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"Love - All That and More" is intended to be a resource for youth designed to promote healthy relationships based on equality and mutual respect and increase awareness of violence and abuse. For a secular audience, it may achieve its goals. However, as a program modified for use with Christian youth, it is fundamentally flawed and dangerous. The video tape series, foundational to the course, is nothing more than a panel of teen "sexperts" more than happy to share their "diverse" sexual experiences. The use of a peer teen panel reinforces the credibility and authority of the message they bring - that dating presupposes sexual activity, that respect and honesty are the only necessary prerequisites for sex, that marriage is irrelevant to the discussion of appropriate sexual activity. The message of these fresh faced teens flies in the face of values regarding sexual expression, chastity and marriage commonly and rightly held by the people of God. Specifically, it refutes the PCUSA confessional standards and God's word to us through. Scripture on these matters. It is a message which normalizes deviant sexual behavior and attitudes and it is dangerously seductive.

A strong supplemental leader's guide for Christian youth might sidetrack the steam rolling cultural relativism of this program. But, the current leader's guide is totally inadequate to do so. Rather than affirm a clear Christian perspective on the matters of sexuality, it caves into the culture's permissive and tolerant attitudes. In the process, it portrays the church as a bastion of narrow mindedness which fosters abusive behaviors. The leader's guide simply responds to the preconceived agenda of the course material with a humanistic "I think" , "I feel" approach to the cited Scriptures.

The panel members often mention living in "the real world". Our Christian young people do, indeed, live in the very real, very broken, world. It is for that reason they need hope filled, Spirit directed and solidly Scripture based information on these
important topics. Only then will healthy relationships be possible for them.
 

*Nancy Fehl a part of the VOW network and the mother of a college student.