During my visit to South Korea last month, I remembered a healing ministry that I was once involved with there, named Wellspring. One person who was involved in co-ordinating the ministry there had recommended to me something called Theophostic Prayer Ministry . Essentially, TPM is a means of using prayer to get to the roots of people’s brokenness in instances where someone is bound by addiction and compulsive behaviour. This is what the ministry is about, in its own words:
Theo (God) Phostic (light) is a ministry of prayer that is Christ centered and God reliant for its direction and outcome. Simply stated, it is encouraging a person to discover and expose what he believes that is a falsehood; and then encouraging him to have an encounter with Jesus Christ through prayer, thus allowing the Lord to reveal His truth to the wounded person’s heart and mind. It is not about advice giving, diagnosing problems, or sharing opinions or insight. It is about allowing a person to have a personal encounter with the Lord Jesus in the midst of the person’s emotional pain.
When I first heard of it, in my strict, hyper-Reformed mindset, I flatly rejected it and thought it bogus. But recently I have had a considerable change of heart. I have actually been following prayers of a similar nature and have found them to be really helpful in me overcoming my own issues by getting to the roots of them. It is important to ntoe that TPM is not a substitute for counselling: but it certainly is a good place to start and acts as a healthy compliment to strong, Biblically-based counselling.
In Seoul, I attended a group of men who are aiming ot overcome sexual addiction by having a weekly ‘Sobriety’ ground in order to remain sexually sober (i.e. free of lust, masturbation, pornography, ‘acting out’, and fantasising). They also tackled issues like listlessness, failure to take responsibility for self and others, identifying blame-shifting and other immature behaviour; owning aggressive and pass-aggressive behaviour, and so on. Another technique was to count the number of days that each individual was ‘sober’ and to enlist threats to their sobriety; and when they regressed into sinful beahviour again, they had to call someone from the group and talk about it. Continual regress meant being they risked being expunged from the group.
It was, I found, a very helpful way of approaching things as it was broad and deep in its scope, but in many ways I felt that it needed something like Theophostic Prayer as a compliment, because TPM helps people to get to the roots of the problems. Monitoring superficial beahviour can only go so far, but TPM allows for God, through the Holy Spirit, to get to the root causes of the specific behaviour so that the person can deal with the past. Otherwise the approach will be merely behavioural and only touch on the surface, and that in the end will lead to terminal regression and backsliding. Behavioural management needs to be always coupled with treatment of roots: they can never be separated from one another.
This is one of the reasons why I was in two minds about the effectiveness of group participants counting their days of sobriety, because on the one hand it does give those doing it a sense of achievement and direction and that their ‘sobriety’ (or soberness, for want of a better word) can be sustained over a medium to long-term period. However, I fear that it can be easily used as a point of pride and give a person a false sense of progress simply because they have abstained from an outward sin for ‘long enough’. And who then is to say that long enough is long enough? That is not to say that long-term abstinence is of no effect or insignificant, but it is not enough and tallying is not indicative. At one stage in my walk, I abstained from masturbation for one year- no small feat for someone who was doing it more than once a day, I can tell you!- but at the end of the year I went back to it with a vengeance and was almost as bad at it than I was before,and simply it was because I hadn’t got to the roots and I was merely measuring sobriety by the yardstick of a tally.
When I attended the group, one man read a stellar list of reflections on himself, and significant portions of it revealed profound sadness and traces of abuse (not necessarily sexual) from the past. His many problems in the present (such as triggers into aggression towards young children and colleagues) came from neglect and emotional abandonment in the past.
By the time he finished reading his list, 10-15 minutes had passed with barely a deep breath taken to read it and even I sighed when he got to the end of it. Yet my biggest confusion/worry about his sharing of the list was his complete lack of emotion in going through it: it was read the way someone would do with a library catalogue or a shopping list and there was no hint of sadness at what he had gone through.
It was as if he was not giving himself (or was not given permission) to emote it, grieve it, and get it off his chest. And it was clearly very painful stuff, because as he shared some of it, it was easy to detect a sense of anger in his demeanour. I thought he was an ideal example of someone who could do with TPM, because it would help him get to the roots and to grieve it to God in prayer and to get that suppressed anger out. I admired the young man because he had taken himself close to his deeper healing, but all he had to do was go an extra step or two and really let it out. Like this man, I commend Theophostic Prayer- to get to the roots and let the emotions out.
To feel is to heal.
Shalom, Haydn (Liberty pastoral worker).