If only sex were as simple as “the birds and the bees.” And perhaps it is. Like the creatures of nature, sex is a part of God’s good creation. Yet, just as birds drop and bees sting, human sexuality can create sudden messes and unanticipated pain in many lives.
Today’s ministry leaders are not immune to the stains and stings of sexuality. In fact, we are called into the middle of them as we attempt to help people live faithfully and well within a sexually charged culture.
Leadership‘s Marshall Shelley and Chad Hall invited three Christian leaders to the campus of Duke Divinity School to discuss ministry in our decidedly post-Eden world.
Bruce Marcey is lead pastor of Warehouse 242, a church in the uptown area of Charlotte, North Carolina, and known for being culturally engaged while placing a high value on communicating theological truth.
James Emery White founded Mecklenburg Community Church in suburban Charlotte in 1992 and has written widely on the intersection of church and culture in works such as Rethinking Church and Serious Times. He also serves as adjunct professor of theology, culture, and apologetics at Gordon-Conwell Seminary’s Charlotte campus.
Lauren Winner serves on the faculty at Duke and is the author of a memoir, Girl Meets God, and, more recently, a critically acclaimed book about chastity, Real Sex. She attends St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Durham, North Carolina.
What’s an example you’ve seen in the last week that we live in a sexually charged culture?
James Emery White: I was stunned by the Kaiser Family Foundation study that came out this week that found that the number of sexual encounters on television programs doubled between 1995 and 2004. This sexualized culture is becoming mainstream.
Lauren Winner: I see it in the lack of clothing on college campuses. For both women and men.
Bruce Marcey: I see it in the skyrocketing occurrences of oral sex among high school kids. Even in many Christian circles, it’s seen as being okay.
White: It’s not even perceived as sex.
Marcey: Exactly.
Is this sexual climate unprecedented, or is it similar to conditions in other times?
Winner: There’s always been premarital sex. There have always been children conceived out of wedlock. But in earlier times, you were supposed to be ashamed about it. What’s unique today is society’s utter acceptance of premarital sex. The key change is not simply that premarital sex is common, but that it’s good—it’s not just normal but normative. Today something is considered wrong with you if you’re not having sex.
Marcey: What’s considered taboo has totally reversed. I mean, think of the movie, “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.” Being a virgin is now a stigma. The culture now assumes, How can you be a healthy person if you’re not having sex?
White: We asked people at our church to submit questions for a Q&A session dealing with sex, and the questions we got were ones you would not have gotten five years ago: “We both had affairs, and we have no idea how to restore intimacy.” It’s almost like an affair for one or both partners is almost becoming the norm. Questions like “Why on earth would you say pornography is wrong?”
I don’t think you would have gotten some of those questions five years ago. It reminds me of a passage tucked away in Jeremiah that talks about people who have forgotten how to blush. That marks our society.
What is driving this overt sexuality today?
Marcey: Well, the sexual and sensual longings are real. The Fall has marred it, but God made us to experience satisfaction. The reason we long for sex is both the intimacy and the pure joy that results. Sex is a beautiful thing, a pleasurable thing. In a sense, Chesterton was right when he writes that the knock on the door of a brothel is, in a sense, a knock on the door of heaven.
White: That’s true, but I think there’s a more superficial answer. When kids walk around trying to emulate Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, I don’t think they’re doing it out of a longing for intimacy. I think it’s because our culture has made sex the benchmark of what it means to be successful, to be popular.
Our culture has made celebrities of those whose only basis of fame is their ability to be sexual. I mean, Paris Hilton has no basis for celebrity other than sexuality.
It’s not educators, inventors, politicians, or even athletes so much who gain attention. Our culture is celebrity-driven. So when kids go through those awful years of puberty, and they desperately want to fit in and build their self-image, they naturally turn to being sexual.
Marcey: That doesn’t sound superficial at all. It’s an issue of identity.
Winner: All this sexual craziness would be unimaginable without our hyper-individualism. Most of us never even imagine that what we do with our bodies might not simply be our individual decision. The idea that your community has claims on your body is unintelligible to most Americans, even in the church. We’ve lost the sense that sexuality is actually an issue the community has claims on. We’ve so exaggerated the notion of ourselves as autonomous individuals, and our bodies as our own, that we assume, What I do with my body is none of your business.
White: Individualism is so ingrained that many people don’t even worry about their partners. There was a great line in Vanilla Sky where the woman who was stalking Tom Cruise said, “Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?” What an incredible line in a movie for our day.
Winner: Pauline theology from Cameron Diaz’s lips.
What impact is this new climate of sexuality having on the people you see?
