This is a book about the fault line: the deep sense of unworthiness that is called "shame" and the ways that people experience it in every human relationship. Biblical texts, traditional belief and practice, and feelings of moral superiority are used to keep traditional sexual values intact. But often the messages about sexuality in the church are as vague and subtle as my first encounter with it as a pastoral leader.

Congregations today are embattled over many issues of sexuality: abortion, adolescent sexual behavior, domestic partnerships, homosexuality, clergy sexual misconduct, sex education. These areas are often reinforced by individual and social shame, though they also hold the potential to be sources of grace. Where shame is the underlying process, persons are increasingly likely to act out. When self-loathing and community shame are present, there is little room for discussion, let alone grace. When shame arises, there is a tendency to find fault.

This is not a book that's intended to fault anyone. The writing is intended to expose the fault lines, those places where the heat and lava threaten to destroy the church, and those places of shift that can be born with grace. With congregations in turmoil about sexuality issues, from clergy misconduct to homosexuality, we are sitting on a line no less threatening than a shifting of continental plates.

Areas of Sexual Shame in the Church Today

I recently had breakfast with one of the district superintendents of my denomination and asked him, "What is the hardest part of your job?" He paused to sip his coffee. "I think that it's dealing with homosexuality, but what takes up most of my time is clergy who have bad boundaries about their sexuality." "Oh," I said, "isn't it interesting that the church is spending all of its time on sex these days?" His reply was not atypical. "I never thought of those two issues as being the same before you said that!" Clergy and denominational leaders are often so busy looking at the crack in the walk that they can't feel the heat of the lava growing hotter just under the surface. A first step in this call to healing is to invite the individual reader, the congregational study group, and the denominational leadership to look beneath the fissures and the fault lines.

No congregation is untouched by what is now a public discussion of the rights and the rites of gay people.

All across the country clergy are taking public stands for or against the blessing of same-sex unions. When sixty-three clergy of the California/Nevada Conference of the United Methodist Church married the Conference lay leader and a long-time member of the Conference Board of Trustees in January 1999, it was viewed as a publicity event. This service joined two women, loving mothers and grand mothers who have been committed to this one faithful partnership all of their adult lives. This public action was a forerunner to movement of great scope across the nation, where individual clergy of many denominations have made human sexuality headline news. The opening of the subject of church and state and their roles in contracts and covenants is no small earthquake. There will be many repercussions from this throughout all levels of congregational life. No congregation is untouched by what is now a public discussion of the rights and the rites of gay people. The topic has received extraordinary coverage, from talk show to small town press, but it is not the only area in which the church and sex are on people's minds.

The war rages in our congregations about whether homosexuality is a "sin" or a "blessing." Excellent resources for the study of Scripture texts regarding homosexuality are available and listed throughout this book. Congregations experience the shame that gay people feel both when they exclude them and when they shift historic positions to include gay people. The church family is in the process of coming out of the closet regarding its gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members.

Congregations are rethinking their definitions of marriage and family in light of cultural acceptance of nonmarried, long-term partnerships. Many a congregation has in its midst an elderly couple who, for reasons of financial survival, make the decision to live together and forego legal marriage. The very notion of "living in sin" is shifting.

Partly because of the rise in the divorce rate over the past twenty-five years, nearly one-third of all people in the United States today are single adults. Throughout this changing situation, the church has remained relatively silent about the sexuality of singles. Divorced persons struggle to deal with the change of sexual activity in lives and put themselves at risk without guidance on sexual ethics from their congregations. When a fifty-year-old divorced woman goes into the drugstore to buy a box of condoms, she is aware that her religious upbringing hasn't prepared her to deal with either her embarrassment or her excitement.

In other words, mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real.

James Nelson has been marking the sexual seismograph for some time. The author of many books on men's sexuality, he has been a mover in the attempt to destigmatize male sexual energy. In the 1994 Earl Lectures at Pacific School of religion, he said that "young people are no longer willing to leave their sexuality outside the door when they enter the sanctuary." When more than half of twenty-year-olds are sexually active and no one discusses sexuality and spirituality in the context of faith, young people experience the church's lack of integration and label it hypocrisy. These twenty-year-olds can't be called "dropouts" from the church; many of them have never been near one because they assume that the church will shame them for being sexually active.

