When I decided to preach a seven-week series called "Sex and the City," a pastor friend in town said I must be crazy. Our city is famous for sex in a way few others are. I live in Amsterdam, the city all too well-known for prostitutes and extravagant sexual practices.
In Holland almost 80 percent of people live together before marriage. It's called samenwonen. In fact the government recognizes samenwonen as a legal standing in society, somewhere between being single and married. Here it is simply another alternative.
In my own congregation, there are more than a few people who live together while claiming to follow Christ. So when I brought up the subject, I decided to set the bar high.
I was tempted to give "seven reasons not to have sex before marriage," but rather than making it a "don't do it" discussion, I spoke about radical purity in an age of rampant impurity. We introduced our community to a man and woman who lived 3,000 years ago and were passionately in love with each other.
In the Song of Solomon, we observe this couple wait to consummate their relationship, see them struggle to have intimacy, and see them honor each other above all else. Then all of us in the congregation were challenged to measure our lives by the lifestyles of these two hot-for-each other lovers.
As we pressed on in the series, I discovered some things about speaking to a postmodern audience on sex and sexuality. Young people want us to "shoot straight" with them, to acknowledge how things are in many of our lives and also how God designed them to be. They were much more open to Bible study on the topic than I expected.
They also want room to reach their own conclusions. Instead of telling people up front that pre-marital sex is wrong (most people in my congregation don't even know what "fornication" means), I laid out the types of love described in the Hebrew text, and how they relate to the people in the poem. I let listeners in the congregation make their own applications.
Old flames
During the series, our counseling center began to hear from people who had a lot of brokenness in the area of sexuality. And there was lots of processing in our small groups as well. But I realized that while people were open to confessing their sin, they appeared unable or unwilling to turn from it.
Four months later, when we were not talking about sex anymore, I gave people an opportunity to write a sin they were struggling with on a piece of paper and burn the paper. People came up by the hundreds to the trash bins to "burn their sins away," their sexual sins. The response was overwhelming.
That same Sunday we also gave people opportunity to go to our elder team to be anointed with oil and pray for healing in their lives. Once again people poured into the aisles.
What I should have expected
During the series I felt overwhelmed by comments I heard over and over again. What I learned was quite unexpected:
1. Many married people are incredibly sexually lonely. I expected single people to struggle with this, but I was surprised that married couples struggle so much to connect on a physical intimacy level. I am more committed than ever to do marriage retreats at our church that encourage couples to spend focused time together.
2. Just about everyone has a sordid story. If we are really, really honest, most of us have a messed up past in the area of sexuality. One of the things I love about Holland is that people do not put on masks too much and are not that hypocritical. What you see is what you get, in a sense. Yet I was still shocked by the depth of brokenness in people's lives, and the long road ahead of many people to become whole again. I have learned not to underestimate the sexual wounds of the past for both men and women.
3. People are tired of promiscuity and really desire purity. I wondered a few times if I was indeed crazy to preach a series on sex in a city famous for it. While it was a great challenge, I believe God would have us do it all over again the same way. It gave God the space to work in people's lives in ways that I had not seen before. That made it all worthwhile.
Brian Newman is lead pastor of Crossroads International Church in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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