"PASTORAL THEOLOGY & PRACTICE" PROF. HAROLD SENKBEIL & DR. RICHARD WARNECK CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 1-800-825-7234 * * * * * This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * * >> DAVID: Right now I'm deeply involved with leading my high school youth group. Conversations about sex and chastity are very common. And, frankly, a wee bit uncomfortable for me. How may the church encourage the young to remain pure and point themselves toward marriage? What do I say to my youth? How do I help them? >> DR. RICHARD WARNECK: David, a place to start would be where you are as you ask your question. The church needs to simply say to our young Christians that our whole sexuality as God framed it and intended it to be is always pointed toward marriage. And it is a precious gift from Him for us to protect and preserve, somewhat, if you will, until the appropriate time when the Lord provides a lifetime partner in marriage, then this marvelous gift and the great powers of our sexuality really kick in toward the fulfillment of our marriage partner and our mutual fulfillment in that relationship. The church simply needs to say this to the young. There are so many voices out in the culture speaking to our youth to the contrary. This is very well known. What is less known or heard less frequently even by young Christians in the church is the emphasis that God has given us this gift for marriage. We need to say that more frequently, underscore it. We don't have to become hacks over it, not at all. But the young people need to hear occasionally that kind of counsel and direction. It's an uphill battle in the culture in which we live, as we indicated, where sexuality is simply viewed in terms of immediate gratification and passion, quite apart from marriage and even more distant from the notion of procreation. The proper teaching will help young Christians to think about their maleness and their femaleness toward a future marriage partner. Isolating all of their thinking and action in the singular direction pointed toward marriage. Whatever is separating sex from marriage in the culture, Christian youth will avoid. To the end of keeping themselves pure in order to present a wholesome, pure and attractive person to their beloved later in their mature adult years, the church may consider adopting an abstinence program for their youth. These are programs which help young people, particularly in Christian settings, to muster the will and will power, with the grace of God, to respect God's creation of them as they are and the powerful gift of sex and to be good stewards of that great power, always heading toward marriage. To keep themselves pure as the apostle exhorts, and we've referenced that exhortation from St. Paul numerous times in these discussions, we await a distinctively Lutheran program which approaches this area of sanctification that arises out of our life as we are justified by grace through faith in Christ and stemming from our baptism, I say a good sound Lutheran program. Some Lutheran congregations and youth ministries have adapted programs from other sources. Frequently, these other programs are decidedly law-oriented and they come down very hard on the exhortations and the commandments in the Scriptures to avoid fornication and lead a chaste and decent life, but they lack the power of the Gospel, which is the accent which a Lutheran ministry can bring so effectively. So I would encourage you and maybe some of your partners in the ministry to do a little spade work in this area. See if you can't come up with a program that would encourage abstinence among our youth in the proper spirit of the Gospel and the whole notion of heading these young people toward marriage. Now, what else can we do in the church to help our young people in this area? I believe that the church is the place where children and children becoming teenagers and teenagers themselves should be able to see modeled for them sound marriages and beautiful families where husband and wife love and respect and honor each other, where children and parents relate to one another in love, honor and respect and vice versa, children to parents. We used to make light of some of the fellowship groups in our Lutheran congregations, like these were largely a waste of time. I'm speaking about some of the suppers and occasions when congregations would get together for recreation, picnics, church picnics and that sort of thing. And I recall how in the perception of busy pastors that these events were somewhat negligible. I've had some second thoughts about that. And perhaps you might share them, David. Now, let's just think. We have a group of Christians in a culture. The larger culture, growing more and more secular in its outlook, enforced by the powerful technology very focused in the media and the whole secular view holding stage front and center in the media pressing upon the young particularly lifestyles and values quite contra distinct to the very values we've been speaking about here in our very discussion. Isn't it, therefore, the more paramount and the more important that our children and youth have an opportunity in leal life, not in virtual reality but in real life, to see modeled for them how a man and a woman really love each other in the marital relationship? How they love and care for their children and how their children are happy and blessed to have those kinds of parents? There are many youth and many children just at sea�today and we find some of them in our congregations. And whenever the church can come together for some of these otherwise negligible occasions, the suppers and the dinners and the projects that they work on together, the picnics that they attend and the young can see Christians in active life together, I just think this is a powerful force and it's one that we need to exploit a little bit more in order to keep our kids focused not only on MTV and all that stuff but the alternative within the community of faith. If we were a little more intentional about this very ministry in our congregations as Lutheran pastors, David, I submit that we would be providing for our youth a kind of indirectly and tacitly the kind of influence that might just encourage them to see their maleness, their femaleness, their sexuality within the context of marriage, which we believe is ultimately God's good will for them and their ongoing life. * * * * * This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * *