4 Reasons to NEVER Talk About Porn in Church
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1) My church doesn’t look at porn.
I mean, I guess you could look at the stats in a negative light. Sure, the numbers say that 64% of Christian men and 15% of Christian women view pornography at least once a month but surely that is not happening in your church. The men and women you worship along side are stronger and more mature than those who struggle with this sin in other churches. In another study, they found that 13.9% of young men never view pornography. I think its safe to assume that all of the young men in your congregation are a part of that 13.9%, after all they come from good families and their attendance is perfect! Forget about all those wives and parents who thought they knew their husbands and children and were surprised to find they had been lied to, there is no way that will ever happen to you. By now you know that porn addiction is slavery to sin and stops people from having a fulfilled and abundant life in Jesus Christ, but since your church doesn’t watch porn then you are good to just stay quite about it.
2) The Bible doesn’t talk about porn.
We want to be people of the Word and we take our Bible study seriously and we want that implanted word to save our souls (James 1:21). And you know what the Bible never talks about? Porn. Yep, never once will you find that four letter word in any of the 66 books that make up the holy Bible. Sure, the Bible does talk about sexual immorality but its important to present a PG version of the Bible because there are young people in the room. It’s not as if those same young people have phones and tablets that can access a never-ending stream of images and videos of graphic sex and nudity. No, in our church its important to skip over sections like David’s sin with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11, or Jesus’ teaching on lust and adultery in Matthew 5:27-30, and especially Paul’s words on sexual immorality in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20. The best course of action is to just avoid these texts because they are too graphic for our civilized church culture that we’ve made for ourselves today and doing so only makes people feel uncomfortable and that leads me to reason 3.
3) Talking about porn makes people uncomfortable.
We all know that the most important ingredient for a growing church is to make people feel as comfortable as possible. Forget how the apostles and the early church fathers addressed sin in the church even at the cost of reputation. Forget how they valued being acceptable to God over being acceptable to man. Forget all those examples of Jesus purposefully making people feel uncomfortable to make them grow. I’m mainly talking to you church leaders here; your job is to make your church comfortable and blissfully ignorant about an addiction to porn that is happening in their own homes and marriages. Preach the easy stuff, people love sermons that make themselves feel good about themselves. I mean, it’s not as if an entire generation of Christians have left the church due to increasingly irrelevant sermons that speak nothing to what they are actually going through in life. Keep them comfortable at all costs!
4) The church doesn’t have the answer to a porn addiction.
Now this might be the biggest reason to never talk about porn in the church because there is no solution to a porn addiction in the church. An addiction to porn is rooted in fake love, self-hatred, and hopelessness and there is just no answer to this in the church that Jesus died for. It is best to never talk about porn because the price that was paid for our sin through Jesus’ blood on the cross, His becoming sin on our behalf, His adopting us as His sons and daughters thereby giving us access to the very near presence of the living God, His value that He has placed on us making us righteous, clean, accepted, and love; all of this really doesn’t hold a candle to porn and this can’t really change people. As long as we keep believing that what Jesus did on our behalf doesn’t matter then its best to not bring up pornography in the church. If we did, it might show just how weak we truly believe Jesus is in giving hope to the hopeless in the world today.
(If you want a less sarcastic conversation of why we need to be preaching and teaching about porn in our churches and start supporting and helping the men and women who are in your church then please reach out. Whether its you who are in trouble or your church, this is why we are here, and it is our life’s mission to free as many as we can from the life of slavery that porn addiction is.)
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