Christ than ever.

For so many years, I was told to be “mission-centered” and to not get involved in “civilian affairs.” Those civilian affairs were broadly and unwisely defined as almost any activity outside of UBF. As a result, I lived as an alien and stranger in my own Christian community. I had no time for my neighbors unless they wanted Bible study.  My UBF “family” was extremely demanding of my time and energy and  it is because of them that I became unnecessarily isolated.

Now that I am realizing all that I have missed, how do you think I feel?

As I began to mature and recover my own identity, I experienced the life-giving work of Jesus in my heart, and I felt compelled to share it with others. My husband and I were allowed the chance to organize several UBF conferences and to explore our new understanding of gospel and mission. But our identity, our American strangeness, was not welcomed by the UBF “family.” In fact, we were removed from positions of influence and leadership. Our friendships were damaged through gossip and rude behavior, by manipulation and control (often in the name of “spiritual authority”). As we tried to speak of truthful things, we have been met almost entirely with silence, platitudes, warnings, and rebukes. Efforts at real conversation have been extremely limited and unsatisfactory.

So how do I feel about this?  I think you can guess.

Rules of intercultural hospitality cannot be broken without consequence. The host cannot be disrespected from the start without consequence. When people are pushed down for too long, they will eventually rebel and assert themselves.

I know that I have failed to express myself with the utmost kind of respect that would please the power structures of our Korean-led ministry. I have also broken some rules of hospitality. But I cannot take full responsibility for the state we are in.

I believe the onus is now on the real stranger, the missionary, to admit failure, to lay down control,  and restore the relationship.

Perhaps there are other Americans whose stories are different. But I know that there are many whose stories are similar to mine. After many years trying unsuccessfully to fit into this UBF “family,” they are now moving on. They will understand what I mean when I say that I have not been given the respect that a host deserves. They will know the intensity of the emotions of disillusionment and bitterness which must no longer be suppressed but addressed with painful openness and honesty. They will know the strength of my feelings when the guests in our midst still can’t acknowledge and address our experience and our desire to be heard.

Some of us won’t stop speaking about these issues because of an undying hope that a miracle of grace may yet occur. But the miracle won’t happen without real dialogue which will be very uncomfortable, messy and  intentional.

It feels like there is an imposter claiming to be the bride of Christ. She wears a similar veil so that it is often difficult to tell the difference until you come close and begin to lift it and rather than finding safety, compassion, and embrace you find protocol, judgment and exclusivity. I feel like our decision to move on is a desire to experience the true bride where vulnerable intimacy, unconditional embrace, and true rest exist and where protocol is not in charge except for the protocol to love. What is additionally discouraging is knowing that I have been seduced by this imposter and tried to entice others into her arms, explaining away her institutional nastiness while redirecting attention to her surface-level ‘pretty gown’.

This is a quote by a young pastor who decided to leave the institutional church. He didn’t give up his vocation as a pastor. In fact, he maintains that he can do more with Jesus outside the church than within it. He began to reengage in his community and found ample opportunity to serve Christ there.

Many today are leaving their churches not because of a lack of faith but because of disillusionment. Some find another church; others don’t. Leaving one’s church is a difficult decision that should not be made lightly. However, I do believe that there are healthy aspects to disillusionment. Disillusionment with church may lead some astray, but in many cases it leads to new and deeper expressions of faith.

In the highly acclaimed book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) characterizes disillusionment as a healthy and necessary step in the formation of Christian community. In fact, a church that refuses to become disillusioned with itself is in danger of collapse. In Chapter 1 he issues a dire warning:

Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.

Bonhoeffer draws a stark contrast between two types of Christian community: the “spiritual” community, which leads to love and freedom in the fruits of the Spirit, versus the “human” community, which leads to “subjection, dependence, and constraint.” He argues that a community must acknowledge the errors that arise from its human desire. “The life or death of a community is determined by whether it achieves sober wisdom on this point as soon as possible.”

Here’s a brief summary of what Bonheoffer says about the spiritual community.

