Richard D. Dobbins Institute of Ministry

Pastor, Your Church Should Be Into Sex Education

How can we as a church be morally responsible while sending our children into the sexually threatening environment of our daily world without the information and biblical training they need to win the battle for their sexual purity?  Our world is too sexually dangerous to subject our children to such risks.

No!  I don’t believe the church should be sexually educating children.  That job belongs to parents. However, even though most parents believe that they should be talking to their children about sex they simply do not know how to go about it.  Why?  In most cases, their parents did not talk to them about it either.  So, where these does this irresponsible cycle of sexual silence stop?

I believe the church has a moral obligation to stop it by  training parents to be the primary sex educators of their children.  Historically, the Church is responsible for imposing much, if not most, of the shame and embarrassment attached to our sexuality that makes it so difficult for us to talk about it.  So, it is time that we own this regrettable fact and take the initiative in helping parents teach their children how to be good and responsible stewards of their sexuality.

Except for the reactive prophetic role of warning youth and adults against the evils of sexual sins the church is doing very little in a proactive way to help parents bring sex education into the home…where it belongs.  In generations past sexual ignorance may have encouraged sexual innocence, but today no thinking pastor or parent believes this.

After all, the age of the onset of puberty is falling and marriage is being delayed five years or more than in previous generations.  So, a young person has to manage their sexuality for fifteen to twenty years before marriage provides them with a Biblical context in which they can safely and morally celebrate it.  I believe the church’s reluctance to get involved with the sex education of our youth is a major reason why so many of them drop out of church between their twelfth and twentieth year.

Unfortunately, many parents are too busy trying to keep their head above water financially to know just how sexually dangerous our world is for children.  Even though they read stories in the paper about the abduction of children or see television programs about sexual predators they find it easier to believe that nothing like this will ever happen to their children.

Parents are aware of the moral deterioration in our society, but they want to believe that their children will somehow escape it.  Nevertheless, almost weekly there is some television program informing us about the seductive skills of sexual predators who lie in wait to prey upon our children.  I believe that the church must awaken parents to deal with these sexual realities of the 21^st century and train them to be the primary sex educators of their children.

How big is the sexual threat lurking daily in our children’s world?  Here are some facts that will help you awaken parents to the urgency of this need:

• In 1998 there were 14 million pages of pornography available on the internet.  By 2003 , only five years later, the number had grown to 260 million pages.
• The pornographic industry made 12 billion dollars in the United States in 2003.  (This is more money than was made by all the major league baseball, football and basketball franchises in the country…more money than was made by ABC, CBS, and NBC in the same year.)
• Nine out of ten eight to sixteen year old boys in our society have found their way onto some of the 260 million pages of pornography available on the internet today.  Most of them made this discovery while doing their homework on a computer.
• Children are spending 65 percent more time on the Internet viewing pornography than they are on game sites.
• Twelve to seventeen year old males comprise the largest market for Internet pornography.
• Telephone companies estimate that children use the information gained from porn sites to make 70 percent of the 500,000 daily dial-a-porn calls in our country.
• In 2002, the Girl Scout Research Institute found that 30 percent of teenage girls had been sexually harassed while in a chat room, but only 7 percent shared that information with their parents.
• Children carry their sexual ignorance and curiosity into chat rooms where they are at high risk for encountering sexual predators.
• The U. S. Department of Justice estimates  77 million of our children are on the Internet.
• Every year three million of our teenagers are infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

(All of these statistics are substantiated in my recent book: Teaching Your Children the Truth About Sex.)

These are just a few examples of the high costs our children and youth are paying for our negligence in reminding them that sex is sacred while also providing them with biblical and practical ways of dealing with their sexual urges before marriage.

Pastor, I believe you are as uncomfortable with these facts as I am…but we both know how tragically true they are.  They make it obvious that we can no longer afford to abdicate the sex education of the children in our church to public schools, peers and pornographers.

The parents in your church realize the responsibility for sexually educating their children belongs to them, but most of them don’t have the foggiest idea about how they should approach the task.  They don’t know when they should start, what they should say, or how they should say it.

