“While one must be aware of the dangers of porn addiction, [pornography] can be used as a healthy tool to stimulate one’s sex life. Caution: much of the material out there isn’t for the fainthearted. But then, Cosmo chicas don’t really need that warning, do they?”

While statistics vary wildly regarding the actual percentage of men, women and children viewing pornography, the theme is consistent: pornography use has become normalized in our culture. Porn stars are now mainstream icons; little girls wear the Playboy bunny with pride on their t-shirts; our music industry continues to push the limits of “sexual expression” to the point that today’s music videos resemble the “soft-core” pornography of yesteryear; and, as author Gail Dines describes in her new book, Pornland, shows like ‘Girls Gone Wild’ (GGW) have positioned themselves “not as a porn product, but rather as hot, sexy fun that pushes the envelope of mainstream pop culture.”

The accessibility to soft-core pornography, “user-generated” pornography, and T.V. shows like GGW and Girls Next Door, has filled a gap for the pornography Industry where, as Dines explains, “in the place of scripted and carefully crafted scenes of hard-core porn” viewers witness ‘real’ women creating porn and engaging in porn-inspired acts as a “sexy” part of a normal woman’s everyday life. Using ‘real’ women in pornography “socialized users to believe that everyday women are sexually available” and experimental, and continues to make most visible the sense that a young woman’s identity is one that emphasizes her as “a sexual being at the exclusion of anything else”. As Dines continues, the pornography industry has worked carefully and strategically to “sanitize its products by stripping away the ‘dirt’ factor and reconstituting porn as fun, edgy, chic, sexy and hot.”

Unfortunately, once a user scrapes beyond the soft-core surface of the pornography industry, they will dive into the “anything goes” world of hardcore pornography, filled with fetish, violence, bestiality, genital torture, barely legal content and group ‘gang-bangs’. In one analysis of fifty best selling adult titles, half of the 304 scenes surveyed showed extreme verbal aggression and over 88% included extreme physical aggression. I took a quick look at this year’s Adult Video Network (AVN) award categories, which include: “Best Orgy/Gangbang Release”, “Best Young Girl Release”, “Best Squirting Release” (female ejaculation), and “Best All-Girl Group Sex Scene” (which must include sex scenes between four or more women). The titles of last year’s winners in these categories are too graphic for me to include.

Some of you may be quick to tell me that pornography is fantasy, and sensible adults can distinguish the difference. Unfortunately, the pornography ‘fantasy’ is spilling over into almost every corner of our culture–pushing powerful messages about human sexuality, sexual relationships, women’s bodies, sexual expectation, sexual norms, and how men and women should relate. A recent study about the Social Cots of Pornography (SCoP) suggests there is empirical evidence that “pornography today is qualitatively different from any that has gone before in its ubiquity, the use of increasingly realistic, streaming images and the increasingly ‘hard-core’ character of what is consumed”.

The study continued to explain that the peculiar nature of Internet pornography makes addiction more likely, and that today’s consumption of pornography can harm women and children in particular, adding that “modern trends in pornography consumption and production, sexualized media, sex crime, online sexual predators, Internet dating services, and sexualized cyber-bullying, have created a world more sexually disorienting, daunting and aggressive than every before” where our children are exposed to pornographic and sexual content at earlier and earlier ages in developmentally damaging ways. Is it any wonder that our children are creating self-produced child pornography? Is it any wonder that schools cancel dances for fear their tweens and teens will “hook-up” on the dance floor?

Unfortunately, our children, our young boys and girls, are not safe from the impact of the pornification of our culture. They have free and easy access to pornography via the web, and habituation to pornographic imagery predisposes our adolescents to engage in sexually risky behavior. One study found a strong association between pornography consumption and engaging in oral and anal sexual intercourse among adolescents.

