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What's the best way to encourage people to save sex for the covenant of marriage? Mark Regnerus, author of Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ross, co-founder of True Love Waits, and Donna Freitas, author of Sex and the Soul suggest the best way to help.

True Love Waits is not a promise to a program, card, or ring. It is a sincere promise of purity made to the reigning Christ for the glory of the Father by the power of the Spirit.

The promise is kept most tenaciously by teenagers who have moved beyond moralistic therapeutic deism and who adore the King of Kings with awe and intimacy. They know their Lord and Savior said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." Their walk in purity is a way to express deep love for him and to respond to his supremacy.

For teenagers who know Christ, that is a far stronger motivator than a desire to avoid disease and pregnancy. Risk avoidance is a weak motivator during adolescence, since the development of the brain's prefrontal cortex (which governs self-control) lags well behind the development of the amygdala (which drives emotions and impulses). Teenagers need to know about the risks of promiscuity, as well as about the benefits that total life purity brings. But the most powerful way to impact prom-night decisions is for parents, leaders, and peers to more fully awaken teenagers to God's Son, to invite them to make a promise to him, and to walk beside them in a journey toward purity.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracked unbroken increases in teenage sexual activity from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Then, paralleling the explosive growth of the True Love Waits movement, the CDC watched those rates drop through 2008. That does not prove that True Love Waits made the difference. But it is more than a little interesting.

Some church leaders have been confused by articles with such titles as, "True Love Waits Doesn't Work." These articles point to studies that have lumped together all teenagers who have ever made any kind of pledge or promise related to abstinence, including many students who have made pledges after weak, brief, and entirely secular programs in schools and by community organizations.

Not surprisingly, a number of those students eventually become sexually involved. But here's the rub: Journalists assign the sexual failures of that pool of students to True Love Waits, even though True Love Waits students usually compose only a fraction of the population studied.

A study of teenagers in one state (Weathersbee, 2002) found that if the behavior of True Love Waits students is tracked exclusively, the students' behavior is markedly different from their peers'. We are pursuing funding to do a similar study on a national scale. Until the hard data are available, we find anecdotal evidence and scores of stories informative.

The genetic code for True Love Waits is made up of several weeks of thoughtful Bible studies about purity, a promise to God made while surrounded by one's family and community of faith, continuing encouragement and teaching at home and in church, and support from True Love Waits peers. Students making promises that are Christ-focused, Word-centered, and Spirit-empowered will likely live in purity up to their wedding day and beyond.

Copyright © 2010 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Richard Ross is a professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and co-founder of True Love Waits. Mark Regnerus and Donna Freitas also suggest the best way to help.

Previous Village Green sections have discussed aid to foreign nations, technology and abortion.

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January 2010, Vol. 54, No. 1

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