Marriage Heat Evangelism
So this is kind of poll, kind of a discussion topic. I’m interested in hearing from the OGs of MH regarding telling others about MH in your church or friend groups. Is that something that many people on here do?
And following up on that question, how many people frequenting this website are in active ministry in a church or a Christian school or something like that? I’m just curious.
Obviously (from my username and the past things I’ve posted), I’m a worship leader at a local church, and I’m sort of known in the community where I live. And if I’m being completely honest, I don’t tell people that I check out this site. (Side note on honesty: I actually really appreciate this website and forum because it’s one of the few places I can actually be completely honest.)
I feel a bit hypocritical, but the fact is that there are so many people in my immediate circle who would condemn me for posting here or even reading the stories. It’s a frustrating state of the church—not a lot of open minds.
Anyway, I was just curious if others on here were in the same boat as me or if they were in different church circles where this kind of site and discussions wouldn’t be frowned upon at all, maybe possibly even encouraged. I would be interested in finding churches and friends like that, where I can be completely honest.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
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I'm a Lutheran and we tend to be pretty reserved on discussing sex matters, but I wouldn't rule it out if it ever came up. We're reserved, but not historically prudish.
Thanks for the response! I think I should clarify that I wasn’t necessarily asking “in your church do they talk about sex” or have a comfortable culture of open discussion regarding sex, but more specifically regarding this particular site: of the people in your church, are there any that you would tell about this site and/or would you recommend it to them going as far as to say you frequent it, comment on the site or even have written any of the posts?
My church tends toward the elderly, so I don't think they'd be too interested in this site.
My husband and I are lucky to be apart of a church that openly talks about sex within marriage as marriage is a big topic that gets missed in the church from fear of leaving out singles. Our church averages 600 people and a majority is married families. My husband and I are blessed to be apart of a life group who often leads into those conversations about each others sex life and even share experiences about MH stories. My husband is on staff as a worship pastor also! The conversation that get brought up in our life group fit well with the topic of doing life together and being open together. Some have even lead to “ hey you should try this or have you tried this. “
Thanks for the comment Young.Couple! I am so encouraged to hear about your church that is so open about sex in marriage. You are right, it’s often avoided in an attempt to be inclusive of singles and then wonder why there are pregnancies out of wedlock in their churches…it’s better to be open about sex and the blessings and pleasures of it in marriage with all ears to hear so young people look forward to marriage, not look forward to hook in up in a college dorm or something…I digress…I’m also really encouraged to know your husband is a worship pastor and you guys are on this site! Makes me feel better! 😂
Have you ever directly told anyone in your church or your life group about this site and recommended it to them to check out? Just wondering if the church is THAT chill that you would have no problem telling people in your church or life group about it (and if so, where is the church 😂 jk)
We actually learned about this site from our college age pastor who’s in our life group. this site was actually recommended from many other couples in the group also.
"it’s often avoided in an attempt to be inclusive of singles"
Lets not talk about marriage so we don't exclude singles.
Lets not talk about the vocation to singleness so we don't exclude marrieds.
Lets not talk about work so we don't exclude the unemployed and students.
Lets not talk about school so we don't exclude workers.
Whoever imposes such nonsense should be shown the disdain such stupidity deserves.
Young.Couple, good on your church. Sounds like they could teach others.
"I feel a bit hypocritical," I would encourage you not to feel like a hypocrite.
Romans 14:22 (ESV)
The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves.
It is not wrong to keep things from other christians. If God says not to throw pearls before swine, we can keep elements of our faith to ourselves. You are doing the right thing.
You bring up a touchy subject, as you know. I feel the nature of this site is anonymity. I have tried in the past to engage other church members on sex, as we do here, to no avail. I resolve to let it come to me if God wants me to have that discussion. So, it won't happen. I voted, but will not be answering your question, respectfully. I do like your post though. Thanks for that. The church is too steeped in tradition to pluck its own head out of its own "donkey" to see it has blame for how things are in the church, & world. Your secret is safe with me.
