The Fault in Our Churches
One of the many things I hope to accomplish with my column is to challenge the Church and support a greater discussion of the issues surrounding sexuality in the Church. We live in a time and culture when sexuality is pervasive and so often manifests as a twisted version itself that becomes pathologized in America’s churches. It is very difficult to develop a healthy, God-given perspective of sexuality in a church which refuses to talk about it openly, teach people about it, and provide tools and skills to help them identify the blurring lines between good sex and bad sex. In fact, 71% of satisfied Christian couples talk about sex at least once a month, according to a survey conducted by another Christian research group. How can we expect Christians to embrace and benefit from a God-given sexuality if we don’t talk about it?
The Story
In making my point here, I want to draw on an example taken from my own experience, at my local church, which happened only a few hours ago. I want to make it well known, before I start, that my intention here is to highlight and respond to a pervasive problem across the Church, not to call any single individual or local church to the carpet. While I completely support challenging everything, including the authority of the Church and the Bible itself, I believe that attacking anything or person to do so is unacceptable. Therefore, I want to make it clear that what I am offering is a systemic indictment, not a personal one.
Several months ago, I approached one of the pastors in my church about getting more connected. As a newer member of the church and coming from highly active churches in the past, I am always looking for ways that I can contribute my skills and expertise. After talking for a while, he suggested that I start attending a young adults class where the teacher was a brilliant academic, and I say that with the utmost respect as an academic myself. However, this teacher was known in the church as often being difficult to understand, because of the depth of his theological knowledge and the approach he used in drawing his conclusions. The pastor thought that my presence in the class may be good because of my ability to act as a translator and reframe the teacher’s ideas into a more usable format. It worked.
I joined the group and connected with the teacher, I even tend to think of him as a friend at this point and he has contributed heavily to the CSRI from behind the scenes with his support. Anyway, long story short, he and his wife recently made the decision to leave the area and relocate closer to his family. This left the class that he was teaching, and I was attending, without a teacher. When he told me that he and his wife had made the decision to leave I immediately saw an opportunity for the church to transition the class.
We have been doing some large pushes on marriage and family recently in the church in which I thought a class that dealt with the issues often experienced by the newly married would be valuable. Essentially, this class would focus on the day to day issues of sex and relationships and how the Word can be practically applied to resolve problems and support Christians. I wrote up my ideas and fired off an email to the pastor.
That was a couple of weeks ago and today I had the opportunity to discuss the idea with that same pastor (as I write it is Sunday 3/18/18). The response that I received was not what I was expecting and I believe helps me to make the point. He explained to me that they were disbanding the class altogether and had made the decision to replace it with a class for new believers. I completely support this; it is important that the Church gather around new believers to teach and support. However, I believe that it is equally important that we continue to support more mature Christians as well. It is so easy to wander off the path and get caught up in the world that ongoing support is absolutely necessary. When I expressed my concern, this pastor addressed it by explaining that many people in the church were content to sit in classes without ever actually applying the knowledge, which I grant is a legitimate risk. I went on to explain that my goal was to use my skills and abilities in the church in whatever way best suited the church, be it teaching a class, one on mentorship or counseling, or any other activity that could be useful. Quite frankly, I just want to use what I have learned to maybe help someone else not go through what I went through, no matter the format.
Here is where it got interesting. He asked me who I knew, by name, that needed the kind of sex and relationship support that I could offer. I told him the truth: nobody. First of all, as a researcher, I am trained and conditioned to observe and identify and then share what I have learned. Unsurprisingly, this means that my social self is often highly distinct from my professional and spiritual selves; I make very close friends but not many of them. The pastor then suggested that I would need to be able to identify several people, by name, who could benefit from any of my skills before the church would consider any kind of class or mentorship program. After hearing that, I simply politely disengaged from the conversation and left.
Finding the Flaw
Therein lies the fundamental fault in our churches; stay with me here. Sexual sin is pervasive in the Church, this is nothing new. However, that sin often becomes pathologized, meaning that sexual sin is more often seen as a sickness or a matter of choice than what it truly is. No Christian willingly becomes addicted to porn, experiences feelings of same-sex attraction, or gender dysphoria; there is no such thing as a bad intention. My church has a kind of motto that I have taken as my own and even teach to my culinary students in my leadership classes: It’s ok to not be ok.
The Pathology of Sin
However, when we pathologize that sin, whatever it may be, we are expressing one of two things: either we are telling someone that they are sick and, by extension, that there is something wrong with them, or we are telling them that it is a choice. I can speak from personal experience when I say that no one ever makes a conscious decision for sexual sin. In most cases, it begins as something innocuous. For example, when I was being trained as a marriage mentor the leader of the class, as evidence against cross-sex one on one counseling, told a story about a pastor that ended up having an affair with a woman he was counseling. I cannot accept that the pastor in that story had the intent to cheat on his wife or cause any kind of harm; in fact, I am pretty sure he just wanted to help this woman and found himself in over his head.
