Why does a church that will preach about money, anger and gossip go quiet about sex? And if nobody says anything, is anything being taught at all? The plain answer is yes. Silence teaches. Dr. Sarita Lyons, a psychologist in private practice in Philadelphia and the women’s ministry leader at Epiphany Fellowship Church, argues that a quiet church tends to leave people with three false lessons: sex is shameful, women carry the blame, and a sexual past puts a person outside of grace. Honest teaching replaces each one with something truer.
The first question is why the quiet lasts, if it does this much damage.
What does a quiet church end up teaching?
Lyons describes the problem in one line: “everybody wants to talk about it, but nobody wants to talk about it.” People want guidance about something that shapes their bodies, relationships and choices, and the church often leaves a gap. Her explanation is ordinary and believable. Pastors and members bring their own upbringing and experiences into the room. The subject feels hard, so everyone waits for someone else to start.
Her sharpest claim is that saying nothing still sends a message. In her words, “the greatest Miseducation is no education”. When the church never names sex, it treats sex as too dirty to mention. “It’s very hush hush versus affirming the beauty and power and gift of sex, that has been created and ordained by God.”
Think about how that lands on a fifteen-year-old. The pulpit has opinions about forgiveness, work and honoring parents. On the subject that confuses them most, it has nothing. The natural conclusion is that God has little to say about it, or that what he would say is embarrassing. So they learn from whoever is willing to talk.
When churches do raise the subject, Lyons hears it come out as a joke. She points to the Song of Solomon, where readers often giggle instead of taking seriously the honor God gave to sexual love. She calls the church’s attitude Victorian and says it treats God’s holiness as fragile, as though the topic itself might stain him.
Isn’t some silence a form of reverence?
This objection deserves more than a quick reply. Many sincere Christians hold back on purpose. Congregations include children, survivors of abuse and people who would be harmed by careless frankness. Scripture itself often speaks with restraint. Genesis 4:1 reports that “Adam knew Eve his wife” and leaves the rest unsaid, and the Song of Solomon speaks in figurative poetry rather than instruction. A pastor who keeps quiet may be trying to protect people from crude talk.
Lyons is not asking for crude talk. She objects to the joking as much as to the silence. What she wants is for sex and sexuality to appear in the ordinary preaching and teaching of the church, “as it fits,” and not as something that “should just be saved for like a small group”. Her reason is theological: “if it’s an important issue to God, it’s an important issue to us.”
Scripture’s own restraint actually supports her. The Bible speaks about sex with care, in suitable language, and it speaks about it often: in law, in narrative, in Paul’s letters and in an entire book of love poetry. Readers have long debated how far the Song’s meaning reaches beyond human marriage, but a canon that contains it is plainly comfortable with desire between a husband and wife. The real model, then, is care about how sex is spoken of, with no doubt about whether it should be. A church can choose its words for a mixed room and still teach.
What does honest teaching say sex is for?
Lyons describes sex as created for procreation, “pleasure and protection in the confines of marriage.” The most useful part of her teaching is how candid she is about the hard case: the single person who wants sex now.
She refuses the common line that sex outside marriage is empty. Anyone who has been there knows better, and teaching that claim sets young people up to doubt everything else they were told. Lyons puts it plainly: “just because you don’t have a license for it doesn’t mean you don’t gain the benefits from it”. She reaches for an example from her clinical world. A prescription painkiller taken without a prescription still produces a high. The pill works. What’s missing is the authority to take it, and the long-term costs come anyway.
That candor treats a young person as someone capable of a real choice. Lyons gives the choice a spiritual meaning too. Single people ask her why God doesn’t simply remove their desire if he doesn’t want them acting on it. She turns the question around: “if God removed our sexual desires, what would we be sacrificing of the way we even demonstrate our love toward God?” Laying down sexual activity for a season, she says, is offered in service to God, and “it’s an act of worship.”
Paul uses the same kind of language in Romans 12:1: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Paul is describing the whole Christian life, not singleness in particular. His picture still clarifies Lyons’s point. In Israel’s worship, a sacrifice was something of real value handed over to God. Paul applies that to the body itself, and he calls it living, an offering made again day after day. Lyons’s argument fits inside that picture. The desire is what gives the restraint its weight. Without wanting anything, a single person would have nothing to offer.
Why does the shame fall harder on women?
Lyons says the church’s double standard starts outside it. Society treats men and women differently around sex. Families absorb that difference, and then it walks into the sanctuary. Boys get cheered on. Girls get warned. Her image is vivid: girls are told to “keep your skirt down, but boys aren’t told to keep their pants pulled up.”
The consequences follow a pattern. When sexual sin leads to pregnancy, she says, “the woman tends to bear the weight and the burden and the responsibility of that sin, because we tend to care about the sins that are visual.” A pregnancy shows. A man’s part in it doesn’t. So the church disciplines what it can see and goes easy on the rest, as if sin were measured by visibility rather than by the heart.
