Sex in the Church: Holiness Gone?

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash

Q: 

Dear Pastor Adrienne,

Anti-Christian, sexual permissions have reached the Church. Is holiness lost?

 A:

No, it isn’t.  But it’s definitely on life-support.  Sadly many Christ-followers have multiple experiences with sexual confusion, misinformation and abuse. None of us are unscathed since the global, sexual culture regularly shoves its ideas into our minds. Not long ago, I was shocked awake at our ignorance:

It wasn’t a normal Christian conference. The gathering of a couple hundred pastors, leaders and prophetic influencers convened, mid-week, in the atrium-sanctuary of an old hotel; now renovated to accommodate large events. We were there to hear from God, enjoy thrilling Christian talks from seasoned superstars of the faith, and get to know one another whose faces and voices we’d only seen and heard via Internet connections. Some of us were there to be ordained.

Lectures were presented morning, noon and evening, with meal-breaks in between. A lush buffet was provided for dinner in one of the old banquet rooms, so we piled our plates and were encouraged to choose seats at giant round tables with people we didn’t know yet—and “just be social,” grinned the emcee, trying to get us to loosen up. It was a serious group of mostly Clergy, sometimes grim-faced and quiet. Life in the trenches of church-work was exhausting and arduous. We all badly needed prodding when it came to conversation.

“We never thought we’d be RV people,” offered the handsome man of sixty-going-on-forty as he dove into his salad. Dressed like a surfer with bleach-blonde hair, he filled me in on their travels from California. He and a stunning blonde woman, also heavily tanned and looking out of place in her heels and gauzy blouse, had bounced over to my table and slid into two chairs by me. We exchanged pleasantries while they began to hold court with animated stories of travel-adventure, house-sales, combined estates and the purchase of a decked-out RV, now their home.

“So we can attend all kinds of Christian gatherings like this without airplanes and fuss,” the woman explained. “It was quite a transition into tiny house living, but we’re happy!”

“How long have you two been married?” I asked, excited to see such a compatible couple, happy and clearly enjoying their lives.

“Oh we’re not married,” she quipped, waving away the idea with a laugh. “We’re having too much fun. We plan to, though.”

I nodded silently and surveyed the table. Nobody changed expressions and we all sat poker-faced. Scriptures about sexual immorality began to click through my mind like a ticker-tape. Do they know this is a Christian conference? Of course. She said so. Does she realize what she just told us? Apparently she’s not embarrassed about it.

 It bothered me for days. Still does. Where there is no fear of the Lord, there is also, no wisdom.[1] Casually making a mockery of marriage… like it’s an inconvenience or an imposition on a schedule of licentious frolic...is unwise in its test of God’s grace. Especially when you’re old enough to know better. I shook my head. Even at a high-caliber Christian ministry event, the sickness of the sexual perversion of God’s plan is found on display.

I have also endured the mind-altering toxicity of porn:

A stack of magazines sat in the hayloft during the summer of 1977. My neighborhood playmates, all of which were boys, had been hiding their porn in my father’s barn for months. My family had recently moved into the old house early while my parents renovated the seventeen-room, Victorian mansion overlooking the Ohio River. We three children were encouraged to make friends and stay outside, playing, during times of house-restoration. An athletic girl of ten, I often joined the herd of neighbor-boys as we rode banana-seat bikes, played army with tobacco-stake guns, and built forts and tunnels from the discarded bales of hay stored around the horse-stalls and barn lofts, now empty of livestock. “Do you want to see something cool?” the oldest boy beamed. Of course I did. What I was shown scarred me for life.

            Looking back, I realize that I was extremely lucky: the neighborhood boys were not predators or damaged sex-fiends who raped or molested. They were simply curious young men who had gotten ahold of a handful of Hustler magazines and a Playboy or two. Since I had become a tomboy and fellow member of the hilltop posse, they included me in their game of “look at the magazines.” Instantly I was aroused as the pages turned and my innocent, sexual appetite was ignited long before its time. Of course, I didn’t know what arousal was, I only knew that the erotic photos made my insides feel funny in key places around my body. The photos also wreaked havoc with my already wounded body image: My breasts didn’t look like the ones in the pictures, and I began to hate myself for my inadequate, adolescent appearance. Self-rejection and hatred toward how I looked was fast becoming a theme in my life.

