All this talk on various churchy folks Xanga’s about sex has been very interesting to watch unfold. Dgausepohl got the ball rolling with the statement “We have no legitimate right to sex outside of marriage.”

He followed this up with an invitation to members of his church who were sexually or emotionally involved with someone who wasn’t their spouse to call him for help. this was also extended to single people who were having sex and wanted to stop having sex.

His actions were clearly a well meaning gesture. The married Houston based pastor seems to want to ‘get down and dirty’, so to speak, with the subject of sex among Christians. Though perhaps unsurprisingly, his invitation hasn’t resulted in his diary being filled.

“Who am I kidding…myself? Silly me; expecting people having a sexual problem to admit it, and to email or call me to talk about it.” He writes.

But really, what did he expect? The Church has struggled with this subject since, well probably since forever surely? We are sexual beings programmed, you might say by God himself, to desire sexual gratification. But when the Bible and the Christian church seems to be so quick to condemn much about the tricky subject of sex, it surely can’t come as a surprise to anyone that people aren’t lining up to talk openly about it.

“Give ’em fire and brimstone for 40 minutes, threaten them with damnation, and then tell them your office door is open any time if they’d like to learn how to spare their souls.” Suggests one comment on the pastors blog. Maybe that approach would work on a Sunday morning in Texas. A bit of damnation before lunch never hurt anyone right? But then again maybe sex in church on a Sunday morning might be a little too much for some?

It’s a fine line. How does a pastor address this with the urgency and passion that Dgausepohl clearly has, but do so in a way that doesn’t actually close more doors than it opens?

“Its one thing to offer counseling and healing to those who have been hurt and broken by sexual relationships. Its another to be calling people on the carpet for unbibilical behavior they don’t wish to change. Everyone wants the first one, but no one wants the second. But can we have one without a clear position on the other?” Asks someone in a comment of Dgausepohl’s Xanga.

And there is the problem. It’s all very well asking the congregation to come and confess their deepest secrets, but what is expected from such meetings? One has to assume the pastor is going to want to see some change, and if he doesn’t… what then?

It could become ugly, worse still, it could become public, and although we might appear to live in a very open age regarding sex, with the media full of stories about ‘who does what with whom and how,’ those stories aren’t about us, are they.

Indeed Dgausepohl himself writes “The New Testament is clear that our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ are not private, but community matters, and that we are accountable to the community of faith for [our] own behavior toward one another.”

Now I’m not judging the pastor when I say this, but that statement immediately makes me extremely cautious. The privacy issue might not be one that effects just me, there could be someone else in the church involved too, and maybe they’re going to be really upset with me if I ‘out’ their sin to the pastor while I confess mine. Furthermore, while pastor might grant me some limited form of confidentiality, what does he do about the knowledge that this other member of the church, who might not have taken up his invitation, is engaged in ‘sexual sin.’

Can – worms – everywhere!

The subject of sex with someone other than your spouse is one that most would probably agree on in that it isn’t generally a good idea. But sex with before marriage, now there’s a tricky one. If you took a census of everyone who goes to church I think I might bet that the age group with the least attendance would be the late teenagers to early thirties. Could it be considered merely coincidental that this age range is the same age range that’s having sex before marriage?

I don’t know if anyone has ever done a seriously large scale study into church attendance demographics, but from my own experience I’ve seen lots of Christian friends leave their churches around the time they leave home and go to University. They then remain absent until such time as they have had enough ‘fun’, then they settle down and possibly return to the church. Could this be because church is an easier place to be in when you are either a child, or married?

Of course many single people go to church. But of them I wonder how many really do remain a virgin in every respect until they are married? And of the ones who don’t, how many of those are willing to talk about it?

Pastor Dgausepohl isn’t getting the response he had hoped for from his invitation. He is, of course, to be commended for seeking honesty among his fellow Christians, but there seems little point in asking questions to which one already knows the answer. So while his door my may be wide open for conversation, behind closed doors people will continue to come together in entirely different ways.