Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Life in a UBF nutshell

(Related: 1, 2)

Related to the subject of the UBF "sogam" is the UBF "life testimony," in which everyone's life story is edited to fit the UBF mold of ...

Part 1: I was so bad before UBF,
Part 2: Through UBF I found God, became a holy man/woman, and got a calling for “world campus mission” which is now the meaning of my life.


At the end of the "spiritual struggle" to write your UBF "life testimony," it's actually your UBF leader(s) who has written your life story, as someone else has observed:

Writing a life testimony itself could not have any spiritual meaning. What matters more than writing a life testimony is how one views and interprets his life during the process of writing the life testimony. If one writes the life testimony only through the help of the Holy Spirit and with biblical perspective, one can clearly find spiritual meaning in his life and put everything in biblical perspective. But in Ubf, you are forced to view everything in your life from UBF perspective. It is because you are forced to rewrite your life testimony again and again before it is considered to be acceptable by ubf leaders. Even after that, the life testimony is heavily edited before it is shared. Thus after the whole process of writing the life testimony, you have your life testimony interpreted purely from ubf perspective or by ubf leaders. And you are explicitly/implicitly forced to accept the life created by ubf leaders for you during the process. If you try to put in any different perspective in it, you will be called a "proud" or "humanistic" sinner or "a cultural Christian" and a ubf leader will announce a special prayer request for the "rebellious" person during a public service. Then another rewriting "training" follows until you accept the life testimony essentially written by ubf leaders but not by you. So the life testimony produced in this way cannot be called a life tesimony in biblical sense.