Silence about male sexuality has made possible a double standard of sexual expression for women and men. But this too has been shifting. Women today have many options that allow them to engage in recreational sex, where once they were in grave danger of a procreational outcome. Biblical teachings on adultery seem old and diluted next to national coverage of a president who has multiple sexual relationships during his marriage. How many clergy condemned his morality? How many feared their own exposure as persons who had engaged in sexual misconduct? Were they silenced by their shame?

For four years I chaired a conference committee that handled issues of clergy sexual misconduct. I observed the damage of the painful repression of sexual passion that often lay underneath the acting out of sexual misconduct. When pastors violate their congregations' trust by engaging in sexual flirtation or consummation with parishioners, deep wounds result. The profile of those most likely to become sexual perpetrators of misconduct includes those who are themselves ashamed of sex. The pastor who denies his or her own strong erotic feelings is most likely to break the boundaries of relationships with others.

Those who feel the deepest level of personal shame are the ones most inclined to act shamefully.

In the parish the pastor is expected to be God incarnate. This pressure attracts people with narcissistic tendencies and fosters narcissistic beliefs and actions. Clergy who put up a front are the ones most likely to be covering wounds to their identities at the very core of their beings. Often the wound is sexual shame. Those who feel the deepest level of personal shame are the ones most inclined to act shamefully, leaving individuals and congregations with sexual secrets and accompanying feelings of being flawed and damaged. The damage of shame leaves both the individual and the congregation with a feeling that no amount of grace and no amount of repentance or redemption can cleanse and restore them.

The shame of sexual misconduct lives in congregations for generation, just as sexual shame is passed down through families from one generation to another. If it remains a family secret, the younger generations are tempted to expose it through acting out or repeating the shameful behaviors. Not enough material has been written to help congregations heal from the sexual shame of former generations. Organizations such as the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence, however, have become a strong voice for education and healing around the specific sexual shame of clergy misconduct.

Why Talk about Sexual Shame?

Our silence on the subject of sexual shame has contributed to a decline in church membership. Church growth experts have been telling us for years that people drop out of the church for an average of eight years between high school and young adulthood. Perhaps we have failed to notice that these years coincide with the peak years of people's sexual activity. Many people leave the church as they come to grips with their sexual attractions. Others leave because they decide to become sexually active and don't want to be in a place where they would be morally condemned. Still others leave when church leaders are exposed as adulterers, or when clergy condemn people for their forms of sexual experimentation or expression.

When we don't talk about sexuality, we reinforce media images of it as separate from spirituality. The gap between sexuality and spirituality is a place where shame grows. Once young adults move beyond the teaching activities of a congregation, they often learn sexuality without respectful spiritual values. This increases the likelihood that they will repeat the shameful behaviors of their parents and be left bankrupt both sexually and spiritually. Without spiritual grounding for sexual relationships, young people are increasingly likely to engage in dangerous sexual practices. Sexuality and spirituality need to be taught in the same curriculum. One without the other leaves us unfulfilled.

Talking about sexuality can keep young adults in the church and open up the healing of those long burdened by a past sexual experience that has left them ashamed. A conversation about sex that focuses on respect and understanding can reverse the effects of many years of shame.

The subtlety of covert shame leaves many to walk away wounded without any understanding of what has just happened.

When I ask people why they have left the church, they frequently begin describing their feelings of being shunned, disrespected, ashamed, ostracized, and banished. The subtlety of covert shame leaves many to walk away wounded without any understanding of what has just happened. Matthew Fox once put an advertisement in a New York newspaper, welcoming anyone who had been wounded by the church to come to a lecture. He expected fifty to a hundred people; four hundred came.

My personal passion for this subject grows out of twenty years of personal observation and experience as pastor in rural, urban, and suburban congregations ranging from 96 to 420 members. Many of these congregations were shame-bound by some past experience or present exclusionary policy. Some of them were shame-bound by the very theology they taught and preached. The layers of unconscious shame blocked personal and community growth. The shame lay beneath the surface where it was covered with a crust of secrets and denials.

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