“DON’T touch what you haven’t got, don’t undress, and don’t lie down together.” These were the three rules promoted by the Revd Steve Chalke in the late 1980s, then a Baptist pastor making videos for youth groups and speaking to crowds of eager teenage Christians at youth conferences.
These edicts were snappy and memorable, and gave young people the words to say no to unwanted advances. But church teaching from the time has been criticised since for lacking nuance and grace by the adults now responsible for teaching a new generation.
Today, the landscape outside the Church has been transformed. Gay marriage has been legalised, a range of expressions of sexuality — and gender — have entered the lexicon, and a tech revolution has facilitated sexual encounters.
Meanwhile, the interval between learning about sex and settling down with a partner has lengthened. The average age of marriage has risen from 24 to 37 since the mid-1970s, according to the latest government statistics, while the average age of “sexual debut”, according to the NHS, is 16 to 17; and studies have found the exposure of children from the age of seven to pornography.
How is the Church responding? Certainly, there has been a shift of emphasis, even among more conservative churches. There is a move away from dos and don’ts towards a person-centred approach that allows room for questions — although how much room that leaves for disagreement varies.
Pope Francis said in December 2021 that sexual sins were not the “most serious” sins. No, he said, these were “hatred and pride”. In January 2022, he urged parents who were worried about their children’s sexuality to work out “how to accompany their children, and not hide behind an attitude of condemnation”.
WHAT does it mean for parents — and churches — to accompany their young people? And what previously accepted teaching is now being retired? “I’ve never actually watched those videos,” Mr Chalke laughs. “I was asked by [the Christian charity] Care if I would do something around sexuality for young people, because of the concern that no one was saying anything that related to kids in their language.”
When it comes to sexual ethics, Mr Chalke is known for his public backing for monogamous gay relationships in 2012, before the vote to legalise gay marriage. But that, he argues, follows on from his concern for healthy and faithful heterosexual relationships. He has not given up on promoting abstinence.
“You avoid harm; you avoid abuse; it gives you a guide. You avoid casual, promiscuous sex; you gain a respect for yourself and a love for yourself; and you see your life as a gift from God and your sexuality as a gift from God not to be abused,” he begins.
Abstinence “acts as a protection”, the need for which has been made only more acute, especially for girls, by the pressures regarding their looks and their weight, which have led to high levels of anxiety and self-harm.
He believes, however, that there should have been more emphasis on “forgiveness, grace, and God’s acceptance of us unconditionally”. He acknowledges that girls are also at risk from a culture of secrecy which can grow up around strict abstinence teaching.
He tells of a young woman whose worship leader attempted to rape her, and of another who recently opted for an abortion because she feared rejection by her church and her friends.
Today, Mr Chalke promotes fidelity in his teaching, without passing comment on sexuality or gender, and his church attracts many LGBT Christians. Meanwhile, since 2012, he says that “huge numbers” of Christian leaders have privately told him: “I wish we could say what you’ve said.”
PRE-MARITAL abstinence was placed on pedestal by the so-called “purity culture” that emerged in the United States in the 1990s. Aspects of it arrived in the UK shortly afterwards, with purity rings and one influential book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Josh Harris, then 21 (and now divorced), who discouraged even kissing out of wedlock.
“Evangelicalism is unrecognisable from what it was in the ’90s,” says the Revd Sally Hitchiner, Associate Minister of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. “I attended youth groups through my teens and began as a youth worker in 2001. On weekends away, the seminar on sex and relationships was always the most popular” because sex was a taboo and young people were “desperate” for information.
Ms Hitchiner, who founded a national support group for young LGBT+ Christian adults, says: “I do think even the most conservative churches I know are now trying to focus on listening to their young people [more].”
St-Martin-in-the-Fields launched a youth congregation last autumn. Ms Hitchiner says: “When it is time to look at this topic, we will start with celebrating diversity in God’s creation, whether that is race or sexuality or being left-handed or anything else. We want to create opportunities for [young people] to grow as disciples of Jesus as they are, not leave the Church because they believe there is no place for them.”
Still, for the Church, sexuality — and whether to bless or marry gay couples — has become the most divisive issue of the age. The Bishops are trying to chart a course through the opposing viewpoints on sex with their Living in Love and Faith (LLF) consultation, whose results are due in the autumn.
Whatever the Church does, its youth audience is smaller, more secularised, and more sexually aware than a generation ago. Usual Sunday attendance of under-16s stood at 226,000 in 1990, but in 2019 that figure was just 88,300 — a drop of 61 per cent. A 2018 document reported that only one quarter of churches offered regular provision for 11-17s — before pandemic-related interruptions.
