From Oral Sex Virgins to Masturbation and Pregnant Rape Victims

On Sunday, January 6, I had the pleasure of starting my new series Religion Saves and Nine Other Misconceptions. The entire series is based on Paul's example in 1 Corinthians of answering questions his people asked. After an online posting of 893 questions, 5,524 comments, and 343,203 votes, I am preaching on the nine most popular questions that were asked. The first Sunday of the series I preached on question #9, which was "There's no doubt the Bible says children are a blessing, but the Bible doesn't seem to address the specific topic of birth control. Is this a black and white topic, or does it fall under liberties?" During the course of the Sunday I preached live for more than an hour five times at our Ballard campus in Seattle. Like always, the sermon was streamed via television satellite to our four other locations where we have nine additional services. While I praise God for the opportunity to grow our church and the kingdom of God by going out into different areas to contextualize the message of Jesus there, I must confess that sometimes I wish I could also do more pastoral work like I used to when our church was smaller, such as answering people's follow-up questions on complicated but important issues like these. So, on January 6 at our 8:30 p.m. service, we launched an experiment of sorts. That service is our last of the day, has no childcare and virtually no families, and most of the crowd is very young, single, and includes many non-Christians. We decided to allow those in attendance to text message questions they had for me on the subjects of sex, birth control, and abortion, in keeping with the big ideas of the sermon. I then answered those questions live on the spot without any forewarning or preparation. The questions included whether or not a young woman in the church who had performed oral sex on her boyfriend was still a virgin, whether or not masturbation was okay, and another woman who was pregnant as a result of rape wondering if she could have an abortion. To say the least, it was an intense way to finish more than six hours of preaching on what is usually a twenty-one-hour work day. We have taken that question-and-answer session and have made it a separate piece of audio and/or video content that can be downloaded for free. As a warning, the content is frank and for mature audiences only, so if you are a minor, please do get permission from your parents before tuning in. You can find the content in a couple of different places; our home page, on a sermon series page, or on our YouTube channel. Here's a short example of the evenings' content: [youtube]484r9RHjXN8&rel=0[/youtube] We are going to continue this experiment at our 8:30 p.m. service for a while to see how it works. If it continues to serve us well, we may one day expand it to all services so that folks sitting in any of our campuses, or possibly even live streaming on the internet, can communicate back to me and text message questions about the sermon that I can answer in real time. We're not there yet, but are considering it and you can judge for yourself what you think.