(The following report about a UBF member’s experience was published in the “Survivor Stories” section on the website of the Wellspring Retreat & Resource Center, a US residential treatment facility specializing in the rehabilitation of victims of cultic abuse.)
She felt intimidated as she sat in the room alone with him. She wanted to follow God no matter what. That was her heart’s desire, but...
“You can’t live with your parents on your back like this,” the group leader told her. “It’s either marry him and live by faith, or commit suicide!”
But the group was on Donna’s back much harder than her parents had been even though they had openly expressed concern about her marrying a man she’d only met three times. They knew it wasn’t like her.
Even so, hour after hour, day after day, the leader of her fellowship reasoned and coaxed and pushed for her to follow through with what had been arranged.
The demands of the group had not been so high when she first got involved in 1987. In fact, the Cincinnati University Bible Fellowship had been a great comfort to this Cincinnati native in a very difficult time. She was adjusting from college life to the “real world,” having just graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Nursing in 1986. She was unhappy with her job where she worked nights. Many of her friends had moved away after college and everyone else worked during the day so her social life was nil. Also, she had just broken up with a boyfriend and her grandmother had passed away.
It was during this time that she ran into an old friend who invited her to a Bible study he was attending at UBF. She attended, and the members received her with open arms, inviting her to hang out with them all the time.
“I was with a group of people who really seemed to care about me,” Donna said.
She revelled in the new-found social support and drank in what appeared to be unconditional love.
UBF does a lot of one-on-one discipling of new members. Donna began studying with the friend who had invited her, but, after a couple of sessions with him, the group leader’s wife started working with her.
After being involved with the group for about three months, Donna became a Christian. She was eager to learn more about God and how to please Him. She was taught that an important part of serving Him was submitting to those whom He had placed in authority; they were his mouthpieces and were there to help her in her spiritual journey.
Little by little, Donna began to commit more and more of her life to the group and its leadership, which, according to what she had been taught, amounted to being committed to Christ. More and more of her time was taken up with fellowship activities and less and less time was spent with her family and friends. There was no time to read the paper, watch the news, or relax with a book. When it came to studying the Bible, she read only the group’s materials to avoid being tainted by outside influences.
As the months passed, those she considered to be God’s mouthpieces called for stranger and more drastic lifestyle changes. They told her to change her name to Sarah like Abraham’s wife in the Bible. They told her to get new clothes; purple garments to symbolize royalty. Her opinions, her vocabulary, her physical appearance; it all changed.
“It was all designed to change my sense of self from my past life,” Donna said. She remembers being uncomfortable with many of the changes deep down, but her feelings were squelched beneath the belief that the word of the leadership was the word of God.
But the changing would climax when she was instructed to move from her home to Chicago to undergo shepherdess training to be a missionary to Russia – with the husband she was arranged to marry.
Arranged marriages were not unusual in the University Bible Fellowship, and she longed to do what was right, but Donna struggled day after day about what to do.
“Walk by faith,” the leadership told her again and again.
In January of 1989, she decided she would follow those she believed God had placed over her. She would proceed with the marriage. The leadership handled the legalities, ignoring and shortcutting the rules in several areas so that the wedding was actually illegal. She called her workplace and told them she wouldn’t be in the next day. About fifteen hours later, Donna was a new bride. The two travelled to Boston for their honeymoon because there was a UBF chapter there.
Donna would be moving to Chicago to begin training for the mission field so she headed back to Cincinnati to clean out her apartment and try to smooth things over at her job so that she could find employment more easily in Chicago. But, while she was in town, her parents confronted her with a professional intervention specialist.
Over a five-day period, she began to see that the group’s theology was inconsistent with the Bible. Their excessive emphasis upon financial giving, their squelching of questions, their insistence that they alone could discern the will of God; all these seemed inconsistent with Biblical authority. And the leadership’s claims to being the mouthpiece of God crumbled.
But even though Donna was out, there was much pain and many issues to be resolved. She was angry that she had been conned. She was confused about how to find the will of God for her life. She had married a man she didn’t know, under false pretenses, in an illegal manner, and didn’t know how in the world to deal with it. And she feared the inevitability of facing the group again.
It was in this quandary, right after her exit, that she arrived at Wellspring, “full of anxiety.”
Donna began her counseling sessions with Wellspring Director Dr. Paul R. Martin and workshops with Larry Pile and Stephen Martin. She worked to put the pieces of her life back together, rediscovering the person she left behind. She rediscovered her opinions and beliefs, but she also worked to pull out what good could be taken from the situation, such as the commitment she made to Christ while in the group.
“Part of my recovery was picking through all the rotten stuff that happened in that group and holding on to those things that were positive, that were Biblical,” Donna said.
She also had to cope with a sense of frustration with herself. She remembers telling Dr. Martin, “I can’t understand why this happened to me because I knew I wasn’t stupid.” Learning about the psychological dynamics of cult recruitment and manipulation and the environmental factors that make one vulnerable to recruitment were of great help to her in this respect.
She also found healing by learning how to get her career back on track, by rediscovering her talents, and drawing up a plan for proceeding with her life. She left the center hopeful and excited.
After her visit to Wellspring, Donna pursued and gained an annulment of the arranged marriage.
As for her life now, Donna speaks to the media about her experience and teaches about the dynamics of cults to graduate counseling students at Xavier University. She returned to school and earned a masters degree in counseling, which she now puts to work at Christian Counseling Associates in Cincinnati. And she works for the Cincinnati Health Department, giving community lectures about healthy living. She’s also found new friends, a new church, and a renewed interest in travel.
It’s a long way from the fear and anxiety and lostness she felt after leaving her group, and, as she puts it, “I don’t know what I would have done had it not been for Wellspring.”