How do you respond when the word God drops on you in the shower is PORN?
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Little did we know, 10 years ago, that this one word would develop into an international organisation focused on raising awareness to the destructive force of pornography? What started as a small idea has driven XXXchurch to step outside the church bubble into a $57 billion a year industry that has a grip on nearly every household in the world.
On January 9, 2002, XXXchurch.com made its Internet debut, and, boy, were we totally not prepared for the response. It was a hit almost immediately, and suddenly we had all this exposure. But there’s something I didn’t mention - the reason for that date. January 9 was the opening day of the AVN Adult Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada, the largest pornography trade show in the United States.
We took our message straight to the gutter. And they loved us.
We didn’t know what the porn industry in general would think of us, because they’re constantly under attack, and not just by religious groups.
Nobody really likes them, and there are obvious reasons for that. But we decided early on not to fight that particular battle; instead we went in with a completely different approach - we went to their turf on their terms.
We did what we thought Jesus would do - we went to the sinners. (Check out Luke 5:30-32 if you don’t believe me.)
Because we took the first step, the people in the industry got to know us.
Once they got to know us, we started hearing them say, ‘‘You guys aren’t like the other religious people; you aren’t what we thought of as Christians.” How can this be? It’s simple - we’re honest about our profession, about our faith, and about our humanness.
The gutter and not just the porn industry, but the gutter at large, the real world, has embraced us, and they’ll embrace the Christian message, too.
They just don’t tend to embrace “the Church,” because they’re looking for people who are willing to be real with them, not preach to them.
Not that everyone gives us big high-fives every time they see us, but on the whole, we’ve encountered astonishingly little resistance from the industry because deep down, they’re all just sinners, desperately looking for someone to love them. And that’s what we do.
Since we started XXXchurch, we’ve had a ton of opportunities to get in the gutter, and we always bring honesty with us. Both Christians and non-Christians struggle with the issue of pornography, so we take the real-life approach, step back from all that’s been said about it, and come at it straightforwardly, honestly, and controversially.
We’ve encountered our fair share of controversy since we started our little “church,” mostly from the Christian community. We’ve placed our own billboard in the middle of a bunch of porn billboards, we’ve bought airtime on Howard Stern and The Man Show to air our commercials, and we’ve been to more porn trade shows, always bringing the same message of Christ, forgiveness, and freedom from addiction.
We also bring our wives. (We aren’t the smartest people in the world, but we aren’t idiots, either.) We bring some user-friendly Bibles, cards that say “Jesus loves porn stars” (it’s true, you know), and - this is key - our belief that the God in us is greater than the sin that surrounds us.
That’s the question we always get: “How do you guys do it?” We’re able to go to our gutter because we aren’t scared of it. Too many Christians get scared of the world, but when you look at Jesus and the things He did, the way He brought light into darkness, you can plainly see that we have nothing to be scared of.
I go to a trade show, and all I see are a bunch of miserable, unhappy people. People looking to fulfill their lives with this crap that’s leaving them empty. I’m happily married. I don’t want what they have; they want what I have.
Hear this - we saw so much resistance, we began to question our calling. We wondered if we were making the right decision, and for just a moment, we lived in that shaky place where we weren’t sure we’d heard God for real.
Perhaps you’ve been there? While resistance made us question our calling, we didn’t forfeit it.
We had to make some bold choices and take some bold steps, but we did it because we wanted to remain true to God’s calling on our lives and true to the gutter we needed to step into. It was intimidating and exhilarating at the same time. But that’s sometimes the way it goes when you follow God.
Over the past 10 years, XXXchurch has attended more than 70 porn shows around the world, helped numerous industry people break free from the world of porn, handed out over 100,000 bibles, and shared the message of Jesus to millions and millions of people in the media and online.
It is our motto: Don’t blame the dark for being dark. Blame the light for not shining in the dark. It is crucial that the church leads the way in shifting culture and shining the light of Jesus in the darkest corners of the world.
Craig Gross is the founder of XXXchurch. He is in Australia to attend Sexpo and will speak at Lighthouse Church’s ‘‘Porn Sunday’’, this Sunday. He will be at Lighthouse’s Southern Campus at 9am and the Wollongong campus at 10am.