Back to Sexuality

The Sexual Youth Pastor: A Youthworker Roundtable

If youth ministers are going to talk honestly about their sexuality, we decided, it would remain either behind closed doors (and unpublished) or anonymous. (Unfortunately, when it comes to ministers talking personally and transparently about sex, jobs are at stake, not to mention marriages.)

We opted for anonymity. What we can say about the four participants is that they are two women and two men—a Presbyterian, a Nazarene, a Lutheran, and a Baptist. They've all been in youth ministry long enough to understand the sexual overtones of working long hours with staff members of the opposite sex, of hugging emotionally needy kids (with a full frontal hug or a side hug), of dutifully teaching love, sex and dating to their students during seasons when, in their own homes, marital intimacy is a contradiction in terms.

In short, these four professionals are not only well aware of their complex sexual selves, but were willing to share a long breakfast as we explored what few youth ministers articulate to anyone—senior pastor, spouse, or peer. We think that such candor can only encourage readers of Youthworker. (Names used in this conversation—whether of the participants or of individuals they refer to—are not their actual names.)

Wes: My first thought when I was asked to join this conversation was that I try to avoid discussing sexuality. I've felt insecure about my own sexuality, going all the way back to when my uncle tried to abuse me. Now I'm talking to my daughters about sexuality. The whole time, the whole time, I look inside myself and think, What the heck does that mean for me? So I avoid the subject when I can. It's too painful.

Dennis: Sexuality is supposedly coming out of the dark corners. But I haven't worked out my own sexuality enough to speak with any confidence and openness about it, let alone lead young people to feel confident and open as they begin to face their sexuality.

Wes: It's hard enough for my wife and I to talk about it. How am I going to talk about it with people I don't even know? Though sometimes that's safer.

Rachelle: Yet isn't sexuality the essence of who we are?

Youthworker: If we don't have answers about sexuality, then let's back up and at least try to phrase the right questions. How can we better explore human sexuality, among ourselves and the students in our care?

Susan: Let's ask about how our sexuality is part of our spirituality, part of our whole psyche. When Westerners do talk about sexual matters, we keep our discussions non-emotive—lists of what's permissible and what's not. To other cultures—the Hebrews, for instance—both teaching and actions are emotive, sexual, psychological, intellectual. If we did our youth ministries Hebraically, we might ask kids, "How are you feeling as a female about this issue? How are you feeling as a male about this issue? What does it mean to be male or female to you?"

I don't think our kids have a clue about their own feelings of being female or male. It used to be that kids could say, "Males do this. Females do this," and could avoid personally struggling with gender issues. We no longer have to limit ourselves to gender-appropriate roles. It's more confusing, but in a good way.

Youthworker: You mean gender roles and gender-defined emotions don't apply any more?

Susan: They do, but they don't need to. We in the church send subliminal messages about acceptable roles for men or women. We say it by who does the ushering in our churches. We say it by the gender of our senior pastors. We say it by putting our female associate pastors into children's ministry but seldom into adult ministry. Placement of females has a lot to do with how their sexuality is perceived. Until we look at sexuality holistically, we're going to struggle with overcoming gender-specific roles.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to try to put sexuality together with ministry decisions because sexuality is such a powerful physical and emotional feeling. How do we move beyond it? That's the issue for me.

Rachelle: My question is how to care for myself when I know that my spirituality and sexuality are intimately connected. My biggest scars and my greatest joys come in my sexuality. Sexuality shows up on both ends of my life experience.

Wes: Maybe you care for yourself by naming the key issue intimacy, not sexuality, and by exploring how men and women approach intimacy differently. When you say sexuality, you immediately become genital. But if you say intimacy, you deal at the core: Why am I uncomfortable with sexuality? Because I'm uncomfortable with intimacy. Why do people become overly sexual? Because they don't want intimacy, the depth of the association of soul.

Dennis: The pastoral team of my previous church found sexuality and spirituality extremely linked in our personal and ministry experience. If your sexuality was poor, your spirituality was poor—and vice versa.

Youthworker: How exactly do you mean that spirituality and sexuality are linked?

Wes: We at least treat spirituality and sexuality the same way—too many answers and not enough questions. The people who have spiritually challenged me the most have been the ones who have forced me to ruminate at depths inside myself where I found no ready answers. I struggled and hurt and literally shook in fear, asking myself, Have I missed the boat spiritually? What does it mean to me? Where is this searching taking me? I don't think I like where it's taking me.

The same thing needs to happen in sexuality. We distract ourselves with too many Q and A sessions about surface questions that don't matter. We never allow serious reflection, so we never really give ourselves a chance to change.

