Mixing Jesus and Porn to Move a Little Merch

By now the xxx church has gained a great deal of attention and coverage, so I won’t go into great detail on what they do.  The “ministry” has become a favorite of the large percentage of young rebelious cats who are desperate for church that doesn’t look like church and things that shock the o.g.’s of the evangelical church.  The purpose of the group, in general terms, is to be a support system and means of awareness about pornography and the implications that go along with it.  Sounds like a good idea right?  Unfortunately so did communism.  Am I trying to make the pornies look like commies, hardly, merely to point out some ways that the well intentioned group has lost a bit of touch with Biblical reality.

To begin with, on their website you can see a series of promotional videos that they utilize to promote their cause.  Among these are videos of a man in a rabbit suit at a porn convention, a video declaring that “every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten”, and a puppet running a porn talk show.  While these techniques are great to encourage children to brush their teeth or to show the ill effects of too much sugar on your teeth, it seems to make light of a subject that the group swears up and down is a serious problem.  Maybe I’m a bit uptight, but I find it hard to take a sin that holds so many men and women captive and make it in to a cheap joke and marketing stunt.  Last time I checked, God seems to have a much more grave view of sin than killing kittens for a good giggle.   I could rant on these things for a while longer, but I should probably move on.

In the section under “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” they again start off in the right direction by recognizing that God can and does save men and women out of the most dire of situations, they soon show their lack of theology farther along in the paragraph.  In the description of this particular program, they make the statement that “He [God] is not angry with us.”  Perhaps I have completely interpreted Scripture, history and the human condition completely wrong, but I seem to remember hearing that God has had a reputation of being angered to great extents because of man’s sin.  “But Chris, doesn’t God love the sinner and hate the sin???”  Absolutely NOT!  Now, it must be kept in mind that I do have a fairly reformed view of Scripture and see quite an emphasis on human depravity, but it seems to me that the sinner and the sin are one in the same unless Christ has sanctified the sinner.  In fact, from the best I can tell, man is born SINFUL and is in essence sin…soooo God is angry with us when we sin because sin is rebellion against the Holy God.    How dare we make light of sin or speak on God’s behalf. 

The group places a high emphasis on ministering to and evangelizing men and women in the porn industry, which is a blessing and an admirable task.  However, as is usually the case, they ended up swinging from the hyper-conservative ostrasizing of these people to becoming emmersed in the culture in order to reach them; both are equally wrong.  While we have no right to question or decide who God will save and who we are to reach out to, we must also show decernment in the way that we go about fulfilling that call.  Evangelizing in a bar is one thing, you can be there and not drink.  Ministry in a place like a porn convention is quite different in that there is no way to avoid taking in what is going on around you. 

I could list many other ways in which the xxx chuch has come up short, but I will end here.  The greatest problem with the seeker-submissive (sensitive, whatever you wish to call it) is that they have time and time again bent Scripture and sacrificed theology in order to fulfill their purpose.  God does not need our help, but allows us to take part in His purpose.  We have no need to make His word and purpose “more relevant” or “more shocking,” He can do that on His own.  We are simply here to live in a way that glorifies Him and minister to others in the way Scripture ordains so that men and women may come to know Him and He may be glorified.