Talking About Sex as a Progressive Youth Minister

The first question of an interview for a youth ministry job is not typically about sex, so when it was I floundered. We were in the church conference room on a sunny Saturday morning sipping water from plastic cups when the pastor decided to get the interview underway by asking me how I teach sex and dating to teenagers.

Pass?

The truthful answer was not much. I’d done full time youth ministry in a church for over eight years, and I could count on one hand the initiatives I had planned to address that subject with my students. The ones I had planned did not go well. One parent told me that her son reported after an overnight retreat about dating and relationship that he’d learned premarital sex is okay as long as it’s fun.

Burned, I started avoiding the topic altogether. Related subjects like sexual orientation and LGBT inclusion were easy enough to deal with in my liberal church, but I didn’t go near discussions of actual sexual behavior and whether they’re okay or not, what the Bible says about sex, or what teens’ parents tell them or expect of them.

After years of avoidance, a parent called me on the carpet, demanding to know why I wasn’t addressing sexuality with his 11th grade son, whom I’d known since he was a sixth grader. I lied and said it was part of the plan for the coming year, which, of course, it was after that meeting.

I know that I don’t want to teach teenagers that God condemns all sex outside of marriage and that I don’t want to uphold “purity” as a sexual virtue, both because it’s ineffective and because it makes a crude idol of female virginity. That’s a lot of what I was taught as a teenager, and I can see clearly now how little it helped me. I don’t want to tell students God doesn’t care about what they do with their bodies, though, and I don’t want to abandon them to exploitative cultural norms for sex.

If talking to church youth about sex only needed a monologue of things I don’t agree with on the subject, this would be a much easier conversation. But what do I want them to hear from me? What is the positive ethic I want my church presenting to teens about sexual relationships? How do I hope to shape their attitudes and decisions?

I have work to do here. I’m starting with “Our Whole Lives,” the UCC/UUA curriculum that’s been around a long while and that always seem to pop up first in these conversations. I want to really learn it and become an expert in teaching it, because, among other virtues, the “Values and Assumptions” behind it are nuanced yet concrete. “All persons have the right and obligation to make responsible sexual choices.” But also, “It is healthier for young adolescents to postpone sexual intercourse.”

“Progressive” need not mean passive or vague when it comes to the sex talk in liberal churches. There are good tools out there for offering loving, informed, and confident guidance to teenagers of all orientations on this subject, and it’s time for me to start using them.