A Personal Testimony Regarding Volunteering and Working at VOM

Posted at ThouArtTheMan:

Front view of VOM Administration Building, part of the $28M complex.


Janna Chan at the ThouArtTheMan blog stated that they would like to hear my story concerning the bizarre behavior of management at Voice of the Martyrs USA and how I was excommunicated for trying to simply do my job well. So here it is, I write it down almost 15 years after my relationship ended with them.

I have followed the controversy closely based on my experience. I know who went to the police and who Tom White’s victim is. The father I run into on a pretty regular basis. So here it is in all the details. To be honest I am an introvert who would, in my flesh, prefer to stay out of the limelight. However, my conscience drives me to take a stand where I see evil inside the Church.

The story starts in the mid 90’s when my best friend introduces me to the “ministry” by giving me a fundraising mailer that he had received. I trust his judgment and my heartstrings are pulled by the heartbreaking stories I read about inside. I start donating to them regularly and generously as I request to be added to their mailing list. In 2001, my wife and I decide to make a big change in order to be able to help out a cause I believed in. We contact both VOM and Gospel for Asia (another fraudulent “ministry”) and we propose to move to one of these towns where the headquarters are at and have my wife volunteer for a six-month period of time after I find a job to support us. My heart was to try to serve God in a practical way. VOM bites on the offer and we plan a trip to Bartlesville, OK and we place our house on the market. So, we traveled there and met with some of staff and came to a mutual understanding. Houses in our neighborhood sold on a average of 45 days so we expected this to happen fairly quickly. That is not at all how it worked out. In hindsight that was, I believe, the hand of God trying to keep me from making a major mistake but I did not recognize that at the time.

During this time we saw the first red flag which we foolishly ignored. When we met with them they made it clear that they had an over-the-top no smoking policy. They did not want any employees or even volunteers to be caught outside the building smoking. They did not want any visitors thinking that any smokers were involved in any way with their enterprise, not even as volunteers. In hindsight, this priority of putting image over substance was a clear warning sign, as was redefining sin: not by what the scriptures plainly state as sin but by some other standard not found in the Bible. Smoking was talked about as a great sin, while other more insidious things were never mentioned.

Read more here.

See also:

"My parents died with a good name. I do not want allow VOM use my parents good name, to raise money under false pretenses. I wrote the VOM directors: 'If you enjoy, for motivations of your own, to wallow in the mire of suspected pedophilia go ahead …. If you do not want to accept an independent investigation and complete transparency of your dealings, I begged you do not use my father' long years of suffering in communist prisons and the intense suffering of his whole family to raise money from naive donors ….'"

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