            Thankfully, my dad realized what was going on in his barn after a few months and burned the stash in a bonfire late one night. I watched the fire burn and knew what was happening, yet he never spoke to me directly about the magazines. Neither of my parents asked me how the situation affected me. Mom commissioned Dad’s awkward lecture about the birds-and-bees at the kitchen table…but Dad began and ended with, “do you know how babies are made?” I nodded yes, since I’d heard all about it from the boys. Dad look relieved and assumed I clearly understood the sexual mechanics on view in the porn-pictures, so the meeting was over after ten minutes. No parent hugged me or explained God’s beautiful procreation plan between a husband and wife. No one pointed out that those images were immoral acts, and many of them were perversions of love. No one told me sex was a good thing, not a raunchy, sordid romp of indecency like the magazines displayed. My dad seemed embarrassed about it all, and so was I. Apparently the 1969 “summer of love”[2] worked an opposing approach toward parental transparency while rearing children.

In our current, sexualized culture, the levels of pornographic debauchery available from one swipe on a smartphone make those magazines look like comic books. Pornography, as well as, its “inspired,” sexual activity have exploded in pandemic proportions across every income stratum, age-group, and every faith community. In 2020, a Barna research study reported that 57% of senior pastors and 64% of youth pastors anonymously admitted to their struggle with pornographic material, yet less than 1% had ever confessed it. If those statistics were true in pulpits, what did they look like in the pews? Religious folks are as afflicted as the rest of the world when it comes to sexual promiscuity…but there’s rarely a safe place or person in which to confess our sins and find healing within the Body of Christ. This is because, in the words of a wise friend of mine, “Church-people shoot their wounded and eat their offspring.” We love the story of God’s grace, but we don’t often apply it in a healthy, tangible way: Our invisible, religious courtrooms of condemnation are full of judges who convict and incarcerate without a jury or trial. We don’t try to restore our damaged members, we leave them for dead. So, nobody talks or finds healing…and the devil wins his game of wearing out the saints[3] until they drop; exhausted, ravaged and abandoned. God’s people get divorced, family units are ransacked by division and isolation and loneliness. They mostly leave the Church, or God himself.

            By the early 1980’s I entered high school and into the clash of two, potent decades. Sexually transmitted diseases, some of them deadly, had wrecked the free-love philosophies of my generation’s hippy forefathers, mentors and influencers. Yet the eighties music, movies and TV shows were even more explicit than theirs, with sexual propaganda and promotions of recreational rites of passage on display. The world had fallen hard after flesh in the 60s and 70s, but the 80s held the brunt of that darkness. It wasn’t free-love by then, it was theft of childhood innocence and an obligation toward promiscuity.

My sex-drive had already sprung forth into early torment as the mental residue of the magazines grew alongside my hormonal changes. I struggled as a church-kid trying to embrace the righteousness I knew I should embody while weeping and feeling distraught over frequent, unbridled urges. I often prayed to die rather than suffer the punishing shame of masturbation. Sometimes I escaped my mental prison by reasoning that at least I wasn’t copulating and pregnant like the nine Catholic girls who graduated high school with me. Our commencement of roughly 250 had yielded a plethora of conceptions. I pondered the secret number of abortions evidenced in the aching eyes of the less courageous girls who hadn’t carried their children to term. All of them were Christian students from families involved in the local Church, including most of the sperm-donor-boyfriends who became scarce after the births. There was no difference between the church-kids and the immoral public when it came to sex, even though biblical teachings explained the carnage of the soul.

“Do you remember about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and the towns around them? The people in those cities did the same things. They were full of sex sins and strong desires for sinful acts of the body. Those cities were destroyed by fire. They still speak to us of the fire of hell that lasts forever.”[4]

            I left for college and left the Church. After five years of the ravages of my secular, college experience, I returned to the Midwest to go to work. In the fullness of time I discovered a home-group of authentic Christ-followers while looking for an apartment to rent. While scanning a community, bulletin board in the portico of a Presbyterian Church, I found a cheap apartment and a “singles group;” a Bible study in disguise. The group offered doorways and pathways that opened into what was then, innovative, Christian counseling. I discovered a safe place with biblical counselors and ministers who knew exactly how to disassemble the layers of sexual shame that had buried me. I learned that Jesus was available, willing and able to love the sexually wounded and repair their damaged lives. Jesus healed me and restored me through their unconditional love, wisdom and experience. My surges of sexual drive diminished to manageable norms, I understood where to place much-needed boundaries to protect me from temptations, and I knew exactly how, when and where the Devil had robbed me of my most intimate gift of humanness—my sexuality.

            Decades later, I began working as a counselor myself. It became important to give-back…to set the captives free, just like I had been.[5] Yet the Lord had a bigger, broader plan than I ever intended, full time ministry. Pulpit ministry…which meant diving head-long into the hornets’ nest of the Christian hypocrisy and dysfunction my life’s journey had personified. I didn’t want to become a pastor, but I didn’t want to disappoint the Lord after all he’d done for me, either. I wept at the denomination’s initiation ceremony that sent me off to battle. They called it, quite literally, a “Charge Conference.”