Dennis: The real talent of a youth worker is not in giving answers anyway, but in stimulating kids to ask the questions. It is not weakness to admit that we don't have answers, because both sexuality and spirituality are a lifelong journey.

Youthworker: So one point of intersection between our spirituality and our sexuality is that we have more questions than answers about both.

Rachelle: Here's another intersection, I feel: the purpose of my sexuality is to be intimate with God.

Susan: At a convention last year, I heard Jerry Falwell say that the hardest thing for him to hear is when a wife calls him in the middle of the night to tell him that her husband, who's a pastor—there are no female ministers in Falwell's world—has left her for another woman. "I would rather hear that he has died of a heart attack," he commented, "than that he's having an affair with another woman."

Jerry Falwell does not want to deal with the intimacy, with the reconciliation, with the whole issue that has caused the problem. Believe me, I would much rather deal with the pain. Been there, done that. Much rather have a friend—or myself—deal with the pain and be a living sinner than a dead saint. The Christian structure is simply not built for intimacy.

Yet intimacy is what our society—and especially females—desperately wants. Even so, women in particular are insecure about their sexuality because they haven't been given permission to think in those terms. They also feel insecure because they've discovered that the desire to risk intimacy is rarely a mutual desire between men and women. They now fear loss because they've risked and lost a lot.

So do not ask me to be intimate. It's a joke. I'm intimate with my husband, though he's not intimate with me. Yes, we're in process here, but it's very risky for us to attempt to be intimate with each other—it's not something we're used to doing. But we desperately want it. For its part, the church does not tend to give us a holistic view of who we are. We compartmentalize instead of dealing with our sexuality and our fears and our pain. Such dealing is way too intimate.

Wes: But when you imply that men don't want intimacy, I feel that you don't know me at all, don't understand men at all. But then neither do men understand women.

I yearn for intimacy. I'm desperate for it. My framework for intimacy is different than yours, though. I've stopped speaking for women in group discussions about sexuality. Instead I ask a lot of questions. And when students ask me questions about female sexuality, I say, "I can't answer that. Can the women in the group answer it?" I claim absolutely no understanding of how a woman's mind and heart are tied together.

My wife and I are in process, too—a pretty severe process. Three years ago she left me for nine months; both of us made some really stupid decisions. We're reconciling, but we're still trying to understand each other.

Which is a key issue in my ministry: how women and men come from completely different directions.

Youthworker: Exactly how do issues of sexuality in your marriages (since you are all presently married) spill over into your ministry?

Dennis: If I want to be effective in youth ministry, I need to have my marriage visible in my ministry. Beyond that, if I'm going to know what a woman thinks, my best opportunity to do that is to know my wife, intimately. The intimacy needs to go both ways, too—but there's the risk for me. She has to know what happens to me when I'm with young people or when I'm with women who are in ministry with me. She has to know what's happening to me as a male, what needs for intimacy I feel.

And that's where previously I would have protected her—not so much from me, but from some of the situations that I endure in dealing with other people. Not only in a sexual context, either—although I don't know that you can ever step out of a sexual context. To withhold from her knowledge of what's happening to me lessens the wholeness of our marriage. And that's even more risky.

Wes: Does that mean you dredge up and tell her all the day's junk every night when you go home?

Dennis: At one time, my senior pastor and I determined not to discuss with our wives the personal attacks we were experiencing because, although we were dealing with it okay, our wives took up our offenses and were hurt more than we were.

Youthworker: And your marriage benefitted from protecting her from the daily grind?

Dennis: To the contrary. It created distance between us. I eventually found some other people to dump that on, but they became the people I was intimate with.

Youthworker: To what extent do you acknowledge your sexual self to your students?

Rachelle: In the church that I serve presently, I've been a single person, a married person, a divorced person, a married person, and now a mom. And I've done that in front of the kids. They deal with this stuff all the time—my personal situation hasn't been exceptional to them. But for all I know, they don't necessarily have anyone else to talk with about tough experiences. In answering the kids' questions I say, "I've made some bad choices and I've made some good choices," or I'll say, "I don't feel comfortable answering that right now." I allow questions but I don't feel bound to answer them all. But I don't make them feel they're bad because they asked the question.

I had to resolve some things myself, though, before I could talk with them about what was going on in me, how much pain I felt, yet how much hope I could also feel.

At our annual sexuality retreat we offer an elective on whether to have premarital sex. And I tell them my story—including the fact that I have an eight-month-old daughter who was conceived the night I got married. And yes, we were using birth control! I invite the conversations into appropriate areas just so they know that I've struggled with it.

There's a peace for me in how I've resolved some of this with kids. I can't change my past, but I can certainly be in conversation with kids and hope my experiences can help them start to work out their own relationships.

