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.