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Commentary
'Sex challenge' misses the mark Gavin Richardson, Dec 22, 2008
Gavin Richardson
By Gavin Richardson Special Contributor
I’m thankful for the witness and commitment of the Rev. Ed Young in pastoring the Christian community. Mr. Young is pastor of the nondenominational Fellowship Church, a megachurch with Baptist roots that now has multiple satellite sites in Dallas.
I’m discouraged, though, that he was so off-target in his “Sex Week Challenge.”
Mr. Young recently challenged married couples in his congregation to have sex every day for a week, to bring them closer to each other and to God. National media picked up on the story.
Having followed Mr. Young closely and watched his sermons online, I know he has some good reasons why sex is an important part of a marriage relationship. But his pandering with the news media outlets and their need for one-line quotations only simplified an otherwise complicated issue.
Let me suggest we should not be talking about sex as a “foundation” for our marriages. Before we should be having sex, we should figure out how we are friends with our spouses and others. If we are to “reclaim sex” as God’s great gift from the seduction of culture we have to start at the deep core, not the symptom. The deep core we need to address is how we are friends in love, not lovers in bed.
Mr. Young said that the church needs to speak out, and that sex is too-often a taboo topic. I suggest he spend some time as a youth minister—he’ll find out it’s not. As a youth pastor for some 15 years now, I’ve heard conversation on sex and sexual relationships over and over again.
It is not that my flock is scared to talk about it; rather, we know that teenagers, as they grow and develop their senses of identity and intimacy, are learning first how they can establish and maintain friendships.
Too often in this culture of consumption, they learn and carry into their future relationships how to consume, not uplift others. I suggest Mr. Young make a case for celibacy and being friends first to lay a foundation for marriages. Not to do that is scandalous.
In talking about the celibacy of monastic life, author Kathleen Norris writes in an article “Celibate Passion” in The Christian Century (March 20, 1996): “Any marriage has times of separation, ill-health, or just plain crankiness, in which sexual intercourse is ill-advised. And it is precisely the skills of celibate friendship—fostering intimacy through letters, conversation, performing mundane tasks together—that help a marriage survive the rough spots. When you can’t make love physically, you figure out other ways to do it.”
Henri Nouwen shares that celibacy is “a witness to the rich and deep inner life of our hearts and spirits” (Clowning in Rome, 37).
These two know something: that if we are focused on a physical act, we forget the true intimacy that God creates within us and allows us to share with others.
Don’t get me wrong. I certainly understand the power and emotional bond that sex can provide. For me, that manifests itself in what I would consider a very healthy spiritual and communicative relationship with my wife.
However, that is not always the feeling, and if we were to jump past reconfiguring our friendship and right into bed, all we would have created was some bad sex—not true intimacy.
Within the bounds of true friendship, moving past our cultural message of consumption, we find intimacy with God—and then a spouse. From there, we can continue to have a solid foundation through tough times of personal and physical struggles when sex is not just a challenge, but also a bad idea.
Pastors need to speak not just to the symptom for the purpose of spectacle. We need to speak to the root problem. Let’s give a true challenge to married couples: Ask them to honor and cherish each other for seven days, then when they have sex, they will know the depths of God’s gift.
Mr. Richardson is director of youth ministries at First UMC in Hendersonville, Tenn., and blogs at www.gavoweb.com.
Gavin Richardson
