National Youth Worker’s Conference is something I’ve wanted to go to for years and this year I am finally here! A bunch of youth staff and shepherds came out from our Church together. We left Allentown at 5am to get on a plane from New Jersey to Atlanta and it’s been non-stop ever since. I wasn’t here 5 minutes before I spotted Mike King and gave him a big hug.

I want to take a moment to highlight some stuff from Lauren F. Winner’s breakout session on teaching chastity to teens. This has been something I struggle with as a teacher/preacher/mentor to teens. As Winter said, the “pragmatic” scare tactics obviously don’t work and they don’t speak to the sacredness of sex in it’s right context. One major mistake we often make in our teaching on sex, Winter pointed out, is that we focus teaching about Chastity on sex itself rather than framing it within the life of discipleship. So chastity becomes a “strategy” to win a good Christian partner or something along those lines. This avoidance of sex as a way to make yourself more sexy to the right person is not chastity.

Winter reminded us that chastity is a Christian discipline, specifically a discipline of restraint (like fasting). And like fasting, Chastity is meant to turn your attention from one thing (like food, or sex in this case) and instead focus on God. By approaching chastity in this way, “not having sex” is not about avoiding disease or attracting the right kind of mate, but is a very important way in which you discipline your body to obey God. Chastity is a practice of surrendering our will and desire to God so that he might rehabilitate our will and our desire. This kind of chastity cannot simply be undertaken by the lone individual but must be lived out in a community that will support such disciplines.

This kind of chastity only makes sense then, to disciples of Christ who are already on the journey towards surrendering their lives to God. This seemed to upset some people in our session who wanted Winter to talk about how to explain this kind of chastity to a non-Christian kid. Her answer was pretty simple, chastity is a Christian spiritual discipline, and you can’t expect a kid to live into that kind of discipleship before they actually connect with God. But we seem to get the cart in front of the horse on this one by trying to conjure up reasons for non-Christian kids to stop having sex, and in so doing we abandon the language of discipleship that is at the very core of what chastity is all about.

For more check out her book, Real Sex: the Truth About Chastity