Home Pastors The ‘Gateway Drug’ to Sexual Sin in the Church

The ‘Gateway Drug’ to Sexual Sin in the Church

Before long, the temptation becomes too great, and the virtual use of women and children spills over into the real world. The youth pastor begins to imagine “what if” when he sees the beautiful teen girl. The seemingly happily-married man who tells his wife he doesn’t need sex soon succumbs to an affair. And the pastor who has been placed on a pedestal and has no accountability systems in place steps over the line when counseling a woman alone in his office. Viewing pornography is the slippery slope that blurs the lines between right and wrong in our minds, allowing us to start operating in those shades of gray. 

It’s clear that ignoring the problem or trying to sweep it under the rug hasn’t made it go away. We need to bring it out in the open and normalize talking about it. Neither the men in the Church nor their wives know how to approach the topic, and through embarrassment and shame, they both continue to avoid the elephant in the room. 

We can’t keep turning a blind eye to it, as it is harming our young people and the reputation of the Church. Let’s start normalizing these conversations – especially within the Church – so that we can all get back to being who God has called us to be. 

Our organization has created a program to help churches do just this. REAL TALK will normalize transparency and authenticity regarding these topics for entire churches, especially for men who realize deep down that they need guidance and are quietly crying for boundaries and a way to broach the conversation. Their wives also have avoided confronting them because of sexual abuse in their pasts from which they haven’t healed – another issue addressed by REAL TALK. And finally, our young people can begin to recognize the grooming of social media and our sex-crazed culture, and return to a biblical view of intimacy in marriage. 

Let’s reclaim this territory that has been so easily surrendered to the enemy and become once again the bastion of safety and integrity the Church was designed to be.