Marcey: The culture has tried to devalue shame and has tried to take it away, yet people still do feel shame. A song by Bloodhound Gang says, “You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals. Let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” We’re being told it’s just a physical act, but people can’t accept that. They actually feel the shame.
Winner: I don’t think people necessarily feel shame. One of the poisonous fruits of participating in sexual sin is that you do desensitize yourself and lose the ability to sense what normal is, and therefore you desensitize yourself to shame. In the church I think sometimes we’re too quick to assume that people really do feel shame about sex. We don’t typically say that about most other areas of sin—in general, we recognize that the Fall is so profound that even our feelings are distorted, so we can engage in a sinful act and not feel bad about it. That lack of awareness of what’s real is itself a fruit of sin. Thus, when it comes to premarital sex or pornography or even adultery, pastoral strategy of emotional scare tactic—”You’re going to feel terrible if you do this”—is not particularly effective.
White: I think what’s really coursing through people is a sense of a loss of intimacy. It’s less “I want to cover up my shame” than “I’m finding this overt sexuality to be terribly empty.” People are thinking, Tell me there’s more. I’ve taken this sexual thing as far as it can go, and … this is it? They’re finding it didn’t have the payoff that it lured them into believing it would have spiritually and emotionally.
Marcey: I agree. The key isn’t telling people, “If you do sex, you’re going to feel bad.” It’s acknowledging that underneath it all, they actually do feel like something is missing.
We did a series of surveys and found people feel two things when it comes to sex. First, they feel, This was supposed to be more than this. What they’re looking for, they’re not getting.
The other thing is a sense of dirtiness. They sense something is wrong. There’s a sense of hiding, especially among men. From those I talk with, a large percentage are involved in some sort of sexual sin. And their feeling is one of I don’t want anybody to know about this. And that sense is pretty profound.
So I’m not trying to shame them, but I do think, deep down, they have a sense that something’s really wrong.
Let’s talk about the individualizing of sex. Not only has sex been separated from procreation (by the pill), it’s been separated from a living human relationship (by pornography). What is the relational impact of that?
White: As a pastor I’m seeing that it’s destroying intimacy within marriages, partly because it’s desensitizing men and women toward sexual acts and sexual deviation.
I was part of a radio interview with a guy named “Jimmy D” who produces pornography. And I’ll never forget that he said, “There are things I’m doing now that sicken me. It’s almost like we’re having to get harder core and we’re having to get more base in order to keep up the titillation because the more people are exposed to pornography, the less it titillates, and the more we have to go into shock, gore, crude value.” And then he said, “I wish I could just have an erase button for my memory.”
Winner: The fundamental thing about porn—even before the widespread use of internet porn—is that pornography removes sex from a relational context. Anything that tells you that sex can happen outside of a real live relationship, with all its blessings and strains, is telling you a lie about sex.
This false story damages our ability to connect with an actual human being. The live person probably has cellulite; the live person probably had a bad day at work; the live person may have a father who has cancer. And when you have sex with that live person, the bad day and the cancer and the cellulite all become part of the sexual experience.
Porn, which says you can have sexual pleasure whenever you want it, totally on your terms, destroys a person’s ability to have sex as part of a living, complicated relationship.
So where is the church’s voice in this sex-crazed culture? What do we have to say?
White: When we did a series on sex, I was amazed at the reaction. Particularly the secular media: “Why are you talking about porn? Why are you talking about sex?” They didn’t see a connection between the church’s agenda and sex.
Marcey: We got that, too, during my five-week series on sex: “Why does it take five weeks to say ‘No’?” Evidently we’ve lost our voice in part because all we’ve been heard saying is No.
Maybe we’ve also caused people to believe Church is a place where we don’t talk about those sorts of things. At Warehouse, if I talk about sex in a way other than simply saying No, I need to go into some detail. I need to be relatively explicit. And there has been in America the notion of church as a sacred place, and so you can’t talk about certain things in church. The sense of inappropriateness mutes any message we have.
Winner: My observation is that churches don’t talk about these issues theologically. So we don’t make the very robust and sometimes obvious theological connections, which provide a legitimate response to those who wonder, Why are we talking about this stuff in church?
White: You’re onto something very significant here, Lauren. We need to lay a theological framework by which we can talk about these issues and engage culture.
Of all the doctrines, of all the theological issues, the one most neglected, but the one that is in the vanguard of most of our issues today, is the doctrine of humanity. That deals with homosexuality, with abortion, with bioethics, with sexuality, with when does life begin?
Yet the church seems caught like a deer in headlights because it lacks theological moorings here.
