So the 30-Day Sex Challenge is already well under way, and if you were looking to join in, you’ll have to wait until next year. We figured we’d wrap up our coverage of it with a poll asking what you thought of it.
Most of you were big fans of the campaign. You like the idea of churches encouraging intimacy within marriage and encouraging singles to abstain. Any British fans of church sex marketing could also check out the new material from the Church of England–“Growing Together.” Summed up (probably inaccurately) by British tabloid The Sun as, “Officials at the Church of England have written a saucy good sex guide for their parishioners.”
36% of you aren’t so sure. Half of you aren’t fans of their caveat that singles should also remain celibate. You think this is condoning premarital sex, and churches ought not be in that business. The other half of you could wrap up your feelings about the challenge as, “Meh.”
The last 26% of you think it’s silly altogether, and there might be a little too testosterone-driven. C’mon guys can make up the marketing campaigns just fine. I mean, what do you propose? Extreme Makeover: Church Edition? (Ed. Note: My apologies for that being the best I can come up with. Comments are now open to 30-Day Sex Challenge Alternative.)
Lex
March 26, 2008
I’m going to be the lame, spiritual commenter here and say we need a 30-Day Prayer Challenge. Or a 30-Day Read-Your-Bible Challenge. Or a good, old-fashioned 30-Day Fast of some sort.
I hate to be the bucket of cold water, but Christians don’t know how to do the basics anymore, and I’m not seeing a lot of churches encouraging it. I don’t even think it’s something we couldn’t share with people outside the church. “You don’t believe? Tell you what, you pray every day for a month for truth and we’ll see what happens.”
Or we could make it fun and challenge leadership to abstain from telling their designers “No” for 30 days. That could be eye-opening.
Cathy
March 26, 2008
It’s not that I’m against the idea of the 30-day sex challenge, I just think that there’s more to this issue than “married people should have sex every day for 30 days.” Having more sex isn’t going to fix intimacy problems; it seems to me that if a couple isn’t having “enough” sex, then the problem likely stems from a deeper issue that should be addressed.
Simply demanding that people “do it more” seems a little like a solution a 14-year-old boy would come up with.
Brett Moore
March 26, 2008
I think the only people who would have a problem with this campaign are people who don’t have a good sex life and are just plain jealous.
C’mon folks- disagreeing with this is what gets us made fun of so much in the first place.
Jon Smock
April 2, 2008
I see your point, Cathy, but I also think that you need to go through the motions (no pun intended) before you start to feel it.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is, if you’re trying to stop telling lies, you need to bite your tongue for a while until you actually WANT to stop telling lies. By the same token, for a lot of married couples, while they might have deeper problems, having somewhat awkward intimacy upfront might be the gateway to being open and dealing with those other problems. I think sometimes we aren’t intimate, because we’re angry, or we’re sad, or we don’t think the other person thinks we’re attractive…and then we haven’t been intimate in a while, so we’re not intimate now, because it’s status quo…and then we have problems. We don’t want excuses to ruin our intimacy, which ultimately creates even more (and serious) problems.