I've always been passionate about this topic, but I think now I'm going to spend more time on it. After reading Forbidden Fruit by Mark Regnerus this summer and concluding a more in-depth study of it this afternoon, I've decided it's time to put my thoughts on paper about the problems with the treatment of sex in the church today.

I'm not going to write another Christian abstinence book, nor am I going to conduct a study on whether teens care about what the church says, as that has all been done before me, sometimes well, sometimes poorly. My aim is to figure out why so many of the girls I went to high school youth group with are now single mothers and what can be done to ensure this isn't a continuing trend.

I've always been frustrated with how the church talks about sex, especially with teen girls. It seems most often they aren't given the same amount of attention as the boys. We're told simply to "guard our hearts" and wait for our husbands to sweep us off our feet and give us the best marital sex in the world. Well, I know personally that it doesn't always work that way. Those who wait often end up wildly disappointed when their idealized notions of sex end up being wrong and those who don't wait often end up pregnant, infected, or misused.

I also want to look into the education of married adults about sex and what their ideas are doing to the institution of marriage. With so much emphasis on abstinence, Christians are left with no real information about what sex and marriage are supposed to look like. Or that they are even good. But how can we change this? Is there any one effective means?

This is just a starting point. But I'm so passionate about this that it is stupid to sit on the sidelines and let other people express the same ideas in disjointed form.