Winner: Even more basic is the doctrine of creation—one must have a doctrine of creation before one can think theologically about humanity. Until you render explicit a basic understanding of Creation, Fall, Redemption, the church loses its voice on these matters. If we don’t start with a theological conversation, we have nothing to say.
When it comes to sex, it seems to me the church has absorbed some of the views of our surrounding society. I think our acceptance of premarital sex for the last 40 years has deeply changed our understanding of what married sex is supposed to look like. We’ve absorbed the idea that married sex is supposed to be a constantly mind-blowing, chandelier-swinging kind of experience. We’ve agreed with society that sex really doesn’t exist well in a domestic context.
That’s a drastic mistake. If the church has something to offer the broader society, it’s going to be a positive vision of everyday, married sex.
Marcey: That’s right. We’ve allowed ourselves to get trapped into just saying no to the wrong forms, but we haven’t painted this alternate picture of what faithful Christian domestic sex looks like.
Winner: And the positive vision of sex is not just you can have mind-blowing sex with your spouse. Although that is sometimes true, of course! The positive vision must depict why is it that we want sex to belong in marriage. It’s not just that kids come from sex, and kids do better with married parents. It’s not just because of the emotional risks you take when you have sex with someone.
It’s that sex is actually radically reconfigured when there are kids down the hall and dirty dishes in the sink. And I think we in the church have a real obligation to articulate what is beautiful about that. Why don’t we let sex be ordinary? What’s wrong with sex being ordinary? The fact that you and the person with whom you’re having sex also share children and a domestic life reconfigures what sexuality looks like, but that ought to be good news.
White: And when we talk about older Christians mentoring younger Christians, sex is not often part of the mentoring process. My wife and I have been married 22 years. We’ve got four kids. We’ve been in that real-life mode. And it’s rare that a couple pulls us aside and asks us for the real scoop on sexual intimacy. “What’s it like when you’ve had three children and you’re pregnant with your fourth?” Well, we know. “What’s it like when you’ve got three of your four kids still in diapers?” We know.
We also really need to talk about the beauty. What is the beauty of being sexually intimate with the same person year after year, decade after decade? Is there a sweetness and a beauty to that? There sure is.
The church has traditionally found sex difficult to talk about, and you’ve all taken steps recently to correct the silence. Where are you now? Would you say you’re talking about sex too much, not enough, or about the right amount?
Marcey: I would say it’s still not enough. We just did five weeks on sex. Five 30-minute talks with creative media elements around it. But our community of people lives in a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-day world that is awash in cultural lies about sexuality.
White: I agree that we’re not talking about it enough. I think that it probably needs to be formally addressed through some type of weekend series dangerously close to annually, because we are in such a sex-saturated culture, there’s such sexual confusion, and the misinformation is coming at us so fast and furious.
Marcey: You can’t just do five weeks on sex and figure you’re done. Now we’re taking it through our small group network, and we’re trying to weave this throughout the entire community—in how we relate to people, our spiritual formation material, everything. I think that’s the thing that will get us talking about it not just more, but more effectively.
White: In our midweek series, we tend to go through entire books of the Bible, verse-by-verse. Right now we’re going through Proverbs. So we are naturally led to an awful lot on sex. We’re also addressing it in small groups. We also have The Institute, kind of the community college dynamic of our church, where we offer a wide range of classes and seminars, and we’re intentionally addressing sexual issues there. So we’re going at it in a multi-pronged approach—weekends, mid-weeks, institute classes, recovery groups, small groups.
Winner: It seems to me that if the church talked about sex better, we could talk about it less. And part of “better,” to me, is being more robustly theological and not just simply plucking verses here and there, or being bad sociologists who spend our time condemning the way Hollywood depicts sex.
Marcey: You’re right, Lauren. During our five-week sex series, we walked through the Bible chronologically to show that the Bible deals with sex in a robust and a rich way. It wasn’t “here are a few verses that mention sex,” but “here’s the story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption in the area of sex.” We want to bring the full well of the theological perspective of God’s design to each of the issues.
White: You are getting into a much larger crisis for the church. The church is not doing the hard spadework of developing a biblical worldview in people’s minds where they’re able to thoughtfully engage culture as a Christian and think about it in light of that. And so we are almost like cut flowers.
We’re trying to engage issues like sexuality independent of a rooting and a biblical worldview. We are not developing a Christian mind where we’re thinking Christianly about all of life in light of what Flannery O’Connor called “Christian realism.” This idea that Creation, Fall, Redemption is as real as the laws of physics. It is reality, and it infuses every single thought and action.
Winner: I spent six years writing Real Sex, so obviously I think chastity is an important, even crucial, part of Chrisitan discipleship. But I will still say that sex is a “second order” issue. I care much less about what someone is doing in bed than I care about how they’re engaging creation and their Maker. And what they’re doing in bed is one expression of that.