The pornography ‘fantasy’ has had real-life implications on our adult society and on our children. Sensible adults-doctors, lawyers, and pastors-have lost their families, professions and life to hard-core pornography use. Our tweens and teens do not know how to relate to one another sexually in positive, supportive, safe and healthy ways. We live in a culture where pop princesses dance in sexified versions of Candy Land with doughnut-covered breasts; where 17-year old teen celebrities are celebrated for openly talking about masturbation and pornography use. Our pop culture and pornography culture have pushed the limits to the point of breaking. Our future generation’s sexual and relational stability are at stake, and no child is immune to being impacted by the floodtide of these messages.

Fortunately, you can make a difference.

Please fight back against the misguided, pornified sexual messages pervasive in our culture by setting a strong example for the children under your care. Protect them from accessing this harmful content online and via mobile devices to the best of your ability by using Internet Safety 101 Rules ‘N Tools® as they grow and develop. And please consider contacting your Congressman to tell them you want our existing obscenity laws enforced.

As Internet Safety 101 featured expert and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Dr. Jill Manning highlights in our Internet Safety 101 teaching series, “healthy sexuality includes many things: boundaries, self-care; how do we take good care of our bodies, our minds and our spirits? How do we develop self-respect and respect for other people? How do we communicate in a loving and constructive way with one another. We need to step out of this limited box that the sex talk is a one-time event. That day is gone… We need to decide whose voice is going to win out… the pornography industry’s voice or our voice.”

Will you take a stand with us?

Visit EIE for more about the harms of p-rnography, information about protecting your children, and for a list of filtering and monitoring software that can help protect your children from exposure.

Dozens of Christians from all over the county tracked me down and sent me notes congratulating me for my boldness. I was swamped by phone calls both at the office and at home. I also received some hate mail, including a quasi death threat. It came sealed in a package with an FBI cover letter that read, “The sender of this letter is under federal investigation. Please alert us of any unusual activity.” I thought, Oh, that’s wonderful! That next Sunday a man came into our worship service with a crowbar and sat near the front. When one of the ushers noticed him sitting in his seat angrily tapping the crowbar onto his palm, he alerted a few off-duty police officers in our congregation, and they forcibly removed him from the church building. I’m sure little kids watched this and thought, Church is awesome!

The problem with my letter was that it was only partially accurate. I listed all the reasons why I felt the words of Jesus in the Bible were trustworthy. I conveniently forgot, however, to include that I had lost my faith just a few years earlier and still had lingering doubts that plagued me. I’m sure that because of my lack of humility, my letter appeared condescending to many of the newspaper’s readers, including our church’s crowbar visitor.

Writer G. K. Chesterton once said that a madman is someone who “is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.” In my early years I felt my job as a pastor was to defend God. I felt it was my duty to present a non-wavering spiritual front, even if that meant not being completely honest about my own misgivings. I felt it was my job to shove my suspicions deep down inside and lock them in a corner closet of the basement of my soul. This, I was convinced, would inspire people; my certainty would rub off on others and give them certainty as well.

A few years of serving people in churches cured me of that. Helping the chronically unemployed, visiting six-year-olds with leukemia, praying with women who had been raped, and taking groceries to quadriplegics has a way of removing false pretenses. I quickly learned three words that I find myself uttering a lot these days: “I don’t know.” I don’t know why you lost your son. I don’t know why God gave you the parents he did. I don’t know why a lot of things happen anymore.

Somehow I don’t think Jesus envisioned his followers sending patronizing letters to newspaper editors or acting as if they have the answers to all the world’s questions. I believe that as Jesus uttered those final words in Matthew 28, he knew that a good dose of occasional doubt would give his followers the healthy hesitation and healthy complexity we all need to stay humble.

I called her on the phone and said, “Mary, did you hear that the church is offering a support group for people who have lost loved ones?”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“Well, would you like to go? The group is full, but I think I can still get you in if you’d like to attend.”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m not going to go into a room full of strangers and talk about my man,” and she hung up the phone. I assumed we had been disconnected, so I called her right back and said, “Mary, this is Brian again, I was wondering if-” Click. She had hung up again.

I shouted into the phone, “Crazy old woman!” and dialed her number again. “Mary, this is-” Click.

I couldn’t believe it. I dialed her again. “Mar-” Click.

