MK forum

Really!!??

NTMers have to submit to the spiritual authority of the Board, but the Board somehow does not have to submit to the governmental authorities? Like reporting confessed child sexual abuse?

Sounds like these attorneys interpret the law like they interpret the Bible - pick and choose.

When I hear someone in a church or christian organization start talking about their spiritual authority my stomach gets queasy. I have seen so much abuse of this growing up in NTM. These people who aspire to such authority never recognize that as christians we each have access directly to God. We don't need to go through them. Every believer in Christ is individually responsible directly to God as His Spirit works in us. While he may use others in our lives, our ultimate responsibility is not to them, but to God. I truly believe that people who have to preach their own spiritual authority are in it for their own prestige and power. People recognize and are drawn to true spiritual leadership that is manifested in love and often consult or ask for prayer without going to the "heirarchy". The best thing that ever happened in our family was when my father told the NTM board that ultimately he answered to God and that what they were demanding of him was contrary to God's Word so he resigned. Of course, then the smear campaign started, but we didn't know about it until years later because we left the mission and moved on with our lives.

We finally found a church to go to that emphasizes grace for living the Christian life. (This is the issue over which we conflicted with our NTM leaders!) The pastor is preaching on Galatians right now. I leaned on Galatians a lot when we had our problems with NTM, so every week I am having flashbacks.

Yesterday’s message was about grace + nothing for salvation and for living the Christian life. Sweet stuff. Gal 3:3 “Have you lost your senses? After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort?”
This is the kind of stuff we learned in the NTM training in 2002-04. We were so excited about what we were hearing and learning back then. I understand that there was a time when NTM did emphasize human effort (i.e. following NTMs rules) for living the Christian life. But that was not our experience. We were pretty clueless about “NTM past”. So after we graduated we went on to deputation, enthusiastically traveling around our home country singing the praises of NTM and trying to get people to jump on the NTM bandwagon and support us. We made the big jump and went overseas, oblivious to the fact that the leaders and many of our co-workers were taught/raised in NTM-past. Obviously, that did not turn out well for us.

Let me tell you how I felt when I realized that I had sold my home, made my parents and extended family very unhappy by taking their grandkids away, uprooted my kids too many times to count in the past 8 years, and burned up thousands of our supporters’ dollars, in order to be sent back to the States for counseling because we conflicted with our leaders over the very thing that we thought NTM stood for, all the while presenting NTM in a positive light to our supporters, and then get no help from headquarters in resolving the problem. I felt like an IDIOT!!

This website has really helped. I’ve realized that the problem wasn’t “just us”. My eyes have been opened to just how deep NTMs problems run, and that there are many, many NTM casualties. I know I’m not the only one that has felt like an idiot for throwing her life into NTM and winding up as NTM road kill.

I realize that my situation is minor compared to what the MKs, who had no choice in the matter, endured. My heart breaks for you. My heart breaks for the parents who realized too late that they should not have entrusted their children to the NTM system.

My heart is heavy too for the many good current and former NTM missionaries who gave their whole lives to NTM and now have to live with the reality that some really, really evil things were happening in the organization that they promoted. I can see why people feel the need to distance themselves from it. It’s got to be just awful to realize that you promoted/supported something that you thought was really good and healthy, something you were proud to be a part of, and now it turns out there was an internal cancer attacking the most vulnerable ones, the children! Sick!

But ignoring cancer does not make it go away. It may have been long ago that the initial events took place, but there has been 20, 30, 40 years of ripple effect since then. The MKs have grown up and married and had children, bringing more innocent lives into the mix. Ignoring it back then didn’t make it go away and avoiding it now doesn’t either.

Investigating what happened “historically” is a good idea, but it is not enough. Terminating abusers and those who covered it up is a necessary first step, but is surgery really all that’s necessary in treating cancer. What about addressing some of the things that predisposed the person to getting cancer, like smoking, diet, alcohol? In the NTM situation that means changing things that predisposed them for this tragedy, like the “spiritual authority” attitude for starters.

Current NTMers, as awful as it is to face all this stuff, the ball IS in your court.

THANK YOU, Kathy!
This is a great synopsis.
You covered ALOT here.
The Word does not tear down. It builds up and equips and encourages.
The wrong use of it is despicable.
But we CAN heal and make our own choices from now on.
Altho soul wounds will linger. Which is why covering up that pain is also despicable.
There has been MUCH encouragement on these forums. We have seen some amazing things happen.
And there are many who want to help others in any way they can to avoid what happened to them or to help others begin to heal.
Yes, there are many, many casualties. They are still happening. It's despicable.
There is no such thing as over-use of a word on these forums.
There are no words to really express ourselves.
But our hearts show thru.

Kathy, what a great post. Tragically sad, but spot-on.

"I know I’m not the only one that has felt like an idiot for throwing her life into NTM and winding up as NTM road kill."

"NTM roadkill" ... wow ... that brings much too vivid of a visual of the many dead armadillos littering the roadways around the Sanford, FL area! eww ....

What amazes me about our Father is the way He continues to pick us up, soothe our wounds, and give us new wings with which to soar. (Sorry ... I've left the armadillo analogy already! LOL) I am so thankful for the good church you've found, and how strong your confidence in God's never-ending Grace continues to be! May His Name be blessed forever!

You are spot-on about the many NTMers shrinking up against the walls these days too. Many of them are extremely ashamed of all this darkness that has been exposed within their ranks, past and present. Sadly though, the ones I know don't see themselves as cancer-fighting crusaders. They are struggling to hang on to their sanity within a mission they no longer feel 100% sold out to, but their focus is not upon change, or even prevention, but rather just on survival. Many aging NTMers in my age-range are just scrabbling to make it to retirement. The realities of today's economy terrify them. They doubt they could earn enough "out in the real world" to even survive.

And so they cower. And I do feel very sad for them.

I'm thankful for my husband who patiently and lovingly loosened my grip on "my" mission a decade ago.

Here’s a topic that’s sure to rock the boat –beliefs about hell. I wrote the following comments on another blog where Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins. I know these comments will sound heretical to some, and maybe they really are heretical, but even so we if we are honest we have to face the reality of the results this belief system produces. Has anyone else wrestled with this one? What are your thoughts?

As a former missionary to remote, tribal people who have no access to the gospel due to language barriers and geography, I have another perspective on this question of hell.

The Bible does talk about two possibilities after our physical death, either with God (heaven) or separated from him (hell), so I am sticking with that. But how exactly a person ends up in one “place” or the other, that is something I am not so sure about anymore.

Here’s why: “When people choose not to believe in Christ, that’s their business. When people have no choice, that’s OUR business.” I used this phrase to garner support from churches for our missionary work. On a superficial level that may sound very noble and caring. It is certainly motivating to those who truly believe there is a hell and that the only way for people to have another post-death option is by hearing (understanding) the gospel.

But ultimately, for me as a Christian missionary, the idea of people’s eternal destiny resting on my shoulders was an intolerable burden. This weight of personal responsibility has also had disastrous consequences for many families in my former mission. These parents felt compelled to board their children at MK schools so that they would be unhindered in their efforts to learn the tribal language and get the gospel to the people before anyone else in the tribe died and went to “a Christless eternity”.
The MKs were told by the school staff not to tell their parents that they were unhappy at boarding school because if they told it would “hinder their parents’ work and result in Africans going to hell”. This spiritual abuse (the “don’t talk” rule) set the foundation for other abuses, including sexual abuse, to go undiscovered or covered up for decades. Now these adult MKs deal with PTSD, broken marriages, addictions, etc. If our urgency to reach those who have ‘no choice’ with the gospel brings results like this, I wonder why any thinking person would want to ‘choose’ Christianity anyway. Something is wrong here!

Another dilemma is how to reconcile the idea of God’s love for all people with the Calvinist/Reformed idea that God chooses who will get to be the benefactors of his ‘love’. Whether you believe God irresistibly chooses some and not others or whether you believe in free will - if you believe that the only possibility for salvation comes through hearing the gospel then essentially you also believe that there is a massive, unchosen, damned portion of humanity, based solely on the fact that they were born in a time period and location without access to the gospel.

This is a relatively comfortable theoretical discussion here on the internet. It’s another thing when a 20 year old tribal guy who was instrumental in helping you move into his remote village and is anxious to hear your special “message” in his own language, wastes away and dies of TB before your eyes, refusing to take the medicine you offer because he does not understand the true cause of illness and the effectiveness of medicine.

How do you reconcile God’s love for you and your compassion for that tribal guy (which compelled you to leave your life in the States and move your family half way around the world to live without modern conveniences) with God’s apparent indifference for the guy, given the fact that you prayed for God to keep him alive long enough for you to learn the language and explain the gospel to him?

I have reconciled it this way. Maybe there is more ‘truth’ out there than what has been revealed in the Bible. Maybe there is more to the ‘story’ of heaven and hell, sin and salvation that what we know. That is what I’m choosing to believe. I have to believe this if I am going to hold on to Christianity at all. I have believe that somehow, someway, someday, somewhere, all people are given an equal opportunity to believe or reject Christ’s atonement for them.

If I don’t believe this than ‘God’s love’ has a hollow ring to it. If God’s love for me really amounts to dumb luck – having been born in the right place at the right time – then it is not love at all. I can’t handle the thought of a world without a personally involved God of love. Life is pointless without a belief in something good and right out there, something that can make sense out of all the craziness and pain. So I just keep holding on to the belief that there must be more to the story, that “questions tell us more than answers ever do” (Michael Card), that in the end I will understand and it will all be good.

“Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now.” I Cor 13:12

Thanks for posting this, Kathy. I recently finished Rob Bell's book. Lots to think about.

Very cool, that you all are feeling open enough to share on here. Raz, I remember the time that I first learned about the subjective nature of Bible translation. Those Wycliffe missionaries . . .even had the Living Bible on their shelves! Scandalous! Ok, so I went to an SIL school for four years, a day school for MKs. Our mission contributed a teacher or two now and again, but we didnt have enough of us to form our own school. There was a lot of gossip and feuding between the missions. One of the most vivid things I remember was when our history teacher thought of a great idea for educational fun. We were going celebrate Martin Luther's birthday (500th). Our history teacher was very suspect because 1)she was smart 2) she was a she 3) she was a short term missionary 4) she was enthusiastic. We loved her. The men jumped all over that heretical idea. Yep, it was our little mission that made a big fuss, demanded equal history class time, and showed a time-line of how Baptists went back to the disciples. It was a heavy burden to bear that day, to say, Yeah, that guy is my dad's boss.

Excellent discussion - one that needs to be had. It all makes perfect sense unless you think about it.