Here David: Here's a good resource for you
Dr. Francis MacNutt "Homosexuality: Can it be healed?"
You might want to promote public education and awareness of natural and voluntary therapy that has
helped people heal from homosexual and other unwanted attractions and addictions:
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Interview - Francis Judith MacNutt - Mastering Life
David: Someone has suggested that homosexuals need to have their confused orientation healed before they are allowed into the priesthood. What do you think about that?
Francis: Unfortunately, I don't think there is that much known among the clergy as a whole about healing the homosexual. That is why we are trying to bring healing back into the church. Even with physical healing, it's not fully understood in the population of priests that it can take place.
David: You've had a lot of success in your ministry with healing the homosexual. What do you do? How do you pray for a homosexual?
Francis: We've had some and Judith's had more actually. She had 20 clients when she was seeing patients in Clearwater who were either homosexual or lesbian in orientation, and they were all healed. Now, it took time. I think that really needs to be said. It is mostly over a period of time and in some depth.
David: Tell a story or two of people that you minister to, Judith, in this area to illustrate how you try to help the homosexual.
Judith: The first thing that has to be said is that they must want to be healed. By and large there are a lot of homosexuals and lesbians that are very happy with their lifestyle. They have found someone that they really care about, and they want to remain in that lifestyle. So, the first thing in coming for healing is saying, Lord Jesus, help me. As in any area of our lives whether it's weakness, sin, or whatever, we have to ask for the help of Jesus.
David: And how would you actually pray for them?
Judith: The actual prayer itself is not that much different than it would be for anybody else who is wounded in any area of their life. So many of us struggle with broken sexuality because of the way we were raised, the way we were taught, the ways our parents modeled or didn't model healthy sexuality, because so much of our sexuality is tied up in our identity, and identity issues need to be healed in most people. Very few of us really know the true-self that God created. Most of us function out of a false-self, so getting back to the true-self and the real true sexual identity is pretty much the same process for any issue that we would work with in inner healing. It involves going back to the childhood, and finding out was the person wanted. So many people say I didn't want a boy, I wanted a girl, or I didn't want a girl, I wanted a boy, and so there was a rejection of their very sexual identity from the time they were born.
I was reading somewhere yesterday where it was so important to a certain couple that they have a boy, and they had eight girls, and they kept trying and trying and trying, and finally they had to adopt a boy. Well, what message did that give to the eight daughters? You have no value and you were just a mistake. So there are all kinds of identity issues in childhood; there is rejection, there is wounding, there is sexual abuse, perhaps incest, perhaps someone outside the family. But so many of the people that I worked with had real broken identities - they just didn't know who they were in God or why they were here or where they were going. It would usually take about six months of psychotherapy, inner healing and generational healing for the person to come to a fullness of their identity.
David: It is quite common that male homosexuals haven't had a positive or strong father figure to call them into masculinity. How do you pray for that situation?
Judith: I found it took a multifaceted approach. We would do the inner healing work with God as father and Jesus as brother coming into the masculine identity that God had already created within them. In a deep father wound we would do the prayers of God the Father becoming their father, which He is, and then healing the brokenness that relates to the earthly father - the deep longing for Abba, with the daddy figure holding and loving them, accepting rather than rejecting them, having conditional love for them. We would have them sit with God the Father and let Him hold them during the inner healing prayer. I would have them listen to the voice of God - “What is He saying to you? Is He rejecting you?” And they would always with great tears of joy say, "No. He's telling me He loves me, but wants more for me," and God would speak all these beautiful words of love to them, and they would start having healing dreams and healing images and visions. Once the Spirit started working in them, that would start this whole healing process.
I also asked for help within the Christian community wherever I've been, especially in private practice, I would ask for men from the community to come and take them under wing and take them out to dinner or take them fishing, take them biking, do whatever, have them in their home and embrace them as part of a Christian loving family. So it's not just prayer. This is where the church needs to respond. It's men and women stepping forward, parenting, what we would call re-parenting in psychology, and bringing them along. And the ones that were able to go through that experience were all healed.
David: When whatever has gone wrong is finally healed -- whether it's the masculine or the feminine identity or whether it's the trauma from child abuse -- what then happens to the homosexual identity versus the heterosexual identity?
Judith: The homosexual identity cannot coexist with a God-given identity so it just starts to go away. Now the struggle that some would have that were very active sexually, in pornography or in being very promiscuous, those images took longer to go away. It's just like anybody addicted to pornography - the images sometimes remain. That's where discipline and prayer had to come in for the individual to reject those images and to bring in the cross and the blood of Jesus to cover them, and then to put positive images in their place.
David: And in some, I would imagine, the true-self, the true heterosexual identity began to flower.
Judith: Oh, yes. The beautiful image starts to emerge within them of the way God created them to be, and they would come to such life in their identity and such joy in being the one that God created them to be. Many of them would say to me, “I always felt like I was living a lie when I was in this lifestyle. I was always full of shame. I was always full of a sense that it really wasn't me. It felt like someone else.” It was kind of like an alter-identity or an alter-ego, because when God starts in a therapeutic process, basically what He is doing is dismantling the ego that has developed, and replacing it with what is originally there, which is still there, but it's under this alter-ego/alter-identity.
Francis: The sad thing is that conservative Christians often don't offer homosexuals anything except condemnation. It takes six months of weekly individual counseling and an intense changing and building up of the individual. Shouting about it doesn't help very much. It just makes things worse.