Pulpit number one was three and a half years of sheer hell in the middle of a dried-up coal town where the congregation had zero interest in the Church’s evolutions and improvements since 1950. They mostly needed someone to keep their Sunday coffee-klatch going.

Pastorate number two had suffered a church-split when the congregation revolted against their female pastor whose boyfriend was regularly seen walking her dog around the parsonage lawn, in his boxers, before dawn. A sweet girl, she was a professional seminary student and new to the pulpit-world of life under the microscope of parishioner surveillance. When you literally live where you work (in Christendom,) there is an expectation of honorable conduct. If the Lord cannot reach you for needed correction, he will often employ your parishioners to lift the veil on your indiscretions.[6] 

I agreed to fill the abandoned pulpit at church number two because it sat ten miles from my high school and it felt like a redemption opportunity for me. Once at the helm to shepherd the remaining embittered families, my attention jerked away from dressing the wounds of the damaged flock to denominational news bulletins that began to fill up my inbox. Transvestites were being invited into pulpits like mine across the country. Same-sex couples, claiming membership in the denomination, were lobbying against 300 years of sound, biblical doctrine so they could marry each other. Rogue, homosexual Bishops were anointing themselves as rainbow-renegades and conducting gay marriage ceremonies in mutiny against denominational laws. As shocking as it became to watch a mainline branch of the Church proudly disembark from the Bible’s teachings, I knew right then why I was in a pulpit and assigned to this particular denomination. Christian marriage, between one man and one woman, is a sacred institution. Even though I was twice-divorced, with the scars and shame to prove it, the covenant of marriage deserved to be defended. Jesus spoke often about the seriousness of the biblical, marital bond: And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.”[7]

My congregants and I organized, linked-arms and revoked our denominational membership. We hired attorneys, poured over piles of legal documents, and tearfully bought our way off of that branch of the corrupted Body of Christ. I say, “bought” because it is a little-known fact that in our particular denomination, when the homosexual agenda succeeded in polluting the global leadership table, it then forced its subjects to pay to leave. They hoisted their perverted flags up the main mast and proclaimed, “Like it or leave.” We didn’t need another warning.

If that isn’t shocking enough, the powers-that-be used our financial report from the previous year (an annual statement of solvency designed to alert the denomination of low-coffers, should the franchise need help) to compile their demonic invoice of release. We wrote a check for $67,000.00 to shake the denominational dust off our feet.[8] They intended to bankrupt us with chilling contempt—it was nearly all we had in the bank—and they knew it. (However, through God’s miraculous favor and the generosity of the devoted parishioners, our bank accounts were restored within a year.)

The Church has forgotten Christ’s call to holiness, righteousness and integrity. It’s not just our youth shacking-up in record-numbers alongside their unchurched buddies, we’re now witnessing a frequency of denominational demise due to the perversion of important, sexual constraints. The Bible warns: “You can be sure that no immoral, impure, or greedy person will inherit the Kingdom of Christ and of God.”[9]

Even our doting grandmothers who once anchored family church pews and choir lofts are changing their belief systems on a dime: The woke granddaughter has a girlfriend. Grandma now agrees with demonic creeds as she quips what she’s told: “Love is love. I can’t reject my grandbaby, now can I?” No, but apparently you can sanction her hell-bound lifestyle with your compliance so that she fails to understand God’s desperate desire to save her, heal her and deliver her from sin.

Christianity has never stopped sounding the call for modesty and sexual morality. Preserving our God-given virginity until marriage is one of the most basic demonstrations of self-control available to men and women who claim Jesus as Savior. Sadly, we are as desensitized to and caught-up in the sex culture as the rest of the world. The idea is that we repent of our sin and turn away—not move in with it, legalize it and call it our sweetheart.

As we trust Jesus, that his biblical mandates and guidelines are correct and made for our good, we arrive at transformation. All of us are looking with unveiled faces at the glory of the Lord as if we were looking in a mirror. We are being transformed into that same image from one degree of glory to the next degree of glory. This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.[10]

Transformation toward better versions of who we are is the DNA of the Christian life. It’s the change we never believed was possible…but God made sure it was available for those who seek it. God’s way of living is the best way. I promise, this is true.

Adrienne Greene is pastor and author of "Kryptonite: The Killing Fields of Christianity's Acceptable Sins". (Amazon - Barnes & Noble) Contact for inquiries or bookings: info@adriennewgreene.com

[1] Proverbs 1:7

[2] Woodstock

[3] Daniel 7:25

[4] Jude 1:7, NLV

[5] Luke 4:18

[6] Leviticus 10:1

[7] Matthew 19:4-8, NASB95

[8] Mark 6:11

[9] Ephesians 5:5, NLT

[10] 2 Corinthians 3:18, CEB