By Andy Hale

I’ll admit it. I had a True Love Waits Promise Ring. I mean, I did grow up in the 1990s Evangelical movement that stressed sexual purity and abstinence until marriage.

Good or ill, it was the only way that the church was talking about sexuality to hormonal teenagers who were trying to figure out what was going on with their bodies and why they couldn’t stop thinking about the classmates to which they were attracted.

And while opponents have denounced this particular movement, no one has come up with a better way to talk about all of these challenging things.

There is a broader repertoire of language today to talk about gender and sexual dynamics than when I was a teenager and a young adult. People were experiencing things privately and internally that now are much more publicly discussed today.

And the Church…well, I don’t know if we have entirely found a way to talk about these things in a healthy way.

“Our society is hyper-sexualized, excessively concerned with sexuality possibility in every interaction,” said Bronwyn Lea on the CBF Podcast.

Bronwyn is the author of a new book, Beyond Awkward Side Hugs: Living As Christian Brothers and Sisters in a Sex-Crazed World. We sat down with the author and pastor in California for a conversation about sexuality.

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Andy Hale created and hosts the podcast of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Hale is the senior pastor of University Baptist Church of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following eight years as the founding pastor of Mosaic Church of Clayton and five years as CBF’s church start specialist. Follow on Twitter @haleandy