Tim Casteel

Thoughts on Leadership and College Ministry

sex

Biblical Dating in a Hookup Culture

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This month I gave two talks on sex/dating.  I got great feedback on both of them (though the Dating talk solicited more) and wanted to pass them along to other campus ministers to hopefully save someone some prep time in the future.  Feel free to use them for whatever purpose you need.

Yesterday I summarized and gave downloadable notes/powerpoint from the Sex talk.
Today, the Dating Talk.

Summary Ideas:

  • You have to understand the sex/dating culture in which you find yourself to effectively fight upstream

College students live in a hook up and shack up culture.

 

  • Hook up:
  • Relationships are increasingly ambiguous
    • “Romantically, the lines between just met, just friends, something a bit more than friends, “Talking”, “going out”, “dating”, being boyfriend and girlfriend, sleeping over, cohabitating, and relating like married people can seem like passing through a series of gradually darkening shades of grey.”
    • “Such tendencies toward nebulous relations . . . leave emerging adult females [with] somewhat more investment than their male peers in getting clear on the nature of their relationships. But they also do not seem to feel empowered to demand that or to be up for challenging the larger amorphous relationships culture. Mostly they seem to simply go along and try their best to figure out what’s going on.”  Souls in Transition
  • Girls have been given the expectation that the very most they could or should expect from a guy is a hookup
  • From an eye-opening article in the very secular The Atlantic magazine: “Is it any wonder that so many girls are binge-drinking and reporting, quite candidly, that this kind of drinking is a necessary part of their preparation for sexual activity?  These girls aren’t embracing sex, all evidence to the contrary. They’re terrified of it.”
  • I showed a short clip from the MTV show The Hills where Kristin and Brody (pictured above!) painfully demonstrate this.  (Start at 14:20End 15:09)
  • Shack Up
  • The vast majority of college students believe that cohabiting is a smart if not absolutely necessary experience and phase for moving toward an eventual successful and happy marriage
  • BUT  – “Studies consistently show that couples who live together before they marry are more, not less, likely to later divorce than couple who did not live together before their weddings”  – Souls in Transition

So what is the Biblical Pattern?

  • Date to Marry (Dating is laying a foundation for a potential marriage which is obviously in contrast to our Hook Up culture)
  • No Sexual Immorality. Love Mark Driscoll’s thoughts on this: “Girls if his interpretation (of the Bible) ends up with you naked in bed, I would argue that he may not be the most objective theologian. I’d go with my interpretation which is: dump him”
  • Guys Initiate — from the first date, to DTR-ing, to setting physical boundaries
  • In dating, the man is demonstrating his ability to lead, protect, and provide.
  • The woman is discerning whether she will be well cared for and provided for, and whether she can follow his leadership. (I think that’s a quote from Mark Driscoll)
  • I ended this section with a 7 minute clip from Mark Driscoll’s excellent talk on Dating (Start minute 35:28 — End minute 42:30)

 

Here are my notes (I probably cut out 10 minutes of this content b/c the talk had already gone close to 40 minutes, including the video clips).
 
And the powerpoint.

 

 

Sex and Dating Talks

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“Not only is God pro-sex, he explicitly uses sexual union
as a metaphor for a believer’s union with God.

In a very daring way, the Bible says that sex was God’s invention,

to give us a sign of the Union that he built us for”

(paraphrase of Tim Keller)

I wish I could speak on Sex/Dating every week at Cru!  Such a critical topic for college students.  My prayer is that hundreds of future marriages will be affected as men and women learn to honor God in dating.

This month I gave two talks on sex/dating.  I got great feedback on both of them (though the Dating talk solicited more) and wanted to pass them along to hopefully save you some prep time in the future.  Feel free to use them for whatever purpose you need.

Today I’ll summarize and give downloadable notes/powerpoint from the Sex talk.
Tomorrow, the Dating Talk.

**Be sure to check out the phenomenal Matt Chandler clip at the bottom.  Amazingly good.**

Sex –

  • Main Idea= Sex is the #1 reason students don’t want anything to do with God in college.

