I spent the weekend with Mike Foster, affectionately known as the “Porn Pastor.” Mike co-founded xxxchurch.com, a ministry dedicated to loving people in Jesus’ name who happen to be involved in the pornography industry or who struggle with the use of porn. More recently, Mike has developed another web-based ministry: theporntalk.com. Theporntalk.com is an amazingly useful tool designed to help parents talk to their children about sexuality and the damaging effects that pornography can have in their lives. (By the way, the average age that children experience porn online is 11 years old.)
Mike and I have become very good friends over the years. He is a cutting edge emerging leader and more importantly, one of the most committed Christ-followers that I know. Here are some of the takeaways from my time with him:
*Buy the Daughtry CD. Great rock and roll.
*Tell as many people as I can about theporntalk.com web-site.
*Read Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.
*Subscribe to the podcasts, This week in technology and formiproject.
*Check out the magazines, Adbusters and Mental Floss.
*Watch the television show The Office.
*Go to a Coldplay concert.
Check out Mike’s blog at www.ethur.org.
Daughtry is great rock-n-roll, however when the cd player broke in my car that was one of the cd’s I lost in the exchange of equipment. Along with a great compliation from Alive that can’t be replaced.
OK Greg, have to confess that as soon as I saw the resource page for the puresex series I was afraid that you would take this thing closer to XXX church… and it just seemed too taboo for a good-God-loving group of people to do in a pretty little Sunday morning church service where everyone is spiritually evolved and morphed beyond imorality and lust…but I just could not have been more wrong. After last Sunday I am praying that we stay involved in the work of the “Porn Pastor”. Thanks for telling my teens the truth.
And yes, Daughtry Rocks.
It’s so refreshing to have Pastors that are truly living in the world, but not being of the world. Too often in the past Pastors have condemned everything in the secular world, ignoring the fact that we are all children of God.
I’d skip the Cold Play concert…but then again, they don’t call me “The Music Nazi” for nuthin’. }:}~
Porn is a problem. Just hit the wrong website, and it’ll set off a string of pop-ups, and your pop-up blocker will sound like a machine gun for about an hour…if you’re lucky. Nowadays the pop-ups aren’t pop-ups, but slide in and bypass your pop stopper altogether…get one of those porn sliders on, you’ll never see the end of it. It’ll just keep coming and coming…and now it’s on your hard drive. It’s that easy to be infected on your PC with porn. Our brains are computers…it’s just as easy to infect them, and just as impossible to get rid of those images. We need churches that aren’t going to thumb their nose at people who have a problem with porn. It’s an addiction, same as any other. It’s not gonna go away all by itself with nobody doing anything.