Want to help young people follow Jesus? Talk about sexuality and gender

A young woman visited a local church one Sunday morning. As she met members of the church, reflected on the words of the songs, and listened to the preacher, she encountered God and decided she wanted to become a follower of Jesus.

After the service, she approached a friend of mine who was one of the leaders of the church. As the young woman started talking, she broke down and began to sob. When she had managed to compose herself a little, she explained her tears: ‘I want to become a Christian, but you’re going to hate me because I’m a lesbian.’

It’s a heartbreaking story – a young person who wants to follow Jesus, but assumes that Christians are going to hate them because of their experience of sexuality.

It’s heartbreaking, but I suspect it’s also not uncommon as it illustrates what many of us already know: young people today are spiritually hungry and spiritually open; God is working among the younger generation; and sexuality and gender are hugely important topics for them. Sadly, it also illustrates one of the key misunderstandings many young people today have about Christians and Christianity: they believe we hate gay people and don’t have good news for them.

My own experience as a young man had similarities. I began to experience attraction to guys in my early teen years. By that point I had already committed to following Jesus. I was suddenly having to wrestle with how to hold those two things together: how could I be a follower of Jesus while also experiencing same-sex attraction? Working through that question was tough, partly because very few Christians were talking about sexuality. What I did hear about those attracted to the same sex suggested they were out in the world, but weren’t here in the church. I was left wondering whether I wasn’t welcome in the church.

My own experience, and stories like that of the young woman who came to my friends’ church, have convinced me that the church needs to talk about sexuality, especially with young people.

If we want to connect with the younger generation, if we want to help them to know, love and follow Jesus, we have to talk about the big topics they care about and the topics that are most likely to stop them choosing to follow Jesus – that means we must engage with them on sexuality and gender.

What do young people need to know?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question over the past year. I’m part of Emerging Generations team at Living Out – a charity that helps people, churches and society talk about faith and sexuality. We’ve spent the past 14 months producing Kaleidoscope, a new video-based series for youth groups designed to help young people explore their big questions about sexuality, gender and faith. We’ve had to consider what young people need to know. Here are four areas we feel are really important.

Good news on sexuality

Young people often think traditional Christian teaching on sexuality is weird. The idea that sex should be reserved for marriage and that marriage is the lifelong union of a man and woman is so different from the dominant perspectives of modern Western culture that to many young people today, it’s crazy.

But, in a sense, the problem is often that people don’t realise quite how weird Christian teaching is. We don’t just believe sex is for marriage, and we don’t just believe marriage has to be a man and a woman, we also believe sex and marriage are ultimately about Jesus. Surely if any part of what we believe is weird it’s that! But once we understand this, we find it’s not weird, it’s beautiful. That’s what we need to help young people to understand.

In the Bible, we find that human sexuality and marriage exist to teach us about Jesus. That’s why throughout the Bible the language of sex and marriage are used to speak about the relationship between God and His people. Think of Israel’s idolatry being described as adultery (e.g. Jeremiah 3:20), God promising to become the husband of His people (Isa. 54:5), Paul stating that marriage is about Christ and the church (Eph.5:31-32), and the whole Bible story climaxing with the marriage of the Lamb and His bride (Rev.19:7; 21:2, 9).

Everything in Christian sexual ethics flows from this central fact: sexuality and marriage are about Christ and the church. They are about telling a greater, more beautiful story. And that story makes sense of everything God says about these topics. Young people need to know that story.

Good news on relationships

They also need to know that God has good news on relationships, and that means more than just marriage.

Yes, God has good news on marriage. Marriage is a good gift of God to humanity. There’s lots of good in marriage, but the central good is that it provides a picture of the future eternal relationship between Christ and the church. Both for those who are married and those who observe from outside, marriage is meant to point us to Jesus.

But the Bible also shows us that singleness is good and a gift (e.g. 1 Cor. 7:7). That’s something many young people (and the rest of us!) struggle to believe. Why do we struggle to believe it? Because we assume singleness means loneliness. Why do we assume that? Because we’ve forgotten the rest of God’s good news on relationships.

Marriage isn’t the only loving, life-giving relationship God gives us. Friendship is also meant to be a relationship of radical, experienced and expressed love. Just look at what Jesus says about friendship in John 15 – it’s in friendship that you can see the greatest love (John15:13). Church family should also be a context in which we experience loving relationships. Being brothers and sisters in Christ shouldn’t just be something we talk about, but something we live out.

A key part of the good news that young people need to know is that God has provided for our need to love and be loved. For some that will include marriage, for all of us that will include friendship and church family.

Good news on same-sex sexuality

Many young people today have been told the lies that God hates gay people, Christians hate gay people, and that Christian teaching is unfair to those of us who are attracted to people of the same sex. Those are lies we need to tackle directly and strongly.

God loves people who are attracted to the same sex, just as He loves all people. That is a simple, Biblical truth that we must affirm and explain. Christians should, therefore, love in the same way. Sadly, however, we’ve not always done that. That’s something we have to acknowledge and challenge. Young people need to know and experience that Christians love them whatever their experience of sexuality.

And we must challenge the idea that Biblical teaching is unfair or harmful. Biblical teaching says the same and asks the same of all of us – we all experience desires that tempt us away from what is right and good, and we all need to trust in Jesus for forgiveness and to receive the Spirit’s empowerment to live God’s way. That’s all true when it comes to sexuality. And the call to faithfulness in this area is the same for all of us – the options are opposite-sex marriage or celibate singleness. Both are good, both are gifts.

Good news on gender

One of the distinctives for the current generation of young people that is different even from when I was their age, is the importance of gender. The last decade or so has seen an explosion of young people questioning their gender and identifying as transgender. If we want to engage well with young people, we’ve got to engage with this topic too.

Young people are hearing a strong message about gender from the world around us: your internal feelings of gender tell you whether you are a man or a woman or neither, and need to be embraced as your true identity to find your best life. It’s a message that claims to be good news, but isn’t. It claims to offer freedom from stereotypes, but ends up reinforcing them (because what other than stereotypes can be used to measure what it means to feel like a man or a woman?). And it claims to offer freedom from gender-related distress through the salvation of transition, but often instead delivers regret, significant negative side-effects, and poor mental wellbeing.

God has a different message on gender, a message that really is good news. We are a man or a woman because God has made us as a man or a woman. And that identity is communicated to us through the body with which God has made us. That’s good news because it means we can know who we are and can truly find freedom from stereotypes. And while it may not always immediately end gender-related distress, God can equip us to handle suffering we might experience in relation to gender.

Young people today care about gender. We need to show them that God has good news on gender.

Engaging young people

The church has come a long way in talking about sexuality and gender since I was a teenager, but we’ve still got a way to go. And this isn’t optional: if we want to help young people today to follow Jesus, we’ve got to help them think about these topics.

We’re hoping that our new youth group resource, Kaleidoscope, can play a part in helping churches to do that. Kaleidoscope is a free video-based series for church youth groups. It has been designed to equip youth leaders to create a context where young people can hear the Biblical teaching on sexuality and gender and can explore their big questions on the topic. The resource includes everything a church needs to run the series, including training videos, accompanying notes, take-home sheets, as well as some bonus material for use before and after the main series. To find out more and to access the series for free, head to livingout.org