By Shea Oakley

Copyright 2002

The past few years have seen a debate among single Christians as to how best pursue romantic relationships in these morally perilous times. Here in America it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference between the world’s idea of dating and our own. Believers are, of course, told to abstain from pre-marital sex. It is often the only uniquely Christian guideline we single adults have going in to a relationship. It is also often broken. Lines get crossed all the time. We may not want to talk about it in the church but a lot of "fornication" is going on and often it is between people who are otherwise looked up to as spiritual models. There is a reason for this. We have adopted our culture’s disregard for the spiritual power of sexuality.

When God created us as sexual beings he endowed us with something that is a strong echo of the passion between Himself and the Church, a passion that surpasses any other in the universe. The culmination of this passion is so powerful that it will end history as we know it. In some ultimate way we shall become one with our Creator and it will forever change us.

The echo of human sexuality can also forever change us. Every time two people come together in physical union they become, as Scripture tells us, "one flesh". Souls, as well as bodies, intermingle. Your partner becomes, in some sense, part of who you are. This remains true, though to a lesser degree, even when the act is not brought to it’s culmination. There is no "safe sex" as far as our souls are concerned. Today we are told about diseases or the possible conception of an unwanted child and we take precautions to prevent it from happening but there is no protection against the spiritual and emotional bonding that, by design, any kind of sex brings with it.

"Serious" Christian dating almost always leads to some degree of intimate physical contact. It is a given that when a man and woman are attracted to one another and spend a lot of time together things are going to happen. The problem is that dating relationships often do not end with the covenant of marriage, which is the only estate that God ever intended sex to be a part of. Instead they often end with a painful permanent separation. The level of pain that a "break-up" afflicts us with is determined to a large degree by how physical the relationship had become. These failed relationships scar hearts and later often negatively affect marital sex.

So how do we avoid this pain which, by the way, is one our Lord never intended for us to experience? At the very least we need an increase in accountability covenants between couples and there fellow brothers and sisters for the purpose of setting limits that are not be easily broken. This should happen with the united support of the whole church body. Otherwise couples might receive mixed messages.

This is the basic thinking behind the increasingly influential "Courtship Movement" in the United States. The idea is to bring romantic relationships into submission to the church and return to the ideals of courtship that, for most of the human history, have been observed by many cultures. Courtship stresses keeping physical interaction to a minimum while two people are getting to know each other in more important, and less dangerous, ways that may lead to a marriage. Whether this is practical for post-modern Christians living in a world that has completely abandoned these ideals is open to question.

Perhaps a sort of hybrid between dating and courtship might be the answer. Or maybe the Church needs to instill a greater knowledge of how pre-marital sex can cause great emotional and spiritual pain. The alternative is broken hearts and seared consciences because the bottom line here is that sex out of wedlock remains exactly what God has always called it, Sin.