ie:missional

A few months back one of our 70+ aged senior adults met me and said, “You ought to preach on sex. If you’d preach on sex people would come to hear it.” I kind of laughed it off thinking, “Oh yeah. That would do the trick.” A while later, he approached me and said, “You ought to preach on sex. I saw on the news a pastor who did it and a lot of people showed up!” So I decided to give it a whirl. The message series, that is.

We were trying to find a creative title-one that would be pretty plain and yet capture the attention without being vulgar. We settled on “My Best Sex Now” which, of course, is a play on the title of a popular book by a guy who preaches about how to have money instead of how to have sex.

Immediately, my wife expressed her desire to work in the nursery for three consecutive Sundays or move her church membership altogether. I’m usually very transparent when speaking and she could already imagine me saying, “And then we did this on our honeymoon…” Since, I don’t typically use a lot of notes when speaking, I made a commitment to “stick to the copy” and not take any risks.

Our creative folks engineered a really good website video (www.mybestsexnow.com), some great posters and cool post cards that we mailed to about 750 homes around us…we focused on the closest subdivisions where we have some members. The post cards featured only a bed and nightstand with the website-nothing else. We only got three complaints. All from Christians as you might surmise.

Anyway, I’ve never shied away from preaching about sex and have always addressed the surrounding issues as the text required, but in reality Christian views about sex are almost limited to “homosexuality is a sin and I’m against gay marriage.” We have associated only “Thou shalt nots” with sex and sexuality, forgetting all the biblical “Thou shalts.” This, surely, is a sin of omission. Why do we rail against the darkness when we ourselves have abandoned shining the light?

Anyway, Song of Solomon is fast becoming my favorite book of the Bible following only Hebrews. Of course, Solomon had hundreds of wives and concubines so he ought to save something to say about the subject. (I wonder if watermelon grows in the Middle East?)

Two more weeks to go in the series. Week one went well, I thought. We had one particular guest who, on Sunday afternoon, went to his particular locale and told everyone, “I want to church today and he talked about SEX!” I’ll take that publicity any day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 8:24 am and is filed under Bible, Church, Culture, God, Life, Sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.