This is why I believe one of the most valuable ministries you can have to the children and youth of your church is to provide their parents with a class where they can be trained by competent committed Christians to be the primary sex educators of their children from a biblical point of view.  I wish my parents had found this kind of help in their church and you probably wish your parents had, too.

Trying to provide this kind of help for your children can be difficult if you as a leader or parent are not comfortable with your own sexuality.   However, you can take some satisfaction in giving your children a healthier view of their sexuality than you were given by your parents…and you can let helping your children inspire you to apply to your own life the same disciplines you are teaching them.

Having pastored for twenty-six years, no one knows better than I how touchy it is for the church to deal with the subject of sexuality; and, you may have to take some heat from people in your church who have their head in the sand and don’t think the church should be involved in sex education.  However, hundreds of those whose pain from poor sexual judgments drove them to my office could have been spared their misery had their churches been more forthright in providing them with this kind of plain spoken practical help.  Nevertheless, the stakes are too high for us to sit idly by and complicate the lives of another generation by abdicating this vital role of sexually educating our children to public school teachers, peers, and pornographers.

I’m sure these are not the people you want to be the primary sex educators of your church’s children.  But right now, that is what is happening!  How can a caring church stand by and watch these secular sources take over the sacred task of sexually educating our children?

After all, God is the One who created us male and female.  He chose to make us sexual beings.  He ordained marriage between a man and a woman and designed sexual orgasm to hold a husband and wife together in a growing bond of pleasure strong enough to keep them together for life.  This bond is intended to be durable enough to give birth to children, and enable couples to stand up to the challenge of parenting and launching children into a future of their own.  These are not things your children will be taught about sex in public schools.

As much as the world is attempting to secularize the subject…sex is sacred!  A sacred subject like sex education should not be left up to the public schools.  Even though some schools do a better job than others, no public school can legally provide the moral context this sacred subject deserves.   However, it sounds a little hollow for those of us in the church to criticize the job the public schools are doing when most of us are not doing anything to address this need for our children.

I know there are some good self-help books out there, but today’s parents need more than self-help books.   They need a safe and sacred place where thy can share their common concerns about the sexual future of their children…a place that will help them find the answers to questions they know their children are going to ask once they open up the subject with them.

Where are our children raising these questions now?  Some are directing their questions to public school sex education classes.  Probably most of their questions are directed to their peers in awkward giggling moments when they are alone.  However, many of our children are raising their questions in chat rooms or looking for the answers they seek on pornographic sites on the internet.

If you believe, as I do, in the sacredness of sexuality, then it must be as upsetting for you as it is for me to see the world trying to secularize it and turn it into another form of adult entertainment.  What can we do about it?

We can limit ourselves to reactive measures such as crying out against the evils of pornography and the secularization of sex.  Or, we can also become proactive and offer parents an elective in the adult curriculum of our Christian Education program where they can be taught by a godly qualified instructor how to become the primary sex educators of their children from a biblical point of view.

Who will teach this class?  From those you know to have a deep commitment to Christ choose a doctor, a nurse, a coach, and a physical education teacher…anyone who has the educational background to accurately explain sexual physiology to parents.  Know the teacher you select well enough to have confidence in the depth of their spiritual commitment and feel the subject is safe in their hands.  Then, trust them with it.

So long as the class is elective those who might find it offensive do not need to attend.  However, why should a few people who do not want to attend the class be able to deny others the benefit they are bound to receive from it?

Parents cannot make sexual decisions for their children, but they can be sure that those decisions are not made out of sexual and Biblical ignorance.  Wise parents will open a dialog with their children about sex as soon as their children can talk.  Through the years, they will accurately and adequately inform their children about this vital part of life and help them see the wisdom of using biblical guidelines for navigating their way through the stormy seas of adolescent sexuality.

Some pastors fear that such an open approach to sex education in the church will meet with intense criticism on the part of a few people.  This may be true, but I promise you that once you launch the project most parents of the church will come to your defense and strongly support your initiative.  They are desperate.  They are aware of the eroticism of our culture and they know they have neither the information nor the understanding they need to help their children.

As a pastor I know when you do something like this your neck is on the line.  It is true, the class may be controversial, but the children of your church are at sexual risk every day in our highly eroticized society.  We can take a little heat for them and their parents…can’t we?