She applies the same point to leadership. In her account, much of the sexual sin in churches has involved pastors, elders, ministers and deacons, and where there is no real church discipline, women are the ones told to leave. “The women are the ones that are made to seem like they are the problem.” Some of what happens in those cases is not mutual sin. A leader who uses his position to pursue someone in his care has abused his power. A person harmed that way deserves safety and someone trustworthy on their side, with no pressure to stay quiet. Anyone being harmed by a partner can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
A reader should weigh what kind of claim this is. Lyons is describing what she has seen as a clinician and a ministry leader, not reporting a study. Churches differ, and some do hold leaders accountable. Her description is still worth taking seriously, because it names a mechanism a reader can test in their own congregation. When sexual sin comes to light, who is asked to step away, and who stays on the platform? The answer will show whether the standard is shared or not.
Modesty teaching is where the imbalance becomes most personal. Lyons notes that the church treats modesty as a word about women’s clothing, while Scripture’s concern is wider: “we don’t talk about modesty broadly in terms of speech and behavior.” The result is that “women often in the church, have been made to feel like we are the gatekeepers of another man’s self-control.”
She grants that there is wisdom in caring how your choices affect others. What she rejects is moving the whole load onto women: “we often aren’t teaching brothers to operate in self-control based on their love for God.” The hidden assumption is that men cannot control themselves. That assumption insults men and burdens women, and it leaves the men without the teaching they need.
Does a sexual past make you damaged goods?
Lyons names a habit many churchgoers will recognize: virginity raised above nearly everything else as the sign of holiness. Her response is blunt and a little funny. Plenty of people who have never had sex are still mean and selfish, and “being a virgin doesn’t make you more holy than someone else.”
The flip side is the damaged-goods warning. She hears churches lean on diseases, pregnancy and one line she clearly can’t stand: “nobody’s gonna want you. You are like damaged goods.” Fear may hold a young person back for a while. For anyone who has already crossed the line, it removes the way home.
Her correction is the gospel. A sexual history, abortion included, does not mean a person has “excluded yourself from the grace of God and the hope that is found in Jesus Christ.” She asks for both truths in the same breath: “I think we just need to preach on sin, and I think we need to preach on redemption. And I think we need to teach people how God can keep them.” That last clause is easy to miss. It makes purity something God does with us. She describes it as “God’s loving protection of you,” a guarding hand believers are invited to cooperate with.
Is purity the same thing as virginity?
Lyons gives purity a definition that ends the scorekeeping. When she studied the topic, she says, she found that “the root word actually means to be single-minded”. Word roots can mislead when pressed too hard, but her point stands on firmer ground than etymology. Scripture itself sets purity against a divided heart. James writes, “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8), and later, “purify your hearts, ye double minded” (James 4:8). Lyons draws on James for this very contrast. On her reading, “purity is to be focused”, a heart committed to God and not split between God and the world. Jesus locates purity in the same place: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
The two definitions lead to very different lives. Purity as a clean record is a status you can lose once and never recover, and it tends to produce either pride or despair. Purity as single-minded devotion is a direction anyone can choose today, whatever happened last year. That second view leaves room for repentance, which is the path Scripture offers everyone.
Does the way we talk about sex matter?
Lyons thinks the vocabulary gives the church away. She points to the culture’s slang for sex, words like smash, tap and bang. “It’s like all rape language.” She has heard it from the pulpit. Her question is simple: “why do we say smash? What is that a picture of?”
Words carry a picture of what something is. Slang built from hitting and taking describes sex as something done to a person. A church that calls sex a gift from God and then jokes about it in the language of force is teaching two lessons at once, and the one that sounds like everyday speech usually wins.
What does grace-filled teaching sound like?
Lyons traces part of the silence to fear. She thinks Christians have felt pushed to treat love as agreement, and have also come to assume that clear conviction must sound harsh. She rejects both: “Being bold and uncompromising doesn’t mean being a jerk”. She echoes Paul here, saying our speech is supposed to be seasoned with salt, the language of Colossians 4:6: “Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.”
Her model is relational. She recalls working at a psychiatric hospital with a man who identified as gay. She ate lunch with him, talked with him and shared her faith without opening with his sexuality, and he told her she was the first Christian he thought he could like. She doesn’t claim his life changed. She leaves the result to God, and she sums up the method in one line: “We often try to clean fish we haven’t even caught.”
Gentleness is only half of it. Lyons insists that “sensitivity doesn’t mean we sacrifice truth,” and that “people want people to love them enough sometimes to say uncomfortable things.” Her complaint is that churches often do neither: “The church oftentimes says nothing to people, does not walk with people at all.”
Gathered together, her picture of honest teaching is concrete. Sex is named from the pulpit as God’s good gift, in careful words. Singles hear the truth about desire, and their restraint is honored as worship. Men and women answer to one standard, and leaders to a stricter one. Every warning comes with a way home, and purity is offered as a direction open to anyone.
Lyons insists none of this requires a clever new approach. It requires doing what the Bible says, and she ties the church’s failure partly to not knowing it well. We can’t teach what we haven’t studied. That puts the silence in a different light. Some of it is embarrassment. Some of it is simply a church that has not learned enough to speak, and calls its quiet discretion. A congregation that knows its Bible well can talk about sex calmly, and one that loves its people will choose to speak first.