When I was a teenager at a Baptist church, preachers were constantly telling boys and girls not to hold hands during church services. Naturally, we perceived that as a challenge to do so and couples often came up with some creative ways to both openly and secretly defy ministerial bans on handholding.As a teenager, I never quite knew whether the preacher's opposition to intertwined fingers was prompted by his own desire to control every aspect of our young lives or whether they thought God frowned on every form of premarital touching. I just know that holding hands with a girl was never more exhilerating than when it was done during a service at a Baptist church.
I mention this to provide some psychological background for my uneasiness with a new trend among preachers of Baptist churches. Gone are the days when Baptist preachers stand behind pulpits and issue mandates against handholding. Today, some Baptist preachers have become so hip that they preach from beds in order to exhort their married congregants to add daily sex to their list of spiritual disciplines. I'm not making this up.
I'm still not certain whether such preaching is prompted by the preacher's desire to control every aspect of his congregant's lives. I am fairly certain that if Jesus gave a sermon on a bed, it would have been recorded in the gospels right along with his sermon on the mount and the sermon on the plain.
I'm also a little worried that if more preachers make sex obligatory, it will start taking some of the fun out of sex.