• The spiritual community puts nothing before the Word and Supremacy of Christ. Christ is the real center of the community and the community strives to acknowledge Him in everything.
• In the spiritual community, there is no room for idealism. The community is realistic, not idealistic.
• The spiritual community loves for Christ’s sake only. All power and dominion are surrendered to Him. Within the community, one person will not seek direct influence over another person, but rather, serve the other while respecting his freedom in the love of Christ. The love within such a community is spiritual love, which releases the other “from every attempt to regulate, coerce, and dominate.”
• The spiritual community has no overall method, no grand strategy, but merely serves people with simplicity and humility.
• The spiritual community is ruled by the Holy Spirit, and relationships among the members are mediated by Jesus Christ. Instead of speaking to a person about God, they are more likely to speak to God about that person. And instead of speaking about one another covertly, they again bring their concerns about one another to God.
• The spiritual community doesn’t try to be other-worldy. The “physical, family, and ordinary associations of life” are fully integrated into daily activities. They ground the community in what is real, in “the sound, sober brotherly fellowship of everyday life.”

And this is how Bonhoeffer describes the human community.
• The human community is driven by noble and devout impulses and human fervor. It often puts human authority and loyalty to people before Christ.
• In the human community, the Holy Spirit is relegated to a position of “remote unreality.”
• Human community will seek to make people conform to its well-intentioned principles. Thus the community is highly idealistic. It may regard itself as “purely spiritual” but ends up following its own idealistic delusions.
• Members of the human community may exhibit high levels of devotion. They are capable of “prodigious sacrifices that often far surpass genuine Christian love in fervent devotion and visible results.”
• The love shown in a human community seeks to directly influence persons to fashion them into an ideal. “Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become.”
• The human community is methodical. It continually employs a searching, “calculating analysis” of its members.
• The human community won’t tolerate resistance when the community is threatened. The one who “seriously and stubbornly resists” the community’s agenda will be treated as an enemy, with “hatred, contempt, and calumny,” even if that person speaks the truth.

When I first read Life Together as a young Christian, I missed much of its meaning because I had the categories of spiritual and human all mixed up. In my mind, “human” was anything related to the life I had lived before my conversion: my old attachments, my former habits, and my natural likes and dislikes. And my notion of “spiritual” was too strongly identified with my church. Anything outside the realm of church activity was worldly and unspiritual. Doubts and concerns about the practices of my church were unspiritual, especially when expressed with strong emotion. I thought that the spiritual life consisted of absolute submission to the teachings of Scripture and the life of discipleship as they were presented to me by my teachers.

For years I struggled to put those teachings into practice. I never missed church meetings. I tried to put my mission of disciple-making first, even before taking care of my children. And I interpreted my eager desire to bring others into this life of obedience as my spiritual love for them. I worked hard to introduce people to Jesus through Bible study. I intentionally tried to increase their commitment to my community through participation in meetings and church activities. When they responded to my efforts, I was overjoyed. When they didn’t respond, I was troubled, crushed, even angry. I thought I needed to challenge them. When they failed to respond to my challenges, our relationships broke. At those painful moments, I convinced myself to just climb back into the saddle and ride on. Pressing forward with this same idealistic strategy is what I thought it meant to live by faith. Despite the setbacks, I always assumed that someday God would reward me for my faithfulness and obedience.

That notion of what was spiritual came from many sources. It came from my own need for safety, the desire for certainty and boundaries. It came from my own “visionary dreaming” (which Bonhoeffer says God hates!), from the Western missionary and Protestant theology and practice of the last two centuries, and from the cultural understanding of Korean Christians who taught me the gospel. And the hand of God was in it as well. God used these things to help my faith grow. But my ill-conceived notions of human versus spiritual needed to be challenged.

Fortunately, I had two very good friends with exceptional radar for falsehood. For years, I was gently warned by them. Sometimes in their anger I was harshly rebuked. Often — almost always, actually — they resisted me during Bible studies and other conversations. I reacted badly, accusing them of being unspiritual, unkind, unthankful and overly critical. I thought they lacked mission. I prayed that God would change them. Our relationship strained and nearly broke. But it was just this difficult relationship, and others like it, which revealed that my understanding of the spiritual life was skewed. My love for them was quite unspiritual. I reacted toward them just as Bonhoeffer predicted when he claimed that the telltale mark of human community is how it reacts to opposition. When the other cannot be controlled, or will not submit to our idealism, we react badly.

During those difficult years, I couldn’t learn much from anyone who didn’t get my view of the spiritual life. But finally I surrendered and began to listen to what my friends were saying. I began hear the ring of truth in their opposition. I allowed my own idealistic version of Christianity to be shattered and broken. For this I can only thank God. When this happened, my relationship with these friends and others was renewed and set on a dramatically different path, a path of mutual encouragement, vulnerability and healing under the supremacy of Christ.