John 17:20-23
I've learned to be very selective. I've never talked about it in person with my friends. We don't really discuss things like sex in my Bible study, except that every once in a while during prayer time, one of the guys might say that he's been "struggling with lust." I'd love to share this site with my friends, but the thing is that this website is very much solid food; in the sexual arena my friends are still eating out of Gerber jars and are not ready for steak.
I'm in a few Christian dating groups on Facebook though and whenever there would be a relevant discussion I might link to an MH masturbation story to show a different attitude than that expressed by the majority (which was usually pretty anti-everything). All those links would be flagged and removed. Now thankfully I was never contacted or warned about posting them, but there was always someone who was offended and would usually comment about it. I guess on one hand women need to feel comfortable being in a group otherwise they'd leave and then the groups would become all-guys. But it shows that there are so many women that are incredibly uncomfortable discussing sex or seeing any viewpoint contrary to their own (men too). And who wants to date someone like that?
I also wondered if the images might be a turn-off to a lot of people, and that was an issue that I'd brought up on a similar discussion post a few years ago, that I'd be far more likely to share this website if the images weren't as raunchy. For a while I've blocked all images from this site on my browser because I didn't want to see them myself. I understand that PatientPassion is now in charge of finding and selecting pictures–I'm sure it must be hard to ride the line between tantalizing and tasteful. It's just that for someone who's never been to the site before, the images make it a harder sell.
I wonder if it would be possible to have all these stories published in blog form at a different URL, sans images, because that might be an easier thing to recommend to the uninitiated.
Agree that most women are uncomfortable with it. I'm thankful I managed to dodge purity culture – my parents weren't prudes and were quite independent in their own theology. This had both benefits and drawbacks. I think the biggest issue is most women cannot conceive of lust and, sadly all too often, even desire for sex. I've spoken to only one woman in church who was like me and admitted she lusted after attractive guys and enjoyed sex. There's a notion where a generality becomes an absolute: since men tend to struggle with lust more and generally have stronger sex drives, people come to the conclusion that only men ever have lust problems and only men ever desire sex. The Bible never teaches this: Potiphar's wife lusted after Joseph's handsomeness and form, and the woman in Song of Songs desires to be with her beloved. But this is not what's commonly taught, so it still surprises.
@Faith-Manages
I can speak to the image issue a bit.
As one of the volunteer editors, I do suggest potential images for the majority of posts. However, our other contributing editors also sometimes make suggestions, and some authors have their own images requests. We generally try to honor those requests as long as the image quality is decent, which sometimes leads to an extra level of spice or nudity in the images (although there are still limits). And no matter who suggests the images, the site owners make the final call.
I generally suggest images that are a bit tamer than MH once had; for example, I don't think I've ever suggested images with female nipples showing, whereas before I started that role, we'd occasionally get posts with an image of a completely topless woman not even trying to hide anything! (Out of curiosity, I went back to some 2023 posts, the year before I started suggested images, and found even more topless features images than I remembered—probably one every 2 weeks or so, which is pretty common!) Of course, the images can still get pretty spicy even without genitals or nipples showing, but the point stands that I've tried to keep them a bit less explicit.
You do bring up a very valid point, though. Your use of the milk-versus-solid-food example from the Bible is very appropriate, I think. MarriageHeat's erotic stories alone would be a bit of a stretch beyond the comfort zones of most Christians, even those with healthy sex-positive mindsets. But add the risqué images on top of that, and their hyper-sensitive pornography alarms prevent them from considering it any deeper.
That's a problem, of course. But to be perfectly honest, I have my own uncertainties about the images sometimes—not in terms of my own temptation to lust, which I believe I have well under control, but because of the inherent nature of the images. Even though we're using them to illustrate stories of sexy marriages, the reality is that most of the models posing nude, or in lingerie, or doing sexually suggestive things together, probably shouldn't be doing that, especially if they're intimately touching another model and pretending to be a couple. In my mind, that's very inappropriate behavior, even if they're not actually having sex. So facilitating and benefiting from that kind of behavior is a concern in my mind, but that's a separate discussion.