When the pathology of sin becomes about a sickness, we communicate the message that there is something wrong with you. God hates sin and there is something wrong with you. Usually, this is read as “God hates me because of my sin”; this isn’t true and every pastor will tell you that, but that doesn’t prevent people from experiencing it that way. Remember, there are no bad intentions from the sinner or the pastor. These feelings, inevitably, cause silence in all but the bravest of us. I have told you about my own story and so you know that I am speaking from experience.
So, when that pastor at my local church tells me that I must beat the bushes and find people in need of sexual and relational support he is asking me to pull people out of their silence and drag them before the church leadership as sexual sinners. There is a concept in psychology where the cardinal rule is that we do everything, literally everything, to avoid causing further trauma to a patient or research participant. I certainly believe that this approach would cause trauma and send the most awful message to the rest of the church: If you have sin, we will find it and hold you accountable.
Being that I find that completely abhorrent, not to mention unchristian and professionally unethical, I have decided not to pursue that particular course of action. This exchange has caused me to consider other interactions I had with the leadership team at my church. Recall from my own testimony that I sent an email to the lead pastor (not the one I am discussing here) who referred me to a local counseling organization. Why was that necessary? Put simply, the questions I raised and the problems that I admitted were more than the church could handle.
As a whole, the Church is ill-equipped to deal with sexuality; it must be farmed out to more qualified experts. Yet when one of those more qualified experts presents themselves, we are told to find people that need it to justify ourselves. This tells me that the Church is not only unable to deal with sexuality, blatantly ignores it.
The fact is that in the modern culture you would be hard-pressed to find a Christian that has not had contact with some form of negative sexuality or sexual sin, including the Church leadership. We are all shocked when Catholic priests are caught in child sex scandals or our pastors admit that they had an affair, but should we be? Why would anyone, especially a church leader, come forward to seek help with a sexual sin knowing that it will be pathologized? Even if that person isn’t blatantly rejected, they can still feel the judgment in the eyes of everyone else, that sense of superiority because “I may be a sinner but at least I never _____.” More than being pathologized, the person seeking help is often pointed to a few Bible verses that do nothing more than confirm that they are in fact filthy sinners unworthy of even being in the same room with the good, churchgoing folk. (Again, I have been that person and I know exactly how it feels.)
Why would the answer to that be “Go find some people that need it and get back to me.”? All that does is force people further away from the Church and God. All the pathology of sin accomplishes is to make people feel unredeemable and exposed. I have been through some stuff, quite a bit of stuff actually, that has put me in that position and the last thing I would ever do is put another person in that place. There is a better solution, but it is challenging and uncomfortable for the status quo of the Church.
Mending the Fault
We must be proactive in offering support, rather than indictment, by creating sexuality-based programs and solutions in our churches before they are needed. We must also accept that these programs, whatever form they take, must be entirely confidential or not a single soul will come forward. (That is simple undergraduate level psychology.) Finally, we must be willing to stand up and challenge the pathologizing of sin. No one chooses to experience same-sex attraction, or any other sin for that matter, and research has shown that this is true of open homosexuals as well. Until we stop treating it that way nothing will change.
Until a handful of people stand up and refuse to continue to pathologize sin and accept the mantle of undertaking the challenge of confronting sexuality, nothing changes. Until local pastors accept that sexuality is not just the world’s problem but sits and stares at them while they preach every week, nothing changes. Until Church leaders and Christians everywhere are willing to get real and understand some hard truths about people, sex, and their own churches, nothing will change.
Another Angry Sinner
I will close this out by stating the obvious. This is an indictment, in no uncertain terms. As Christians we should be ashamed of our willingness to allow sexuality, our God-given gift, to fall into the corrupted hands of the world while we do nothing; while we sit by and quote Leviticus 18:22 or 1 Corinthians 6:18–20 without bothering to actually understand them as they were written. How dare we, as Christians, look at someone else with judgment and pity in our eyes like there is something wrong with them when we ourselves are just as pitiful? Who are we to assume to the role of the judge and weaponize the Word of God as our advocate, clubbing our own fallen believers over the head with half-understood memory verses until they fall into a guilt-induced silence and never seek the help they actually need; and who are we to keep it from them? These may sound like the words of a man spurned, like sour grapes over having my idea for a class rejected, but I assure they are not; these are the words of an angry sinner that is sick and tired of watching a cancer of sexual and biblical ignorance destroy Christian after Christian while we all just sit by glad it’s not us. All while we sit in our own sin and apathy induced guilt and pray to a God we are confidently unworthy of, hoping that no one ever finds out about us. It’s time to wake up.
(This is where I would normally leave you with a
Verse or two drive my point home, but there are far too many that
apply. Check them out for yourself.)
Romans 1:11Ephesian 4:29Ecclesiastes 4:9–121 Corinthians 2:5–11Proverbs 39:1Matthew 7:1–2Luke 6:37–38John 8:1–8Hebrews 12:11Proverbs 9:7–9James 5:19–20Galatian 6:1–2Matthew 18:15–172 Thessalonians 3:15Titus 2:15
Roger Dale Plummer Junior, MBA, CC, MFP