In my case, disillusionment was just what I needed. It exposed my shaky foundations and led to deeper experience of Christian fellowship. My relationships with my friends could have been broken, but they weren’t. God led me to share in their disillusionment, to learn and grow from it.

This doesn’t always happen. It is sad when fellowship is broken because disillusioned and truth-telling brothers and sisters are pushed aside and feel that they must move on. But disillusionment isn’t a bad thing. In fact, Bonhoeffer claims that it is the point where real spiritual love begins to grow. It is where the community “begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.” Now I only wish that I hadn’t resisted it for so long.

Bowing to alternative views that appeal to us has always been a temptation. We refuse to believe there is only one way of salvation, only one way to the Father. We choose to believe there are many paths to God.

Why? Because if there are many paths to God instead of just one, then we can willfully and selfishly choose the path we want. We can live the way we want, and never be held accountable by God. We can choose a religion that appeals to our own pride and vanity.

This quotation by evangelist Michael Youssef recently appeared in a friend’s Facebook post, and when I saw it, I instinctively felt a negative reaction. I hope you don’t mind humoring me as I try to explain myself, because this matters to me. I am not objecting to the content of Dr. Youssef’s words, but to the tone and attitude behind them as they are likely to be perceived in our present historical context. I think that his words are unlikely to accomplish what he hopes they will, which is to bring sinners to repentance.

Perhaps I seem arrogant to challenge a man who is, I am sure, very great and genuine. But I am bothered by his words and want to tell you why.

I do not deny that sinners are selfish, willfully disobedient and given over to Satan’s temptation. But as followers of Jesus, we ought to be willing to apply those rebukes to ourselves first. And God is using this postmodern generation to help us do just that.

A few years ago, Rick Richardson spoke at a UBF Staff Conference. One of his major points was that we are now living and evangelizing in a context where the church has a bad name. There is a deep breach of trust between Christians and non-Christians which we ignore at our own peril. I’ve spent years speaking to students on campus and have seen this firsthand. Over the last two centuries, the Church has damaged its witness by assuming a position of privilege and power. Christians’ overconfidence in their own positions, dogma, and practice has left many people hurt and wounded (even dead!) and deeply disillusioned by the Christian faith. In this historical context, shouldn’t our stance be one of humility and openness to criticism? But I don’t hear this in the quote by Mr. Youssef.

I recently read The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission by Leslie Newbigin (Revised edition, 1995). The meaning of the book’s title is this. As Christians, we have been brought into God’s kingdom. That kingdom in all its glory is already fully present and realized in Jesus. But among his followers in this world, that kingdom is still a well hidden secret, not yet apparent to the human eye. Jesus has died and risen and been bodily glorified, but we as yet have not. Until we have been glorified with Jesus, our relationship to this world must resemble the relationship that Jesus had when he physically walked among us: a relationship characterized by openness and meekness.

Newbigin bases his argument on the principle of election. Election has been widely misunderstood and misapplied. God’s elect are people chosen and called by God. But because they are sinners, they all too easily mistake their election for a kind of special status that makes them superior to the non-elect. This happened among Israelites in the Old Testament, and it happens within the Church today. All too easily, election morphs into a position of privilege and power. But the biblically accurate picture of election is a position not of privilege but of humility and suffering.

God’s elect are called to the way of the cross. Here we need to be very careful, because this too is often misunderstood. What is the way of the cross? Is it to obey a life of “mission,” of obedience to church practices, dogmas or even to Bible verses? At times it may include these, but the way of the cross is much more than these. To follow the way of the cross it to live with a deep sense of responsibility toward our fellow human beings. It is to live as a witness to the salvation we have been given in Jesus. This responsibility goes far beyond verbally stating certain uncompromising truths which are commonly used in evangelistic presentations. No, it is much, much harder than that. To follow the way of the cross, we have to actually live out and embody the uncompromising truths of the gospel.

The way of the cross, according to Newbigin, requires that we enter into mutual relationships of love with God and with the Other (the non-Christian). This relationship with the Other may be hard and long-suffering. It may take enormous investments of time, humility and love to lay the foundations of trust. Trust develops through open, reciprocal dialogue where privilege, power and position have no place. This is the nature of missionary encounter. It involves listening to, entering into the reality of, and even accepting the rebuke of the Other. You can’t enter into this kind of mutual dialogue with Other as anything but equals before the cross, as a living witness to Jesus who is there seeking the sinner.

