Sex-saturated culture addressed at summit

NASHVILLE (BP) -- Pastors and other evangelical Christians should speak biblically and live purely to minister faithfully in a sex-saturated culture, speakers said at a Southern Baptist-sponsored summit on the Gospel and sexuality.

In addresses during the three-day conference, speakers challenged participants with messages designed to equip church leaders and other Christians to live with purity while aiding people inside and outside the church who are captive to a sexualized society. The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission sponsored its inaugural ERLC Leadership Summit in sessions April 21-23 at the Southern Baptist Convention building in Nashville.

As sexualized as American culture is, it does not appear to be at the saturation point, ERLC President Russell D. Moore said.

"In terms of the entire society, I don't think we're there yet, because I think that what's happening is that technology is making the sexual revolution more and more elastic," Moore said during a panel discussion on ministry in a sex-permeated culture.

He suspects that "what we are going to find is there are a lot of people who have been promised a kind of easy gospel of sexual freedom who are going to be asking, 'What now? What's after this?' And so I think we need to be the sort of church and the sort of people who can be ready" to welcome and help them, Moore said.

The summit, titled "The Gospel and Human Sexuality," dealt with such issues as moral purity, marital sexuality, pastoral care for sexual immorality, pornography, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, sex trafficking, discussing sex with children and young people, and biblical manhood and womanhood.

J.D. Greear, lead pastor of The Summit Church in the Raleigh/Durham (N.C.) area, said presenting the beauty of the Gospel of Jesus is vital in dealing with sexuality and sexual sin.

"The problem is not that our desire for sex is so strong but that our love for God is so weak," he said in a keynote speech on pastoral care for sexual sin.

"[O]ur message cannot simply be, 'Stop having sex.' Our message has to be, 'Behold your God,'" Greear told the audience, which consisted of 205 registrants.

"What you have to do is to be consumed with a God and His work so much that it breaks the craving" for sex, he said.

Various speakers pointed to the need for pastors to preach systematically through the Bible, and some pointed to the damage that preaching to address felt needs has done among evangelicals in recent decades.

"The generational effect of felt-needs preaching, the generational effect of preaching what we think people want to hear and not exalting the unique person and unique work of Jesus Christ has caused irreparable harm in the church world," said Kevin Smith, assistant professor of preaching at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and teaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky.

"It's easy to scapegoat gay people," he said. "It's easy to scapegoat the culture war without proclaiming the Word of God from the pulpit to the people sitting in your congregation looking at your face."

Evangelicals should make certain they are speaking biblically and factually while befriending gays and lesbians when addressing homosexuality and same-sex marriage, speakers noted.

"The point is not homosexuality; the point is the Lordship of Jesus," Greear said.

"God doesn't send people to hell for homosexuality. He sends people to hell for self-rule and self-righteousness," he said.

Jimmy Scroggins, senior pastor of First Baptist church in West Palm Beach, Fla., said Christians should "reject redneck theology in all its forms," including jokes about "Adam and Steve."

The summit addressed the pervasiveness of pornography, especially among church leaders and other Christians.

Pornography "represents the greatest moral crisis in the history of the church," said Heath Lambert, executive director of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and assistant professor of biblical counseling at Southern Seminary.

While there are all sorts of moral problems, "porn is something evangelicals can do in a dark room behind a shut door after they have railed against homosexual marriage," he said during his keynote speech.

"I think the greatest threat to the church today is the Christian pastor, the Christian school teacher, the Christian college and seminary student who exalts sound theology, who points to the Bible and then retreats to the basement computer" for an hour of pornography, Lambert told the audience.

The average age of a boy's first experience with hard-core pornography is 12, Lambert said. "We don't know what it is like to have a nation of men who are addicted to pornography," he said.

David Prince, pastor of preaching at Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, Ky., and associate professor of preaching at Southern Seminary, said he is convinced pornography is "devastating the spiritual vitality of our churches."

Pastor and seminary professor Tony Merida said Christians can battle sex trafficking by halting their consumption of pornography.

"I would go so far as to say if you are viewing pornography you are perpetuating the sex trafficking industry," said Merida, founding pastor of Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, N.C., and associate professor of preaching at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

Pastors need to be accountable to others regarding pornography and to address their churches, Lambert said. While practical strategies are needed, "[t]here is no grasp of porn that is so tight that the grace of Jesus cannot break it," he said.

Evangelicals need to awaken the culture to the problem, Lambert said. "[W]e need to dedicate ourselves to a decades-long fight to end this."

While discussion of pornography focused on the need of males to be on guard, Trillia Newbell said women should not be forgotten by pastors when they address the issue of pornography and other sexual sins.

Research from 2007 showed about 13 million women go to online porn sites each month, said Newbell, an author and the ERLC's consultant for women's initiatives. About one-third of visitors to adult entertainment websites are females, Newbell reported.

