A Vision For Ministering To The Sexually Broken
In the first few years of my Connecticut pastorate (which began in the mid-90s) I noticed a curious trend happening with couples who came to me asking if I would marry them. In the initial get-to-know-you session, I would always explain my three expectations as a pastor before I would agree to marry a couple: that they attend an 8-week premarital counseling course with me, that they attend church, and that they honor the Bible’s directives as far as marriage (specifically, they couldn’t be living together or having sex prior to their wedding.)
Early on, if the couple had been co-habiting, when I came to this point in the conversation, invariably they would blush and their heads would look to the floor, because the wider culture still accepted these directives as proper and good. But a few years into my ministry, I noticed that when I came to that section in my talk, what came over the couple’s faces was not embarrassment but bewilderment. It was as if I suddenly were speaking to them in gibberish.
There simply was no agreement, let alone recognition, that these behaviors were in any way wrong or immoral. It was as if it was the first time they had ever heard such a thing.
It was then that I decided to write out a detailed fact-sheet explaining my wedding policy, along with Scripture verses and supporting reference notes (for example, there were countless studies that clearly showed that co-habitation weakens a future marriage because it injects instability and lack of commitment into the relationship from its inception). I realized that our first meeting might be their only chance at hearing a compelling biblical vision for what a Christ-centered marriage could be.
Many of these couples hearing my presentation agreed to my conditions because they wanted in on what I was offering. Maybe it was because they knew I wasn’t “judging them” (they didn’t hear condemnation in my voice; I didn’t “look down on them” for their choices.) Or maybe it was my willingness to invest so much time with them with the counseling. (And it didn’t hurt that for the first 15 years of me being a pastor, not one couple I had married ever divorced.)
But mainly, I believe it was the life-giving boundaries that Christianity placed around sexuality that were the point of attraction for them. In an “anything goes” world, they hungered for someone to help provide some direction.
The Slide Continues
Sadly, as culture sank deeper into sexual confusion, I realized that I would need more than a wedding policy to help our congregation, so around 2010 we began to offer dedicated “purity training” as we called it. (You could say we began to hold regular “theology conversations” about sexuality.) The first sermon series we offered around 2010 was titled A Month Of Sex At Grace Baptist. It darn near brought a mini-revival, no exaggeration.
What we began to realize was that we needed to do more talking about sexual ethics, not less. People crossing paths with our church needed to hear up front and early on what we believed. It wasn’t a matter of providing legal protection for ourselves. (We were still five years away from Obergefell vs. Hodges which legalized gay marriage.) It was all about outreach and discipleship. We believed that God’s path led to life, and abandoning that path led to harm. It was out of love and compassion for our community that we wanted to be very clear about an area where so much fog had rolled in.
Fast-forward to our brave-new world of 2020 and beyond. How in heaven’s name can a faithful, Jesus-loving, Bible-believing church minister to the sexually broken in a world like ours? Well not by flying rainbow flags outside our front door. And not by standing inside our churches and shaking our fingers at those who drive by either.
How do we do it? I’m convinced now more than ever that the strategy we adopted a decade ago in my Connecticut church provides a roadmap to follow (and yes, though it’s astonishing to have to even say this, we must add religious liberty protection to that list of reasons for choosing this path.)
It’s a path where:
- We’re upfront and unapologetic about our beliefs. (And new people to BridgeWay want to know anyway. It’s not as if sexuality is an obscure cultural topic. It’s one of the top things on everybody’s mind.)
- We speak of sexuality as one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity. “Male and female” was part of creation which God pronounced “very good” (Genesis 1). Our sexual nature is good, God-given and holy. It is not a “taboo” subject (“that which shall not be named”) or a shameful subject (that we speak about only with contempt).
- We speak of our sexuality as one of the most powerful forces within us. And because it has such power to either bless or curse our lives, God has placed clear boundaries to guide its expression. These boundaries don’t prevent our happiness but promote it, by providing an environment where oneness is experienced and shame avoided.
- We make intentional training in biblical sexual ethics a core part of discipleship. This training includes not only help for the those caught in various expressions of sin-addiction, but also help for Christians in knowing ‘what to say and how to say it’ (for talking about things-sexual is certainly not something that comes easily. Most parents dread those talks with their kids, let alone a talk with someone in church.)
- We make intentional training in biblical sexual ethics a strategic part of our outreach. Yes, there will be many that will be repelled by what we teach. But there will be many more occupying the margins of today’s sexual landscape that will be attracted to our life-giving teaching, particularly if they experience the final point.
- Compassion and grace guides our every interaction. At all times, we strive to imitate the Lord’s example of how to minister to the sexually broken (in John 4 with the Canaanite woman, and in John 8 with the woman caught in adultery) where he simultaneously affirms the image-of-God-dignity in the other person while upholding the life-giving truth of God’s Word.
As I wrap up this article, let me answer a few questions that some have asked in this conversation. There’ll be more things that we discuss as we go along, but here are three big ones.
Sexual sin is no different from any other, so why go on about this one?
Hopefully you can intuit my answer from what I’ve already said, but let’s spell it out.
1. We want to call special attention to sexual ethics because the Bible does. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is abundant and clear about how to use this great gift God has given us.
2. The reason the Bible is so clear and firm on this area of teaching is because this is what God does with those areas of life that have the greatest power to bless us or curse us. A loving God, like a loving parent, wants to keep his children from harm (Deuteronomy 6:24). God in giving us his commandments is not anti-joy, but anti-ruin.
3. Why does sexuality have such power? Because we are sexual beings. It is a core part of our humanity. To be silent about something so obvious is foolish. That God chose circumcision as a sign of his covenant with his people in the Old Testament speaks many things, but among them is the idea that God commands our sexuality.