I tried once more. She didn’t even bother talking this time; she just picked up the phone as soon as it rang and hung it up again.

That Sunday Mary smiled at me and said, “I’m sorry, Brian. I just can’t. I can’t bring myself to do it. I hope you understand.”

Two weeks later the group started with a room full of hurting people. Women who were grieving miscarriages joined the group. One woman had lost her sister in an airplane crash. My friend Philip from chapter three was there; Claire had gone home to be with Jesus. The group grew so close that they didn’t want to disband after eight weeks. They kept going. Two people who met in the group actually ended up getting married. It was an amazing experience. Yet I always felt a twinge of sadness whenever I thought about that group because my friend Mary missed out. The group could have changed her life if she had just given it a chance.

Don’t make the same mistake my friend Mary made-make a decision to take a risk. C. S. Lewis once said in his masterful book The Four Loves:

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

Don’t let this happen to you. Make the decision right now that you’re going to step out and risk living in Christian community.

But God, being good, walked us through the first eight months without many issues and sooner than we realized we were in the hospital for the second time. Only this time, the situation was much healthier than before. Melissa would spend a few weeks in the hospital gearing up for the baby’s entrance while the doctors and nurses watched over and cared for her. Our daughter would be brought into this world a few weeks early but God was working it all out. We definitely noticed.

The night our daughter was born was both triumphant and tragic. For our family, it was joyous. Yet for another family, it was jaded. Excitement was brewing in our little hospital room for a life soon to be born but, in that same moment, echoes of mourning could already be heard for a life that was ending. Doctors and nurses ran back and forth, grabbing this thing and that thing, running down the hall to a room with a mother, just a few years older than my wife, who was dying.

Personally, I found myself in a difficult position. As I walked down the hall, past the room where the mother lay dead, my heart broke; a feeling that usually accompanies such an enormous loss. “What if that was my wife, my mother?” were the thoughts going through my head. But at the same time, I was filled with joy and anticipation because this night would be the night I’d meet my beautiful daughter, Bella, for the first time. It was as if my own personal universe was being thrown off its axis and into a whole new dimension. Little did I know this difficulty would drastically elevate the moment I stepped outside.

Our daughter was born in a small hospital in a small town in Oregon; the kind of place where everyone knows everything about every situation going on everywhere. So when I walked outside and saw a man trying his hardest to hold his composure, yet failing to the extreme, I knew it was the mother’s husband.

He was pacing back and forth talking to someone on his cell phone. One moment he was talking. Another he was weeping. And the next he was shouting things like “Why?” and “How am I going to take care of the kids by myself?” His world was falling apart. His kids wouldn’t grow up with their mother. The same day I celebrate the birth of my daughter is the same say he mourns the death of his wife. If you think about it, and if you have lost someone close to you, you can understand just now tragic it can be.

Two hours later, my daughter was born. She was beautiful and healthy and alive. And I boasted my newest treasure for all our family and friends to see. I took pictures and helped print her little foot on her birth certificate. It was triumphant; everything but tragic.

People die. We weep and mourn. People live. We leap and dance. Death and life – there is nothing new about either of them. They’ve been around for, well, the beginning of creation. We understand this. We live and cope and continue and refocus and move on but we still grieve and mourn and cry and remember. We are surrounded by death as soon as we enter this world, so from a young age we gather a common perspective of what death looks and feels like.

But what if we changed our perception concerning death? What if we look at death as the greatest gift that life can give?

For those who put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ, this concept of death immediately becomes attainable. Our new awareness of death gives us the ability to turn our mourning into dancing and our sorrow into joy; a revived and renewed hope that our lives are not lived in vein. We hold fast to the promise of Revelation that “God will wipe every tear from our eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

So we will continue to weep and mourn for those who have passed away, only because we will miss their time here with us. This is good and normal and right. But our strength isn’t based on our situation. It comes only from knowing that God is good and that He’s making all things new. And we’re equally thankful that God’s goodness isn’t based on our situation. It’s based simply on the fact that He is good. He is holy and wholly righteous. And knowing this beautiful nugget of truth should change our situation.

