Pastor Ed Young’s Sexperiment

To promote his new book called Sexperiment, MegaChurch pastor Ed Young is having his very own “bed-in,” you can watch the promotional video below. By “bed-in” he means that he and his wife are putting a bed on the roof of their ginormous church, (ala-Yoko and John), and then they are going to stay in bed for 24 hours and broadcast it live on the internet. No word yet on if they are actually going to fool around. Pastor Young says, “It’s time to bring the bed back in church.” I wasn’t aware that it was ever in church originally, but who knows?

I’m trying to figure out what to make of this. Why would he do this? Is it an outlandish publicity stunt meant to sell books? Is it a sincere thing? Confusing, because there are lots of laughs and giggles, especially from his wife, in the promotional videos – of where there are scores.

I can’t figure out how evangelicals and fundamentalists – who used to repress sexuality – all of the sudden can’t stop talking about sex. Mark Driscoll just wrote a book with his wife, revealing secrets of their bedroom. Ed Young challenged the married people of his congregation to have sex everyday for a week, to see if it would help with intimacy and temptations to pornography, etc. Do we need this much sex advice from our pastors?

A couple of interesting articles have been written on the Ed Young Sexperiment.
–  Christianity Today: an article by Matthew Lee Anderson (please God, don’t let this be the son of Pamela Lee Anderson… the irony would be too much.
–  Huffington Post: Christian Piatt makes some interesting points as well .

What do we make of this? I can tell you that I would never feel comfortable, as a pastor, recommending this as a blanket “challenge” to my congregation. We did talk about sexuality for three consexutive, sorry, consecutive weeks last year. If you want to give that conversation a listen you can find it here:

Sex & Sexuality Part I
Sex & Sexuality Part II
Sex & Sexuality Part III

Bed-in Blog from Fellowship Church on Vimeo.