I do think that much of the obstacle to sharing this site would be removed if we significantly tamed down the images, and not much would be lost from the site. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to such a move, as I think it would be a more readily acceptable place to land for people like me. When I first found MH, it was a helpful alternative to pull me away from the world of sinful secular porn. If the images had been even more explicit, and more frequently so, I may not have found MH to be as good an alternative, and may never have stayed and gleaned its enormous benefits.
If we were to consider change of this nature, we'd also have to consider that making MH more available to a wider audience would also come with additional challenges. For example, as a few authors who have inquired are already aware, we currently have quite a backlog of submissions waiting for publication—so long that the wait time between submission and publication is several months right now, and had been for the last year or so. Publications are roughly keeping pace with that backlog, so it's either staying steady, or even at worst, growing only very slowly. But the reality is that if we made a major change that resulted in MH reaching a wider audience of readers and potential authors, our volunteer admin team would need to spend a hefty amount of time completely reworking how we process submissions and publications due to the impossibility of publishing everything that gets submitted.
Generally, the only two reasons we decline to publish a submission is if it completely conflicts with our values (i.e., it's a story about sex outside a marriage context), or if—to put it nicely—the story would just take too much editing time and effort to make it fit for publication. If we suddenly had a significant increase in size of audience, and therefore number of authors, and therefore volume of submissions, we'd have to start spending a lot more time figuring out which posts to accept and which posts to decline, which would add another big step to the workflow for our volunteer team. Maybe we could manage that at some point, but right now we've got about all we can handle without stretching ourselves too thin.
Sorry if I got a little off-topic there, but it seemed like a good opportunity to relate the behind-the-scenes efforts to some issues that were mentioned. Hope it was helpful!
PatientPassion,
I very much appreciate the work you and the other volunteers put into MH.
I have several stories I'd like to write, but writing is not my forte, so writing for me is a lot of work, (I imagine yours is many times that). The majority therefore remain merely ideas.
Thank you all for the very necessary service that MH provides.
Sarah K.
Im a missionary overseas. If I let people know about this site and that I frequent it to get good ideas for my wife and I, then it would negatively effect my ministry or even have the potential to be removed from service. My wife knows I frequent something, but she does not know about MH. She warns me all the time. She only knows because of the Amazon cart or wishlist from what people have mentioned on here. I also listen to a Christian Pod cast called One Extra Ordinary Marriage and have followed their Amazon list which makes my wife upset since others could see that list and it could embarrass us. For me, its in all good fun and wanting to be sure our bed never boring and never the same ole thing. I think it keeps being adventurous and keeps my wife thinking what is next. Love the site, but it likely could get me removed from my position if I talked about it. If anyone talked to me about it, I would encourage them in it.
PatientPassion, I couldn’t agree more with your post. Images that are too revealing will drive away the demographic this website is trying to attract. The images can be suggestive, but they should still leave much to the imagination.
Thanks for bringing up this subject. It's unfortunate that despite having attended more than a few churches,
I've never heard anyone discuss marital relations pertaining to sexual activities, beyond one shouldn't engage in sexual activity outside a marriage relationship. Even that topic isn't talked about outright, more often it's taken for granted than being discussed
I find this a great disappointment, as evidenced by the number of Christian divorces. Sexual dissatisfaction by a mate in marriage is a huge factor that affects the marriage relationship, in my opinion. Unfilled needs lead to other communication issues which snowball a divide between couples. Unequal physical needs can result in feelings of rejection between mates.
Knowing & believing this, I do not share our intimate activities with anyone, though there are times I'd like to speak on the subject. Wife & I had a good relationship, sexually for entire time together, soon to be 48 married yrs. As I've posted in the past, it wasn't until after my retirement ( @ age 56) that we started working on improving / enhancing our intimacies. How I've wished I could share what we've learned with others. I'm an elder in my church, and wish that I could address marriage intimacy with others, but have concerns with sharing my participation on this website. The fact that anyone would put limits on the sexual activities or imagination of seniors (frequency or type of activities enjoyed) only reflects their ignorance.