Missionary encounter doesn’t happen when you hone your argument skills, puff up your chest, and boldly declare your uncompromising convictions, letting the chips fall where they may. That doesn’t resemble Jesus. Nor, for that matter, Peter or Paul.

This is how Newbigin (p. 182) describes the purpose of dialogue with people who do not share our faith:

This purpose can only be obedient witness to Jesus Christ. Any other purpose, any goal that subordinates the honor of Jesus Christ to some purpose derived from another source, is impossible for Christians. To accept such another purpose would involve a denial of the total Lordship of Jesus Christ. A Christian cannot try to evade the accusation that, for him or her, dialogue is part of obedient witness to Jesus Christ. But this does not mean that the purpose of dialogue is to persuade the non-Christian partner to accept the Christianity of the Christian partner. Its purpose is not that Christianity would acquire one more recruit. On the contrary, obedient witness to Christ means that whenever we with another person (Christian or not) enter into the presence of the cross, we are prepared to receive judgment and correction, to find that our Christianity hides within its appearance of obedience the reality of disobedience. Each meeting with a non-Christian partner in dialogue therefore puts my own Christianity at risk

(emphasis mine).

In other words, my own beliefs and practices of Christianity are never the same thing as Jesus himself. In a true missionary encounter, it is Jesus, not our proclamations of Jesus or anything else, who is at work. Evangelists are always in danger of talking about Jesus as if he is not there, reducing him to a belief system or a few Bible verses. Doctrinal positions may communicate certain things about Jesus, but they are not the same thing as Jesus. Jesus is a person. Sharing the gospel, his personhood, does not resemble a one-way transmission. It is not a monologue in which one party merely issues declarative statements and the other party merely receives them. True communication among persons always involves dialogue.

In another excellent book, Missional Church in Perspective by Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile (2011), the authors put it this way (p. 134):

The gospel is not merely a possession to be passed from one person to another, a kernel that exists in whatever cultural husk is at hand, but rather a living event in, between, and beyond us that changes both parties involved in the encounter.

The words of Michael Youssef which I quoted at the beginning of this article may be true in a certain propositional sense, but in our current historical context they fall far short of reflecting The Truth. I cannot imagine that Jesus himself would approach the Other who is reluctant, (yes, proud, but also) skeptical, disillusioned, and possibly hurt by Christians or the Church with what appears to be flippant disregard, labeling them as selfish, willfully disobedient and given to lies simply because they do not yet believe as he does. Jesus wants far more from us. Jesus requires us to let him love them through us, the forgiven ones, by listening carefully to them, hearing and healing the lack of trust which often lies at the root of their objections, and not assuming that we are the sole possessors of the truth whose job is to defend it all costs. Jesus would never be satisfied with an uncompromising proclamation of doctrines which makes dialogue impossible and drives the nonbeliever away. If Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, then he will be alive and present and active in our encounter with the Other if we allow it.

Near the end of Newbigin’s book (p. 181), he portrays the missionary encounter with a simple yet profound diagram.

The ascending staircases are all the various ways by which human beings have tried to better themselves and reach God. They represent “all the ethical and religious achievements that so richly adorn the cultures of humankind.” But in the center, at the bottom of every staircase, stands a symbol of a different kind. It is not a cultural or belief system but an historic event. This event involved a double exposure. God “exposed himself in total vulnerability” to human beings, allowing us to do to him whatever we pleased. And at the same time, he “exposed us as the beloved of God who are, even in our highest religion, the enemies of God.” This diagram conveys the paradoxical truth that God meets us at the bottom of our staircases, not at the top. “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mk 2:17).

This same paradoxical truth applies in the missionary encounter. My system of Christianity as it has developed through history is one of the staircases. If I want to have an evangelistic meeting with a person of another faith, I need to come down from my staircase to the very bottom, to the base of the cross, where the two of us may stand on equal footing. There must be a self-emptying. “Christians do not meet their partners in dialogue as those who possess the truth and holiness of God but as those who bear witness to a truth and holiness that are God’s judgment on them and who are ready to hear the judgment spoken through the lips and life of their partner of another faith” (emphases mine).