In the life of the local church, we always have to make choices. You only have so many Sunday mornings or Wednesday nights, and it is pretty challenging to simultaneously “engage the culture” and do basic catechesis. Not that I want to draw too sharp a distinction between culture and theology, but where is the basic theological formation happening? We cannot address these second order questions well if the essential theological and scriptural story is not in place.
What kinds of relationships within a church community lead to a healthy sexuality? Is accountability the answer?
Marcey: Though Gen-Xers talk incessantly about their desire for relationships, these relationships and community have to be formed by biblical norms. And the Bible says more than just “be accountable.” Especially when it comes to sex, we have to get beyond programs and accountability.
Winner: We use the word accountability too much. Community gets reduced to an accountability group. And yes, accountability is important but so also is blessing. Particularly when it comes to sex, community has to be more than saying, “Come confess to me that you used porn again yesterday.” Community is life together. It is blessing where God is present. Frankly, I think we should put a moratorium on the word accountability for ten years.
What’s wrong with “accountability”?
White: It can become a euphemism for all sorts of toxic things. A great example came to light this past week. There is a software that men can download to provide accountability in terms of the websites they visit on their computers. And they agree to list each other as the one who gets the report on all the sites visited. And …
Winner: Sorry to interrupt, but already that story is so weird. Talk about denatured and disembodied!
White: Wait; it gets worse. They do this in the name of accountability. Then a wife comes to me in shock saying, “I have discovered pornography on my husband’s other computer.” All he’s done is to use another computer that doesn’t have the accountability software.
In such “accountability,” if you want to get around it, you’re going to get around it. And if this relationship is a “sin patrol” kind of thing, it’s very unhealthy. It can also just be a euphemism for control.
Marcey: Such “accountability” doesn’t support the gospel, because it turns spirituality into reverse Nike: Just don’t do it. And so it does not encourage coming out of hiding; it actually encourages hiding.
Accountability that’s stripped of an actual relationship takes the gospel out of the picture. What I want is a relationship with someone who is going to attempt to be with me like Jesus was. Someone who’s going to look at me and I’m going to be able tell him what’s going on. Someone I can come out of hiding with.
And when I come out of hiding with him, he’s going to say, “Now, even though you know this is wrong, why do you think it is that for the last 12 weeks you’ve come in and you’re dealing with the same thing? What’s the question behind the question? What’s the real issue? What are you getting from this?” We never seem to ask those kinds of questions in accountability. We never ask, “What are you getting from this?”
Speaking of not hiding, and making things easier for people to talk about, how do you handle self-disclosure, especially from the pulpit, on sex-related topics?
White: I probably err on the side of not disclosing enough. And what’s ironic is that much of this is personality driven and very much in the eye of the beholder. For instance, I’ll share something that I don’t think is self-disclosing, and people will say, “Oh, thank you for sharing that. That must have been hard.” It wasn’t.
I don’t tend to share the things that for me would be hard to share, and I do tend to share the things that are easy for me. And a lot of that’s driven by what I am insecure about, what I’m not, and my own sin issues, and what I’m comfortable bringing out of the closet. But I probably err on the side of simply not sharing. When it comes to sexuality narrative, I’ll pull something that Lauren shares in one of her books.
Winner: Well—I’m in the Episcopal Church. Disclosure is not what we do! Nor would I say the main thing Episcopalians need more of is disclosure! I’m actually not interested in hearing someone’s disclosure if it is not rooted in a biblical story. Disclosure needs to serve a larger purpose, which is part of the biblical kerygma.
Marcey: If personal narrative isn’t finding meaning with biblical narrative, then it really serves no purpose.
I have a group of people who every week critique what I say in my sermons. Their role is not to tell me what a great job I did. But to say things like “I don’t think you should have said that” or “I am not sure you needed to reveal that much.” And I’ve learned some of this the hard way. I can say things flippantly off the cuff, and I have to beware of that. I still find there to be a tension.
Over time, a rhythm develops where you can feel that this won’t be so much information that it makes the congregation lose confidence, but it’s enough information that they know I’m a real person. They understand that I’m not telling them everything about my life.
White: But the more I share personally, as pastor, the more it becomes legal to talk about. For example, if I were to share in a marriage series that my wife and I experienced Christian counseling over a particular issue, all of a sudden it’s okay to start talking about Christian counseling, and people feel greater freedom to do that without stigma.
If I were to share a struggle with a sexual issue, if I were to share a financial struggle—death, credit card, whatever—all of a sudden it’s okay to talk about. And we need to do that with a Christian vision of sex.
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