Unless home-schooled, young people are likely to encounter more diverse family structures, lifestyles, and sexual practices than their parents and church leaders have, and they bring expectations of tolerance with them when they encounter the subject in church.
“It’s such a complex subject,” the director of children’s and youth work in Peterborough diocese, Canon Peter White, says. In the 1990s and 2000s, “We were just talking about sex in the context of relationships and dating, and ‘How far can I go?’ was the question, whereas now it’s so complex.
“It’s still about sex and relationships, and dating and consent within that, but it’s also a whole sexuality, LGBTI-stuff, gender-identity, sexting, social-media [thing]; pornography is so much more widespread.”
Youth workers are in a “really tough” place, he says, “caught between the young people and the church leadership in trying to work out how . . . we teach what the Church wants us to teach in the context of young people who are in a very different place and asking very different questions.”
A topic that youth workers are often asked about is their view of gay and trans people, he says. “I have a suspicion that some church leaders may not be happy with [youth workers] for having these conversations, and want them to push a certain party line, and that’s just not where young people are at.”
WHILE working for a conservative church, a youth worker, Beth Pinder, ran sessions on sex and sexuality using Bible passages, and asked the young people what they thought. But, having been brought up in “very strict” Baptist churches, she did not tell them to shun sex before marriage.
She fielded a few “very conservative” views of gay people, given that a couple of members “had almost openly said they were gay”. Now working at the more liberal Midhurst Parish Church, in West Sussex, she has had private chats about sexuality and gender, but is yet to run a formal session on sex, because she feels that sessions held on Zoom during the lockdowns have prevented her from building up the necessary level of trust.
A question-led, small-group approach is central at an influential central-London church whose representative did not want the church to be named. “We leave the whole thing very open,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of ‘What do you think?’”
The views of the people receiving the teaching are taken seriously. “We have hundreds of young people and hundreds of students. Holiness is an imperative, but everyone has their view.” Discussions on sex take place out of the public eye, not in the church’s more public settings.
He flagged the LLF consultation, which could have a bearing on this issue: if the consultation takes the Church closer to blessing or marrying gay couples, that could have an impact on what churches feel that they can teach.
Megan Metcalfe, 18, a student in Sunderland, says that abstinence is more difficult today. “With teenage groups and young adults it’s a lot harder for people to say, “Oh, I’ll wait” because of . . . younger people becoming more mature earlier,” she says. “Yes, other people would wait, but I think people should have the respect for the people that haven’t waited, as well.”
Megan did not receive any teaching on sex and relationships from the Baptist church in Basildon, Essex, where she attended the youth group. But, she says, her brother, who is gay, felt welcomed there, and was wary of finding a new church when they moved, “because he didn’t want people to find out”.
A YOUTH minister at Trinity Church, Lewes, in East Sussex, Dave Sinclair, runs a group attended regularly by 20 young people. The group recently asked for sessions on gender identity and sexuality.
He favours phrasing such as “My understanding of scripture is . . . My personal view is . . .”, and says: “There’s no point in trying to hide other people’s views, because they’re just a click away.”
At the Evangelical Bishop Hannington Church, Hove, a youth minister, Stephen Demetriou, says that “in the past, the way we’ve taught sex and sexuality has come across as quite negative, as though sex is dirty. . . We do talk about dos and don’ts, but in the context of the beauty of living God’s way.”
He opts for “a story-led, not a question-led, approach”, to counter the stories that secular culture tells young people “in such a powerful and persuasive way”; but he leaves room for questions in one-to-one contexts.
The church has begun introducing the subject in the 11-14 group in what he says is an age-appropriate way, and sends teaching materials to parents in advance so that they can be aware of what will be taught, and prepared for questions that may arise at home afterwards.
For the youth worker Rachel Gardner, an important lesson for the Church is how to listen without squeamishness when young people open up with their questions, be they about sexting, bodily functions, or their sexuality or gender identity.
For her book The Sex Thing (SPCK), she surveyed 551 churchgoing young people on what they would like the Church to talk about with them. The top three responses were “How to have a healthy relationship, how to set godly boundaries, and how to deal with mistakes — shame and guilt.”
She interprets these as: “Help us think Christianly about this stuff . . . and don’t judge us if we don’t agree with you; don’t shame us if we make mistakes.”
Ms Gardner, who leads a youth group in Blackburn and works for the Christian youth charity Youthscape, argues that the Church should start not by teaching sexual ethics, but by emphasising to young people that holiness comes from belonging to Jesus, and sexual choices follow on from that.
The goal, she argues, is to encourage thoughtful discipleship, not people who simply agree with the church leaders’ views.