Now that I have kids, I don’t really get to have church anymore. Our four year-old quadruplets (all natural, so step-off, octo-haters!) keep us scurrying during the breaks. I go to church for them now. Statistics on church attendance, especially for men my age, suggest that I’m not alone. Maybe the problem isn’t me, after all. Maybe something is wrong with church.

As much as postmodern evangelicals bandy about the word “community,” our gatherings have changed very little. Stylistic alterations might add some hipster flair, but the focal point of the liturgical week remains theater. A dozen or so people perform for a few hundred that sit, stand, kneel, pray, and sing on command. We squeeze real community into the gaps, between events with a hierarchical structure. Not only is this a long way from Biblical models of the early Christian church, it’s a breeding ground for messy group dynamics. And, again, it’s boring.

Church today, whether a cathedral, a mega-aluminum warehouse, or a little wooden building in the country, has little in common with the New Testament church. In the first century there was still teaching, prayer, and worship, but the early church was about community. Paul’s letters paint a picture of people living together and collectively figuring out what it meant to follow Christ. The authority of the leaders and teachers wasn’t a forgone conclusion. They were in dialogue with their congregations. Paul himself often had to defend his position of authority and many of his letters are part of an ongoing doctrinal debate. You get the sense, however, that even theological issues were somewhat secondary. The focus was a meal, not a class or a worship service. Some early Christians enjoyed the community meal so much that Paul had to tell them to tone it down because they were partying a little too hard.

Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine most Christians getting too carried away having a good time together. Church is an adjunct to professional and familial communities. We get up on Sunday, drive, park, sit, listen, sing, pray, chat, and go home. Even if we’re involved in a small group, the relationships are usually secondary. The early Christians learned and grew through relationship. It’s plastered all over the New Testament. Yet, we still structure our religion around one guy, and it’s not Jesus.

Churches often grow for the wrong reason. If you don’t find church boring, it’s probably because of a talented preacher. He’s smart, but moreover, entertaining. Big, active churches are cults of personality, not communities. Try to imagine Mars Hill in Seattle without Mark Driscoll. Try to imagine the other one without Rob Bell (though at least he had the wisdom to abdicate his throne). Try to imagine Lakewood Church without Joel Osteen. You can’t. When the focus turns to Christ, it’s because a showman gets our attention first. We don’t find God in each other. The Body of Christ has an enormous head atop a weak, flabby body.

Though pastors give “servant leadership” lip-service at leadership conferences, few enter the ministry out of a desire to submit and suffer for others. How could they? How can we expect our leaders to be authentic when theater is the center of our religious week? How can someone consent to shepherd the flock as a Man of God without being narcissistic? Any leader in the modern church needs at least a little bit of narcissism to survive. No one is drawn to such a job unless they enjoy power and attention.

A little narcissism isn’t really the problem. We need to like ourselves and have a healthy sense of entitlement. But when these traits reach a clinical level in the form of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), it’s poison to the body of Christ. In my fifteen years as a psychotherapist, I have encountered few human systems so consistently dysfunctional as church staffs. I’ve heard of pastors doing things that would make the most ambitious CEO’s blush. Though most of us only hear about this when a high-profile church leader’s grandiosity leads to recklessness, most of the time acrimony and dysfunction continue behind the scenes for years. When we rely on the talents and titillating vision of one man instead of the slow, silent life of community, it’s easy for people to get hurt.

After spending a thousand words twitting the Sunday service, I should probably come up with an alternative. But I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m too narcissistic as it is, and I don’t want to be the one to tell you how it’s supposed to be. We need to decide. We need to figure out, once again, what it means to follow Christ together. This is a plea, not a prescription. I want church to be fun again. By fun, I don’t mean entertaining or topical or cool. I can get that at concerts and movies, and they do a much better job than the church ever will. No, I want to talk. I want to listen, but to a friend instead of a sermon. I want to be taught, but only if I can ask questions and participate in dialogue. Mostly, I just want to eat, drink, laugh, and enjoy other people. That’s where I find God.