4. Culture has forced our hand. A generation ago, culture largely adopted classical Christian beliefs about sexuality. Churches needed to produce no theological statements on human sexuality. But in a generational heartbeat, all that has dramatically changed.
5. To not speak out, and point to Christ and his Word, is to condemn countless souls to sexual oblivion and ruin. The Christian worldview of sexuality and the LGBT worldview being rapidly and ruthlessly advanced at lightning speed are utterly opposed to one another. For example, to say that sex is defined at birth by biology (and God) is completely opposed to saying that sex is assigned at birth. And there are severe repercussions for the choice you make, particularly for your child.
The LGBT community has experienced so much discrimination and hatred in the past (and that still continues today). If we adopt a statement that identifies these things as “sin”, aren’t we just “piling on”, doing more of the same?
There isn’t a true follower of Christ who isn’t grieved or angered by any expression of hatred or violence directed against another human. And whenever that is witnessed, it must be condemned. The Bible tells us we “wrestle not against flesh and blood”; in other words, there’s a real spiritual enemy out there, and humans aren’t it.
However, let’s be clear on what “hatred” is. I’m not “hating” you if I disagree with you, or if I see something that you’re doing that I find harmful or wrong. When I sat across from a couple that was living together and they wanted me to marry them, I didn’t despise them for it, or feel revulsion at how evil they were, or secretly relish how better I was than they were. The gospel teaches me that I see myself as a sinner saved by grace just as anyone else, and that I look at anyone else as an image-bearer of God just like me, who needs a Savior just as I do.
But I knew that what they were doing was “sin”. It missed the mark of God’s best for them, it would harm them in some way, and if they wanted God to bless their lives and marriage, then they would need to bring their life into alignment with God’s will for them. And I would help them with that if they wanted my help.
That’s exactly the same way in which I look upon a gay person, or a porn addict, or someone struggling with their sexual identity. It’s not hatred to say to a person, “You’re disobeying God in this. This isn’t God’s best for you. This isn’t going to lead you to the happiness you’re looking for. This needs to be repented of and worked on.”
But they’re born with these feelings and desires, so clearly God wants them included in his family, yes?
That’s what we need to be careful with today. The science is very slippery when it comes to sexual identity and attraction, and people are highly motivated in the interest of ideology to “find the study” that supports their beliefs.
Furthermore, members of the LGBT community can’t even agree within themselves what “sexuality” means. The argument advanced by homosexuals before gay marriage was legalized was that they were “born this way”, thus rooting their claim in biology. But now the transgender community has completely undermined that argument by claiming that biology is irrelevant and that it is a person’s psychology that matters most, leading to the rise of the “gender unicorn” where how I choose to identify is what matters most.
But in undermining biology as determinative, all sorts of mischief has now been unleashed on the world. Biology says that a “male” is on average 30% stronger and faster than a “female”, so in what sense is it fair to allow biological males to compete on women’s track teams?
Biology says that “male” and “female” differentiation is found down to the very cellular level, and so when you go to the emergency room, the doctors and nurses could care less how you identify. They want to know if you’re a true man or woman, because it will impact the care they give you.
If there is no true difference between “male” and “female”, then years of advocacy for “women’s rights” and “women’s protection” go out the window, a point J.K. Rowling has vehemently made this year, which has consequently made her “cancel culture’s” Public Enemy #1.
And then of course there are the bathroom and locker room wars. Do you really want a biological male undressing or showering next to your wife or daughter?
So where do these feelings arise? There may be some underlying genetic component, but there is no genetic test than can taken to say that your infant child will be this or that. Even studies of identical twins show no consistency between sexual expression. Roughly 50% of the time, if one is gay, the other is straight. So clearly there is a huge environmental and sociological component to a person’s sexual future.
I had a gay friend whom I worked with at a restaurant who insisted he had same-sex attraction for as long as he could remember. (And we were friends incidentally. He knows that I valued him as a unique and precious human. We enjoyed great conversation. I took interest in his life. And when I shared with him my thoughts and beliefs, he listened to me.)
I told him that I believed him, that he had these feelings early on. But were those feelings sexual ones? I honestly didn’t have any true “sexual” feelings until the furnaces of puberty fired up. Fascination with body parts, sure. But frankly, I thought girls had cooties, and the first time I heard someone explain sexual intercourse to me (in the third grade, on a time out between second and third base when Tommy the pitcher drew a very vivid picture in the dirt) I recoiled (and made 3 E-6s in the next inning.)
Could it be that my friend, watching as a three-year-old, a parade of men come in and out of his life, and his mother’s bedroom, developed a longing for men, for a father, which later took on a sexual dimension as he grew up? (Just as another young child could develop an aversion for a particular sex based on abuse or other maltreatment they received.) Though he wouldn’t agree with me, my friend couldn’t deny the possibility either.
What’s more, once puberty does arrive, and we begin to act out sexually on our attractions, the brain suddenly jumps on board in a chilling way. The experience of true sexual pleasure attached to a certain experience or type of person lays down neural pathways in the brain which then reinforces those attractions and drives them deeper in the psyche. “The cells that fire together wire together” is a saying in neurobiology.
What that means is that any latent attraction the person may have felt prior to puberty suddenly becomes a full-grown desire. You are now conditioned to look for pleasure from that object or experience or person. For a Christian ministering to a sexually broken person, this realization should elicit great compassion and patience. To say to a person, “Just repent and be done with it. Just choose to be another way,” falls far short of the person’s reality.
The power of Christ to change a heart and mind is real. And countless testimonies over the years prove it. But to say the change is a simple thing is misguided.
All this being said, there is a great mystery to human sexuality which science cannot fully understand, but neither can Christians either. Vive la difference, the French proclaim. So when someone speaks with authority of how they were born, I’d exercise great caution. And cling tightly to the truth God’s Word teaches us.