Our Father's House has had a strong emphasis for the last 20 years in the areas of Biblical counseling and personal prayer ministry. I believe this is a call of God for our church, and that He helped us to see the need when a person sometimes attended church regularly, but did not seem to be victorious in their lives nor were they able to be overcomers to the point of being able to help others get spiritually strong.

The Biblical counseling aspect of the ministry here is mainly applied in relational situations such as marriage or parenting when persons need help in seeing how to apply God's principles in their lives. As our creator, He alone knows best how these aspects of life were intended to work. Minnesota offers a discount on the cost of marriage licenses when certain pre-marital counseling requirements are met. The pre-marital counseling offered and required at Our Father's House than meets the state requirements. The personal prayer ministry aspect has two components: 1) inner healing to deal with things like emotional wounds, memories, lies, and forgiveness issues; 2) deliverance ministry to deal with the removal of demons and their programs or devices. Part of the reason that even born-again Christians have a need for deliverance is the generational curse principle (Exodus 21:5, 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9, 23:2). God's Word says that He will visit the iniquity of fathers on the children into future generations. The sin of parents negatively impacts the bloodline until it is effectively cut off. Since we were all born to sinful parents, we have received some demons at the point of conception. Because the laws of God are sure, Satan and his demons have been allowed to use this generational principle against us for centuries.

Our personal prayer ministry has always sought to be Biblically based. Psychology can help us to think differently about things that trouble us, but only Jesus can reach into our souls and heal the wounds and offenses that have lodged there. So in our search for training based soundly on God's Word, we have received training from the Elijah House Ministry of John and Paula Sandford and it has served us well. We've added other ministry tools such as ministry of the Father's love as needed.

As the years have gone by, we have seen the darkness that invades people's lives increase due to the world's acceptance of sinful behaviors and Satan's accelerated activity due to the realization that his time on earth is short and growing shorter. God has brought to us a new deliverance tool from the Freedom Encounters ministry of Ken and Sylvia Thornberg. This way of praying confronts the whole demonic hierarchy within a person, and rather than removing only part of the generational demons as most traditional deliverance prayer has done, it takes out the whole demonic chain-of-command within us instead of just reducing the demonic cadre in our container. We have seen some very positive results, enabling people to become what God has intended them to be, and to be "the head and not the tail" over the circumstances in their lives. God is good!