IN CHICHESTER diocese, organisers of the annual youth festival Maycamp felt that “it wasn’t our place” to teach about “difficult subjects” such as sex, relationships, and sexuality, a diocesan youth officer, Dan Jenkins, remembers.
But, in 2017, after reading that children as young as seven were having access to pornography, they felt that they had to help young people air their questions and concerns.
They now have a psychosexual therapist, who leads a panel. “We equip them with as much information as we can,” Mr Jenkins says. “We tend to get equal numbers of complaints afterwards from conservatives as we do from the liberals; so that says to me we’re probably striking it about right.”
Young people, he says, “need to know they’re going to be loved unconditionally and supported unconditionally, no matter what’s going on in their life, no matter what choices they’ve made or are making”,
The Canon for Learning and Outreach at Ely Cathedral, the Revd Dr Jessica Martin, believes that the Church should have much to say about keeping children safe online. Canon Martin, who has two daughters, one aged 16, says: “People growing up . . . know that they are being monetised simply by using online platforms. They know that they are always in danger of being turned into a consumable, or turning somebody else into a consumable.”
Canon Martin, the author of Holiness and Desire: What makes us who we are? (Canterbury Press), says: “They’re anxious to find out what makes them unique and valuable, and one thing Christian practice and doctrine offers is a sense of not being unique and valuable because you have qualities that you can purvey, but because you are.”
The unconditional support voiced by Mr Jenkins and others is far from Canon Martin’s own experience. She became pregnant at 18, in the early 1980s, by a boy she had met at the United Reformed Church youth group, despite having heard “fairly uncompromising” messages about pre-marital sex.
“I walked out on Evangelical youth Christianity,” she says. “I can remember hiding from Sunday-school teachers from when I was much younger — literally hiding behind a pillar in the shopping centre.”
She says that she found relief in saying, “Right, I’ve failed,” and the next few years — during which she raised her young daughter while studying at Cambridge University — taught her to value qualities such as kindness.
But she wishes that her teenage church had asked more and dictated less. What are you doing when you are being physically intimate? Between men and women, who holds more power? What does it mean for a person to encounter someone physically, and neither of you exploit the other?
THIS more thoughtful, experience-based approach is being used by Christian youth-work organisations working outside church structures.
“We go to young people in their context, which is often the margins,” says John Wheatley, leader of the non-denominational Frontier Youth Trust (FYT), a network of 45 projects working with at-risk young people, such as LGBT youth.
His colleague Matthew Wilmot runs a project for LGBT people and a URC youth group in Northamptonshire. They don’t have a fixed programme, but encourage exploration to help young people to make their own decisions and work out what will make them more whole.
The traditional view of marriage is a “viewpoint on which to reflect”, Mr Wheatley says. Mr Wilmot issues a stark warning: “Your Church’s attitude to LGBT people affects how the whole of youth society sees the Church. Young people who are LGBT are now scared of the Church.”
At ACET, a relationship and sex-education charity working in schools, the Christian distinctive is imago Dei, the belief that each young person is made in the image of God.
Paul Semakula, the charity’s schools and training co-ordinator for London and the south, says that the charity promotes “honesty, communication, and loyalty”, and encourages delaying sexual activity until after the legal age of consent.
“Once they realise that that’s the law, hearing that they don’t have to go out and have sex is positive, for boys and girls. A lot of them feel empowered,” he says.
Staff talk to children about STIs, protection, healthy relationships, sexting, body image, and pornography, to equip young people with “knowledge, attitudes, and skills”.
The charity also helps parents to talk to their teenagers. ACET takes a neutral position regarding LGBT issues, talking about sexual acts rather than who is doing them.
Youth leaders today are keen to avoid passing on the harsh unintended consequences of purity culture, and are offering a more person-centred than doctrine-centred approach to sex, sexuality, and gender. Shame is to be avoided rather than wielded; questions of identity and value leave room for exploration of a theology of God-given identity and value.
As a result of the difficulties that the youth workers in Peterborough described to Canon White, he ran a training day with a local organisation. By the end, participants saw a need for a complete rethink of how they spoke with young people about sex, starting from broad principles such as the character of God, humans’ being created sexual, and what it means to be part of the Body of Christ.
Echoing Ms Gardner, he has concluded that he wants to “give young people the theological tools to work things out for themselves”. Is the Church ready for that? And where could that lead, given that many young people feel more instinctively inclusive towards LGBT people than older generations?
That generation may be best placed to answer those questions. But already the issue of children and young people’s online safety is one on which agreement appears to be broad, even in the shadow of the Living in Love and Faith process.