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:
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
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.
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