Susan: I'm not willing to tell a whole lot about my sexual life with my husband—or even apart from my husband—because then it becomes as cheap as what's on TV or what's at the movies. Yet kids need a place to begin asking those questions, because I don't want them to go through the crises or the pain that we go through. Yes, they're wonderful lessons, folks, but costly. Somehow in youth ministry we have to allow kids to make mistakes—that's how they learn. But we also have to love them enough to say stop.

Dennis: We need to expand the meaning of sexuality to the kids. My sexuality is more than what goes on between my wife and I. Any expression of intimacy involves my sexuality. When I meet my best male friend, I give him a hug. That is a sexual expression.

Wes: We conduct discussions about sexuality because we know kids are acting out sexually, but we've got to allow for process and failure in them. We've got to allow for journey.

Dennis: Maybe it's as important to be there on the other side of the crisis as it is to teach them on this side of it.

Wes: They're going to have sex and they're going to get pregnant and they're going to have an abortion and they're going to experiment homosexually and they're going to get divorced. Now, where do I fit in that whole process? I teach intimacy, reality, humanness, and Christ.

Youthworker: So because sexual mistakes are inevitable, we should instead concentrate on walking with the students through their sexual crises?

Wes: We tend to want to rescue our kids. But we wouldn't be who we are if we hadn't gone through crisis. Robbing kids of their crises means robbing them of personal growth.

Susan: That's bull. The cost is way too high. There are things in my life I would love to erase. Have they made me a more effective youth minister? I'll never know, because I don't get to do my life over without those experiences.

I know a woman who impacts lives, yet she's been so protected, I almost resent her. But she ministers to people in a different way than I can.

We should be teaching people that they are worthy of good choices. Kids choose whether to be sexually active based on how they perceive themselves and their values. My brother-in-law planned an AIDS assembly for public high schools. His message was "Don't have sex because it can kill you."

That won't stop kids. Kids stop having sex when they know they are people of value because they are created in God's image. Self-destructive behavior can be avoided if by the grace of God we can say, "You are the most incredible thing on the face of the earth. God has created you uniquely and wonderfully and will always love you—and maybe a little bit more today than somebody else." We must teach them that they have an incredible—power—the power of the Holy Spirit inside them-to say, "I am beyond this."

I see kids pass up bad choices for that reason. Our God transcends poor choices. If that's our focus, then our whole sexuality, our whole being, takes on a whole other perspective.

Rachelle: A settled confidence that you are worthy is the bottom line. My mom and dad have always told me they love me. But when they listened to me tell them that my marriage was over and then stayed with me and hurt for me, it settled in me that they do love me.

Dennis: Kids can receive the benefit of crises without having to experience them in their own lives. That's why I use the book Tension Getters more regularly than any other teaching tool—its case-history approach sets kids up to feel a crisis and make a decision about what to do, but in a safe context.

Youthworker: In what other ways can we naturally open conversations with our students regarding sexuality?

Rachelle: I set an environment in our church where it's okay to talk about touchy things. We've got teenage mothers, people who have been abused, people who have gone through date rape. My fear is that they don't see the church as a place to ask for help sorting through their hurt. We try to convey to our kids this idea: If you can't talk about it at church where God has something to offer, where can you talk about it? So when kids feel ready, they come to me and say, "This just happened to me, and I need to sit and talk to somebody about it." I guess I've chosen to be vulnerable in an area where I haven't figured out all the answers.

Dennis: Yes, I agree that dealing with sexuality includes being real in front of the kids. Once one of my young girls wrote me an affirming letter—"The thing I like about you is that you're real. You're open. I can see you still have questions." At the time I wondered, Is that good? For me, the role of a youth worker includes taking the risk of being transparent with the kids.

Susan: Our church is in a middle- to lower-class area, so I'm geared toward reaching the unchurched, kids that have incredible bag-loads of pain, kids from gangs, kids with their own kids—and I'm ill-equipped for that. They're looking for intimacy—a sense of the community they found in their gangs. These kids are desperately trying to figure out who they are, desperately trying to grow up. We need to ask questions, ask them appropriately, and honestly convey that we are all in process.

Youthworker: How do you feel as females about how your sexuality interrelates with your ministry?

Rachelle: I was frustrated as a single female in youth ministry. I knew I needed relationships with peers, yet I had no clue how to date in front of my kids. I had to drive a long ways in my area to get away from them in order to date privately. I'm a much better youth minister now that I'm married. I just didn't know how to be a 25-year-old single person.

