News broke this week of a new church coming to Madison, Tennessee, a quiet suburb just a few miles north of Nashville. The church, the United Fellowship Center, is next door to a Christian school and about a mile away from a local megachurch. Pretty ordinary, yeah?
But the residents of Madison are, according to this report, not welcoming to this new gathering of worshippers in their midst. Why? Because the United Fellowship Center is “a planned church where adults will ready themselves to have sex with each other after enjoying a little BYOB togetherness.”
See, it’s really a relocated swingers’ club, swooping in from the heart of downtown Nashville when it lost its parking lot. But, due to boring stuff like zoning laws and building codes, the only way the sex-havers could move their gathering spot into the ‘burbs was to call it a church.
Now, we aren’t going to get into the philosophical stuff about what should and should not be called a church – that’s not really our jam here at XXXchurch (and yes, we know: “church” is in our name but we aren’t a normal “church” either – we understand irony and you don’t need to point it out). But I do want to look at this story as a pretty bad example of something we talk a lot about here:
Something salacious hiding behind something religious.
And I gotta hand it to these folks – at least they’re being up front about their religious pretense. (Tweet This!) Too many of us – and I include myself in that number – have spent too much of our lives hiding our illicit activities behind a cloak of churchiness. Have put up a sign on the outside that looked pretty great and godly, but reserved the inside for stuff we’d rather not talk about.
I had to call stuff what it was, and I had to let someone else in on my story.
Accountability is everything. We know this. If you’ve spent any amount of time here, you know this, too. It’s important to us. That’s why we talk about it so much. It’s why we offer the resources we offer, and why we try to do it as cheaply as we can.
It’s why we wrote a book about it. It’s why we’re introducing a video series about it. It’s why we developed our own accountability software.
It’s also why we’re offering a ton of that stuff for free right now! Just sign up and you’ll get some free videos from our series, a free chapter of our book, and some encouragement that comes directly to your inbox.
It’s time. Time to stop hiding behind a fake sign and accept yourself for who you are. And time to invite some folks into your story so you can start telling a better one. Put a sign that says who you really are and shut down the United Fellowship Center for good.