From the book Souls in Transition: “One of the reasons why many emerging adults may want to distance themselves from religion is that religion in their minds conflicts with [their] lifestyle options.  Most of them want to party, to hook up and to have sex”

Major Premise — Serious religion says sex is bad

Minor Premise — I want to party and have sex

Conclusion — I am not interested in serious religion

  • But ironically Sex/Desire is one of the greatest proofs that there is a God.  The “inconsolable longing” is what brought CS Lewis to Christ.
  • Most college students would say:

“For right now I want to get a lot of that stuff out of my system, like messing around with girls and stuff, or partying.  You know, Get all that stuff out of your system before you get married.  Once you get married, you won’t be able to do all that stuff.”

  • The problem = that stuff doesn’t get out of your system.  Jesus says that “stuff”/sexual desire is internal and is a raging fire that will consumer your life
  • It’s not a switch you can turn off once you “Settle down”
  • This talk borrows heavily from Tim Keller’s two sermons (especially the former): Love, Lust and Liberation and Singleness
  • Some of the talk is verbatim from TIm Keller’s talk.  I type up many of my notes verbatim and then use them as jumping off points when I speak – using the ideas but putting them in my own words

I ended the talk with this powerful clip from Matt Chandler where he tells the story of a pastor who passed around a rose that represented someone’s sexuality — and as it’s “passed around” and “handled” by everyone — it comes back to the front it’s used and broken.  One girl e-mailed me after the talk: “I broke down in tears when the clip ‘Jesus Wants the Rose’ was played and I have watched it over and over again in my dorm room.”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuGYh6QDNYY[/youtube]

Here’s my notes.

For the powerpoint slides backdrops, I used the incredible (and free!) artwork from Southeast Christian Church. Here’s my slides.

photo courtesy of steeljam

What Happens in My 20’s, Stays in My 20’s

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Part 5 in a series on seeking to better understand our college audience from the research of the book Souls in Transition


Settling Down is for Later – College is a time to have fun.

I know. Not exactly ground breaking. But read some of the excerpts from Souls in Transition explaining this mindset of Emerging Adults and tell me this doesn’t have huge repercussions for ministry:

Rather than being settled, most of them understand themselves to be in a phase of life that is free, fluid, tentative, experimental, and relatively unbound. They want to enjoy it while it lasts. Here a bit of tension over life goals is expressed. They want to acquire independence and the ability to stand on their own two feet. But most of them also do not want full adulthood to come too quickly.

Someday in the future, when they’ve got their youthful passions worked out of their systems, then they will settle down.

Furthermore, when it comes to romantic relationships and sex, many — if not most — emerging adults see little connection between their lives now before settling down and the lives they will live later after having settled down.  Now . . . they can party, hook up with strangers, and generally play at being wild.  Later, when they settle down they’ll be sober, faithful, and responsible adults. The assumption seems to be “whatever happens in my early twenties stays in my early twenties”

As one young man said, ‘I think people should have a career and good income before getting married. Maybe get a lot of stuff out of your system, like messing around with girls and stuff, or partying, get that our of your system. Get all that stuff out of your system before you get married.  Once you get married, you won’t be able to do all that stuff.



The problem?  That “Stuff” doesn’t get out of your system.  That stuff is in you.  Sin is not external to you.  It is in your heart.  Lust is not a switch you can flip off when you get married.  You have the same heart.  The same sinful desires.

“They reflect only slight awareness that they may now even in small ways be establishing patterns and priorities. . . that will carry through the rest of their lives.”   pg. 71



We interviewed a student named Pete last spring who, I think, speaks for most college students.  He would likely call himself a Christian (as most students at the University of Arkansas do) but lives the wild college life – partying and hooking up with girls.

We asked him what he and his friends thought of Cru.

His response, “Most of my friends in my fraternity just want to have a good time in college.  So they don’t want to come to Cru or a Bible study because they don’t want to be good, they don’t want to be perfect right now.  They want to make mistakes and party and have sex with girls.”


So how do we reach Pete and his friends?  What have you seen that has worked?

We’re talking about this topic this morning at our team’s staff planning so I’ll share anything we come up with.


photo courtesy of Szymon Kochański via flickr