While I was single and working mostly with men, I promised myself I'd get to know their wives. My first male boss was very articulate, asked caring questions. I can't tell you how many times that first year I fell apart in his office. He cared about my personhood as well as my ministry. To be safe in that kind of a relationship with him, of course, I needed to get to know his wife—and that was the best thing I did. Betsy is still one of my best friends, even though her husband is no longer my boss.

I picture every married male I work with in his family context and build our friendship in that context—"How's it going? How are the kids?"

Frankly, I'd love to meet occasionally with a group of married women in ministry and ask, "What are you struggling with being in ministry, being married, being a mom?" I know no one in my area who is a female pastor in youth ministry and a mother—and pulling it off. My dad did an awful job combining parenting and ministry. I don't know who to talk to about this and not get easy answers.

Susan: I combine ministry and family. I have three children. My husband's a doctor who listens all day to the intimacies of people. Let me tell you, he does not come home ready to be intimate with me. Oh, I wish he would! But we have very, very different worldviews.

Unlike you, Rachelle, I loved being single and working in youth ministries because I didn't have to be intimate. At the time, I was coming off a lot of pain: my fiance had broken off our engagement because I'd become a Christian, and then he died in an accident. I thought, I can minister for the rest of my life, I can spend a zillion hours with these incredibly needy kids, and never have to deal with my own pain.

My husband and I walk around the block every night. That's when we share a lot, when we talk intimately. That's how I found out my husband had had an affair with my best friend. It makes you wonder who your friends are. Which may explain why I choose not to have real intimate friends.

But the kids in my youth group don't see us struggle. All they see is a healthy family. They totally love Gene—who could care less! The kids are like, "Oh, he's cute." They want to be around him. Being married to him is a struggle for me because I know that we have to be intimate. And that means I can no longer just take care of kids; they would have to be a part of taking care of me.

It was safer being single, though it was lonely. I would fear being single now. I worry more about being a widow than divorced. I wonder how I'd deal with my sexuality, how I'd live celibate—knowing that's how I'd choose to live. In marriage my whole sexuality has become more defined; I'm more aware of it.

Youthworker: You've heard from Venus, men. How do you view the subject from your planet?

Dennis: There's a difference between sexual life and physical life. I acknowledge that I'm drawn to girls and to guys for various reasons that are under the banner of sexuality. The physical direction that intimacy may take, however, is the area I struggle in.

Among my friends there are few people I can hug and feel completely understood and secure about that expression of intimacy. And I recognize that I want that intimate contact, and probably hug more than the average male. So part of a healthy youth ministry is having good peer relationships.

Among my students—male and female—I'm more the dad, and there's safety in that. Not that all of my relationships with my female students are safe. But I truly desire the best for my kids, and I act in harmony with that desire. When I get to the point that self-gratification becomes my motivator, I know I'm in trouble. That's when I have to let go of a relationship. Again, my spirituality affects my sexuality.

Wes: My divorce papers were a day away from being filed, though my wife didn't know it. I thought it was completely over, and I feared ever establishing another relationship like that. Even now I don't know if it's even possible to have the right kind of a male-female relationship.

Dennis: Susan and Rachelle were talking a few minutes ago about being what could be called "functionally single." I look back over my life and wonder if I have ever been functionally married. I was a youth worker before I was married, so my wife knew what she was getting into. But I've put more into the journey of growing into a functional youth worker than I have into being functionally married. That's painful to admit. The intimacy that I thought should characterize marriage—in other words, the ideal—isn't there. Yet my work as a youth worker still includes the totality of marriage, parenting, and every other aspect of my sexuality, whatever their quality. The intimacy—or lack of it—in those relationships is part of the drama in front of my kids every week.

Yet I don't want to deflate the ideal of sexuality. If the ideal is of God, then it's right. Just as my maturity in Christ is not yet materialized, so my maturity in marriage is not yet materialized. But I want to get rid of the unreal images. Like the image I had of a honeymoon. I didn't expect to be lovemaking for 24 hours day—but at least 20 of those 24. I want to get rid of the Hollywood pictures that can never be real in any condition of spirituality. Hollywood images drive us to despair. The godly ideal is a goal that guides us to help each other grow up.

Rachelle: My first marriage was only for function. As much as I hated single life, I would live single again for the rest of my life rather than live in a marriage that was for function only. Months after we were married, my first husband told me he didn't love me and never did. Now my ideal is a Christian man who cares for me and my family. And I'm willing to be put through a lot of crap to go with that. My second marriage is still fairly new, but I have a new approach to our marriage relationship. I regularly ask myself what's really important in a given situation. I think through what time I'm going to give to make our marriage continue to work.

Unfortunately, I had to experience divorce in order to learn a right way to make a marriage work. Maybe I could have learned the lessons in other ways, but the divorce is what taught me.