Sex, marriage, and friendship

Gavin Richardson is a well-known Methoblogger through his blog, Hit the Back Button to Move Forward. Gavin has also recently written an insightful piece in the United Methodist Reporter entitled, "'Sex challenge' misses the mark."

Ed Young, pastor of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX, drew a ton of publicity recently from challenging the members of his megachurch to have sex everyday for a week as a way to deepen their intimacy with God and one another (and presumably, to show that the church embraces a healthy sexuality). Gavin's op-ed piece criticizes the sex challenge on one level for the media hoopla it generated (and the vast oversimplification required to communicate it to the press).

But, drawing on his years of experience as a youth minister, Gavin criticizes the sex challenge on a deeper level as well. He argues that emphasizing the sexual relationship in marriage as the basis for the marital relationship itself is misguided. It plays into the consumerist views of the larger culture toward sex and sexuality. (Note the common cultural message: Sex is something you've got to 'get' in order to make yourself happy and fulfilled. If you are not having it at a certain frequency and a certain level of excitement, then that's a sign there is something wrong with you or wrong with your relationship.) And it turns the focus of happiness and fulfillment to the individual's perceived wants and needs instead of to the true, intended mutuality of marriage.

Gavin makes a countercultural move in arguing that the church should be teaching that marriage is - at its most fundamental level - about friendship. It isn't that sex is not important; it surely is. But friendship is a deeper, fuller, and more holistic expression of God's intention for marriage. Gavin makes some great points about how teaching about celibacy, sexual intimacy, and marriage to youth is much more constructive when these issues are approached from the standpoint of marital relationships as friendships in their most fundamental sense.

Clearly, our culture has skewed and unhealthy views of sex and sexuality. The church isn't often good at dealing with those, probably because of our historic ambivalence about sex. And it is true that our concupiscence often finds its most ravenous expressions in our sexuality. Sex is a good gift of God when received and used in the proper ways, however, and the church should be able to talk and teach about that. I think Gavin's critique is suggesting that Ed Young's approach plays into the negative ways sexuality is framed in the culture. We can talk about sex in healthy ways, but to do so it must be discussed within a larger relational framework (of which it is only a part).

I've heard Stanley Hauerwas remark on more than one occasion that the marriage relationship is really about learning how to be friends with another person. I'm actually working on a paper right now about how Christian friendship finds its paradigmatic expression in the marriage bond. So I think Gavin is on to something, and I'm glad his youth have a pastor with such a holistic view of healthy marriages.

Meaning of Church Membership

There are a number of posts up on several blogs I read having to do with the meaning of membership in the church. I'm not sure if this is all coincidental, or whether there is rather some story or event I have missed. At any rate, I have also just finished a column on the meaning of church membership for the United Methodist Reporter. I'll link to that when it comes out.

In the mean time, here is a summary of several posts that are worth checking out:

On his Accountable Discipleship blog, Steve Manskar posts about the way we often treat church membership as membership in a civic club (and how at odds that is with an understanding of the church as the body of Christ).

Amy Forbus posted on the Methoblog on the way that an 'open door' membership attitude allows for easy exiting as well as easy joining.

Also on the Methoblog, Jay Voorhees has posted on membership as it relates to the deep longing for family, as well as the vows of membership as similar to marriage vows (I agree with him strongly on this count).

(Both Amy's and Jay's posts are drawn from still other blogs, to which they link, and those are worth a look as well.)

Matthew Johnson has an excellent post on pastoral responsibility in helping determine readiness for church membership, something that most pastors are probably to intimidated (and too eager for new members) to do.

And Gavin Richardson quotes himself on the nature of the church: "At its best the church is a family, at its worst the church is a family."

My own column, which I'm tentatively calling, "Cheating on your church," focuses on the implied seriousness of our vows of church membership as well as the poverty of contemporary church life today. It is that deep poverty that keeps people from understanding the meaning of membership in Christ's body. The church's failure to truly be the community of Jesus' friends leads to a situation where people treat church as any other consumer choice. And that causes them to make terrible choices both for the church and for their own discipleship. As I argue in the article, leaving your church for reasons of personal preference is nothing more than a form of ecclesial adultery.

Blogging about ordination

In the past week, there have been several blog posts about the issue of the candidacy and the ordination process in the UMC. If you are interested in what has been said elsewhere, check out:

-- This Methoblog post that I wrote on Friday, basically summarizing what I said a couple of days earlier on Gen-X Rising.

-- This impassioned and poignant post from Gavin Richardson (who, by the way, may be the hardest working blogger in show business). Gavin offers a few good examples of how bad candidacy can really be. It wasn't nearly this bad in my own experience, but I have certainly heard stories of the kind Gavin shares.

-- This post on the United Methodist Reporter's new blog, written by Amy Forbus. Amy mentions on the Reporter post that Rebekah Miles' op-ed piece is going to come out in the Aug. 31st edition of the Reporter. Keep an eye out for that. The Reporter's general website address is here.

I will link to Dr. Miles' Reporter article when it appears. In the mean time, you might be interested in seeing this report on clergy age trends, compiled by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary: youngumclergy.pdf. It is filled with fascinating and shocking statistics, most of which are related to the aging of United Methodist clergy. For instance, did you know that in 1985, over 15% of clergy were under the age of 35?

Want to take a guess what it is now? Try 4.69%.

Correlation does not prove causation, as psychologists like to tell us. And I have no doubt that there are many reasons why younger folks are not answering God's call to ordained ministry in nearly as high numbers as they once did. But I also do not doubt that the length and complexity of our candidacy process does not help.

Methobloggers, unite!

I am new to the Methoblog community, but I'm learning as fast as I can. A friend of mine in my doctoral program was at the recent UMerging Colloquy at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, and he remarked that he saw a lot of the prominent Methobloggers. They are using actual conferences and gatherings to meet in ways a little more physical than cyberspace allows.

Gavin Richardson is putting together one such gathering at the upcoming Congress on Evangelism in January of '07 at Myrtle Beach. I'd love to attend. If you want to find out a little bit about what they are planning (and maybe let Gavin know you are interested), check out the announcement he posted.