"There is a stereotype and a really, really, really bad rumor that women don't struggle with sexual sin. Or so it appears," she said.

All Scripture is useful, "and therefore those [biblical] texts aren't meant for only men," but for women also, Newbell said.

The problem of pornography among evangelicals was reflected in research data presented by Mark Regnerus, an author and associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He cited research showing:

Regnerus also reported that more than 48 percent of evangelicals report having premarital sex with their spouse.

Prince pointed to the Gospel in a keynote address about helping parents address their children's sexuality.

"We are to have a distinctive, Christ-centered view of everything, including sexuality," he said.

"Our approach can't be, 'Just say no.' That is not Christian sexuality. We want them to have a comprehensively, Christ-centered view of sexuality."

Among his recommendations, Prince encouraged parents to recognize sex education as an important part of Gospel education, to answer questions without hesitation when asked by their children and to be the first to explain sexual intercourse to their children.

Smith said pastors and other Christians should address sexuality but with the "tone of Scripture" and "in ways that reflect God's glory."

"[W]e must realize the over-sexualization of our society can't lead to the a-sexualization of the church," he said. "[W]e can't get to a place where the church" doesn't talk about sex.

He urged the audience -- some who were watching by live-stream -- to avoid vulgarity and "ways that remove the mystery of the special intimacy between a husband and wife."

"I'm tired of preachers bragging about their hot wife," he said. "No. 1, hot is an objectifying term. There is nothing good, profitable or godly about calling your wife hot in public. All it does is set up an examination" of your wife.

"We're trying to heighten the conversation," Smith said. "We're not trying to make sex less dramatic. We're trying to make sex more dramatic."

I agree with many of these pastors’ comments about the saturation of sex in our society and how we have lost the Christ centred world view that is so desperately needed. However, I find that when dealing with the topic of sex, so many church leaders miss the boat entirely. God created sex… and as it says in Genesis 1: 31 “And God saw every thing that He had made, and behold, it was very good”. This means that sex as God intended it, is something that is very good…..a concept that so often gets completely thrown out with the rest of the bathwater. The problem is that the church has gone down the path of condemning all those times when sex is used in its abusive and perverted forms to the extent that they forget to teach what it means to simply be doing sex in the God approved way. Men and women who are doing sex God’s way are satisfied with their lives and aren’t inclined to go down paths of pornography, adultery and homosexuality etc…. and they will raise children who as adults will do sex God’s way. It is doing things God’s way that keeps evil from gaining its foothold and in no area is this truer than with sex.

The real problem is extramarital sexual immorality.

While extramarital immorality is a problem, I’m not sure that I’d agree that this is the ‘real problem’ or even the biggest problem….. I think it is more fundamental than that. Rebellion against God and what He says is my opinion the REAL problem and that covers a lot of ground. Extramarital sex of course falls under that big umbrella as ‘rebellion’ covers much more than just sex. Regardless, sin is sin and while mankind may think that some sins are worse than others, God actually treats them pretty much the same. Then there are the sins that lead to other sins and the sins of adults as they corrupt the youth…. One would think that if God actually did treat some sins as being worse than others, the corrupting of youth by teaching them sexual immorality and claiming that it is good and natural when it is vile, abominable and will take its practitioners to hell would have to be about the worst.

He's right. As soon as you say a person is "hot" or "sexy," you've wiped out everything that is individual about that person - good, bad, or indifferent - and replaced it with yourself: I want to use this person to satisfy my sexual urge.

Our approach can't be, 'Just say no.' That is not Christian sexuality. We want them to have a comprehensively, Christ-centered view of sexuality."

Having a Christ-centered view of ALL things is key to living abundantly and doing what is pleasing to God. Children should be raised with the understanding that sexuality is one of the gifts from God and is His sharing with us in the awesomeness of procreation. When kids learn to respect themselves they will also respect others. Society, as a whole, has lost that respect for life and is why it has become devalued - making our culture anti-life in all areas. When we really believe that God loves us and wants what is best for us, we will surrender our lives to Him knowing that His will WILL be the best for us.

Correcting the lead: Pastors and other evangelical Christians should speak biblically and live purely to minister faithfully in a ~~sex~~ sin-saturated culture, speakers said at a Southern Baptist-sponsored summit on the Gospel and sexuality.

Sodomy and Lesbianism may be gratification, but it is not sex, and does not involve propagation of the race.

The value of spiritual birth is that it frees one from both the penalty and the power of sin. Spiritual maturation (progressive sanctification) is defined as being freed from the preference and practice of sinfulness.

Our culture is just as soaked in other sins as it is in twisted sex involvement.

From the 1st chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Romans:

God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death,they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Romans 1: 18-32 NIV

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.