30 Day Sex Challenge

Ybor City's 3-year-old Relevant Church offered a unique challenge to its members Sunday: 30 straight days of sex, or no sex at all.

It's called the 30-Day Sex Challenge. Married couples are expected to have sex at least once a day, every day, for a month. Single people are to abstain from any sexual activity for the same period.

Head pastor Paul Wirth, 39, delivered the challenge to the married couples, citing the statistics: About half of all marriages end in divorce.

"And that's no different for people who attend church," he said. "Sometimes life gets in the way. Our jobs get in the way."

Sarah Bassil of Tampa and Tim Jones of Clearwater are engaged to be married in a year and have been attending Relevant Church since the summer.

"We're going to take the challenge," Bassil said. "We talked about it, and we both realize the importance of doing things the right way."

Jones said it would be a tough month.

"I think it's worth trying to find out other things about each other," he said.

Any thoughts???

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Practicality?

Submitted by paul on Fri, 2008-05-23 22:38.

Surely 21 days would have been more appropriate for the married folks...

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More practicality

Submitted by paul on Sat, 2008-05-24 02:59.

...and all church meetings would need to finish before 8:30 pm so that we could fit it into our life every single day.

You can tell this idea was created by a man. When i mentioned it to my wife, all she could think about was all the things it would interfere with! ;-)

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Leadership Lesson

Submitted by John Sweetman (not verified) on Sat, 2008-05-24 21:39.

This sort of challenge for marrieds is a danger for leaders. It's radical, passionate and challenging, but completely insensitive to people's needs and God's will. To equate the depth of a sexual relationship with quantity is immature. The guy is trying to make a point but doing it the wrong way. I agree that the Bible promotes good sex (eg. Song of Songs) as much as it condemns wrong sex (outside a married relationship), and Christian leaders need to make this clear. I just don't think this is the way to do it.

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Biblical mandate????

Submitted by joe (not verified) on Sun, 2008-05-25 23:47.

This guy is going to cause more problems than he will solve...

Firstly as John has said above the suggestion is totally insensitive to the reality of the marriage relationship - it is not all about sex! What of the woman who is married to the C5 quadriplegic? What of the man married to the woman who is undergoing chemotherapy? What of the man who is suffering from erectile dysfunction? What of the woman who has just given birth via C-Section? What about the man who is away on business? Reasons for NOT having sex in a marriage relationship can be varied and genuine and part of the learning process within a marriage relationship is to be sensitive to the other person, especially in the area of sexuality. It is not something that you can force on people and it is definitely not something that you can use to get a cheap grab for media attention for your "relevant" church.

Secondly, the implication for singles was that some of them must have been living in, or struggling with sexual sin. Giving them a 30 day challenge is not going to fix anything, there are deeper relationship with God issues at play here. The thought that we can make a 30 day program to help people through this struggle is ridiculous! Especially when the the program is as naive as "just don't do it for 30 days" when everybody else in the church is supposedly doing it everyday!

Thirdly there is no biblical mandate for the challenge, in fact the reverse has a greater mandate - when Paul encourages couples to abstain from sexual intercourse for a period of fasting and prayer.

Really this is just another example of controversy for controversy's sake! Instead of coming up with silly controversies this "relevant" church should simply and passionately teach what the bible has to say about sex and marriage.

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