User:Bab5blake7/His Mansion Ministries

His Mansion Ministries

His Mansion Ministries defines itself as an evangelical ministry that "offers Christian counseling and long term residential care for those with addiction and substance abuse problems. We help men and women between 18-35 years old who are struggling with substance abuse, sexual addiction, pornography, eating disorders, depression disorders and other mental health issues." . His Mansion Ministries warns potential residents that "His Mansion is a no-nonsense community where recovery must be more important to the residents than it is to the staff. Residents are expected to work at the program and exhibit a desire to change. Those who are not ready to surrender to the process need not apply. Those who play games after arrival will be asked to leave." . His Mansion's counseling program is based on a spiritual warfare model , popular in both fundamentalist and evangelical circles. Blogger John Weaver of Against Biblical Counseling has accussed His Mansion Ministries of using the counseling practice known as nouthetic confrontation, which holds that mental illness is the result of sin and therefore must be confronted. Fritz Maurer of His Mansion Ministries contests this analysis, argueing that His Mansion Ministries does not use any material published by major biblical counseling outlets, such as CCEF and NANC. His Mansion Ministries is led by Stan Farmer. Farmer comes from a family of alcoholics. As a teenager, he twice participated in robberies. Blogger John Weaver contends that Farmer may believe in divine healing theology, but this assertion so far is unproven. Farmer compares himself to a Jim Jones who has been "derailed." . His Mansion has, by Farmer's own admission, counseled dissacociative patients to lower their medication levels before entering the ministry. According to Farmer, one of his workers was almost impaled by a sickle, when a schizophrenic patient wielded it at him. Reports indicate that His Mansion does not always lock up dangerous objects from mentally ill patients. In Farmer's sermon "Good News," he acknowledges that the progam admits murderers in to the program, to cohabitate with drug addicts and the severely mentally ill.

Controversy
Farmer and His Mansion Ministries have recently garnered attention on the blogosphere, due to the accusation in sociologist Ron Enroth's book Recovering from Churches that Abuse, that Farmer purportedly slept with an 18-year old client . See pages 25-35 in linked document. While sleeping with a client is a crime for a psychologist, it is unclear whether it was a criminal action for Farmer (assuming Enroth's accusations are true), since Farmer was a biblical, not psychological, counselor. According to Enroth, Farmer admitted to this "abuse". Against Biblical Counseling blogger John Weaver has accussed His Mansion Ministries of using psychological coercion in their counseling program. According to Weaver, he was locked in a room for five hours, screamed at, and told to repent of his OCD, while he was a client at His Mansion Ministries. To date, there is no independent verification of this accusation.