Beware of Soul Care
The soul care ministry has been warped! Usurped! Hijacked!
Soul care, for many years, featured more biblical and traditional insights for ministering to the people of God. Not anymore.
Soul care today uses the heretical inner healing movement (Agnes Sanford, Leanne Payne), the heretical spiritual formation movement (Richard Foster, Dallas Willard), and the unbiblical new deliverance ministries (Neil Anderson, Rob Reimer), where they cast demons out of Christians and free Christians from generational curses.
Churches that should have known better welcomed what they should have rejected, allowing sheer nonsense to cause severe damage.
Each movement’s appeal for scriptural support is easily refutable. We’ll focus first on the inner healing movement as we start to prove that.
The inner healing movement attempts to deal with the emotional pain, real or imagined, often masked, they say, by suppressed memories.
To give you a sense of what this inner healing movement stands for, we’ll briefly identify some of its core components.
Trusts Psychoanalysis More than Scripture
The inner healing ministry jumps the tracks at the outset by steering away from Scripture into psychoanalysis.
Leanne Payne, a major inner-healing writer, writes: “Serious problems arise from our failure to understand and appreciate the ways of knowing, peculiar to the so-called unconscious mind.”1
Payne laments “the confusion of the layman whose reasoning powers are untutored in the psychology of man ….”2 She further opines that “with the advent of psychoanalysis, human empathy … found its place in psychiatry.”3
Scripture isn’t enough! According to her, we couldn’t empathize and sympathize as we should using only that; we need psychiatry.
Therefore, Matthew, Mark, and Luke get shuffled to the side to make room for Freud, Jung, and Pearl. Particularly Jung, upon whom Leanne Payne most depends when explaining her views.
Focuses on the Unconscious, Not the Conscious
Psychoanalytic counseling contends that nine-tenths of who we are exist in the unconscious realm. Therefore, to get the help we need requires accessing that realm.
Trying to justify this approach with Scripture, Leanne Payne refers to the deep heart mentioned in Scripture as “the unconscious mind and its ways of knowing.”4
Attempting to prove what she can’t prove, Ms. Payne cites Psalm 64:6, where men scheming against David said they did so, noting the cause: “the inward thoughts and the heart of man are deep.” All their scheming, though, was done with conscious thought. This verse does not connect the heart with the unconscious realm.
That ploy of equating scriptures that speak of the deep heart with the unconscious is repeatedly used by Ms. Payne, each time in error.
The deep dive into psychoanalysis and its fixed focus on the unconscious runs exactly counter to Scripture. Scripture never does this!
Man is dealt with as a rational being, responsible before God, with each scriptural directive appealing to his conscious faculties. The unconscious (in any psychoanalytic sense) is completely bypassed!
It gets worse with this movement.
Inner healing advocates also say there is a “collective unconscious” realm that our parents and their ancestors are a part of. What!
They then make it a major emphasis to heal hurts we never knew we had, telling us we’ve been hurt by our parents and others floating around in this “collective unconscious” realm. Leanne Payne writes, “… every rejection we experience, until forgiven and healed, we will project onto another. Such pain and anger has to go somewhere.”5
This hurt, she said, often begins at birth. Payne warns that an adult may relive infantile trauma because “the hurting ‘infant’ within the full-grown person is still fearful of being outside the womb, a condition that represses the true self ….”6
Ok, well, I guess that’s mother’s fault; so she’ll need to be forgiven. Bad, bad Mama!
But for Ms. Payne, her Dad was at fault, too.
Payne tells of a healing session where she was called upon to forgive her father for having died while she was a young girl. And did she do it? Oh, yes. And then she wrote, “Can the dead know when they are released from another’s unforgiveness? This is wonderful to speculate on ….”7
Actually, it isn’t. There is no biblical basis for forgiving her father in the first place, and no biblical basis for wondering if he experienced some release. Only one straying from Scripture would write something like this.
Leanne Payne contends that facing the “darkness in one’s own parents” is the only way that persons “can begin to get their identities separated from both their parents and their past situations, and go on to truly forgive.” 8
Do you see how this agenda sets up whacko regression therapy where false memories surface, are believed, and cause so much damage, even suicide?
The inner healing practitioners run wild with their journey into the unconscious, telling us not only of our need to separate ourselves from our parents, but Leanne Payne adds: “The primary separation is between the self and God, out of which issue the separations between the self and other selves.…”9
Self and other selves? Does the Bible teach we have many selves? No, but most of what the inner healing proponents teach isn’t gospel, either, it’s gobbledygook.
With the meter running the whole time to pay for all these inner healing sessions, we now have to identify all these other inner selves we didn’t know we had and somehow get them healed.
Replaces the Biblical with the Mystical
Having used psychology to diagnose problems that don’t exist, the inner healing movement then tries to bring God on the scene. Not by using Scripture but by abusing Scripture to sanction mystical leaps in the ethereal.
In her book, The Broken Image, Leanne Payne quotes Father Alan Jones, approvingly, who wrote: “Only in silence comes the Word—it is then we discern the pattern of the Spirit. It is then we are available to our deepest self as it unfolds in the Spirit.”10
The premise laid here is false, and much of the church today is being led astray by it.
Proponents of these mystical encounters with God through silence exaggerate supposed Scripture’s support.
For example, Psalm 62:1 is cited, a verse which speaks of the human soul waiting on God in silence. But this verse doesn’t mean what these proponents say it means: the decision to vacate cognitive thoughts. It simply means, as the rest of the verse makes clear, that David is trusting God to rescue him and therefore will not entertain contrary thoughts.
Leanne Payne writes, “Listening to God is the most effective tool in our ‘healing kit,’ for by it we know how to collaborate with His Spirit.”11
So, let me see if I understand this: The practice of listening in silence is more valuable than Scripture, and more valuable than those prevailing prayers that release faith based on specific covenant promises?
Yes, according to Ms. Payne, “… listening prayer is the best possible training in the practice of the presence of God.”12
But the writer of Hebrews thought boldness through the blood was most important, and that having full assurance of faith was also important, and that having an evil conscience sprinkled by the blood was important, too. In fact, in this passage (Hebrews 10:19-22) there are seven dynamics stipulated for engaging God’s presence, and listening prayer isn’t one of them.
The inner-healing ministry also buys into the heresy of the spiritual formation movement. Since I’ll address that in future posts, I’ll say no more about guided imagery, time travel with Jesus, and mystical leaps from the cognitive in this post.
But have you heard enough to raise an eyebrow in suspicion, to hold palms vertically in rejection, to shake your head in consternation, and to turn your back from ideas that don’t even sound like Scripture?
Soul care sounds right and good. It isn’t. It’s wrong and dangerous.
Notes:
1. Leanne Payne, The Broken Image, (Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Publishing Group, 1996), p.177.
2. Ibid., p.108.
3. Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence: Curing the Soul Through Union with Christ, (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Crossway Books, 1991), p.257.
4. Leanne Payne, The Broken Image, p.177.
5. Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence: Curing the Soul Through Union with Christ, p.204.
6 Ibid. p.128.
7. Leanne Payne, The Broken Image, p.84.
8. Leanne Payne The Healing Presence: Curing the Soul Through Union with Christ, p.66.
9. Ibid., p.29.
10. Leanne Payne, The Broken Image, p.50.
11. Ibid., p.148.
12. Ibid., p.71.
