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.

Let's talk about sex

Shannon Vowell has a remarkable article in the United Methodist Reporter this week where she calls the church to reappraise its teaching (or lack thereof) on sex and sexuality to its youth. She writes, "The bottom line on teenage sexual practice as far as our church is concerned is this: We've failed them by copping out on Scriptural teaching about sex, both institutionally and individually." She says that our desire to be relevant has led us to become relativistic, both in moral teaching and in fundamental doctrines such as the truth of salvation through Christ and the nature of God as Trinity.

She goes on to observe that "about sex, we stand silent - or simply echo a muted version of the ethos of culture: Anything goes, because we are too civilized and sophisticated to need God's boundaries."

Now, anyone who grew up in a United Methodist Church where the silence on sex was deafening can relate to what Shannon is saying. I grew up in a church like that, and while no one in the church - pastors included - would have thought they were doing anything wrong, neither did they consider that the church is the absolute best place for children and youth to learn about their sexuality.

In a seminar I'm currently taking on ethics in the early church, we spent a couple of weeks reading the church fathers on marriage and sex. Granted, the early church had some views on sexuality that we would rightly question. But what was significant to me is that these guys were preaching on sex and seeking to engage their congregations in the issue of how sex should be rightly understood. A colleague of mine in the class said that she had led a "good sex" retreat for her youth while a pastor in Arizona, which was oriented around helping adolescents understand sexuality in healthy and holy ways. But my colleague's courageous ministry aside, I think Shannon Vowell's view is the more common one in the church: Sexuality is considered so taboo that most churches won't engage their children on it at all.

Watching what this leads to in campus culture is as depressing as it is frightening. How many of us went to colleges or universities where, without any real formation around issues of sexuality in our faith communities, we were thrown into a culture where Bacchanalian revelry was the rule rather than the exception? And with no formation, what resources do such kids have to fall back on?

It is not as if there aren't brave individuals out there. Take Justin Noia, an undergraduate here at Duke who wrote this column last year on valuing sex and sexuality as a fundamental and inseparable component of love - something you would not want to trade in cheaply. Of course, Noia's column received angry letters to the editor (such as this one and this one) that insisted that his views were boring, Victorian, and misogynistic.

There is also a growing trend amongst Ivy League schools for abstinence organizations (or "chastity clubs"), such as the one described in this NY Times Magazine article on Janie Fredell and Harvard's True Love Revolution organization. It is a fascinating story, and one must appreciate the heroism of young adults who embrace chastity as a virtue in a culture that is often hostile to such a practice.

But we might ask, "How do we turn chastity from a virtue of the heroic minority to a viable or even preferred option for Christian college students?" I think the answer to that question has a lot to do with what Shannon is talking about in her article: it has to start at church.

Do you have any experiences of ministries on sex and sexuality in your own church context? Do you have any resources that you would recommend?

How does forgiveness work?

The Washington Post's On Faith forum currently features bloggers commenting on how and whether the sexual lives (and infidelities) of public figures should be scrutinized. Underlying all this, of course, is the debate over whether the sexual behavior by individuals in a society is inherently a private or a public activity. And the opinions range from "It's nobody's business" (Susan Jacoby) to "Of course people have a right to know because it suggests something about the person's moral character and ability to lead" (Chuck Colson).

Christians might think how this issue relates to the way we treat one another in the church - particularly church leaders. In one Post commentary, the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy argues that adultery is no more serious than other sins and should be forgiven by the church. Grace, he says, is just as capable of healing folks of sexual sin as it is of any other sin. I say, "Amen to that!" But the question then becomes, "How does that forgiveness happen?" For instance, should we follow Matthew 18 and 1 Timothy 5 and make forgiveness a matter of the entire community? Following the logic of Titus 1, should forgiveness carry with it a necessary removal from ministerial office? That is to say, do we need to look hard at the way that grace and responsibility must go together? And is any of this different for a church leader than it is for a lay person?

My sense is that, while adultery is no more serious than other serious sin, it - like financial malfeasance - has the ability to do a disproportionate amount of harm to the body of Christ. Anyone familiar with a congregation where one of the pastoral leaders has commited adultery knows what I am talking about. And I worry that the church does not deal with such transgressions in ways that are both gracious and responsible. We get so freaked out by adultery that we either want to sweep it under the rug or punish it vindictively.

So what would a gracious and responsible ministry to sexual transgressors in the church look like? And why does this seem to be one area where the church fails so miserably?

Sex on Campus

It was with more than a little fear and trembling that I wrote this column - "Sex on Campus" - in the United Methodist Reporter this week. No one has ever accused me of being a saint, and I was about as far from sainthood as you could get during my own college years. But time and maturity cause one to reflect, not only one's own past but also on the way that environments play such a key role in helping people to live in healthy ways. I'd be curious to hear readers' thoughts on this column in particular.

I believe there is very little that is healthy about the recreational pursuits of college students these days. The levels of substance abuse and casual sex, the inattention to engagement with the larger world, and the neglect of virtue formation all have real consequences for later life. Bad habits ingrained during the formative years tend to stick around and only become worse.

By the way, I wasn't picking on Duke in particular in the blog post. I only use it as an example of the permissiveness of campus culture because it is the campus I happen to walk around on everyday. And despite all the Duke lacrosse controversy over the past year-and-a-half, I don't think Duke is any worse than most places.

Amy Forbus had this to say on the Reporter's own blog about the issue of campus culture. Her comments about the "Shirttails Serenade" tradition at our own alma mater, Hendrix College, is right on: "Back then I saw it as innocent fun. Now it seems far less innocent." You could say that about a lot of the troubling behavior that happens on campuses. We have lost the sense that virtue formation is something that is intimately connected with an educated person.