.gif)
New efforts to protect children win secular allies.
Ask Ian Henderson what he does for a living, and he has to decide whether to respond with the quick version—that he runs a charity—or the potentially awkward version—that he works in pornography education and recovery.
“Sometimes it’ll really open a conversation,” said Henderson, the CEO of Visible Ministries and the Naked Truth Project, which helps over 10,000 people a year in the United Kingdom through training, support groups, and counseling.
Facing a porn epidemic can feel like being dropped into the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, Henderson said, up close with filth and pain while God shows him “how bad things have gotten.” As pornography has proliferated online, however, more of his fellow Brits are open to talking about its dark side too.
For ministries such as Naked Truth and Christian advocacy groups such as CARE (Christian Action Research and Education), opposing pornography is no longer the lonely position it was for British evangelicals back in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were maligned as prudish killjoys.
Now, websites face legal challenges for hosting abusive content; research is revealing more about how porn affects the mind; and parents of faith and no faith share concerns about kids’ early exposure to sexual material online.
“For a while, there’s been a clear divide of [pornography] being unacceptable in Christian circles and socially acceptable if you’re not a Christian,” said Hannah Lodge, an administrator at Naked Truth. “I think that gap is closing.”
When pastor Ioannis Dekas learned that his teenage son had searched for porn on a school device last year, “It was a wake-up call,” he said. “I had ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
