Fresh from closing their Gold Coast mental health care facility for young women, where they cured anorexia with exorcisms, they’re now charging public schools to teach troubled girls beauty tips.
The program, “ShineGirl”, has Hillsong trying to improve troubled girls self-esteem in prisons and schools by teaching them how to put on make-up, do their hair and nails and walk with books balanced on their heads.
But teachers and psychologists have attacked the program, saying it re-enforces gender stereotypes, isn’t being carried out with proper parental consent and is simply a clandestine way of getting religion into schools.
The whole shebang has echoes of the Pentecostal Church’s
‘Mercy Ministries’, a program where young women, struggling with drug addiction, eating disorders and mental health problems were promised cost-free, live-in treatment.
But many of the girls went to the media after “free” meant signing over Centrelink payments to the group and “treatment” didn’t include proper access to the promised legion of doctors, psychologists and social workers.
Instead, many girls found they were kept virtual prisoner in a suburban house, with restricted access to friends and family and taught that prayer, singing and housework were the solutions to their problems.
Some told LIVENEWS.com.au they were also subjected to “exorcisms” and say they were counselled by amateurs - bible studies students who had no qualifications to treat mental illness.
Some of the girls told me the program made them sicker; sending them into a spiral of self-harm and depression.
Like the ‘Mercy Ministries’ program most of the facilitators that deliver ‘ShineGirl’ in Sydney classrooms have no university counselling qualifications.
At some schools, like Alexandria Park, Glenwood and Cheltenham Girls, the program is run by recruits from Hillsong’s own ‘leadership college’.
The program’s webpage is full of the kind of self-development guff Anthony Robbins would be proud of – with slogans like: “She can be anything she believes she can be” and “A girl is a verb”.
A read of the
website reveals the aims of ShineGirl are as amorphous as its techniques:
“These… experiential programs are built on life principles and are practical, life-equipping and values forming.”
Maybe Hillsong could best help public schools by donating some of the tax-free millions they earn from Christian music sales to our struggling schools to help with maintenance and qualified counsellors?
Or maybe the Church would be better off funding training for their staff through conventional social work and mental health educational institutions, instead of trying to extend their own cloistered empire?
At worst, the use of such people is an insult to the teachers and school psychologists who study for years so they can work competently with our children.
Just because people mean well, doesn’t mean they’re always equipped to do well.