Forgive them for what?!

Here are some common responses I received when questioning why a UBF chapter should keep doing the same things in the same ways forever I’m sure people are very familiar with:

1) In my chapter in Korea, we did such and such
2) It is the best way to be holy and listen to God
3) Dr. Lee / Mother Barry said such and such
4) This is how we do things
5) We can consider it for a later time
6) Let’s pray about it (in order to make us quiet and let the time go by)
7) If you don’t like it you can make your own ministry
**we’ve covered this list before**

My impression from your article and considering these things regarding UBF teachings and viewpoints is that maybe at a deeper level it’s really the lack of considering people as people that makes these views so extreme and viable to pit people against each other rather than love each other. I think it also violates the spirit and life of Christ, which you get at in the article with “To have non-dual thinking is to be like Christ.” Christ is the both the Son of God and the Son of Man. By his very nature and life, the the Word that has become flesh and dwelt among us, the one who died and lives again, the holy one of God who welcomed sinners and ate and drank with them, Jesus espouses this kind of different way of thinking that welcomes all people to him in the most loving way, and yet can be seen as something threatening even to Christians who fear that to love and live like Jesus is to invite Hell into the congregation and judgment on the nation.

So, I guess a major factor on why we make things a big deal is that we don’t love as Christ did and instead love rules and labels and being praised by other people.

It’s like a husband insisting that he loves his wife, even though he berates her, humiliates her and demands that she obeys him without question.

I asked him what that means, but he doesn’t answer. I think his name should be Missionary Quotable, because he rarely ever explains his real thoughts, just posts quotes in response.

“Dualistic thinking is the well-practiced pattern of knowing most things by comparison. And for some reason, once you compare or label things (that is, “judge” them), you almost always conclude that one is good and the other is less good or even bad. In the first half of life, this provides ego boundaries and clear goals, which creates a nice clean “provisional personality.” But it is not close to the full picture that we call truth.

Dualistic thinking works only for a while to get us started, but if we are honest, it stops being helpful in most real-life situations. It is fine for teenagers to think that there is some moral or “supernatural” superiority to their chosen baseball team, their army, their ethnic group, or even their religion or gender; but one hopes that later in life they learn that such polarity is just an agreed-upon game. Your frame should grow larger as you move toward the Big Picture in which one God creates all and loves all, both Dodgers and Yankees, blacks and whites, Palestinians and Jews, gays and straights, Americans and Afghanis.

Non-dualistic thinking or both-and thinking is the benchmark of our growth into the second half of life. This more calm and contemplative seeing does not appear suddenly, but grows almost unconsciously over many years of conflict, confusion, healing, broadening, loving, and forgiving reality. It emerges gradually as we learn to “incorporate the negative,” learn from what we used to exclude, or, as Jesus put it, “forgive our enemies” both within and without.

You no longer need to divide the field of every moment between up and down, totally right or totally wrong, for or against. It just is what it is. This inner calm allows you to confront what must be confronted with even greater clarity and incisiveness. This stance is not at all passivity. It is, in fact, the essential link between true contemplation and skillful action. The big difference is that your small and petty self is now out of the way, and if God wants to use you or love you, which God always does, God’s chances are far better now!”

I have also learned that binary thinking has a useful role in discussions. For example, I see Jesus using binary thinking, not often, but sometimes. He seems to use binary statements or questions in order to draw people into deeper, more analog type thinking.

The best example I can find is Jesus’ words on good fruit and bad fruit. I find such binary thinking is critical in order to navigate complex situations.

Such thinking helps me understand the massive complexities in ubf. How can ubf be a good tree when we see so much bad fruit? How can we explain why there seems to be some good fruit on the bad tree?

The answers can be found by starting with binary thinking. We know that no good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is known by its own fruit. So when we see good fruit on a bad tree, we know the tree is bad. And we can see what looks good is tainted. The good fruit we saw at ubf is tainted with fear, excessive control and loss of identity.

That is common when there is a crisis/reform movement going on. That happened in 1990 and 2002 (after the 2nd and 3rd crisis/reform movements). After a few years, things tightened up again. And so we have the current 2011 crisis/reform. By God’s mercy, this crisis/reform will never end, but will be ongoing.

In any case, the binding to rules is only one of many problems, and really only a surface issue. There are much more deeply rooted problems that need to be addressed. If we can keep the relaxation going, those other problems will surface and can be addressed in time.

We are all God’s. The great law of the Kingdom is to love everyone as Christ loved us.

Ben, from what I can still see going on in the ministry, from the outside looking in that is, is a relaxation of some of the long-held rules that you listed. I see some genuinely trying to meet others where they are at and not shoving those rules down their throats as was done in the past. That being said, the problem is that some don’t know how to help people to grow as disciples of Christ without tools like sogam writing, fishing and common life or attending weekly meetings and listening to the Sunday message without fail. While variations of these practices are being implemented, it is obvious that they are simply interpolations of the original core ones. And the implicit message is that if you are not on the path to doing those activities then, while you are free to stay in the church, there might not be much hope for you to grow or be fruitful in the way that ubf defines fruitfulness. Are there other ways for disciples to grow and be fruitful? I surely think so. If any ubf person reads this and objects to what i said, please feel free to correct me and also give me examples of what the ministry is doing outside its norm to foster robust discipleship.

It sounds like what’s being said is that if you are critical (say of UBF) then you are being dualistic with a feeling a superiority.