Wednesday, August 04, 2021

an indelicate set of questions about the CT series moving forward, will the (at times, or often) disastrous legacy of Mars Hill pastoral counseling and "biblical living" pastoral care come up?

The death of John Hoover seems like something that needs to be discussed in the history of Mars Hill.  I didn't know John very well but we came across each other during my time at Mars Hill.  I knew people who knew him but what was going on in John's life but they spoke guardedly about it. He seemed profoundly sad to me for reasons I couldn't even guess at.  With years since those days and hearing intermittently of what has increasingly seemed like the often unmitigated debacle of Mars Hill pastoral counseling I'm thinking that topic will be something the Christianity Today series should look into.  Mars Hill may have not officially billed itself in the "nouthetic counseling" wing but it is doubtless symptomatic of rifts and differences in approach.  I have more first-hand experience with that stuff than I really want to get into. 

What has been referenced briefly is Redemption Groups or Grace Groups but that would be a subset of "biblical counseling".  I'm not going to sugarcoat this point, pastoral counseling was, it seemed to me, often disastrously bad at Mars Hill.  To sugarcoat the matter even less, complaints clustered around former pastor James Noriega, for instance and I felt obliged to delete comments that I regarded as libelous but that many people who had to deal with Noriega found his methods and appraisals brusque is probably not in itself a particularly contentious point.  The more basic point was how or why anyone who did do pastoral counseling was regarded as fit to do so probably needs to be discussed in the CT series at some point.

Among former members of Mars Hill there are those with same sex attraction and the question of whether conversion therapy was endorsed or required within Mars Hill is another topic that probably needs to get some examination.  

I have first-hand and second-hand experience with the pastoral counseling side of things but I'm loathe to get into it much.  When I left Mars Hill I did say that I was concerned that the pastoral counseling side of things seemed to be so bad that I had lost all faith in both the basic competence and goodwill of pastoral counseling at Mars Hill.  There  was some helpful counsel from guys who had actually known me for years but at that point the helpful advice of friends who happened to be in ministry was that, not "counseling".  

UPDATE 8-5-21
To reformulate things in terms of bare questions
1. Will the series get into pastoral counseling in general at MH?
2. Will Redemption Groups and Grace Groups get discussed along with the backgrounds of Mike Wilkerson and James Noriega as instrumental to those groups getting formed?
3. Given the stances Driscoll had on gender roles and the inevitability of same-sex attracted people at Mars Hill, has there been any indication that Mars Hill pastors or biblical living pastors advocated for conversion therapy?
4.  For that matter what catalyzed the change of nomenclature from use of pastoral counseling to "biblical living" pastors?
5. Driscoll's accounts of his personal counseling revealed a penchant for recovered memory tropes as well as spiritual warfare jargon, how many, if any, Mars Hill pastors who did counseling had credentials to do that?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am also uncertain whether MH advocated "conversion therapy" per se but I do seem to remember same-sex-attracted people being invited to join the redemption group for people with sex addiction

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Redemption Groups probably needs to be the topic of an entire podcast.

It sounds like your memory and my memory correspond on RGs and what likely happened with SSA folks attending MHC. Whether or not anyone feels comfortable going on record about any of that remains to be seen.