Topics for Young Ladies

Rosie Perera said:

Seriously, I remember being that age and it was not from the men in the church or books by men that I could hear any of this sort of teaching. They just didn't communicate a sense of understanding what it was like being in our skin. I remember our pastor even trying to give me some "advice like a father" about dealing with acne as a teenager, and it was very unwelcome. If there are any woman in your church who are mature in the Lord and have taught before or have a gentle ease around young people, maybe one of them can help teach these topics to the young ladies. I think the girls would feel more free to ask questions and not be embarrassed that way

Very nicely said Rosie

My question & my pet peeve (to the larger church) is why do our conversations always have to revolve around sex? While sex is part of relationships, it is not the only things two people do together. There are lots of other things that can be discussed like abuse, self-identity within a relationships, and how our gender roles are changing and now women are no longer considered property of their father/spouse (which is a good thing if you ask me) .

Rosie Perera said:

You need to do a search like this (but unfortunately it doesn't exist in Logos): author-gender = female

This is because there are soooooooo few female authors in Logos.

I  can remember half a century ago that sex ranked very high in  our thinking.  I got much of my early information from an often wildly inaccurately informed room mate, and it did me not much good.  We felt cheated when a talk on "relationships" was not about "how far can we go?", but about how to get on with other people!  We did have a very helpful talk on relationships with boys from a visiting preacher who often came and whom we all loved.  But I agree, the ideal would be to get a woman to talk to the girls about what it means to become a woman.  I sometimes mention to my stroppy teenagers that we, too, have been their age, and the problem is when you want to be an adult you're treated as a child, and when you want to be a child people expect you to be an adult.  But the subject of sex is unmentionable.  As a result, a gang of little boys, some of them still in the kindergarten, stripped a little girl and tried to rape her.  After that we did stress that boys need to remember that the girls are their sisters and to love and respect them as such.

In my Scholar's library I turned up 7 titles when I searched sex.  Different by Design by MacArthur might be helpful?

If your young ladies are regular members of your congregation, you have an example of a relationship going wrong in Genesis 3  (and the man was a wimp, not doing anything to discourage his wife at whose side he was standing when she plucked the fruit, let men take note!).  And of  course in Genesis 2 you have God's will for the marriAGE RELATIONSHIP.  Very relevant here, when the bride moves in with mother in law and has to obey and try to please mother in law - or else....!

Incidentally, talking to our women about Mary's response to Gabriel's earth-shattering announcement, one of them said:  "Mary could have said:  'I'll have to ask Joseph, so come back in 2 days time and I'll let you  know'."  Our situation is very different from yours, and I'm off topic in most of this, so I'll shut up!

Jerry, this set has a book titled, "COUNSELING ADOLESCENT GIRLS" that might be helpful.

Jerry Walker said:

I tried to go on to Logos website to see what else they had along the lines of dating and self-esteem but I don't know how to look up those things. Can anyone give a hand on how to search the web site.

Type your search term(s) into the "Search" box at the top of the website and click Search. As with searching in Logos, use quotes if it is a phrase. I'm not sure how the site treats punctuation in searches, but I would consider a hyphenated word as a phrase just in case. So, for example:

 Note that with new Logos website's "faceted" searching, you can narrow the search results down by clicking one ore more categories from the left panel. These will be added to the facets list at the top. You can click the X to turn off any of the facets and widen the search again. This particular one finds only eight results so there's no need to narrow it down, but if you're searching for sex you get 43 results. So you might want to narrow it down to just Pastoral Care and Counseling books or just Practical Life books (you can't add two search facets from within the same section at the same time, so you'd have to try the first one, then remove it, and try the other one).

Philip Spitzer said:

sorry I didn't keep this on target with the forum goals.

Truth be said, I believe that I am the one who got this post off target, and I am sorry for that.

I do agree that we agree on the topic.

I can get a little passionate when we talk about sin (sin with a lower case “s”  - the personal dimension of sin) when we do not talk about Sin (Sin with an upper case
“S” - the systemic dimensions of Sin ~ racism, sexism, poverty,
and . . .).

I also get a little passionate when we attempt to subjugate a group of people based on their sex, race, size of their little toe, etc..., and claim that it is "biblical teaching."

I also get a little passionate when we attempt to take something from the Bible and simply imposing it on our context, and claim that it is "biblical teaching."  This passion tends to be directly related to my other passionate issues.  To use an example from America's past, Richard
Furman, President of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, wrote in his essay Treatise
on Slavery, “For the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the
Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example." [“Treatise on Slavery, 1822”, Readings
in Baptist History, ed. Joe Early Jr., (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008),
82].

While I do agree we need to talk about sex, but we also must remember several things when we look at our scripture for help in this area of theology.  We need to remember in scripture:

• Mary was a teenager when she gave birth to Jesus (Girls, and possibly boys too, were expected to marry not long after reaching puberty  ~ David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1996, c1992). 6:948.) 
• Women were property, and if a girl loose her virginity, her value is now diminished (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).

In today's context we need to remember that:

• We manipulate our food supply so that it grows faster and bigger than it would naturally.  Because of this, our youth are going through puberty at an earlier age.

Because of all of this, I thought I would copy a quote from a book that I just suggested that I would like in my Logos Library.

The Christian sexual tradition uses scripture and theological tradition as supports for a code of behavior which developed out of a pre-scientific understandings of human anatomy, physiology, and reproduction, as well as out of now abandoned and discredited models of the human person and human relationships. The churches are still today teaching theological conclusions originally based in ignorance of women’s genetic contribution to offspring, ignorance of the processes of gender identity and of sexual orientation, and of the difference between them – ignorance which has allowed and supported patriarchy, misogyny, and heterosexism, the assumption that heterosexuality is normative. We are still teaching a sexual code based in fear of the body and of sexuality, in understandings of sexual virtue as the repression of bodily desires by the force of the rational will, on physicality, especially sexuality, as an obstacle to spirituality, and on women as lacking reason and only possessing the image of God through connection to men. The churches have disowned the Mosaic law’s assumption of male ownership of women and children, Luther’s understanding that women are like nails in a wall, prohibited by their nature from moving outside their domestic situation, and Aquinas’ teaching that females are misbegotten males, produced from male embryos by physical or mental debility in the father, or by moist winds off the Mediterranean. But we continue to teach most of the sexual moral code which was founded upon such thinking.

- Christine E. Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics  

I agree that we need to use scripture to use as our primary guild for our relationships, it cannot be use to subjugate a group of people based on their sex, race, or the size of their little toe.